Servants and Immigration

I was just speaking on the phone to a Washington lawyer who wants to contribute a piece to First Things , and in the course of our rambling conversation he proposed a thesis about the current struggles over immigration. It was one of those nonce theses—proposed in a conversation just to test it out, but I thought I’d see what others think. It boils down to this: Professional women are one of the major reasons immigration control has been so hard to achieve.

If I understand the point, it means that certain classes (and generations) of women wanted to have both successful careers and successful families. And to achieve that, they needed to be able to afford servants on middle-class and upper-middle-class incomes. But the cost of legal employment in the United States is very high, and, besides, the population generally resists and resents being personal servants.

Still, when compared to third-world employers, these American women had a great deal of money to spend on gardeners, cleaners, cooks, nannies, and handymen (either directly or through piece-work firms). And over the years, with networks of illegal immigrants telling their families and friends back in their native countries, the numbers of such immigrants swelled.

The children of these immigrants, however, prove to have little more desire to be personal servants than the legal Americans do. And so the flow of new immigrants has to be kept open to provide new servants.

The claim in all this is that the construction, food-service, and farm industries are not the ones that will suffer much if illegal immigration is halted. It’s the professional women who will suffer. As voters, they overwhelmingly oppose attempts to crack down on illegal immigration, and they typically insist they do so for high moral reasons. Is it only a coincidence that the interests of their economic class demand exactly the same position?