[QUOTE=ITR champion]
For most of human history, once a society moved past the primitive tribal stage, it divided into social classes. There was always, at the least, a ruling class and a working class. Societies devised various means for maintaining this class structure. (See Marx for the details.)
Within the past two centuries this strict division of classes has crumbled. All industrialized societies believe to some degree in social mobility.
The result of this belief is dissatisfaction among those on the bottom. Nobody, not even those born into the working class, wants to be working class. There is particular unwillingness to do the most unlpeasant manual labor jobs. Hence, we eventually see industrialized countries with many jobs that need doing, and few people willing to do them.
Immigration is the most obvious solution, and hence the most common one. Immigrants who come from poorer countries have a different perspective. Jobs that look unacceptably shitty to natives of a wealthy country may look quite reasonable to immigrants from a poor country.
Of course these immigrants do bring problems, but experience suggests that the problems can be handled. The United States, for instance, has fully integrated the waves of immigrants who arrived to do our dirty work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and there’s every reason to believe that current immigrants will integrate over the coming decades.
[/QUOTE]
This is a popular canard that I’ve never seen any evidence to support. What jobs do Mexicans do that Americans are unwilling to do? Working as seasonal agricultural workers is something that many Americans would be willing to do if they were paid a legal wage, Mexicans do these jobs not because Americans are unwilling to do them but because many of the employers in question are operating illegally.
A lot of illegal immigrants in fact are doing jobs that many Americans actually do, believe it or not. I’ve seen people who hire groups of illegals to paint their homes, remodel a deck and et cetera. There are tons of American citizens who do contracting work, but they are a lot more expensive than the Mexicans because private independent contractors have to take out money from their income to pay payroll taxes, income taxes and et cetera. The illegals work under the table and thus can avoid paying the taxes the American contractor has to pay meaning they can work for much lower prices.
Other examples are things like seasonal work which, again, many many Americans who are of the lower economic classes have done in the past. There’s a lot of under the table jobs out there that more than just Mexicans do.