Is the Illegal Alien My Nearer Neighbor?
Christians should not be indifferent to, or passive about, aliens undercutting jobs and pulling on the threads of a delicate social fabric.
Our suburban Denver home needs exterior painting, and we’ve been calling contractors to source quotes. We could do it ourselves, but it’s probably not the wisest decision for half-centurions to be on ladders 40 feet off the ground at the highest points. So, we researched area companies and asked them to bid. All the painting outfits are just brokers—they subcontract the work to other “companies,” and the marketing fluff for the broker does not resemble the crew that shows up.
Every broker has been unable to satisfy an essential requirement to win the contract: "Will everyone on the job be an American citizen or legal permanent resident?” The immediate response is always a false equivalence, “They are fully bonded and insured.” Our requirement is repeated differently and a little more slowly: “We will require proof of citizenship or permanent residence from the subcontractor owner.” That terminates the conversation immediately with ghosting or responses like these:
Repressive Tolerance
This is a de facto admission of illegal employment practices. All U.S. employers must submit Form I-9 to confirm employment eligibility for every individual hired for employment, full-time or part-time. Similarly, it’s supposedly impossible for employers to secure occupational health coverage or retirement benefits for employees unless they are legal residents.
Why do we care about the citizenship of painters or anyone else? As legal immigrants who had to patiently jump through a thousand expensive hoops to get to America, we do not appreciate a different set of rules for select classes and individuals. America used to be revered because Lady Justice was mostly blindfolded, but now she winks audaciously when the proper political bell is rung, just like in the homeland we gave up. Secondly, we will not lightly forget being subject to a Colorado Department of Labor citizenship investigation in 2011 after a disgruntled employee made trouble by lying about our citizenship status. Thirdly, in our 24 years in the US, we have seen a dramatic change in the standing and composition of the low-skill blue-collar workforce, and not for the better.
An American boy who left school with a tenth-grade education used to have a reasonable shot at making a living as a roofer, painter, or construction laborer. Perhaps he could even build his own business. Instead, his opportunities have been wiped out by a flood of economic migrants who will work for much less and tolerate employer abuse. The “new arrivals” easily undercut the informal trades because they are shielded from investigation or prosecution by complicit authorities and consumers turning a blind eye.
Yes, house painting and roofing have become cheaper adjusted for inflation, although the brokers driving around in fancy lifted trucks show a lot of fat on the bone.
Consequences
The chain of lawlessness and its consequences are sobering for a vulnerable subset of legal workers, as ineligible individuals displace them into permanent unemployment. We are guilty of breaking the Seventh Commandment when we employ ineligible workers.
Indeed, we see many able-bodied youngsters loitering on the streets of Denver or “camping” along the creeks and rivers deep into the suburbs. They do have jobs: the Mexican cartels that control the underworld here press-gang them into a range of illicit activities in exchange for a day without dope sickness and permission to live in encampments controlled by the gangs (speak off the record with any beat cop or firefighter/paramedic to know what’s going on in your city or town concerning crime - the public police blotters are heavily censored).
Over the years, the Front Range’s transient population has grown incredibly despite tens of millions of extra dollars allocated to “solving the houseless crisis.” That population is much younger, much more drugged out, and visibly more mentally unstable, if not irreparably brain damaged. At least our civic leaders are so compassionate that these youngsters can overdose to death knowing it wasn’t hepatitis C that killed them, thanks to free needles, alcohol swabs, and being tirelessly educated on the best way to get narcotics into veins.
The ever-expanding underclass, strongly correlated to the flood of illegal and legal aliens, creates a giant drag on the law-abiding economy and accelerates the dismembering of God’s ordered relationships that are necessary for a functioning society that can be adequately managed with the first use of the law.
Social License to Operate
Christians should be active stewards and guardians of their communities and environment, which are delicate and quickly decay without constant maintenance and firm control. Indeed, churches should be the primary actors in their sphere of influence, providing the embedded moral mediation and discipline for a thousand social filaments, including employer-employee relationships.
Pitiable, miserable, and spiteful is the pastor who is not profoundly concerned with and knowledgeable about his parishioner’s physical, social, and cultural welfare in addition to their spiritual condition.
Our churches should start demanding that corporations and civic leaders attain a social license to operate in their communities. Social licensing is mandated for industries like mining, where a company cannot reach production without securing the consent of everyone affected by a project. Consequently, mining companies invest heavily in consultation and providing benefits that uplift communities, including guaranteed local employment sourcing, skills training, capacity building, regional procurement, and building facilities such as churches, clinics, houses, schools, roads, connection to the electrical grid, etc.
It speaks volumes that social licensing is ignored in America for profound social dislocation issues like mass migration. Our churches have a role in fixing these gaps and avoiding the runaway destabilization of norms that allow us to have Christian liberty and whole families.
For accessible evidence, investigate the communities in Iowa and Nebraska where meat-packing plants dominate local capital structures. Then, plot the trajectory of LC-MS congregations in those towns, which became special economic zones without their permission or even awareness. Likewise, divorce rates, metabolic disorders, drug overdoses, and school outcomes do not tell a positive story even before we get to church attendance and an ability to articulate justification by grace through faith.
The Social Gospel?
Many will cry that active community involvement is necessarily the Social Gospel J. Gresham Machen railed against. Far from it. Nobody suggests that caring about employment and community health is the saving Good News. There is a happy medium between bootlicking for the Chamber of Commerce and William F. Buckley's Republicanism (little more than an echo of Machen’s Liberalism…) and Washington Gladden’s or Walter Rauschenbusch’s Progressivism.
We have a Christian duty to acknowledge and engage with America's deep crises in ways that are not superficial and political. It starts with charity at home in our families and congregations; before we search far afield for new good works and mint neighbors.
Found this article since reading your post. Interesting.
https://cis.org/Fishman/Exploiting-Mass-Immigration-Displace-Blacks