Well, Happy New Year to all. Hope you’re all now properly chained back to your desks doing the bidding of the bosses…

Right after the transit strike, we had a pretty intense back and forth about immigration policy and health care, set off by my post that the transit workers deal (which is causing a bit of a rumble inside the union) showed why we need to fight for Medicare For All. A few comments suggested that if we just stopped the flow of undocumented immigrants into the country, presto, the health care crisis would abate. To which I said, more or less, nonsense.

The folks at the Drum Major Institute put out a report just before the holidays that I think has some useful points:

Immigration policy should bolster—not undermine—the critical contribution that immigrants make to our economy as workers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers and consumers, because:

• On average, immigrants pay more in taxes each year than they use in government services, and these taxes fund programs like Social Security that strengthen and expand the middle class.

That was a point that several people tried to make. The financial crisis facing local and state governments is not the making of illegal immigration. In health care, it’s a profit-driven system that eats up 15 percent of our Gross Domestic Product–if we had Medicare For All, it would cost about 1 percent of GDP. And in other services, it’s the draining away of resources by crazy tax-cutting policies and tax breaks to corporations.

The DMI report also points out this important point: “Because employers threaten undocumented immigrants with deportation, these workers cannot effectively assert their rights in the workplace by, for example, asking for raises, complaining about violations of wage and hour or workplace safety laws, or by supporting union organizing drives. As long as this cheaper and more compliant pool of immigrant labor is available, employers are all too willing to take advantage of the situation to keep their labor costs down and are less willing to hire U.S.-born workers if they demand better wages and working conditions. U.S.-born workers are left to either accept the same diminished wages and degraded working conditions as immigrants living under threat of deportation or to be shut out of whole industries where employers hire predominantly undocumented immigrants.

When immigrants lack rights in the workplace, labor standards are driven down, and all working people have less opportunity to enter or remain part of the middle class. So a pro-middle-class immigration policy must guarantee immigrants full labor rights and make sure that employers cannot use deportation as a coercive tool in the labor market.”

You can get the full DMI report here.