Debt Free

We've got an illegal immigration problem. Ask almost anyone. There's a flow of immigrants coming here from Mexico and, according to the Office of Homeland Security, 7 million were living here at the beginning of this decade. They estimate 4.8 million of these were from Mexico. That was a rise of over 100% from just a decade previously. One shudders to think where this figure is today. This isn't just a Mexican problem either, with other central American countries contributing hundreds of thousands of their citizens to the poor, huddled masses that make up our little immigration problem.

The flight of currency from the U.S. initiated by illegal immigrants is almost unfathomable. Mexico, a country with copious oil reserves, exports about 1.8 million barrels a day. The huge sum of money this infuses into the Mexican economy pales by comparison to the estimated $10 billion (PEW Hispanic Center estimate) annually sent back to Mexico in 2003 alone. In addition, it's estimated that the net drain on US social and health services costs the US taxpayers over $200 each.

We've got a prison population problem in the U.S. as well. Some of this is caused by immigrant crime, much of it is caused by good, old fashioned, home grown crime committed by U.S. citizens. Over 2 million people now call some prison in the U.S. home. This huge number was caused, to some extent by mandatory minimum sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, causing violent criminals to be excused so they can fit in the drug offenders. That's a story for another day, however. The bottom line, however, is that our penal system is overtaxed, and something needs to be done about it.

We have too many illegals here and too many people in prison. Many in our agricultural community claim illegals are an intregal part of our economy, allowing food to be brought to market at competitive prices. They claim that they illegal immigrants allow them to get the produce from the fields at labor rates that American workers shun. Well, let's give the illegal immigrants one less reason to hop the fence. Remove the economic incentive for their trip across the Arizona desert.

We should use our prison population to harvest our crops. They could supplement the efforts of legal immigrant farmworkers. Growers would pay them on a piecework basis, so that they would pay a comparable rate to what they are paying now. The convicts would probably be far less efficient than the immigrant workers, but we have so many of them, it wouldn't matter. Their pay would go back to the state and be used to offset the cost the cost of their incarceration. They'd get in an honest day's work, the state's taxpayers would benefit, and the growers would get their crops from the fields at prices similar to what they pay now. Who knows if, when the economics of the system were examined, such a system would really bear fruit, but it would be worth investigating.