I did not say that.
Why does she not learn English? Is she so new that she hasn’t had a chance or does she refuse to learn? Is she very old and ornery & stubborn?? I have met a few but those were not the type I was talking about and you know it… ::: sheesh :::
That’s nothing but a rant. When I got laid off I was competing against illegal immigrants working for cash who undercut me by avoiding taxes.
There’s a lot of handwaving about illegal immigrants only taking jobs that American won’t do. This is nonsense. Less educated or lower skill level Americans would be glad to take physically hard and nasty jobs if the wages were in line with the work demanded. People line up around the block to become unionized garbagemen because the pay is decent.
Illegal immigrants readily take on those jobs and do so for relatively low wages. This shuts a lot of lower tier US workers out of those physically demanding jobs because the wages are so small relative to the effort involved they are realistically not worth doing for the meager wages offered or they are not offered period because the employer knows the illegal worker is more desperate and will work harder for less so they don’t even bother with US workers if they can get away with it.
It used to be that a 15-18 year old could get a summer job working for a landscaping company or doing construction grunt work. I did in the 70’s. If you are in an area where there is a substantial immigrant population these job openings no longer exist for US young people or lower education adults as they are all taken by illegal immigrant adults who work harder for less.
The issue is not that that US workers will not do the jobs because they are lazy it’s that they will not do the jobs for the meager wages being offered for difficult and nasty jobs, and these meager wages being the prevailing wage for these jobs are the direct result of illegal immigrants taking these jobs at low wages.
Pretending this is not a serious and real issue for less educated workers means you are in the middle of your own echo chamber. These jobs are life and death for less educated, lower skill people and the impact of illegal immigration on the wages and availability of these jobs is very real for those people.
I think the problem is partially in the minds in a certain segment of the white population. Undocumented immigrants are not evenly distributed across the country. You’re a lot more likely to find them in large cities like LA, Chicago, or New York, or in the rural areas that already have a lot of Hispanic people like the Rio Grande valley in Texas or agricultural areas in California. You’re not likely to find huge numbers of Hispanic migrants in rural Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania.
What happened this election, however, is the exact opposite of what you would expect if undocumented immigrants really did bring down the standard of living of the local citizens. White people in big cities that have a lot of undocumented immigrants such as LA, NYC, Chicago, etc. favored Clinton, while white people in rural Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, most of who have probably never met an undocumented immigrant, much less had their job taken by one, tended to favor Trump. This tells me that a big part of the problem tends to be in people’s minds, not in the reality of the situation.
Sort of.
I live in rural western Pennsylvania. I’ve never seen a non-WASP looking person around here whose parents were not born in the US.
But, I spent some time in the area around Philadelphia in the mid 80s. Kennett Square is a sleepy little rural town that grows a shit-ton of mushrooms. Mushroom work has lead to the town being ~50% Hispanic. For reasons.
I remember being weirded out the first time I was in Kennett Square. All stores, banks, etc have their signage in English and Spanish, something I’d never experienced in Pa.
Similarly, there is a giant chicken processing plant in Lancaster county that employs workers flown in from Puerto Rico(?) on one year contracts. The company built dormitory style buildings near the plant where workers are housed. I toured the plant and noticed that the supervisors were all older white guys in white short sleeve shirts and clip-on ties who were fluidly bilingual. They would be talking to me in “farmer English”, then switch to perfect Spanish when speaking to a worker.
I guess it really depends on what you consider “rural”. If you mean you have to drive more than 30 miles to get to stores, post offices, churches or anything but farms or ranches, then you may be right, but you won’t find many immigrants or even native-born Americans in those areas, either. Sure, there are some, but not anywhere near enough to turn the election. But, if you mean metropolitan areas with populations less than 100,000 (just about any city large enough to have a Lowe’s or Home Depot), then I think you would be wrong. Go to a Lowe’s or Home Depot at 6:30 AM on a typical weekday and see who is in the parking lot. Go to a construction site in one of these smaller cities and see who is there.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of undocumented immigrants is greater in these smaller cities and towns than in larger cities. It’s hard to tell, though, since they are, you know, undocumented.
However, even if it was true that the problem is not as big as people imagine (such as airline security), failing to address it is not a wise course of action. Like airline security, people think it is a problem and want to see something done about it. Seeing the real results (young adults cannot get a construction job that pays enough to live on like their parents did, for example) and being told “there really isn’t any problem, here” isn’t working.
