Nader on Immigration: Friend or Foe?

OAKLAND -- In between fending off questions about his spoiler role in the presidential election, Ralph Nader has spent some of his five-day "Don't Waste Your Vote" swing through California and Texas quietly sketching out an immigration policy unlike anything the United States has ever seen.

The Green Party candidate would strengthen the U.S.-Mexico border, set an unspecified limit on immigration (without country-by-country quotas), block "high-tech visas" for Silicon Valley companies, discourage immigration by the wealthy, allow short-term work permits, and guarantee all immigrant workers -- legal and illegal -- full labor and civil rights.

Nader's central philosophy toward immigration is to treat it as a foreign-policy issue.

"First of all, the first stage of our immigration policy is to stop supporting oligarchs, dictatorships [and] authoritarian regimes that drive people to leave their native lands out of economic desperation or political repression," he said in the heavily Latino, fast-growing central California city of Fresno on Saturday. "Lots of people from Mexico and Central America would now be in those countries, not in this country, if they had a decent chance at a democratic society and an adequate standard of living."

Questioned directly about trade and immigration issues with Mexico, Nader consistently refers to the United States' southern neighbor as "dictatorial" and "oligarchical."

"There's no such thing as free trade when the country's not free, and suppresses its workers' rights to form independent trade unions through police actions, suppresses wages, condones corporations violating every law that has been on the books in Mexico -- environmental law, worker protection law, minimum wage law, etc.," he said in Houston Thursday.

According to Nader's worldview, the system works like this: America supports dictators in developing countries who drive out their talented professionals. These skilled workers are then scooped up by ravenous U.S. technology companies under the "H1-B" visa program, which Congress has increased drastically over the past three years.

"I don't think Silicon Valley should be allowed to bring in 250-300,000 computer specialists, scientists and engineers, who are desperately needed in third-world countries," Nader said, charging that Internet companies just "underpay them compared to Americans who are ready to be retrained in the new computer languages."

Asked if he considers India to be an "oppressive regime supported by America," and whether there should be a specific limit to H1-Bs, Nader said:

"Well, a lot of workers in this country can be trained in new computer languages. There are minority groups in this country that formed associations to highlight that. There is no shortage that can be documented that Silicon Valley is trumpeting. It's just that they want foreign, skilled computer programmers and engineers and scientists that they can push around and pay less to.

"We are hogs when it comes to brain-draining," he continued. "There's no country in the history of the world that has consciously drained more talent of other countries who desperately need this talent for public health, for entrepreneurship, for scientific and engineering development. And had any other country pursued that against us, we'd be extraordinarily angry at them. Put the shoe on the other foot for a change."

Consistent with his range of policies, Nader is opposed to any immigration system that favors the rich and brutalizes the poor. If enacted, his would be the first immigration policy in U.S. history to deliberately skew toward low-income workers, and offer them a full range of rights.

"The way immigration operates now ... the well-to-do can multiply their number of immigrants because ... they have connections," he said in Fresno. "There's actually a law now in the United States; you can buy yourself in: if you invest $500,000 in job-producing activities, you just come in, and that's very little known."