John Kenneth Galbraith on Immigration (Pt. 1 of 2)

As is the case for many issues, the description of the problem by John Kenneth Galbraith is hard to improve upon. The description in this case being of the illegal immigration situation he gave in The Culture of Contentment (1992).

Galbraith always accorded central importance to the problem of poverty in the United States. In that book he discussed "the functional underclass" which "all industrial countries have ... in greater or lesser measure and in one form or another." And he defined the political context of the issue in a way that is virtually unchanged 12 years later. The existence of this underclass is accepted, he says:

What is not accepted, and indeed is little mentioned, is that the underclass is integrally a part of a larger economic process and, more importantly that it serves the living standard and the comfort of the more favored community. Economic progress would be far more uncertain and certainly far less rapid without it. The economically fortunate, not excluding those who speak with greatest regret of the existence of this class, are heavily dependent on its presence.

The underclass is deeply functional... As some of its members escape from depreivation and its associated compulsions, a resupply become essential. But on few matters, it must be added, is even the most sophisticated economic and social comment more reticent. The picture of an economic and political system in which social exclusion, however unforgiving, is somehow a remediable affliction is all but required. Here, in highly compelling fashion, the social convenience of the contented replaces the clearly visible reality.

He proceeds to explain that in western European countries since the Second World War there evolved an "accepted and highly organized" system for recruiting foreign workers to fill jobs for which suitable native labor was not available. Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain, Austria, Italy and the Scandinavian countries are heavily reliant on immigrant labor for unskilled jobs.

The 1990s brought a need for highly-skilled immigrant labor in some high-tech fields. Though in both Europe and the United States, those immigrants have been largely legal and do not constitute part of the "functional underclass" of which Galbraith speaks.