Iqra’i

The more I learn about immigration policy, the more frustrated I get with the (mostly) uncritical consensus that employers who hire undocumented immigrants deserve to be prosecuted. Today’s NYT lead story reads to me like a step and a half in the right direction.

First of all, since employers are lobbying for more liberal immigration policy at the grassroots and state as well as federal levels, they’re more likely to have an impact where the legislative action is as well as changing citizens’ opinions. (Public opinion, incidentally, is offered by Secretary Chertoff at the end of the article as the reason immigration policy can’t be liberalized — which would be a satisfactory explanation if his department’s own ICE, wholly unaccountable to public opinion, weren’t pursuing more aggressive anti-undocumented-immigrant practices in the absence of any change in law.)

Second of all, this is being covered without recourse to the phantom the pro-immigrant Left usually raises over this issue: “employers who hire undocumented immigrants engage in abusive and inhumane practices!” It’s true that noncitizens don’t have the leverage to protect their rights that would make abuse impossible, but from what I’ve heard in the field the phenomenon is greatly exaggerated.

In fact, the relationship between employer and employee is often more humane than it’s usually given credit for being, and I’m disappointed that the Times didn’t touch on this as well (hence the half-step). Most employers the NYT quotes are driven by their need to “fill” positions, i.e. with warm bodies — providing at least some credibility to the claim of inhumane treatment. One employer goes further in recognizing her employees as human beings, arguing that their skill and knowledge make them “irreplaceable.”

But no one the Times quotes finds himself (or is willing to admit he finds himself) in the position that I hear is most common: having been presented with documentation that appeared to be legitimate at the time of hiring, employers don’t want to confront their workers about it now because they feel a personal connection to them and don’t want to leave them out in the cold. Perhaps this is mostly true of small business owners, who are less likely to be on the radar of a Times reporter; but it seems to me that much of the reason no one says these things in the press is that no one expects them to do so.

Both Left and Right expect employers to treat their employees according to a purely transactional logic rather than a corporate one — some call it exploitation, some entrepreneurialism. And they’re expected to lobby as business owners protecting their interests, not people engaged in relationships with others. But the ability of various dynamics to play into a single relationship — economic and personal, for example — is one of the strongest arguments for integrating immigrants into their communities completely rather than allowing them to remain in the shadows. Failing to recognize the humanity of business relationships makes it impossible to talk about this, and impugns the transactional logic by which we’re expected to talk about business in general.