FWD.us, the tech industry’s mass immigration advocacy mouthpiece, has declared with the certainty of scientific fact that our “Economic recovery from COVID depends on a citizenship pathway for 11 million undocumented immigrants.”
Of course, the declaration is anything but scientific. Rather, it is a naked attempt to use whatever circumstance is at hand to promote an ideological objective. If COVID wasn’t upon us, they would have found some other issue or phenomenon that amnesty and mass immigration would supposedly cure. But that’s what ideological advocacy groups do and we shouldn’t be surprised.
What is surprising – and dismaying – about FWD.us’s Vice President for Advocacy Alida Garcia’s essay is that it begins by asserting that having an exploitable class of workers in our country is somehow a necessary and acceptable condition.
“By now, you’ve seen the viral photos of farmworkers hunched over, working in the fields under an orange sky, inhaling ash from wildfires, doing the skilled and tough labor that has allowed millions of us to keep food on our tables in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. These striking images make it clearer than ever: Our economic recovery from the pandemic is entirely reliant on providing a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people currently living in the U.S.,” Garcia writes.
Therein lies the essential difference between organizations like FAIR, which oppose illegal immigration and believe our laws against it must be vigorously enforced, and groups like FWD.us that work to thwart enforcement of immigration laws. Advocates for immigration enforcement look at those viral photos Garcia describes and find it shameful that we tolerate exploitation of people, regardless of their immigration status, who toil under unnecessarily harsh and dangerous conditions for meager wages. Anti-enforcement groups, on the other hand, seem willing to accept such exploitation and then claim that the majority of us who never countenanced such conditions now owe a moral debt for something we never wanted in the first place.
Worse yet, granting amnesty to 11 million (or perhaps way more) illegal aliens would do nothing to ensure that we won’t be looking at viral photos of exploited workers in the future. As the 1986 amnesty demonstrated, the newly legalized workers were quickly replaced by a new and larger wave of exploitable illegal aliens because business-funded lobbies, like FWD.us, fought to prevent border enforcement, worksite enforcement and, most importantly, mandatory E-Verify that would hold employers accountable.
Whatever “essential” jobs (a very broadly defined category) that are now being done by illegal aliens can, would and should be done by legal U.S. workers who are every bit as essential to the recovery of our economy, post-COVID.
The moralizing of advocacy groups like FWD.us notwithstanding, granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens is not essential to our economic recovery; it is essential to realizing the political aims of their funders. We should not confuse the two.
