- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I am a naturalized US citizen from South America, I have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and I have lived in San Antonio for 12 years. I would like to make a few points:
1) There IS some high-tech industry in San Antonio and it seems to be increasing. I work for a company that grew in ten years from 20 employees to more than 450 and it is owned by an Indian immigrant. It is a spin-off of Southwest Research Institute that hires about 2000 engineers and scientists. The avionics and health-science industries are quite strong. I frequent an inventors/product-developers club and I can see entrepreneurship alive and well. It is true there have been some set-backs in the last years (Sony and VLSI closed their chip fabs) but there other well paying jobs continue to come (Toyota is opening a plant this year). By the way, SWB just gobbled up AT&T, so their big honchos make San Antonio their place to live.
2) The effect on immigration is complex. In the case of unskilled labor it does lower the wages of native unskilled labor and they may have a reason to complain. But everybody else, including all the people that have time to read this, is benefiting directly or indirectly from their work. The earning power is the relation of wage to the cost of living and unskilled immigrants are making housing, food, transportation and multiple other things more affordable to the rest of us.
3) Illegal unskilled immigrants pay more taxes than citizens of comparable income. Their income is below the minimum to pay income taxes. The ones that use fake SSN get taxes discounted from their payroll but they will not be able to request a refund or claim social security. They cannot claim tax child credit that other workers with the same income can. But they pay sales tax on all the things they buy (and poor people in general pay a larger percentage of their income as they cannot put aside more money to save and invest). And they do pay property taxes through their rents. But as illegal they cannot use many of the services their taxes pay for (or work in the public sector).
4) High-tech immigrants like me probably lower a little the wages of highly skilled native citizens, IN THE SHORT RUN. But I cannot think of a better deal for the US as a whole as to bring in the best and the brightest from around the world. I believe it is the best (and perhaps only) option for this country to remain a technology leader. Better to bring the Chinese engineer to America than to outsource the work to China. Immigrants have proven to be great entrepreneurs, what is not surprising as they were willing to take on the adventure of migrating. And, personally, I wouldn't mind to bring a few more medical doctors to decrease the cost of health care . . .
Yesterday I did march on the pro-immigration rally in San Antonio. Although I am in a different situation than most of them, I think that giving a path to citizenship to the people that are already here is the right thing to do. They have not forced anybody to give them jobs. They were hired by US citizens that benefited from their work to build their businesses and their services have been used directly or indirectly by almost everybody in this country. All that while living in the shadows as second class citizens, working hard for little money, many times abused and with no rights. If we take advantage of them we do owe them something.
