Chicken Or Egg Corruption

As Mona Charen noted earlier this week, our immigration debate in many ways masks debates we should be having about the corruption of our own systems. Here's another take on immigration and corruption all around.

the toleration of what is in effect a pool of illegally employed indentured labor corrupts our business community. As long as Big Billy’s and businesses like it continue to be profitable, they will gets loans from the bank, renew their insurance policies, get their ads placed in the local paper, and be honored with a bell at the Rotary luncheon.
The politicians—all those other folks at the Rotary tables—seem to be pitching their rhetoric and tailoring their legislation more to a view of capturing the loyalty of a new voting block than finding a solution that is both charitable and honors the law. Law enforcement, perhaps through resigned frustration, appear to be blind to the situation. But equally blind are the patrons. Because the mountains of food are so cheap, we still wait for the tables. We just have to pretend not to see the dark skinned boy speaking Spanish hauling the plates back to the kitchen.
But then we have a tradition here in the South of not seeing dark-skinned boys hauling plates back to the kitchen, don’t we? Oh, that hurts. Maybe it’s not that the illegal immigration business is corrupting us here in Tennessee. Instead, perhaps it’s our corruption that’s attracting the illegal immigrants.