Sohrab Ahmari has a short, powerful piece in his Compact magazine this morning on the exploitation of illegal immigrants in American farming and how this is making the spread of bird flu worse. Rhetorically, his piece is aimed at the Left, urging people who care about immigrants to oppose illegal immigration in part because some businesses exploit the workers.
But it could just as easily be aimed at the Right. While immigration remains primarily a cultural issue touching on questions of national identity and security, Republicans have a great tradition of treating “unfree” labor as a cultural issue that touches on economics and republican self-government. Many early Republicans had their roots in the Free Soil party, whose slogan was “Free soil, free labor, free men.”
As Eric Foner argued in his book on pre–Civil War Republican ideology, the Republican movement believed “free labor was economically and socially superior to slave labor and that the distinctive quality of Northern society was the opportunity it offered wage earners to rise to property-owning independence. From this creed flowed Republicans’ determination to arrest the expansion of slavery and place the institution on what Lincoln called the road to ‘ultimate extinction.’”
Occasionally, early Republicans would go further and disparage almost all wage work as servile and in some way a disreputable step toward a life of financial independence through proprietorship. But, importantly, they recognized that people who were economically “unfree” to change jobs undermined the market for free laborers, and the rule of law. They argued further that enlightened republican self-government could only be had when the predominant sort of man in society was one who was not abjectly dependent on others. The importation of millions of people with no right to residency, tenuous rights to work, or even residency tied to one particular wage job is an assault on the freedom of all. Conservatives believe that man is free when the law guards him. Illegal immigration is a way of habitually placing employer relations before, above, or beyond the law. It should offend a free people.