Just in time for Thanksgiving (ironically a similar topic on which you have been subtly brainwashed your whole life to sympathize with the exploiter instead of the exploited), let's put our napkins in our laps as I serve up a heaping helping of the hypocrisy surrounding the discussion of illegal immigration!
There appears to be no more popular whipping boys in Conservative discussion circles these days than the "evil illegal immigrants", who apparently spend their time simultaneously stealing all the jobs from hard working Americans while at the same time lazing about doing nothing as they live off the American dole, presumably while twisting their evil villain mustaches and maniacally laughing. They also apparently moonlight as the United States main sources of drug dealers and rapists while concurrently hanging out in hospital beds using up all of America's healthcare resources. Stated simply, Conservatives believe illegal immigrants are America's best multi-taskers.
When you clear away all of this frantic vilification and double speak, you will find underneath the ugly financial reality that Illegal Immigration is currently being used to falsely suppress prices on American goods and services, thus propping up our economy on the backs of the unfairly exploited. Consumers and politicians are happy to buy products that they KNOW use illegal immigrant labor, while in the same breath vilifying the impoverished victims that produced their low priced goods. The government is happy to run massive raids to deport illegal immigrants, while handing out laughable fines to their employers. Our total current approach to reduce illegal immigration is entirely backward, as we are attacking the wrong side of the power dynamic, punishing the exploited, not the exploiters.
Illegal immigrants are not holding guns to wealthy mega farm owners heads and saying "pay me under-wages and make me work without enough breaks". No one should have to break the law to work, period. While it does take two to tango, the employers whose families are not on the brink of starvation are the ones in the power position to stop this illegal practice. The desperately poor will always do desperate things to save their lives, and we as a country and consumers have been happy to look the other way so long as we get to buy our cheap crap at Wal-Mart as a result. Building walls will solve NOTHING till we recognize 3 uncomfortable realities:
1. Americans citizens are not willing to do the same work as illegal immigrants for the same wages in the same conditions. Pushing for a 100% American citizen workforce in the USA will mean careful, long-term planning for a notable increase in the costs of goods and services, so American employers can raise their wages enough to entice legal citizens to do the work, as well as pay for the safer conditions / breaks / etc. those legal workers expect. This cannot be done with a flip of the switch or wall without planning for the economic impact on American families already on a tight budget.
2. America will ALWAYS need at least some international labor. Our birth rates are too low, as is our tolerance of grueling conditions, to ever fill all the jobs illegal immigrants are filling today. Our current guest-worker program is a red-tape nightmare for businesses to use with far too low a numbers and duration limits to be effectively used by the agricultural and service industries that need it on a larger scale. Those industries will correctly determine that it is far more profitable to break the law, entice illegal labor, and pay the occasional fine if caught, than use the guest worker program until this is corrected. Once the guest-worker program is corrected, punishment for being caught knowingly using illegal labor needs to intensify exponentially, include significant jail time and serious loss of profits. Whistle-blowing illegal immigrants need to be offered amnesty and a path to citizenship for outing their law breaking employers, not punishment. Till this exists and is enforced, illegal labor will continue to flourish.
3. America needs to provide a simple, fast, and affordable path to citizenship for a majority of the current illegal laborers in our country. We happily looked the other way as their employers underpaid them and made them work in unsafe conditions, only to get them deported when they dared to complain. We happily tore apart their families while their employers never saw so much as a night in jail. The vast majority of these workers have contributed heavily to our economy, doing the jobs we found unsavory, and don't deserve to be discarded wholesale for the work we ASKED them to do with a wink and a nudge. Every consumer that bought a $5 tub of strawberries and whined about how expensive it was while in earshot of their grocer ASKED these workers to come here. I count myself among the guilty on this point and am striving to do better, but until issue #2 is addressed, my personal spending habits will have no meaningful impact.
Any American with even a vague moral center should strongly believe in a living wage for every human that works full time. Providing manual labor should not mean that you should slowly starve to death without government assistance or charity. Every employer that needs a healthy human to complete a task should pay enough to keep that human alive long enough to keep doing that task, period. Providing non-intellectual labor should not mean that you have to work 60+ hours a week and never see your children to survive. It is INSANE that we allow companies to pay full time wages insufficient to keep their workers alive and then ask TAXPAYERS to pay the balance in the form of public assistance. Crazier still, we then allow those companies to call themselves PROFITABLE, when really those profits are partially the wages those companies owed their workers that we as taxpayers paid instead. Immigrant labor, legal or not, also deserve a living wage, though their wage needs may be lower since they are living part time in the USA and part time in a different economy with a lower cost of living.
