Believe it or not, I still go to the gym. Admittedly, it’s dropped from five times a week down to slightly less than three (on average), but I’m still there after work more often than not, sweating away on some machine, listening to the same five albums on my iPod, and watching Fox News with the closed captioning on.

I don’t choose the Fox. It’s what’s on. But having nothing to do with my eyes for an hour a day while I run on the goofy pseudo-mountain-mimicking machine reconfirms my old suspicions that it’s nothing but a propaganda mouthpiece for the far right. It really hurts to watch it and realize that a huge swath of this country thinks it’s news. Tonight, for instance, I noticed that the right-wingest of right-wing nut jobs, Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer are regular commentators. I haven’t seen any amid the sweat dripping into my eyes, but I’m assuming that the liberals they put on stage to pretend at an unbiased presentation sound pretty middle of road. If they showed us the rainbow from green to ultraviolet, we’d be happy to affirm that the whole spectrum’s there, give or take the lunatic fringe.

My favorite sequence tonight segued within ten seconds from a story about Al-Zarqawi’s aide’s confirmation of intent to pull off attacks on U.S. soil (did that come as a surprise? the last one got such a rise out of us) to a couple of apocalyptic quotes about how terrorists could plant a bomb anywhere if they put their minds to it (e.g., movie theaters, malls, schools, your freedom-loving blonde-haired son’s lunchbox), to a story about our wide-open and unsecured border with Mexico where, wouldn’t you know it, over one million illegal aliens are caught ever year trying to sneak across! And an estimated three to five million more get through! Omigod! We’ve got to shut that border with Mexico!

Last September, Time magazine gave a similarly dramatic pronouncement: “The number of illegal aliens flooding into the US this year will total three million.” Time, bastion of rigorous analysis that they are, reached this figure by figuring that for every illegal immigrant caught, “at least three make it into the country safely." Now that’s science. I expect my journalists to use more than the fingers of one hand to do their figgerin’. Do you?

I might have believed those figures, too, had I not been reading this very morning on the bus to work in, you guessed it, The Economist, that

. . . the immigrants caught by the Border Patrol are often repeat offenders. They are returned to Mexico and then promptly try again. In other words, a million arrests do not equal a million different people.

What would be a more plausible figure for the growth in illegal immigration? The INS once calculated that around 40% of undocumented residents entered America legally, but then overstayed their visas. At the same time, many illegal residents have managed to legalise themselves.

Apart from the official amnesties (some 2.7m took advantage of the blanket amnesty in 1986 and another 3m or so have benefited from six targeted bills passed by Congress between 1994 and 2000), at least 100,000 unauthorised residents become legal every year, either by “adjusting their status” (it helps if you marry an American citizen) or by leaving the country and returning with a visa. The numbers are confused guesswork, but it is perfectly possible to believe that some 1m migrants might enter the country illegally this year.

If their numbers are in doubt, their destinations are not. Many will join the 1m or more undocumented immigrants (out of a total agricultural workforce of 1.6m) who are at back-bending work in the nation’s fields, particularly in California.

The last figure got me thinking. Almost two-thirds of the total agricultural workforce in this country consists of illegal immigrants? So what would happen if we were, in a hypothetical world, successful in rounding up every last undocumented worker and shipping him or her back to Mexico or Paraguay, and sealing up the border for good? Would we find a million Americans who are willing to toil in the sun picking strawberries and oranges for $4 to $6 an hour? It’s possible, but I suspect not. I suspect that even if we could find a million Americans (or legal immigrants, but i guess they’re Americans too) who were willing to do the work, they’d demand a hell of a lot more than minimum wage to do it. That would drive up produce prices, making American produce more expensive on the world market and (ouch!) in the grocery store. It might put a dent in our ability to get asparagus for $2.99 a bunch in the middle of January in Chicago. Would consumers stand for that for long?

That got me thinking about the minimum wage, an increase in which was recently discussed briefly in Congress and shot down. It’s been $5.15 for eight years now, so I can only assume that the road to our glorious and shiny new ownership society is paved with fives. Now, I remember finding that it was difficult to own much of anything when I made minimum wage. I’d always go to the restaurant next to Tower Records and order a glass of water and a cup of soup for my lunch, because it came with a roll basket, and even then my lunch came to almost an hour’s pay. On that kind of pay, I’d love to divert a hefty chunk of my social security contributions into a personal savings account. Heck, I’d throw in $20 or more a year! Would that be enough to retire on? If the S&P 500 grew just 10,000% annually (on average), I’d be able to afford name-brand coffee to drink while I relax in the shade on what’s left of the concrete slab upon which used to set my grandpappy’s mobile home.

Even Rick Santorum (that’s Latin for "asshole") proposed a $1.10 increase, just barely half of Ted Kennedy’s $2.10 proposal, with an exemption for small businesses (which admittedly makes some sense). But both were rejected as amendments to the bankruptcy bill, which passed to the delight of credit card companies everywhere. Here’s what The Economist thinks of the law:

Is the system really abused? In fact, evidence suggests that the boom in personal bankruptcies has more to do with the piling on of consumer debt than with debtors playing the system. In the 1990s, revolving debt (mostly credit-card debt), grew by as much as 12% a year; from 1980 to 2004, it increased nearly 15 times. And the non-partisan American Bankruptcy Institute puts the number of bankruptcy filers who could afford to pay a good chunk of their debts at 3.6%: still a big number, but not nearly as much as the 10% or more claimed by creditor groups.

