Mr Bush is on my TV right now. He’s rabbiting, well doing politico speak but he has just informed me that some (illegal?) immigrants should be allowed in to the US because “there are some jobs Americans won’t do”. What are these dreadfully icky jobs? He is basicaly saying some jobs are too low and icky for Americans…let the damn foreigners do them. Please tell me he is speaking out of his arse!
He also told me that North Korea is fiddling around with nuclear weapons and that is BAD and WRONG and they should stop it and hand em over. I’m just wondering if anyone ever gets to tell the US to hand over their weapons of mass destruction…yes I know NEVER is the answer. How about the French, the British?
On a similar vein Fox News (yes I know it is crap but it makes me giggle) told me that several US senators (or congressman, I can’t keep the whole congressman, senator etc thing straight in my simple mind) have called for Kofi Anan to resign over the oil for food hooha. Why would these politicians expect the UN to obey them when they dismiss the UN?
Ahhhh it is verrry early in the morning and I’m all grumpy but that Bush prat makes my skin crawl. I know the SDMB needs another Bush thread like it needs a hole in the head and I will regret pushing submit any minute now but he really is a smarmy wanker.
[Tom Lehrer]
Should Americans pick crops, George says no
'cause only a Mexican would stoop so low
And after all, even the Pharohs
had to import Hebrew brasseros
[/TL]
Of course Lehrer was singing about George Murphy but the name coincidence is eerie.
The jobs Americans won’t do? Probably the ones where you’re paid far below minimum wage, with no safety regs or adequate supervision. The reason we won’t do them is because we know our rights and that the conditions of these jobs are illegal. Thus, these poor companies are forced to hire the evil illegals who don’t know any better-and hey, they’re not American citizens, so what does it matter?
He isn’t in this case. These immigrants are pretty much the only ones who will pick crops. They make much more money that they could at home and are paid minimum wage, maybe less if they are paid per bushel or something. I suppose wages could be raised to the point where Americans would do it but it would significantly raise the price of food.
Don’t flame me over this. I am stating what I believe to be fact and have not given an opinion on whether this is a good or a bad thing.
Nope. He’s right. There are a variety of jobs that Americans want done but which have relatively low economic value and for which the supply of American citizens willing to do the work at the economic clearing price is too small. These jobs include many that are at or above the minimum wage, including day laborer, garden hand, some personal caretaking jobs, etc. A large part of our non-grain agricultural infrastructure counts on foreign labor to produce fruit and vegetables at a cost whose price you are willing to pay.
Here’s a very very short guide to foreign policy. U.S., France, Britain = good. North Korea = bad. Russia, China = bad, but too tough to push around. You’re welcome.
We’re still picking up a big chunk of the tab there. If you don’t like that answer, why do, say, anti-war persons expect anyone to listen on a part of a war strategy when they dismiss the whole war? Same same.
Then he needs to stick great big ad in the the international job advertised section of the newspaper and forget the strengthening the borders idea. He can’t have it both ways. He either wants lock tight borders or he wants cheap underlings to peel his grapes. He can’t have both. (Oh and I am quite happy here in NZ. I’m not angling for a job )
Good is a subjective thing. Many shades of gray. Bad is easier to define.
America was still picking up a big chunk of the tab when they ignored the UN. They can still pick up a big chunk of the tab and be ignored. Swings and Roundabouts.
Actually, I think ideally he’d want something very similar to the program you have in New Zealand with seasonal and temporary work permits for these kinds of jobs. But New Zealand has an important advantage over us enforcement-wise. Immigrants can’t walk into New Zealand!
You know, I look at some of the jobs American’s supposedly won’t do, and I’m amazed at how many of them were done by me or my family members.
My mom was both a cleaning lady and a nanny before she became a waitress. My grandfather, after retirement, mowed lawns for the county parks department. My dad painted houses when he was laid off.
My brothers and I have been laborers at construction sites, have mown lawns and cleaned out dog kennels.
All of these jobs are dominated by immigrants in the time and place I now live in.
I don’t think there’s any job Americans won’t do, and I say that as an American who’s done a good chunk of them.
It’s really circular reasoning. There are jobs that “Americans won’t do” beacuse there are a bunch of illegal immigrants here who will do the work for less than what most native born folks here would. If the illegals were gone, wages would have to rise, or the agricultural jobs would flow to Mexico (where the cheap labor was). These jobs aren’t necessarily sub-minimum wage, either. It’s just back breaking work…
You don’t hear politicians saying we need a guest worker program for S.E. Asians to come to the US and be employed in Semiconductor assembly and test jobs. Nope, those jobs have migrated to S.E. Asia.
I’m skeptical that we allow illegal immigration simply to keep agricultural prices low. If that’s the goal, couldn’t we accomplish it by eliminating all agricultural tarrifs? Win-win. We get low prices, third-world economies that are dependant on agriculture get a boost.
I’m also skeptical that people who would violate immigration laws by hiring illegal immigrants are going to follow minimum wage laws and labor laws.
If there’s a labor shortage, than shouldn’t we allow wages to rise? Isn’t that the wonderful effect that free-marketers are always on about? I always wonder how come the market is such a great thing until wages start to rise. Then the government has to take action.
Mr. Moto, first of all these jobs paid relatively more a generation ago. Times have changed. Also, I don’t think that the point is that no Americans will do them, it’s that you can’t get nearly enough Americans to fill all of the needed vacancies. When I was a struggling college student, I picked up garbage at construction sites and was a helper to a flooring installer for a summer. 90% of my co-workers were Latin American immigrants with dubious immigration status.
I agree with most of this. Couple of things, though. One, there’s a broad consensus that the U.S. should be agriculturally self-sufficient. Not just for most stuff, but for just about everything we can get to grow in our climate. I don’t necessarily agree with this, but there you go. Additionally, because of different growing seasons and the like, there may be some overall economic utility in ignoring national borders when dealing with migrational agricultural labor – the guy picking cheap tomatoes in Mexico might be the very same person picking more expensive tomatoes a month later in California.
Second, if wages were to rise a lot of the jobs literally wouldn’t exist. An example is landscaping. It used to be that having professionals come in to trim your hedges and tend your flowers was something only rich people did. Middle class people either did it themselves or they hired kids to do it (mostly at a negotiated rate that worked out to near minimum wage). Now in many areas middle class people can hire a company to do that work because the company in turn hires immigrants (legal or otherwise) to do the difficult but low-skill work required. Again, if wages were to go up, the job would simply disappear. The same is even more true of housekeeping.
I was just thinking this same thing! I’m 29 now, but I’ve had at least a summer job since I was 14. I spent a LOT of my time in the summers detassling corn or painting. My family was fairly well-off, but I wanted more spending money than my mom wanted to give me for an allowance, so she said, “You want money? Then work for it. You can babysit, detassle corn, pick strawberries, do odd jobs, or run errands. But although we’re not really hurting for cash, I don’t think a 14 year old needs that much of an allowance, and I’m not willing to give it to you. So you want it, you work for it.” Thinking back, asking for $100 per month was a little much for a 14-year-old (hell, I lived in rural Indiana - I wound up with quite a bit of savings after having a job, because we mostly spent our money at the gas station on candy).
Don’t forget that this is not a recent phenomenon - today’s American was yesterday’s immigrant, and it’s pretty much always been the newest immigrants with the least education that have taken on the hardest, dirtiest, lowest-paid jobs, with the hope that their children would be able to do better. It’s just that today the people are coming from Mexico and Central American countries, whereas before we had waves of Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants who did the same.
Just from my own perspective, admittedly, but when I was a kid in the Midwest I could get a summer job on a farm de-tasseling corn. And the local farm economy depended on this pool of labor: if the tassels (flowers sprouting above the cob) are left on, the cob won’t grow as large and the yeild will suffer. There wasn’t a lot of migrant labor outside of California and the South back then.
Now the kids sit all summer with no money and nothing to do but get into trouble. Sure, they’ll get out of school and get decent jobs someday, but right now we’d like to see them develop a work ethic and learn to manage their own money. I think "jobs Americans won’t do: doesn’t cover “jobs their dads make them do.”
What do the Japanese do? IIRC, their constitution requires that their nation must be able to feed itself (could be BS, but plenty of US governors have gone to Japan to beg they buy our farm export). And you can’t swim the Sea of Japan as easily as you can the Rio Grande.
What exactly happened to cause this increase in labor flowing into the US? Did the World Bank lend Mexico some money in hopes that they’d improve their country but, proving Malthus correct, it only produced more hungry mouths?
I’ve been thinking about this lately in the context of troops who are being sent abroad. There seems to be this idea that joining the military is the only option for a lot of people. I was thinking I would do almost anything rather than do a job that involves potentially killing other people, and thought about the fact that there are migrant workers and immigrants coming to the US to work, so clearly those who join up haven’t exhausted all options.
I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
Sorry. I always think of that sketch when I hear these kind of stories.
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