I think Jeff Alworth’s take on the immigration issue is exactly right. Yet it is kind of funny the things I’ve heard in the past 24 hours…. from self-professed progressives.

I read one economist describing how illegal immigrants keep low income worker wages down. “Oh?” I thought, “so they’re the ones that have held the GOP-controlled Congress at gunpoint for ten years to keep them from raising the minimum wage?” Then I thought, “if there were no illegal immigrants around and the wages at the bottom rose, the businesses would just move to countries like those where the immigrants come from, where they can pay lower wages.”

So neither scenario has anything to do with immigrants - legal or illegal - at all.

The one that surprised me most of all was from Stephanie Miller on Air America, who said something like: Americans don’t want to landscape or clean toilets, so that’s why we need immigrants, to do those things. Ms. Miller, who I like a lot, displays an ignorance that I think goes to the root of why so-called Reagan Democrats went Republican.

Many blue collar workers think people expressing such ignorance are completely out of touch with their lives.

Sure, cleaning toilets is hardly anyone’s favorite job. But even janitors only spend a small percentage of their time actually cleaning toilets. And I maintain there’s plenty of janitors - US citizens - who take pride in their work and are perfectly happy being janitors. And no, it doesn’t mean they set the bar low, or are unintelligent, or any other negative stereotype some would attribute to them.

If a job pays the bills and you’re competent at that job, I think most folks doing the job try to do it well. And it’s a turn-off to hear some people be dismissive about the job they’ve invested themselves in, when those people are really saying the job is beneath THEM.

My impression is that many illegal immigrants will take any work that pays more than they made in their country of origin. In Oregon, from what I’ve observed, field (farm) work and the building trades are where most illegal immigrant men work. And there’s no shortage of US citizens willing to do that work - especially in the building trades.

Do citizens in those trades resent the illegal immigrants working beside them? For the most part, no. But if they’re around a bunch of guys speaking a foreign language, that can cause anxiety, because it causes wonder about what’s being said, and that is plain old annoying. I don’t think that’s racist either. Communication with peers is a human trait and anything that limits that can cause annoyance and discomfort.

I question assumptions that seem all too common about illegal immigrants, as well as stereotypes about blue collar workers. It’s common to expect politicians to be out of touch that way, as most of them come from the so-called professional classes (law and business managers/owners, especially).

But activists and opinionists in the persuader class should certainly know better, before they open their mouths. As a guy who’s a blue collar worker myself, I’ve been persuaded often…. to tune out the rest of the opinions of people who miscast me out of ignorance. And since it happens with some regularity, from righties and lefties alike, it’s common for me to feel that there’s nobody at all truly representing my concerns in electoral politics.

Which leaves me, and I bet many other blue-collar workers, feeling like every election is not about anything positive but simply a chance to vote for the lesser of two evils. That’s not much of a motivator. And it leaves me ripe to respond to single-issue appeals. Is it any wonder why so many Dems jumped to Reagan? They probably did so because of one single issue (tax cuts?). Now, if Carter or Mondale were offering platforms that demonstrated they had a clue about many things blue collar folks wanted someone to address, Reagan wouldn’t have been able to peel them away with a single issue.

That missing platform, that lack of understanding, has been exhibited by the GOP and the DLC-dominated national party ever since. The Dems could be the majority party if they quit trying to patch together poll-induced quilts of platforms and simply listened, then represented what they heard.

But back to the topic of immigrants, the situation is similar. Have you spoken with any illegal immigrants lately? Then how can you know their motivations and desires? How can you offer a fix if you’re only guessing what’s wrong?

That’s not to say that people at the lower end of the economic scale don’t have some myths and biases themselves. For example, I believe the culprits in this immigrant debate are not the immigrants. Employers who are labor exploiters and/or tax evaders are the greatest causal factor of the problems our society wants to address.

That’s my bias. And maybe it’s not a myth. I also have another bias that assumes our society would rather use immigrants as the convenient, powerless scapegoats than to do anything about the corrupt employers who created and maintain the problem. And I also believe politicians on both sides are being disingenuous to make a morality play out of this issue, as legalities and penalties get discussed. They’re both pandering to voters based on what their polls say.

Are there any politicians left who’d rather do ‘the right thing’ to resolve a problem honestly, instead of putting their elective viability forever first?

My bias says, there’s too damn few. Which is why I’d rather side with those being scapegoated. I may know almost no Spanish at all, but I understand the universal language of the lower-paid worker far better than the language of the shuck-and-jivers in the political class.