In a previous post I mentioned Timothy Henderson’s A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States
At the American Heritage Blog Henderson was interviewed. Here is the beginning of his answer to the last question, one concerning the Mexican War and today’s immigration issue. I urge you to read all of his answer, but here is the beginning of that answer.
I’m struck by how similar the debate on immigration is to the debates that preceded the U.S.–Mexican War. The debate tends to treat Mexico as if it were at best irrelevant to the issue, or at worst an agent of evil. It seems that the debaters seldom take into account that the problem now is identical to the problem then, namely the vast disparity in wealth and power between the two countries. Many of the migrants who come here have to abandon their families and endure tremendous hardship. It’s not as if they want to do that; they’re merely behaving as perfectly rational economic actors, going where the jobs are. So it’s offensive when people portray them as an evil brown-skinned horde intent on subverting our nationality and sapping our prosperity. Obviously, if Mexico were to become a prosperous and stable country, then the flow of illegal immigrants would slow to a trickle. Problem solved.
Once again, I urge you to read his entire response to the question, but here’s another money quote:
People who want to defend immigration happily point out that Mexicans are willing to do nasty, low-paid jobs that are just too hard or disgusting for Americans to do—and they say it as if this is a good thing. I have a hard time seeing that as a positive. Do we really want to encourage the formation of a permanent underclass of ethnically distinct people doing disagreeable menial labor? Isn’t that kind of what slavery was all about?