If the thought of paying full time "low-skilled" workers (citizens or guest-laborers) enough money to survive distresses you, ask yourself what other business expense is a company allowed not to pay for and force local taxpayers to foot the tab on? If you decide to become a farmer, and buy a tractor for your farm, you cannot drive the tractor till it runs out of gas and stalls out in the middle of your fields and then stand in your town square and demand that everyone pitch in to buy your gas! Your neighbors would look at you like you're nuts and say "Buy your own darn gasoline and just charge more for your vegetables". Why does this feel different to you when the tractor is a human that needs fuel to keep running?....a lifetime of programming by the wealthy to devalue your perception of the worth of poor people's lives is the answer. No really, keep thinking of other business expenses that you can make local taxpayers purchase long term for your business while you pocket huge profits and have those taxpayers applaud you for it. And don't try to cough up weak examples like public road maintenance and the police, as every citizen and corporation shares their theoretically fair portion of that expense through their taxes for their shared benefit. Ask yourself exactly how you actually benefit from paying the final portion of corporations under-wages while they pocket the cash that they should have used to pay their workers? Sit with this for a minute until you can see it...I'll wait.
Slowly starving people in other countries where you don't have to watch them die is no better than starving US citizens and harming both is below the moral standards we as a country claim to uphold. A wall and mass deportations solves none of this. Until both Conservative and Liberal discussion circles are willing to shift their focus to the exploiters in the illegal and legal labor dynamic, all efforts to affect change on this issue will be nothing more than ineffectual posturing for the entertainment of their respective political bases.
There appears to be no more popular whipping boys in Conservative discussion circles these days than the "evil illegal immigrants", who apparently spend their time simultaneously stealing all the jobs from hard working Americans while at the same time lazing about doing nothing as they live off the American dole, presumably while twisting their evil villain mustaches and maniacally laughing. They also apparently moonlight as the United States main sources of drug dealers and rapists while concurrently hanging out in hospital beds using up all of America's healthcare resources. Stated simply, Conservatives believe illegal immigrants are America's best multi-taskers.
When you clear away all of this frantic vilification and double speak, you will find underneath the ugly financial reality that Illegal Immigration is currently being used to falsely suppress prices on American goods and services, thus propping up our economy on the backs of the unfairly exploited. Consumers and politicians are happy to buy products that they KNOW use illegal immigrant labor, while in the same breath vilifying the impoverished victims that produced their low priced goods. The government is happy to run massive raids to deport illegal immigrants, while handing out laughable fines to their employers. Our total current approach to reduce illegal immigration is entirely backward, as we are attacking the wrong side of the power dynamic, punishing the exploited, not the exploiters.
Illegal immigrants are not holding guns to wealthy mega farm owners heads and saying "pay me under-wages and make me work without enough breaks". No one should have to break the law to work, period. While it does take two to tango, the employers whose families are not on the brink of starvation are the ones in the power position to stop this illegal practice. The desperately poor will always do desperate things to save their lives, and we as a country and consumers have been happy to look the other way so long as we get to buy our cheap crap at Wal-Mart as a result. Building walls will solve NOTHING till we recognize 3 uncomfortable realities:
1. Americans citizens are not willing to do the same work as illegal immigrants for the same wages in the same conditions. Pushing for a 100% American citizen workforce in the USA will mean careful, long-term planning for a notable increase in the costs of goods and services, so American employers can raise their wages enough to entice legal citizens to do the work, as well as pay for the safer conditions / breaks / etc. those legal workers expect. This cannot be done with a flip of the switch or wall without planning for the economic impact on American families already on a tight budget.
2. America will ALWAYS need at least some international labor. Our birth rates are too low, as is our tolerance of grueling conditions, to ever fill all the jobs illegal immigrants are filling today. Our current guest-worker program is a red-tape nightmare for businesses to use with far too low a numbers and duration limits to be effectively used by the agricultural and service industries that need it on a larger scale. Those industries will correctly determine that it is far more profitable to break the law, entice illegal labor, and pay the occasional fine if caught, than use the guest worker program until this is corrected. Once the guest-worker program is corrected, punishment for being caught knowingly using illegal labor needs to intensify exponentially, include significant jail time and serious loss of profits. Whistle-blowing illegal immigrants need to be offered amnesty and a path to citizenship for outing their law breaking employers, not punishment. Till this exists and is enforced, illegal labor will continue to flourish.
