What a lot of people dont seem to understand is that many of the jobs immigrants are doing are jobs many other americans are not. Simiarly, immigrants are often willing to live in living conditions many other americans wouldn’t dream of- cramming themselves into a 10x10 room with a dozen other laborers, for example.
I don’t think Alabama’s unemployment drop has anything to do with the change in immigration law, because its the minority of sought-after jobs that citezens are competing with illegal immigrants. The immigrants go, that doesn’t free up a ton of jobs necessarily, because the jobs they were doing were stuff other people won’t do. Those businesses will close shop/relocate elsewhere if their business model depended on immigrant labor.
Also, many immigrants start their own little businesses. These businesses often employ other immigrants (communities form with the goal of helping each other out). If laws regarding immigrants get strict, the whole business may relocate elsewhere- its not like some guy from Guatemala owning a taco stand is going to suddenly hire Billy Bob American in lieu of any of his own peers being around.
That’s a common misconception. Picking tomatoes is not just manual labor. Do you know anyone who grows tomatoes? Have you ever seen them look at a tomato to see if it’s ready to be picked? Even the hardest-working Americans need two or even three seconds to figure that out. Agricultural laborers are able to make that determination without wasting time, because they’ve grown up acquiring that skill.
ETA: My own expertise is based on a single date a long time ago where a girl wanted to go pick strawberries. I still can’t believe that we paid someone to work their fields.
Three quarters of that drop was people who quit looking. Not so impressive.
Meanwhile they are not getting hired by the farmers as crops rot in the fields for lack of labor willing or able to do the job … and it is generally not good for business to detain visiting Mercedes and Honda executives.
that’s a good point, all they have to do is raise their prices to cover their extra labor cost. Then they get to go out of business, as their buyers decide to buy cheaper tomatoes from farms outside of Alabama.
If you can’t turn a profit without making use of illegal workers, then you’re in a similar situation to someone whose plantation was made unprofitable by slavery becoming illegal.
The problem is that Alabama is not an island unto itself. Her farmers have to compete with farmers in neighboring states and neighboring countries. Significantly increase their costs, while everyone else’s costs stay the same just makes them uncompetitive. They are uncompetitive, they go out of business, and a significant industry in the state goes belly up.
Which is exactly what’s happening. I’m not going to argue whether or not that’s an acceptable result, but it’s unfair to criticize the farmer for not wanting to pay enough for labor. Unless we think these farmers are letting their crop rot and their business crash and burn, rather than reduce their ample profits by paying a “market wage”.
Farmers are going to pay whatever they can afford, whatever is going to ultimately net them a profit when they sell their crop. It certainly makes more sense than tilling your rotten crop back into the soil.
I agree that it is unfair to put the blame completely on the farmer, which was perhaps implied by Ibn Warraq, so your initial objection was valid.
But I don’t think the market gives anyone free license to do anything. There are countries that make use of child labour. Should we be allowed to do the same, to compete?
Not really. We’ve had a lot of “groups” in America. Everybody assimilates. Even the Jews assimilated to (and in the process changed) the mainstream culture, which they never had before anywhere else. The only ones who never really assimilated were African-Americans, who (until recently) were not allowed to, and American Indians, who (some of them, anyway) did not want to (nevertheless, you probably have some Amerind ancestors in you’e tree if you’re a “white” Old American).
Right. Because the Irish and Scottish were welcomed with open arms last century. Because they were white, no one ever said anything derogatory about them or persecuted them as a minority.
Now that’s just not true. In some places, Jews assimilated so well you have a hard time telling they’re Jews anymore, and the thing has to be settled with genetic testing and the like, such as the Ethiopian Beta Israel, Indian Cochin & Chinese Kaifeng or the completely assimilated-to-the-point-of-absorption Lemba of Southern Africa.
:rolleyes: The point is no one would now. (Not since the Irish became white.) Not even the Minutemen, many of whom descend from such. (Pat Buchanan does, anyway.) (BTW, I think you mean the century before last.) The Minutemen exist because racism still exists – in different forms, using different conscious and subconscious definitions of the “races.” Which are not, now, such as to object to the presence of (most) Canadians, or Irish, or Scots.
Oh, all that was just pretend-assimilation to get some Jews better positioned to pull the host country’s strings for the International Jewish Communist Elders of ZOG etc. You know that!
You’re right, of course. For obvious reasons we tend to think of “Jews” in terms of those whose ancestors never did assimilate, i.e., convert. But many did in every generation, the pressure was always there, you know, and some yielded. And their children married gentiles and their grandchildren mostly forgot they had ever been Jewish. (I think practically all of us so-called white gentiles have statistically-certainly got to have a Jew in the woodpile somewhere.)