The High Cost of Cheap Lettuce

The May-Day Protests of Illegal Aliens (in at least one case without bothering to get the required permits) in our cities brings home a very stark reality. Our short-sighted greed for cheap labor is going to cost us. The universe seems designed so that the right thing to do is almost never the easy thing to do in the short run. There always seems to be some short term advantage to cheating. In the long run though, the right thing usually winds up being the easy thing as well. Those who take illicit shortcuts wind up lost.

We are lost. We are lost because we have taken illicit short cuts. We are lost because our leaders, business and political, got greedy and winked at illicit short cuts. And we passively bought our cheap lettuce, or fence, or chicken or whatever, and let them.

We now have tens of thousands of illegal aliens in our streets, all of whom want our benefits but not all of whom desire to assimilate into our culture. All of whom want changes in our laws, but if the changes they want in our laws don't come, they will break them anyway.

Yes, you saved money on your construction project because you hired illegal aliens. I know of a roofer whose family was in the business for thirty years who had to close his business down because he could not compete with an endless supply of illegal labor. The man would have spent the money he made in the community. The illegals wire it to Mexico.

Mexico's second largest source of foreign currency, second only to oil, is wire transfers from its citizens living abroad. They are sucking money out of this country as fast as they can make it. When the boom is over, they will go back home. That is after all the honest businessmen who tried to play by the rules got their throats cut by the competition who were willing to skirt the law. When the bottom falls out of our economy because of our short-term greed many of those protesting in our streets to stay here will just go back home and leave us to clean up the mess.

I lack time or space to delve into the increase in crime and other social problems when you take a subset of a country's population that is most likely to commit crimes- young men daring enough to sneak into another country against their laws- and move them to your neighborhood.

Decade after decade of disrespect for the law has produced a situation that is bad for all of us. It is unfair to the legal American citizens, and it is unfair and unjust to even some of the illegal aliens. Greed is sin. I know that is an old-fashioned concept, but ignoring spiritual truth is at least as dangerous as taking illicit short-cuts that cause us to lose our way.