April 20, 2006 | Britt Minshall is a United Church of Christ pastor and a proud member of the religious left. A former civil rights Freedom Rider, he heads an interracial Baltimore congregation of 200, which has ministries that care for recovering addicts and for prostitutes. He also works in Haiti, and has written a self-published novel "to expose the pernicious effects of American foreign policy" on the people of that country. He calls the current administration "evil, wrong, treasonous ... a pack of monsters." And yet as he watched hundreds of thousands of immigrants march through the streets of America's biggest cities in the past few weeks, he found himself agreeing with some of the most right-wing Republicans. Most liberals are "dead wrong" on immigration, he says, arguing that social justice demands a crackdown on the undocumented. "I'm afraid the Minutemen have a point here," he says.

Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in them a new kind of civil rights movement. They've supported calls to legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right, where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are working against the interests of low-skilled American workers. "I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote last month. "But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration ... [W]hile immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration -- especially immigration from Mexico."

Minshall says he sees the pain every day. Baltimore, he says, is full of young, black men who are "unemployable because they won't work for $4.50 an hour." The influx of immigrants, he says, "is tilting everyone's wages down, except for the upper class." He says that one member of his church, the owner of a roofing business, recently fired his entire crew and replaced them with immigrant contractors. The man felt "pushed up against a wall," Minshall says, because he couldn't compete without using illegal labor. "The customer will always buy the $2,000 roof and not the $2,500 one," Minshall says, adding, "We've gotten so addicted to cheap goods."

You need a free "day pass" to read the whole thing (but Salon sucks so don't give them any money).

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/20/debate/

Here's something very interesting I did not know:

As [Air America radio host Tom] Hartmann notes, Cesar Chávez, the legendary founder of the United Farmworkers Union, was at one point so opposed to illegal immigration that he was known to call the INS on the undocumented. "What he was trying to do was to stop growers from using immigrants to break the strikes," says Nestor Rodriguez, co-director of the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston.