Amidst all the failures and destructiveness of U.S. socialism, interventionism, and imperialism, U.S. officials can claim 3 recent successes in their war on immigrants.
The first success story involves a man named Keith Eckel, a 61-year-old farmer in Pennsylvania who is one of the largest tomato growers in the United States.
Not this year though. This year, Eckel isn’t growing any tomatoes at all.
The reason? The federal government’s war on immigrants has shut down his supply of laborers.
For decades, Eckel has been hiring illegal aliens who have been furnishing him all the proper documents indicating that they were legal. However, given the federal crackdown in the war on immigrants, Eckel decided that he couldn’t risk planting millions of tomato plants only to watch them rot in the fields for lack of workers to harvest them. Better to simply not plant any tomatoes at all.
About a year ago, Riverside, New Jersey, enacted legislation imposing criminal penalties on people who employed or rented to illegal immigrants.
According to the New York Times, “Within months, hundreds, if not thousands of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled…. The local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.”
Riverside officials recently rescinded the law, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the immigrants will return. As Mayor George Conard put it, “I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden.”
At a recent meeting of Google engineers, someone asked where Sanjay Mavinkurve was. He’s a 28-year-old Indian immigrant who helped lay out Facebook when he was a student at Harvard.
It turns out that Sanjay was in Canada, where he resides. While U.S. immigration central planners have given him a work visa, they haven’t done the same for his wife, Samvita Padukone. Like Sanjay, she too was born in India. Rather than live and work with the other engineers at Google in Silicon Valley, Sanjay has chosen to live with his wife in Canada. He is the only engineer in a Google office filled with marketers.
I suppose the response of the immigration central planners would be that Samvita might go on welfare, she might have a baby in the United States, she might burden American public schools with her children, she might have to go to the emergency room, she might take a job away from Americans, and she might be a terrorist (India is next to Pakistan, which is next to Afghanistan, where the terrorists live.).
While the crises and chaos continue to worsen in the drug war, monetary policy, fiscal policy, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, and foreign policy, at least U.S. officials have three recent successes to crow about in their war on immigrants.
The Future of Freedom Foundation is the publisher of The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration.
