So your solution to illegal immigration is to bring American labour down to their level? :dubious: The real solution is twofold-the first is to raise the minimum wage to tighten labour markets and thus discourage importation of cheap foreign labour. The second is to enforce laws against employing illegal immigrants, not against the poor souls themselves but against their employers who treat them terribly even while subverting the integrity of the Republic and undercutting American labour. And make these punishments hurt-fine the hell out of them, seize their assets, hell send a few of the worst bastards to corrective labour camps.
The difference is that this is the United States of America, not Mexico. I find it distressing that you’d have so little sense of honour and dignity for our country that you think it only natural a labourer in Mexico should have the exact same conditions in America. There is literally no reason that workers should be packed in sardines in shacks or paid starvation wages or be under the threat of abuse.
No, it’s a propaganda term designed to dehumanize and demonize them, especially when shortened to “illegals”. That’s why it’s preferred to the more accurate, bureaucratic-sounding phrase “undocumented immigrant”. Even serial killers aren’t “illegal”, but we call these people that so we can treat them as less than human and feel self righteous about it.
And them coming here as undocumented immigrants is what passes for “proper procedure”, it’s how we’ve set the system up to work. There is essentially no chance for them to become citizens, because we don’t want citizens; we want cheap, easily abused labor that we can demonize so we can blame them even as we victimize them.
Who is we? Certainly, the liberals don’t want an underclass of unfree labour neither do most conservatives due to it undercutting American labour-the only people who like the status quo are the plutocratic class and their lolbertarian whores.
Because it is tantamount to slavery. Our society is damaged by having a labor market that is outside legal authority. If we need them to work our fields then we should ensure that they receive the benefits accorded to the rest of us.
Illegal immigration is a very complicated socio-economic issue that many people insist on reducing to a bumper sticker. The minimum wage isn’t as complicated but still more complicated than many people want to think.
Illegal immigrants are all sorts of people doing all sorts of jobs. A pretty small % are farm workers. But farm worker illustrates one type of situation among a variety in a very complex overall picture. Most farm work is just too physically hard to interest most American born people at any feasible wage (before you’d just grow those farm products in lower wage countries instead), given that they can survive without doing hard labor in physically easier minimum wage jobs and by way of govt benefits available to the (legal resident) working poor. In that case, even assuming you can fully enforce the MW on the farm, raising it is reducing the incentive of Americans to shift away from physically easier MW jobs to brutally difficult farm labor jobs, and the easier jobs might also require skills (language, cultural) illegal workers are less likely to have.
That was my thinking- migrating to the US, working for minimum wage or a higher than present-day sub-minimum wage suddenly becomes MORE attractive to immigrants from places like Mexico, as they can afford to send more money home than before.
On the other hand, if wage pressure becomes too much, there will be a lot of incentive to automate things that are currently done by the cheapest labor they can find, like a lot of agricultural jobs or low-skill food service jobs.
I agree with Sage Rat; the problem’s not a structural one on the part of the US, but rather a pretty abject failure on the part of Mexico and other latin american countries in recent years. The reason terrible jobs like the agricultural ones are done by illegal immigrants for (in many cases) less than minimum wages isn’t because we have latter-day Simon Legrees running the shows, but because things are SO shitty back home, that even something as awful as 18 hour days in the fields picking lettuce is preferable.
In a lot of ways, it’s the whole free trade argument in a nutshell (albeit geographically reversed); people who have some money can get cheap avocados, the poorest of the poor (the immigrants) are better off, businesses make money, but there’s a somewhat neglected domestic lower-wage group who might potentially do those jobs, but who are cut out, either by choice, or by circumstance.
Something I think many people tend to forget is what’s the vision of that other side from “back home”. For each movie which involves poor people and isn’t L&O, there are dozens where people live in houses which are huge by the standards of most of the world. A lot of people see the glitter but not that someone has to clean that shiny bathroom.
The easy solution to, let’s call it non-legal employment of, let’s call them ‘extra-legal immigrants’ would be to vigorously prosecute the people who hire them.
Put the CEO of Hormel or one of the meat packing companies in prison for hiring non-legal workers and see how fast other companies back off. Right now there’s no real penalty for them doing it other than the odd (and rare) chance of an ICE raid taking a chunk of their workers.
Until we’re willing to do that, we’re just running in circles blaming each other.
Illegal immigration from Mexico to the US is now close to zero net, and has been declining for awhile. So you can’t explain a recent rise in illegal immigration from Mexico by recent Mexican economic performance because there’s been a decrease not an increase. Illegal immigration from Mexico probably would have peaked and declined sooner if GDP per capita PPP in Mexico had steadily risen as % of that in the US, whereas it’s actually slightly declined in the last few decades. Some other middle income (Mexico’s GDP per capita is ~10% above the world average) countries have been catching up rapidly with rich countries, others including Mexico haven’t.
But even back when net Mexican illegal immigration to the US was high, overall relative economic conditions in Mexico v the US weren’t worse than in previous decades where illegal immigration was much lower. A newly poor Mexico IOW was never the explanation. You have to look deeper. For example NAFTA while it eventually provided a lot of new job opportunity in northern Mexico that’s among the reasons net Mexican illegal immigration to the US has dried up, for now at least, cheap US grain imports also displaced a lot of small farmers in Mexico.
