When we conservatives complain about illegal immigration let’s pick the right target. It is not the illegal immigrants themselves who are the most responsible. Washington created this mess.

The roots of the problem are explained in Why Braceros?.  This 19 minute film made for the Council of California Growers in 1959 describes the shortage of manpower to harvest “stoop labor” crops. The solution was the Bracero program created by the U.S. and Mexico. It allowed Mexican workers to enter the country during harvest season.

You recall John McCain’s claim that Americans won’t pick lettuce in Yuma? I think we get a more realistic explanation of what’s going on in Yuma in Why Braceros when the narrator states plainly that if we can’t get cheap Mexican labor then the U.S. growers will move to Mexico. We either bring cheap labor or we lose those crops forever domestically. Apparently the state of journalism today is such that with all the interest in immigration issues over the past few years, you need to watch a PR film produced during the Eisenhower era to learn this simple fact.

When the Bracero program was suspended in 1964 many of the Mexican workers simply crossed the border into the U.S. for good. It was at this point that Washington began its policy of willful ignorance: they took no action against the employers who hired the returning Braceros. Effectively the folks in D.C. chose to separate a generation of men from their livelihood with nothing but an unenforced border. The stage was thus set for 45 years of border problems.

DC says “what would happen if we don’t deport border-crossers and never, ever punish those who employ them?”

Who are the bad guys here? In this YouTube video, a U.S. citizen who is familiar with the realities of illegal immigrants says it is a simple matter of conditioning: if you cross the border illegally for a job, even if you are deported, you will still be better off with the money you have saved or sent home than if you had not risked the border crossing. This is common knowledge in Mexico. As Americans we take for granted the benefits of a college education. As Mexicans they know the enormous earning power of the man who finds a job in the U.S. An honest family man who will not lower himself to cross the border knows that his neighbor who risks the crossing into the U.S. will send home money that will improve his family’s standard of living. They will buy a better house. Their children will be better provided for.

To this emotional argument conservatives say, as Sonny Bono once famously said, “What’s to talk about? It’s illegal.” One YouTube commenter on the video above wrote:

rjsmitty69: “So , I should rob a bank because I want money and when I get caught I will scream don’t put me away because it will break up my family. I just want a better life for my family.”

It is a strong argument but it ignores the part Washington has played in this. What if Taylor Farms of California paid you to rob the bank?  And the security guards watched you rob it but did nothing? And when you got caught you and Taylor split the money after paying a small fine? If you had witnessed this going on for 45 years I bet it would change your opinion of robbing banks.

“I don’t care, they are breaking the law” conservatives say. This is an impasse that we reach quickly. Conservatives argue law, progressives argue compassion. But let’s put aside who is right and wrong on this issue briefly. Instead consider how much more difficult this situation is for the honest Mexican father than it is for us.  It is he who must, if he stands by his honesty, watch his family wither as his neighbor’s family thrives.

Many great thinkers have wondered what the word “illegal” means when the  society you live in fails to protect your interests. No less a conservative giant than C.S. Lewis wrote

“No one, I hope, thinks Dr. Johnson a barbarian. Yet he maintained that if, under a peculiarity of Scottish law, the murderer of a man’s father escapes, the man might reasonably say, ‘I am amongst barbarians, who… refuse to do justice… I am therefore in a state of nature… I will stab the murderer of my father….’ When the State cannot or will not protect, ‘nature’ is come again and the right of self-protection reverts to the individual.”

The honest father in Mexico does not need an Oxford education to be aware of this philosophical dilemma. He only needs to have grown up in a failed state while witnessing 45 years of his border-crossing countrymen rewarded with few consequences. Be glad that in this country we are not presented with such a difficult decision.

Please don’t be angriest at the Mexican who decides to enter illegally to help himself and his family. Especially when our largest growers will hire him, our social services organizations by directive will not ask him his status, and our politicians on both sides of the aisle will look the other way while he provides cheap labor and future voters.

Besides, do you really have a problem with a group of individuals who (except for the criminals among them) exhibit strong family values, a cheerful and robust Christianity, an indefatigable work ethic, and a strong enthusiasm for free enterprise? Shouldn’t you instead aim your anger at the governments that have created a situation that forces a man to choose between obeying the law and doing what will help his family?

Historian Victor Davis Hanson, whose experiences as a California grape farmer make him particularly entitled to comment, has written convicingly on how to resolve the problem of illegal immigration. Note that he’s not directing his fire at the illegals themselves.

When you rail against illegal immigration, please direct your justified anger at the right people. When we keep yelling at the illegal immigrants themselves it’s like yelling at the lab rats. Start yelling at the crass politicians who for the sake of cheap labor and cheap votes have set the rules for this 45 year experiment.