3. America needs to provide a simple, fast, and affordable path to citizenship for a majority of the current illegal laborers in our country. We happily looked the other way as their employers underpaid them and made them work in unsafe conditions, only to get them deported when they dared to complain. We happily tore apart their families while their employers never saw so much as a night in jail. The vast majority of these workers have contributed heavily to our economy, doing the jobs we found unsavory, and don't deserve to be discarded wholesale for the work we ASKED them to do with a wink and a nudge. Every consumer that bought a $5 tub of strawberries and whined about how expensive it was while in earshot of their grocer ASKED these workers to come here. I count myself among the guilty on this point and am striving to do better, but until issue #2 is addressed, my personal spending habits will have no meaningful impact.
Any American with even a vague moral center should strongly believe in a living wage for every human that works full time. Providing manual labor should not mean that you should slowly starve to death without government assistance or charity. Every employer that needs a healthy human to complete a task should pay enough to keep that human alive long enough to keep doing that task, period. Providing non-intellectual labor should not mean that you have to work 60+ hours a week and never see your children to survive. It is INSANE that we allow companies to pay full time wages insufficient to keep their workers alive and then ask TAXPAYERS to pay the balance in the form of public assistance. Crazier still, we then allow those companies to call themselves PROFITABLE, when really those profits are partially the wages those companies owed their workers that we as taxpayers paid instead. Immigrant labor, legal or not, also deserve a living wage, though their wage needs may be lower since they are living part time in the USA and part time in a different economy with a lower cost of living.
If the thought of paying full time "low-skilled" workers (citizens or guest-laborers) enough money to survive distresses you, ask yourself what other business expense is a company allowed not to pay for and force local taxpayers to foot the tab on? If you decide to become a farmer, and buy a tractor for your farm, you cannot drive the tractor till it runs out of gas and stalls out in the middle of your fields and then stand in your town square and demand that everyone pitch in to buy your gas! Your neighbors would look at you like you're nuts and say "Buy your own darn gasoline and just charge more for your vegetables". Why does this feel different to you when the tractor is a human that needs fuel to keep running?....a lifetime of programming by the wealthy to devalue your perception of the worth of poor people's lives is the answer. No really, keep thinking of other business expenses that you can make local taxpayers purchase long term for your business while you pocket huge profits and have those taxpayers applaud you for it. And don't try to cough up weak examples like public road maintenance and the police, as every citizen and corporation shares their theoretically fair portion of that expense through their taxes for their shared benefit. Ask yourself exactly how you actually benefit from paying the final portion of corporations under-wages while they pocket the cash that they should have used to pay their workers? Sit with this for a minute until you can see it...I'll wait.
Slowly starving people in other countries where you don't have to watch them die is no better than starving US citizens and harming both is below the moral standards we as a country claim to uphold. A wall and mass deportations solves none of this. Until both Conservative and Liberal discussion circles are willing to shift their focus to the exploiters in the illegal and legal labor dynamic, all efforts to affect change on this issue will be nothing more than ineffectual posturing for the entertainment of their respective political bases.
My $0.02. It takes two to Tango. For every undocumented worker in the USA, there is an employer who is employing them (and potentially exploiting them). Instead of the current attempts to work the supply side of this argument - it would make more sense to work the demand side. if *stiff* penalties were levied on companies employing undocumented workers (by stiff I suggest ~1% of the corporate gross sales per incident), then the demand would drop. I also expect that, in the face of this, market segments that rely on undocumented labor would instantly lobby the US Government to adopt a solution that brings undocumented workers out of the shadows and into the light of day.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the current political climate means that no significant change in levies or fines is happening for the businesses that employ these immigrants. The sad part is that the legal immigration process is also horrible, in that people have to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars, sometimes at the whims of bureaucrats, and if they have an H1B, they can't leave their employers, even if they are being mistreated. Oy vey. Thanks for the good conversation this morning. :)
ReplyDelete