Cheap oil, cheap labor and costly habits

WHAT IF HALF of the hundreds of thousands in Monday’s pro-immigrant throngs had been carrying signs griping about gas prices?

They could have. Because immigration and oil go together like peanut butter and tortillas.

Two issues, one problem. We’re a nation of junkies. Cars on crack! Factories on smack! It’s been one long, fabulous high, but we’re starting to crash. We’re starting to realize that cheap gas and cheap labor aren’t all that cheap after all, and that CEOs have been playing us for suckers, pocketing the profits and benefits for themselves and spreading the costs around to the rest of us.

What we were told in high school driver’s ed is true -- driving is a privilege, not a right; the DMV can give, and the DMV can take away. And entering the U.S. to work is a privilege, not a right. Workers who come here illegally aren’t entitled to jobs any more than we are entitled to tool around behind the wheel of a car.

But. But, but, but. So big a “but” that I repeat it yet again: But cheap driving and cheap labor are so intertwined and so interdependent in the functioning of this nation that it’s only when there’s a disturbance in the force -- the workforce or the driving force -- that we realize it.

Cities and commerce are designed for the driver, not the transit passenger. A dozen miles to work, 10 to the kids’ school, four miles to the market, all on different points of the compass.

And our consumer economy loves cheap labor. In the sprint to the bottom in labor costs, American companies that can’t outsource their work abroad outsource it right here, to desperate foreign workers. Either way, we can afford to get just about everything that we think we want. And the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful.

WE’VE BEEN mainlining cheap gas and cheap labor, and now we’re hooked. We assume we’re entitled to it.

Why shouldn’t we? It’s worked pretty well so far. Businesses are happy with cheap, complaisant workers, and there’s always more where they came from. The government is happy with complacent consumers. We’re happy with SUVs and gardeners for $50 a month. Workers here illegally are happy to earn more money in a week than they could make in a month at home.

But then gas prices broke through psychic barriers -- $2, $3. We learned that, last year, Exxon’s chief executive made about as much in one day as the governor of Maryland makes in an entire year. Lee Raymond made almost $6,000 -- or, as I prefer to think of it, 2,000 gallons of gas -- a minute. (And Congress wants to make felons out of baby-sitters and busboys.)

The immigrants have broken through some psychic barriers too. With their shirts and flags and their sheer numbers, they made it harder for the rest of us to think of them only as abstractions, harder not to come to terms with our complicity in their illegality, harder to take what they offer and wish their problems away.

You don’t have enough fingers to count the opportunities missed to fix all this. After 9/11, or in any of the years before, for that matter, Congress -- a massive organism that, amazingly, functions without a spine -- could have required more fuel-efficient cars. It could have given huge tax breaks to alternative-fuel research and hybrid buyers instead of to “commercial” users of monster SUVs like the Hummer -- as much as $100,000 until recently. It could have raised the minimum wage to attract homegrown workers to jobs and cracked the whip on companies that reap rewards from being “American” but that outsource their labor and bypass our regulations.

(Some Mexican politicians are as boneheaded as their U.S. counterparts. A Baja California pol named Gloria Ramirez Vargas told a May Day crowd that places like California “were once ours” and “with intelligence, with love and with a lot of work, we are reconquering [them] again for our Mexico.” Madame, do you really think that your countrymen -- who crawled through deserts or hid in car trunks to get here to work -- would welcome California being run by the same politicians who are so lousy at creating jobs that their citizens have to sneak into another country to make a living? Claro que no.)

So politicians don’t always rise to the moment? Forget it, it’s Washington, Jake. The Senate feebly debates immigration reform and belatedly waves $100 gas rebates in our faces. Hey, big boy, howzabout a $100 date? Meet you down at the premium pump. Just because Congress screws red light bulbs into the Capitol fixtures doesn’t mean the rest of us will take them up on their come-on.

The next time you see hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets, they might be protesting -- and they might be going cold turkey and walking to work.