Brother Sandstrom and The Utah Compact

"Rep. Stephen Sandstrom said the LDS Church’s position on immigration announced Thursday was directed squarely at his enforcement-only bill and suggested the church should leave the issue to lawmakers.

"'I kind of wish I’d been given more of a heads-up because it is taking aim at the bill I’m doing,' Sandstrom lamented Thursday. 'My other thought was that I thought the church’s no-position was the best way to go and to let this be the purview of government.'"
-From The Salt Lake Tribune online, November 12, 2010 (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/50656971-78/church-utah-compact-bill.html.csp)


On the campaign trail, one of the few issues that voters actually articulated when I would ask them about their concerns was immigration. Without exception, the voter's perspective was the same: "illegals" are sapping all our resources and we have to stop them. I got to the point where I'd nod and explain my perspective that we need to enforce the law and that the best way to combat the problems associated with immigration is to punish employers who hire undocumented workers.

I still believe that.

From a free market perspective, however, all labor should compete fairly for jobs, with the aim of reducing labor costs. Quite frankly, to me, that would mean (if I subscribed to free market philosophies) that we eliminate all barriers to immigration worldwide and allow all labor to fight it out with each other for penny wages, producing a class of the most efficient, lowest-cost laborers. That is, of course, the approach of modern corporate America, which has outsourced, to the maximum extent possible, their labor to China and India, whose highly skilled workforce will literally work for pennies on the dollar compared to their American counterparts.

Back in the United States, what few jobs are left get divvied out among the highly skilled, the well-connected, the lucky, and those who are willing to work for the lowest wages. In many cases, particularly in the agricultural and low-skill labor sectors, the lowest-paying jobs go to immigrants.

Whether or not this is fair, the fact remains that despite exorbitant subsidies paid out to the farmers and ranchers who produce our food, they remain unwilling to pay their workers amounts that would satisfy even a teenager's understanding of "minimum wage." I don't necessarily blame them, because inflation-adjusted income in middle-class America has actually dropped since 1980, food prices must remain ridiculously, unrealistically low.

I could talk about how demand from commercial tenants drives down wages among the janitors who clean our floors and empty our garbage, and how tourists and business travelers insist on ridiculously low hotel rates, driving down wages among the maids. But I won't.

Suffice it to say, that in a very real sense, the free market is operating exactly as it is designed to work. The fact of the matter is that immigrant fruit pickers are extraordinarily efficient and will at the same time work for much lower wages than their native-born counterparts. The mass of undocumented workers who vacuum the floors of our jungle of corporate offices work insanely faster and for far, far less than the teaming flood of liberal arts college graduates who don't bother to apply for their jobs.

And yet Americans complain. Those who vote for Republicans have the audacity to demand that in this area, where the free market is actually hurting them personally (so they think), that the government must step in and stop the work of the invisible hand. Those who vote for liberal Democrats argue, with just as much roaring cognitive dissonance, that somehow government should stop its work of deportation and regulation because in this case, regulation is bad for workers and their families.

I won't go into the ridiculous array of proposed solutions, from both the right and the left, from the monumental waste that is an actual, physical wall separating the United States from Mexico, to the "guest worker" and "amnesty" programs that seek to legitimize undocumented labor by simply changing the law.

Frankly, until Americans wake up from their schizophrenic stupor and wet dreams about a fantastical free market that simultaneously raises their wages while producing cheaper commodities, we'll continue our senseless political battles over the spectre of "illegal immigration."

In the middle of it all, in comes the Utah Compact. After some reflection, I signed it. Not because I agree with its erroneous support for the free market (I chose, in true American style, to ignore nonsensical statements about freedom and instead to hang my hat on its simultaneous support for a "free market philosophy that...maximizes opportunity"), but because I figured that someone needed to try to do something to steer us away from proposed solutions that would effectively create a criminal class out of our immigrant population.

In a move that none should view with much surprise, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved quickly to also support the Utah Compact.

Utah's Republican leaders acted with indignation, declaring, as did Representative Stephen Sandstrom, that the church should stay out of policy. Forget the fact that Utah Republicans would not occupy even as many seats as their vastly outnumbered Democratic colleagues in the legislature were it not for the overwhelming support Mormon voters heap on Republican candidates. No, the Mormon church (and its immigrant Second Counselor in the First Presidency...) should mind its own business.

What's fascinating is the brazen response here. How in the world can a political party so deeply, politically, indebted to the members of a church so critically disregard the expressed ideology of the church's leadership?

Stephen Sandstrom is himself a Mormon, and as such, almost certainly has raised his arm dozens of times over the years to manifest his support for church leaders as "prophets, seers and revelators." Not only that, I'm quite certain that Brother Sandstrom and his fellow LDS Republican legislators have entered into sacred covenants to support and defend the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as the Kingdom of God on the earth, with its leaders as the only ones on the face of the earth authorized to speak by the power of God.

Yet Brother Sandstrom is suggesting that the prophet of God should have called him first before issuing a public statement? That the presiding high priest of the Holy Priesthood after the Order of the Son of God should stay out of Brother Sandstrom's business?

You betcha.

Here's the deal: Stephen Sandstrom knows damn well that his LDS constituents support his bill. Not only do Brother Sandstrom's LDS constituents support his bill, but they would without a doubt vote him out of office in favor of a candidate who did, should Brother Sandstrom ever back away from his support for his bill in favor of an approach more consistent with the LDS church's stated position.

This reflects a larger dissonance among LDS voters generally. Where their church consistently takes moderate positions on a wide range of hot button political issues, from abortion to gun control to immigration (even gay rights!), LDS voters, by overwhelming margins, reject moderate politicians in favor of extremists. Democrats are certainly worse than Republicans. And Republicans like Mike Lee are, inexplicably, better than Republicans like Bob Bennett. Oddly, Republican evangelicals like Sharon Angle are even better than moderate, faithful LDS Democrats like Harry Reid.

Combine that with the face that only 30-40% of eligible Utahns actually cast their votes in a given election with the fact that the LDS church constrains itself by policy and by federal law from doing much more than they are currently doing to influence their members' vote, and you get the wacky phenomenon of an ultra-conservative state defying the calls for moderation from its ostensible prophets, seers and revelators.