First, secure the border. Yes, build a wall.
Second, only after the inflow has stopped you work to give the non-criminals some sort of legal status.
Third, find the remainder and deport them.
The first one MUST take place first and taking about the second step should wait until then since you don’t want to create a belief that amnesty is coming for anyone who manages to cross the border before the wall is done.
This is not entirely true. Many rural and semi rural areas in the US are seeing very substantial increases in Hispanic populations (and illegal immigrants) who are locating increasingly in areas where there is the need for a lower tier wage base population for factory or agricultural labor. The illegal immigrants have effectively squeezed lower skill, less educated US workers almost entirely out of the job market in those areas. We had a lot of white Trump voters in this area and while lower tier voters themselves might not have attended the polls in great numbers I can tell you their relatives that effectively have to deal with the situation sure did.
I live in one of these communities. The immigrants are putting down roots and being generally good citizens but the illegal immigrants that come along with them who will do hard, nasty work for little pay and bad conditions are taking the oxygen out of the labor market for younger and lower tier workers. Interestingly the legal immigrants don’t really want these hard nasty job at the wages offered as they make the same time/effort vs reward calculation as the lower tier US workers.
I hadn’t noticed that **FlikTheBlue **referred to “Hispanic migrants”. It is true that “Hispanic migrants” are not really the problem. This is just another way to dismiss the problem; expand the scope then declare the problem, with the expanded scope, doesn’t exist.
The problem isn’t Mexican immigrants, it isn’t Hispanics, and it most certainly isn’t “brown-skinned people”. It is the uncontrolled influx of people who utilize social resources and lower wages. It’s the fact that in some “sanctuary cities”, an illegal immigrant with no driver’s license can drive a car whose lights don’t work, whose inspection is lapsed, is not registered, and has no insurance, but if he gets stopped by the police, he is let go because their policy is not to pursue immigration issues. An American driving a car with a burned out taillight gets a ticket. If he happened to be an African-American, he is at least going to get his car searched, if not shot.
For starters, every media outlet in the country should be encouraged to replace op-ed columnists and editorialists with undocumented writers.
We’d gain valuable perspectives, and it would “keep the economy humming”*.
*as the N.Y. Times so aptly put it yesterday in an editorial on illegal immigration.
You’re actually quite right it’s ‘instinctive’: this study found about half the variation in attitudes towards ‘open door immigration’ was genetic. I also agree that different people have very contrary instincts that makes mutual comprehension very difficult: those of us who naturally are suspicious of demographic and social change find it very difficult to understand why people would go ‘oh, shiny’, and likewise for the other side.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp806845.pdf
As for how to solve the problem, in the last analysis investing in economic development and family planning in poorer countries is the biggest part of the solution. Immigration is caused by differences in income between countries as well as by population pressure, so we need to deal with the root causes. Part of the reason immigration from Mexico today is much lower than it used to be is because 1) Mexico is much richer today than in the past, and 2) the average Mexican woman has 2.2 children apiece today, around 1970 she had over 7.
You have to start from reality.
The huge wave of illegal immigration is mostly the result of NAFTA. Cheap US corn drove Mexican subsistence farmers out of business. Same with businesses which could not compete with US multinational corporations in the Mexican market. People fled north because they had no choice. They are economic refugees.
The US supported wars against the peasantry in Central America created vast death and misery. People fled. They are political and economic refugees.
Once the truth is known, solutions can be found. Neither Democrats or Republicans acknowledge the truth. No surprise there.
People thinking something is a problem does not make it a problem. Or perhaps the problem is ignorant people; how to solve that? There are also people in this country who think terrorism is a major issue. Irrational fears can give us bad laws: see parents being hassled for letting their kids go to the playground alone due to fears about stranger danger.
The number of illegal immigrants living in this country doubled over 20 years, 1995-2005, peaked in 2007, and has decreased since then. So it’s a self-solving problem. That said, it’s good to know who is entering and exiting the country for security reasons. Not that terrorism is a major problem, but why make it easy? It’s also easier to make good policy when we have good data, and we don’t actually have good data on immigration.
Do we have a good cost-benefit analysis, or even a cost-efficacy analysis for border enforcement? The cost to stop every single unauthorized entry is likely to be steep and certainly not worth it. But half of them?