In any case, the bill’s means test (an average of the debtor’s past six months of income) should catch those who can clearly pay up. But opponents fear that the test, which they think too harsh and arbitrary, will drag those who rightly belong in Chapter 7 unfairly into court.

More troubling is the part of the legislation that makes it harder for poorer debtors, not likely to be the abusers of the system, to file for bankruptcy. Some 84% of all filers are too poor to qualify for the new law’s means test. But they will still be put through a great deal of rigmarole to get relief. For example, all debtors will have to get credit counselling before they file—a costly process, and one which does little to steer people out of bankruptcy. The bill also requires people to produce all sorts of paperwork, from payroll stubs to tax returns. Those who have not kept strict records will have to give up or pay for a lawyer to plead their case in court.

Other quirks of the legislation make one wonder why credit-industry groups are so keen on it. One loophole allows rich debtors to go on shielding assets in special trust accounts that are legal in a few states. And debtors’ fancy homes in Texas and Florida will still be off-limits to creditors. The bill’s backers say that fear of trampling on states’ rights stopped them closing such loopholes. But it smells rather pervasively like special treatment for the rich.

But here’s my point (by now you were wondering if I had one): Those who argue that people at the bottom of the income ladder deserve to be there—that they would simply find a better-paying job if they were responsible enough to handle one—always seem to miss the basic point. Someone has to do those jobs. Some of the foundations of the daily pleasantness of our American way of life depend upon people earning what many of us wouldn’t bother to pick up if it were blowing down a windy street.

Imagine if waitresses weren’t paid $2.10 an hour, and every restaurant bill suddenly shot up by 20% or more as their wages figured into the meal’s overt price tag. Imagine, immigrants gone, if Americans were picking all those grapes and avocados, and produce prices shot up by 30% or more. Imagine (gasp!) if we kept all these outsourced manufacturing jobs in America and you had to pay at least 50% percent more for everything you buy at Target or Walmart. Imagine what would happen to the cost of living if all the cleaning people, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants, window washers, furniture movers, and so on were suddenly paid enough to live on? It sounds like I’m arguing to drop the minimum wage even lower, but in fact I’m just trying to point out to what extent our comfort and easy living depends explicitly upon the low wages of the people who provide us with it. (And yes, I pulled those percentages right out of my santorum.)

Whatever the anti-immigrant views of the ordinary Joe on the factory floor, America’s bosses are well aware of their dependence on foreign workers. High-tech companies benefit from H-1B visas, created in 1990 to allow the entry of scientists and other skilled professionals for a maximum of six years. In theory there is an annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas, but during the dotcom boom this was frequently relaxed. Immigration critics say there are now more than 1m H-1B visa holders, plus more than 325,000 holders of L-1 visas, which allow the intra-company transfer of workers from foreign subsidiaries. Doubtless one reason for the influx is that foreigners are cheaper, but the bosses argue that there is also a shortage of qualified Americans.

The same argument applies lower down the employment scale. The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition lobbies Congress and the White House on behalf of ill-paid sectors such as the hotel industry, fast-food, farming, nursing and animal-slaughtering; these could not survive without their immigrant workers, many of them undocumented. The argument is that immigrants take the nation’s dirty and dangerous jobs because Americans will not. The counter-argument is that Americans would if they were paid enough. But there is precious little evidence that Joe White, whatever the pay, is willing to toil alongside José Blanco picking fruit in California. Short of a big increase in legal immigration, illegal immigrants will continue to meet America’s needs.

If everyone in every crappy service-sector job in the country mustered up the motivation to enroll in community college this fall (provided they could afford tuition) and went out looking for that better job in 2007, would we be willing (1) to do without the services they provide? and (2) to provide them each with a better job? No to both, of course, because they perform necessary services, and there simply aren’t enough skilled jobs in the economy to accommodate all the people. Though it takes no real skill to perform them, the worst-paying jobs must still be performed by someone. And there’s no cosmic economics equation dictating a one-to-one correspondence between born losers and crappy service-sector jobs.

In fact, as more manufacturing jobs are shipped off to cheaper places, there are few options left to many people. Ask the guy I know in Polo, Illinois (population 2500) how far he’d have to travel to find a decent-paying manufacturing or trade job of any kind. Everyone for miles around now works at Walmart or Costco in the next big town over.

For many people, it amounts to getting stuck at the wrong end of the bell-curve in a class of overachievers. Even though you answered 80% of the questions right, the fact that half the class did better than you means you’ll be cleaning out toilets until you’re 70. Sorry, that’s just the way things work out. Here’s your plunger. The company supplies the first one. If you should lose or break it, the next will come out of your paycheck.

I need a second plunger. It's too much efffort to bring the one from the north wing upstairs when there is a mishap. Do new plungers automagically come with a minimum-wage operator? It's a disgusting job and I don't like gettting my hands dirty

once again, i must stress your need for an "audible" subscription. i don't think you need to watch a great deal of fox to get the point, and wouldn't you prefer to listen to "this american life" or some book? it's true i work out good and hard when i'm pissed, and i'm sure something like "crossfire" could get me revved, but i don't think it's positive reinforcement to look at sean hannity whilst exercising. it's enough to drive you to the couch and the DVD player forever.

The Christian Science Monitor (3/21/2005) has more to say on the matter.

Fox News is an “advocacy group”? More here.