Here’s a question I’d LIKE to see asked (but Jeb sure won’t be the one to ask it) of liberals:
"A lot of you are behind the movement to increase the minimum wage to a so-called Living Wage. How do you propose to jack the minimum wage up to, say, 20 dollars an hour while simultaneously welcoming in millions of illegal aliens who’ll gladly work off the books for a lot LESS?
Isn’t bringing millions of foreign scabs into the job market incompatible with raising wages for the working poor already here?"
Speaking for all liberals, the answer is “It’ll work exactly the same as it does now, so I don’t understand the question. And by the way, referring to immigrants of whatever form as ‘foreign scabs’ pretty much makes you sound like an asshole.”
Or perhaps more politely: “welcoming millions of illegal aliens who will work off the books” is pretty much a straw man position.
Most of the pro-immigration people I know (and some of them are very conservative) don’t want to increase illegal immigration. Heck, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anybody who actually wants to increase illegal immigration. Rather, we’d like to get rid of the racist and pointless barriers that prevent most latino immigrants from ever being able to immigrate legally. Let those “millions of aliens” immigrate legally, and suddenly they’re back on the books, paying taxes, and everybody wins except the folks who are scared of the brown folk.
Oooooh, sorry I hurt your tender ears by using correct terminology.
The United Farm Workers are, supposedly, a labor union, right?
And the purpose of a labor union, in theory, is to get better pay and better conditions for union members, right? Wow, we agree again.
Which makes the UFW the strangest labor union of all time. How do you think the UAW would react if Ford started bringing in millions of, oh I dunno, non-union Filippinos who’d gladly work in their factories for $10 an hour?
FIlippinos aren’t Americans, so they’d be, what’s the word… FOREIGN!
They’d be non-union workers taking jobs from union workers, which makes them… what’s the word… SCABS!
Non-union workers from other countries who take jobs from unionized Americans are, by definition FOREIGN SCABS!!! No other union in history would pussyfoot over this definition. SO, why does the UFW?
Because the UFW long ago stopped being a labor union and became an ethnic solidarity group.
As Empress of All The Liberals, I would solve that problem by jailing the people who hire illegal aliens off the books.
In so far as we have an illegal immigrant problem, it’s because cheap and skeevy bastards keep hiring them. We can’t really lean on the immigrants, because even when we make them miserable, they’re still better off here, than back over there. There’s just nothing we can really take from the immigrants. However, if we lean on the businesses owners, a soft and cushy bunch, who value their social status, we would get results.
Bad results, mostly. Illegal immigrants fill a sizable economic niche in our economy and cutting them out would cause collateral damage. But if you want to eliminate that niche, you go after the fat bastards who created it.
So basically anyone who wants to come can come. That’s known as “open borders”, which is a defensible position on the merits but political poison. Even Latinos would hate it because they’d soon find themselves outnumbered by Asians.
Thanks to UKIP, I think immigration will have a modest influence on Scotland’s 2016 election, but not as much as it did in this year’s General Election.
Oh wait, you’re asking after that minor election the other side of the Pond.
Even now, there are many people, mostly conservatives, who push for stiff penalties against people who hire illegal aliens. But it never happens, and do you know why? Because people like you, my EMpress, always roar, “You can’t do that! That would make employers afraid to hire ANY brown-skinned people!”
See, that’s the bind you’re in. Oh, I have my own bind. That’s the problem.
I do NOT hate brown-skinned Hispanic people. If I did, I wouldn’t have married two of them, and I wouldn’t be welcome at my family Thanksgiving gatherings (my lily white brothers and I all married brown-skinned Hispanic women, and we “white” folks are now outnumbered by numerous brown-skinned nieces, nephews, cousins and grandchildren.
I’m no racist. But the sad truth is, by opposing illegal immigration, I am, de facto, on the side of a lot of people who ARE just ignorant bigots. That’s my bind. I have some sleazy, contemptible allies.
But so do you. You are, de facto, a firm ally of the exploitative bastards of Big Agriculture and of slimeballs who just want cheap labor and lots of it.
You’ve jumped to a conclusion here. Can you cite any evidence for this reason? (Not for the Empress specifically, but for any public outcry, real or perceived, about discrimination.)
A more likely reason, I’d think, is because of fear of economic harm, since we all know that we, as a group, are benefitting by exploiting illegal immigrant labour.
Then why won’t the Dems join the Reps in seeking to achieve the first step in any sensible immigration problem: locking down the borders? It seems to me that the Dems want as many immigrants as possible coming here—period. The illegal strain is just fine with them. That is why everything they do is designed to be more of a magnate for illegals coming here, not less.
So, they don’t want to secure the border and they promote and support policies that encourage more illegal immigration. And you say they don’t want more illegal immigration. HA!
I wholeheartedly agree that the people who hire the illegals should be gone after. We should make an example of them. That’s what it will take to have them stop. But while I’m fine placing the emphasis on the employers, the illegals don’t get a free ride. I’d deport them as they became known. Immediately.
Going after those who hire illegals is a last step, not a first step, because it makes no sense to say that illegals can come here and do anything they want as long as they don’t work. Once you’ve made it so that people can’t get deported five times and then come back a sixth time and kill someone, then we can worry about employers.
We also need to stop spending resources going after major employers like McDonalds and Wal-mart and fining them $10,000 per violation because they failed to get a certain document, which is all for show(and revenue) and start taking down the employers who hire almost all illegals. And when you find those workplaces, you round everyone up and you send them home, as well as shut down the business permanently and arrest the people in charge.
Nonsense. This “bind” is entirely in your imagination.
I, as Empress, have no problem whatsoever, because if idiot employers stop hiring brown people, I’ll simply jail those fuckers, too, for violating the discriminatory employment laws. They’re obviously racist idiots, anyway, if they think that the illegal immigration problem is something that correlates to skin color. They’re probably too dumb to even have a successful business anyway, so the hell with them.
adaher - I agree it makes no sense to fine MacDonald’s or Walmart $10,000. that’s why I’m talking jail for their executives. You want to focus on the little people first - that’s what we’re doing currently and it’s not working, according to you. Stop doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
If this is really a problem, which you say it is, then figure out who keeps causing the problem and sit on them like a fat raccoon. It’s not the immigrants who cause the problem. They don’t just come here randomly and then take an illegal job to pass the time. They come here because someone has offered to hire them. That someone is the cause for their coming.
It’s like putting out food for stray cats. Even if you poison every cat that shows up, they’re going to keep coming, along with rats, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, and dogs, as long as you keep putting out food. If you want to stop the river of strays, you have to take the food away. Nothing else will stop new critters from coming to your door.
Find the person putting out the food and kick them in the head until they stop. If that’s too scary or too much trouble, then I guess we don’t really have a problem, after all.
