Mexican Gardeners and Middle Class Copouts

Posted on September 18, 2003 in Morals & Ethics Neighborhood

Once my mother drove through a neighborhood near me and saw the INS rounding up several illegal aliens. They made the women sit in the hot sun while they collected their busload. She was angry that the INS was so cruel. “I bet that none of the people in those fancy houses had to sit out there.”

In a discussion about Victor Hanson’s Mexifornia, we got to talking about how we employed Mexican gardeners. I wondered about the ethics of this. We knew that many businesses out there probably employed illegal aliens. So we hired a service to avoid the problem of having to check the green cards ourselves. “That strikes me, in a way, as the classic Middle Class copout,” I said.

I never got to explain myself in the resulting tumult. People invoked the Law, of course, which does not require them to check. But I still wonder: we claim that we want this end to illegal immigration. So why don’t we seek lifestyles that are less dependant on lawns and nonnative shrubs? We have to have these gardeners because we have to have these gardens that look like a piece of New England instead of native California chaparral. So why not make some bold changes in the way we live? Why not seek the native beauty of the land? Mexico could teach us a great deal, I think, about how to live in this land. Tile our yards and our courtyards. Make them beautiful without the necessity of grass and nonnative hardwoods like liquid amber and elms. Live with the land.

I think as long as we keep making these demands on the landscape, we will continue to have these cravings that lead to the creation of the market. Instead of focusing on the gardeners, let us focus on our wastefulness.

We are responsible for the market for illegal labor. Let’s stop shuffling the blame on someone else.