Immigration Rallies

I'm beginning to suspect that the rallies taking place today aren't about my birthday at all. My Way News reported today about some of the rallies around the country, as well as the effects they're having in various business communities.

Grassroots organizers are protesting stricter immigration laws that are being debated in Congress, and they hope Monday's events will raise awareness about immigrants' economic power.

The media is being disingenuous by lumping illegal aliens in with legal residents and green card holders and calling them all "immigrants." I work with people who immigrated here legally and became US citizens. They have true economic power in our country, but somehow I don't believe the protesters are talking about my immigrant-coworkers.

In Carmel, Ind., Jeff Salsbery said about 25 Hispanic workers skipped work at Monday at his landscaping company.

"I'm not very happy this morning," Salsbery said. "We're basically shut down in our busiest month of the year. It's going to cost me thousands of dollars today."

Carmel is a suburb north of Indianapolis. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there are that many Hispanic workers at just one business in the middle of Indiana (not exactly a border state), but I am. If his Hispanic workers are illegal, I hope Salsbery gets in trouble for hiring them. I'm not holding my breath about it, though.

Activists in Florida said many immigrants were concerned about recent federal raids, in which hundreds of immigrants with criminal backgrounds were rounded up in Florida and throughout the Midwest.

I would hope illegal aliens would be "concerned" about federal raids, and I would hope the raids will continue and not just be a one-time event for the publicity.

One of the guests on Hugh Hewitt's radio show a couple weeks ago (can't remember who it was) made a comment about what life would be like without illegals providing us with cheap farm labor. He said that when the cost of labor gets too high, employers start innovating with automation. Industry, including agriculture, will make capital improvements and come up with inventions that can make their labor-intensive processes automated. In the same way Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, some lettuce grower out there is capable of inventing the lettuce picker. But as long as labor is cheap, the grower has no incentive to spend the money it would take to automate lettuce picking. Take the illegals away, and some enterprising inventor will come up with a machine to get us our lettuce cheaply again. I'm all for it.