By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Illegal immigrants have been blamed for slowed U.S. wage growth, our shrinking middle class, rising healthcare costs, poor schools, and many other ills. I do believe that immigration law should be strictly enforced. But imagine that you have god-like powers and you can simply will that no immigrant ever again reside in the U.S. illegally. Do you think it would make any difference to these problems?

I don’t. I believe that the cause of these problems is the same as what causes the illegal immigration explosion: federal policies that systematically promote the interests of an elite against those of everyone else.

Let’s take one example. There were 7 million, mostly family-owned, farms in the U.S. at the time of the Second World War. Today, there are 2 million, of which only 565,000 are family operations. Yet, some evidence suggests that family farms are more productive than corporate farms. And anyone who lived through this time knows that the food was better.

The U.S. government implemented crop subsidies, water distribution regulations, and other policies that favored factory farms. Concentration within industries from which farmers buy supplies and to which they sell products reduced small farmers‚Äô relative bargaining power.  Families lost their farms.

What‚Äôs that got to do with immigration?  When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994, giant corporations like ADM and Cargill began dumping government-subsidized corn on Mexican markets at prices below Mexican and American production costs. Increasingly unable to make a living, Mexican farmers migrated. U.S. Government statistics report that over the next ten years, illegal immigration from Mexico increased three fold. The actual number is probably higher.

Also in 1994, the Uruguay Round extended the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and further reduced a signatory nation’s right to restrict imports based on their exporters’ brutal labor policies or destructive environmental practices. Many American industries at a competitive disadvantage simply ceased to exist, along with living wage jobs.

The balance between what we import from and export to other countries is one of two time-bomb deficits. In 1993, the year before NAFTA and GATT III, it was $75 Billion. Last year, it was $764 Billion. Every $1 billion of trade deficit represents 20,000 U.S. jobs lost.

The most popular argument for holding foreign producers to the same standards that we hold U.S. firms is that it results in lower prices.  But strolling through Somerville‚Äôs Christmas Tree Shop, I keep asking myself this: Is there any real human need for most of the Chinese-made crap that such retailers get rich on selling and American consumers, with their wages stagnating, go into debt buying? 

Of course, in comparison to their government, American consumers have been sober Puritans. The President and Congress have financed their idiocy through ballooning that other time-bomb, the federal budget deficit, plummeting ever deeper into debt to the same countries who are eating our industrial lunch, repressing democracy, exploiting workers, and biding their time.

And don‚Äôt Americans have to make a living if we are to consume, no matter how low the prices are?  Isn‚Äôt that why we‚Äôre supposed to seek more education ‚Äî to qualify for those wonderful high-skilled jobs that free trade is supposed to bring us?

Since 1994, the proportion of Americans with a high-school diploma or less fell from 44% to less than 35 percent. That with a four-year college degree or more increased from 28% to more than 35 percent.

But the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that 75 percent of new job openings between now and 2012 will be filled by workers who do not have a bachelor’s degree and are entering an occupation for the first time. BLS says that, 48 percent of all job openings in this period will be held by workers who have a high school diploma or less education.

So, while the native born population grows older and more skilled, U.S. trade policy skews job growth toward young and unskilled workers. And where do these young and unskilled workers come from?  U.S. trade policy has thoughtfully expanded the workforce with illegal immigrants whose livelihoods and communities it has destroyed.

Throughout U.S. history, when people feel economic fear and see no one is helping them, they have scapegoated immigrants. They become susceptible to spectacularly stupid schemes like spending $49 billion in taxpayer funds to build a fence that will enrich elites while doing nothing to reduce illegal immigration.

You want effective immigration policies?  Try these: 
¬∑ End corporate welfare. 
· Hold importers to the same labor and environmental standards to which we hold each other.
· Take away the billions in subsidies now propping up dying but well-connected industries and invest them in technologies that will produce well-paying jobs for U.S. workers.