Immigrants: Legal, Illegal Or Just Human (IV)

by Jacob Jaffe

Another example as to how our nation has contributed to the problem: our subsidized corn--paid with taxpayers' dollars--enables our farmers to sell corn more cheaply in Mexico than Mexican farmers can sell theirs. An estimated 3,000,000 Mexican farmers went bankrupt, causing desperate families, in order to survive, to cross our border to find work.

One last fact: nations like Japan, with restrictive immigration policies, will in another generation have too few workers to support those who will retire. In our country, the children of these immigrants, "legal" and "illegal," will be sustaining many us when we retire. Their children enter the full spectrum of jobs, blue collar and professional, further enriching our country. By the way, many "illegal" workers pay taxes and all of them purchase billions of dollars worth of goods, adding to the prosperity of our nation.

A solution to the immigration issue is complex. But rather than a patchwork of ineffective and self-defeating band aids, we should consider difficult but fundamental solutions. These would require international cooperation. As long as there are starving or poorly paid workers in the world, they will seek work to support themselves and their families. If these people had jobs at home, few would come here. In fact, a little publicized fact is reverse immigration: Mexicans and others do return to their home countries.

There are many reasons; they include discrimination, low or unreliable wages as well as their longing for their homeland and families. What is needed is an international effort to improve living standards around the world, just as the industrial and commercial interests have their international policies to invest and make money. An investment in people will pay in the long run for our--and other nations'--prosperity. And we've done it before. After World War II, rather than punishing our enemies, we funded our Marshall Plan, which provided aid to Germany and Japan. Rather than their people fleeing the devastation of the war, they were able to rebuild and improve their lives at home. We need such international efforts to help people throughout the world for their and our mutual benefit.

As I consider my own family, with its recent immigrants as well as longtime residents (my grandson's father is an Apache), we have much to gain by developing the means for all of us to prosper. Rather than our considering selfish and parochial solutions to the problems of immigration, which are self-defeating and impose hardships on others, we must realize that to survive as a species, with immigration as well as other global issues, we must consider that all of us are our brothers' and sisters' keepers. That is necessary not only for their survival, but ours as well.

Dr. Jacob Jaffe is a psychologist who has taught at Columbia and City Universities. He is also a psychotherapist and the author of two novels,"Hobgoblins"a political-psychological thriller and "Land of Dreams,"based on his family's immigrant experience. Find out more, visit http://www.jaffeauthor.com