Branding Immigration

The day the healthcare bill was signed into law, another event was taking place on the grounds of the National Mall.

More than 200,000 people came to Washington DC to demonstrate for comprehensive immigration reform.

Obviously, that story was buried in the signing of healthcare, but it resurfaced in a big way weeks later after the signing of the Arizona immigration law.

All cards on the table, my company – The M Network – is the company that’s did all the ads for the Washington DC rally as well the other immigration demonstrations that have been happening all over the country recently. (“si no es ahora… cuando?”)

Because of that work, we might have a little different view of all of this than the traditional pundits.

The real issue here – the one that nobody is talking about – is the fact that we need illegal immigrants.

This is not about the rights of any person within our borders or the pain and suffering going on in the countries where most of these people are coming from or even the Democrats importing voters. It’s not about any of the things you’ve heard recently on cable news channels or talk radio.

The reason we need illegal immigrants is for very practical, financial reasons.

One good one is that in illegal immigrants, we have a workforce that actually pays into government programs like social security without ever having any chance of getting money out of those same government programs.

If it weren’t for illegals, those programs would go broke much faster.

Another reason why we need illegal immigrants is this: If all the working illegal aliens in this country became legal, imagine what that would do to the cost of labor. They would all have to be paid minimum wage. More expensive still is that they would also have the ability to unionize.

Imagine what that would do to the price of strawberries!

From a branding standpoint, however, you can’t open those cans of worms.

For those who are for the kind of immigration reform being bandied about at these rallies, it’s important to paint amnesty as something noble and righteous and necessary to help those less fortunate.

For those who are against this kind of immigration reform, it’s important to paint amnesty as an affront to our laws and a threat to our safety.

So let’s talk about immigration!

Let’s talk about immigration! That way we won’t have to talk about the fact that, by law, we must pay our legal employees exponentially higher than the rest of the world pays their employees. As a result we have no ability to compete with them on price for basic manufacturing goods and, therefore, are pigeonholed into exporting high priced jobs and/or importing illegal, low priced laborers.

Let’s talk about immigration! That way we can hide —at least for a little while longer – the fact that the government puts out far more on government programs (like social security) than it could ever possibly bring in.

The big problem, of course, is that you can’t logically talk about immigration without first addressing these other issues.

But that won’t ever happen – because the immigration debate isn’t about reform, it’s about branding… and it’s about the worst kind of branding, branding without substance.