But even that kind of specific policy reason ignores bigger underlying factors. The US just is just a more diverse less ‘white’ dominated society than it used to be. In a lot of localities the population and therefore authorities have no interest in the illegal immigration ‘problem’, which they don’t even view as one. I live in one. Ithe federal govt has the ultimate responsibility to deal with issues like this, and it’s legitimate to debate how it should. But if you’re looking for a ‘cause’ you can’t ignore big changes in US society itself. There used to be a consensus behind the strongly anti-illegal immigration sentiment of some parts of the political spectrum. Now there’s not. That’s a big difference sitting out in plain sight.
Overall I agree with your post. The above quote makes me want to go one step further and ask a couple of questions:
Okay, we’ve heard ad nauseam how American-born workers are not willing to do the hard work for the wages offered, so let’s ask… ignoring all follow-on issues like food prices, what wage would you (anybody here) feel is the minimum you’d accept to do this kind of work?
Is there really much work left that’s doesn’t have machines or automation to lighten the “back-breaking” toil involved? Are there still crops out there that have to be sown, weeded, pruned or harvested by hands in the USA?
By recent years, I meant in the past 2-3 decades, not in the past five or 10.
Illegal immigration from Mexico grew steadily and drastically since 1990, peaking in 2007, when it started to level off and decline a bit, not coincidentally with the recession in 2008. NAFTA took effect in what… 1995?
Ultimately though, the US is more attractive than Mexico for economic reasons- when the economy tanked, the Mexicans quit coming, and a bunch even went back. To me, this indicates pretty strongly that it’s all about the differing income/opportunity between the two countries.
I agree that there’s less push in some communities against illegal immigrants than there may have been in years past, probably more due to a greater participation of Latinos in those communities’ local politics than in say… the 1940s. But I don’t think that’s a primary reason for immigration to the US; it just makes it easier to stay once you’re here.
But I think I covered that too. If you look quite recently there’s hardly any net illegal immigration by Mexicans though GDP per capita PPP in Mexico is not a significantly higher % of the US level than it used to be. But if you look further back than 2-3 decades, there also wasn’t a huge flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, it was certainly way less of a political issue in the US anyway, but again Mexico’s economic conditions were similarly unfavorable in general compared to the US.
So while it’s clear that individuals come illegally to the US to improve their economic fortunes, the variable of relative US and Mexican economic conditions, broadly measured by itself, is just as clearly a poor predictive variable of how much illegal immigration there’s going to be from Mexico. The reasons illegal immigration from Mexico in the 1990’s and 2000’s was so relatively higher than earlier or now must be due to other things. The relative poverty of Mexico in overall terms was a constant before during and after that period.
I think the reasons I gave are better places to look for the reason for that surge: changes in the Mexican economy due to NAFTA, and moreover social and demographic change in the US itself: increase in legal immigration in the US, as well as self reinforcing effect of increased illegal immigration: that’s what has created ‘seas to swim in’ for illegals, big parts of the country where nobody much views them as a problem. The reason it’s such a divisive issue isn’t necessarily illegals v people who think they are a big problem, it’s Americans who do and don’t think they are really a problem.
I think that the laborers shouldn’t be in the country. We tried the whole second-class citizen thing once and it was stupid and immoral, right up to the point where we abolished Jim Crow laws. Making the state of illegal work better in this country will be discriminatory and immoral right up to the point where we just make them full, legal citizens. But we already have a legal immigration system which, if I remember correctly, accepts more Mexicans into the country than any other country. No one wants that because, fundamentally, the 2nd tier status is where the market value is, just like the slave status was where the market value was 200 years ago.
Would you rather recreate Jim Crow or just say, hey let’s try and not go there again?
As to your more specific point, if you find a pimp who’s beating on his girls, do you give the girls coupons for better food and a pamphlet for a substance abuse programs, or do you arrest the pimp? Which really makes more sense?
1 is easily answered. eliminate illegal immigrants and minimum wages and you’d find out how much Americans would want to work those jobs which would be balanced against what farmers would be willing to pay. The price of food will likely go up although I doubt it would be higher in the long term as the market would find ways to use those machines to compensate.
A lot of the berry crops (strawberries, blueberries, etc.), sweet cherries, grapes, and apricots are among the fruits harvested largely by hand; among vegetables, asparagus is extremely labor-intensive. Peppers, lettuces and other leaf vegetables, and broccoli have varying degrees of mechanical picking.
You could still do all of those things with legal labor. Many of the arguments for illegal immigration are unbelievably racist on their own. In New England, there is a large apple crop in the fall. Affluent white people pay to pick apples on their own but there is also an industrial side so they pay Jamaicans a small amount of money to move up North for a couple of months to climb trees and pick apples. I have asked why that was and the answer was always that they can climb trees and pick fruit faster than anyone around especially if you give them temporary housing and don’t let them interact with the larger community while they are here.
Even if that was true, does it sound even remotely reasonable to say that there is no group of Americans like, say, impoverished blacks that have a long and unfortunate history with American agriculture that could use the money themselves as long as the working conditions and pay were legal? If you think that last statement is offensive, think again because that is what modern day farm and factory owners are doing to illegal immigrants.
I am very surprised that anyone supports it other than the people that get rich off the backs of their labor and the misguided bleeding hearts.
