Francis Porretto at it again
Mr Porretto had a post two days ago, that has had me thinking for all that time.
I have done a LOT of work in a LOT of places all over north America where a huge portion of the workforce is mexican. Sleep on Martha Stewart sheets? Buy knockdown bookcases? have your house drywalled? Mexicans all over the place.
Nobody is gonna take those jobs. In Naperville Illinois, or Lagrange, Illinois, not one child of parents making $400k a year is gonna go out and mow lawns for minimum wage.
The core of this problem is that we have a clear cut (though ostensibly secret) caste system. We claim to be above the idea of caste, but the fact is, there’s a whole culture of underclass doing everything from changing the sheets at Super 8 motels to mowing the lawns at your office complex.
Face it: The land of the free and the home of the brave exists in no small part because of the hard work and dedication of the undeserving underclass. In our defense as a nation, all of that underclass has the ability to better itself, and some do. As they assimilate into the culture, and a lot do, they also bring family values that are, in a lot of our class, obsolete. They have a strong sense of family and it shows in the way they live. Are you anxious to have your grandmother move in with you? To the mexicans I know, it’s a matter of fact.
Rather than shout “learn the language or get out” or try the impossible task of deporting the whole lot of them, maybe we need to recognize the existence of that class. Develop standards for their pay and benefits. Is it fair to have one set of standards for one group and another for some people just because of their immigration status? maybe not. But, that’s what we have NOW. it’s just illegal. And it’s illegality is completely uninforceable in any meaningful way.
No, I don’t know the answers. I want the borders closed, that’s for sure. I also know that if you take out the greymarket labor, it fucks up America as we know it for a very long time.
Yup. Just Annex Mexico. Make 20 more States and be done with it. It’s manifest destiny anyway.
Once we close the border to illegal immigrants, we will probably have to allow more legal immigrants from Mexico. Which is good because we can deal with legal immigration much more easily. Since legal immigrants will have something worth losing (their legal status) more of them will be inclined to obey the laws of the US.
Please don’t confuse legal and unlawful immigrants,that water is muddy enough as it is.
While I am all for legal immigration, I have no use for somebody who sneaks in.
This is OUR house! We get to decide who gets to come in and who doesn’t. Just like guests in our own homes.
People talk a lot about how Mexicans will do work Americans won’t. But the point is, I think, that they miss the truths of market dynamics. If the supply of cheap sweat labor dried up, then the work that supply was doing will be dealt with in one of about three ways:
1) The wages for it will rise until a sufficient source of workers can be found willing to do it at the wage offered.
2) The work will be done some other way. In Australia, they don’t have wetback laborers to pick their grapes, so they’ve automated it. And, in case you hand’t noticed, Ozzie wines are giving California vintages a run for their money at the local Kroger wine shop.
3) The work will either not be done at all, or will be done by “volunteer” labor — I’m thinking yard care, which is really getting ridiculous. The reason people don’t mow their own lawns is that the cheap labor is available. Think that might have something to do with the perceived increase in obesity? (Along with all associated pathologies.)
The presence of illegals — who can be exploited at sub-market wages by the unscrupulous BECAUSE of their illegal status — depresses wages overall. And, as the labor is paid under the table in the black market (there is no gray market — it’s legal or it’s not: a binary situation), most of the income goes unreported and thus untaxed, which aggravates the burden on the rest of us.
But worst of all is the fact that the border system which permits illegal day laborers to cross also afford terrorists entry to the country, and that cannot be tolerated.
M
mark, it’s not as simple as that. I can take you to two hundred factories in Chicago alone (and more than a few in Cincinatti) where the illegals make just about everything. it’s not about migrant workers anymore. A whole slew of American businesses are ONLY still in business because they have a huge illegal workforce. These people fill out the forms, claim to be naturalized US citizens, the employer is not required to make them show proof (after all, that would be discriminatory, right?)and they go to work for minimum wage. The industry knows them as greymarket workers.
Speaking of gray: how much do you know about immigration laws? My wife is canadian, I know more than I want to. If a mexican has a child in America he/she has certain rights, but not others. It’s not as black and white as you might hope.
When nobody is available to fill those immigrant jobs, the wages will not go up, the jobs will go away. And no, I’m not talking about lawnmowing, I’m talking about 80% of the US textile industry including furniture and carpet, most food processing, second and third tier automotive manufacture, most plastics, and a great deal of forge & foundry work. When nobody is available to do those jobs, they move offshore. I’m in a different manufacturing facility every day, I see this all the time, and I know it to be the truth. A prime example is Zenith corporation. They made an effort to automate their facility to upgrade, to minimize the amount of manpower required to do certain jobs, and even after they had succeeded, a korean company (goldstar) purchased their facilities, shut them down, and moved the whole operation to Korea and China.I was there for the whole thing, day by day, and saw the process happen exactly like that with my own eyes.
And I’m all for closing the borders. But: it’s time we opened our eyes to the fact that the underclass culture exists and all the wishing in the world won’t stop it from existing. Better to recognize it, control it, and move on.