Immigration is one of those sticky widgets you don’t often hear about unless it comes from one of two camps. On the one side of the issue, you have guys like Pat Buchanan who unabashedly come out against immigrants coming to the United States because he feels we have a pretty good way of life and it would be a damn shame if all the white people had to put up with people of color coming here and turning our Mulligan Stew melting pot into something more closely resembling mulligatawny.He has support as well. Ninety percent of Americans might call themselves middle class, but somebody is out there doing the work, and it isn’t just 10 percent of the American populace. American workers, from the auto industry to the food service sector, tend to not think about immigration in very sensitive terms. When a guy like Buchanan comes along and tells them they have a right to be worried, they listen. Frankly, Pat need not have bothered. Since America’s founding, we have reacted with fear toward immigrants whether they came from Poland, Ireland, Germany or Mexico.On the other side, you generally have the well-meaning leftists who will do anything to maintain their enlightened status. Supporting unfettered immigration comes about as naturally to them as Birkenstocks with socks, tie-dye and pretending to respect Vegans. It is in the blood. After all, even the right doesn’t want to look like it supports Pat Buchanan.We tend to look at things in black and white; it is our nature. It is much easier to categorize any issue into one of two categories. Finding a third option is tricky business. Unfortunately, we do live in a world of many colors as well as thousands of shades of gray. Sometimes, the truth is closer to off-white or charcoal than anything else, but when you get there, you might not have the pack there telling you you’re right.The fact is, immigration is much trickier than most people assume. On the one hand, you have the needs of American industry. What they want is cheap labor. They would have us believe that Mexican immigrants do work that Americans just do not want to do. They are half right. Mexican immigrants are willing to do jobs Americans are not willing to do for next to nothing.I take great offense at the generalizations people who have never worked with their bodies make about working Americans. This slanderous claim about unwilling and lazy Americans invariably comes from people with white collars whose idea of a hard day’s work is coming home with eye strain and a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome because their gel-filled mouse pad isn’t cutting it.They have no idea what it feels like to come home so tired they just barely manage to feed their kids before they plop down on the couch to watch the only entertainment they can afford. They have no idea what carpal tunnel syndrome feels like when it comes from making the same cutting motion with a butcher knife thousands of times per day at IBP.They also have no idea what it feels like to go to work one day and be told they are getting their wages and benefits cut because their company has found employees desperate enough to work for next to nothing.This is the tricky ground I was talking about. This isn’t the right wing anti-immigration platform. This isn’t the left wing pro-everybody-but-us stance. This is the pro-labor, pro-Mexican, anti-industry first amalgam you don’t see every day.Industry would have us all believe we are racist if we do not embrace the flood of Mexican immigrants coming into the United States to work cheap. American workers feed into this because overall it is difficult for them to take a sophisticated, geo-political view of their own joblessness. The working class is the working class because they don’t often have the education, skills or sophistication to be anything else. They have a hard time talking about the position of American labor being undermined by an influx of an even greater underclass than themselves without it descending into a hate-filled diatribe about Mexicans.More than once have I found myself talking to construction workers, welders and custodians about wage cuts and lost benefits to find their attention wandering off the subject into offensive remarks about crowded apartments and increasing crime rates.What those of us concerned with working Americans need to do is practice the kind of patience normally reserved for martyrs. Failing that, we need to convince our well-intentioned brethren in other walks of life that what is good for America is a radically different perspective on race, class, labor and immigration than most of us have time to consider.What we need to understand is that no one is inherently racist because they fear losing their job. If you have eked out a meager living or even a great living stacking bricks your whole life and are faced with the prospect of losing your only source of income, that is legitimate.There is nothing trivial about the prospect of unemployment. Many Americans live in towns with only one or two plants or factories to support the community their families have lived in for generations. Lost jobs mean expensive moves or welfare for people too proud to go on the public dole.Mexicans come to America to find work because the Mexican economy is in the toilet. No one can blame them for wanting a better life. Hating them for that is wrong. But likewise we cannot place blame on American workers who rightly fear losing their pay, benefits and jobs to desperate people willing to risk their lives to come here and work for slave wages.American companies will turn a blind eye to fake green cards to keep wages low and subtly threaten American workers with unfair competition.The history of American labor is one drenched in the blood of men and women who risked their lives for a living wage. To abandon all of that now because Corporate America has found a loophole with Mexican immigrants should be insupportable by the left.The kindest thing we can do for working Mexicans and Americans alike is to support economic aid to those regions of Mexico that need it most. The smartest thing we can do as leftists is to not buy into the black and white arguments of the past.Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.