Hey, if O’Reilly chooses to show himself as a simpleton for ratings, that’s his choice. A true media whore.
Someone said back there that “wetback” is a valid term. Is it?
They do pay sales tax everytime they buy something in the US.
Anyway, my taxes pay for a lot of crap I don’t like. I don’t want to pay for Bush’s scummy little war, I don’t want to pay for a ridiculous, unwinnable “war on drugs,” I don’t want to pay for the death penalty, I don’t want to pay for the new, fascist Homeland Security department. I don’t want to pay for Dick Cheney’s medical bills every time he drops dead. I don’t want to pay George Bush’s salary. As far as I’m concerned, spending a little money for the education and health care of underpriveleged children is a far more worthwhile and honerable expenditure than any of that stuff, and it costs a lot less than most of it too. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me what piece of dirt those kids were born on, their parents are here to do work that Americans, hypocritically, won’t do for themselves. Does Asscrack O’Reilly ever rip the Americans who hire illegal labor? Does he ever suggest that we aggressively go after the sweatshops who exploit desparate human beings to make a little more profit. Is Bill O’Reilly going to pick grapes? Is he going to pay the difference in payroll for growers who suddenly had to pay minimum wage to pickers?
I don’t understand his horror that a few people come across the border, do crappy, menial jobs for rich white people, and then go back to Mexico where their crappy earnings will last a little longer. What would he do to feed his children? What would any of us do? It’s extremely easy for us to villify, demonize, dehumanize others when we have never had to face the same desparation. Bill O’Reilly is a rich, overpriveleged white guy, who grew up in an upper middle lass neighborhood and went to private schools. He’s never been poor, he’s never been hungry, he’s never had a sick kid and no access to medical treatment. He’s never seen one of his own children die as an infant.
If had to choose between breaking an immigration law or letting my children starve, well that wouldn’t be a choice. It would be immoral not to break the law. O’Reilly wants the military to open fire on families who make that choice.
How can you be so right and so fucking stupid in the same paragraph?
According to that reasoning, people on welfare are good for the economy, since they pay sales tax when they spend their welfare check.
Untrue. Illegal aliens are working in all different sorts of jobs and trades. From agriculture, to construction, to assembly line work. Are you saying that Americans won’t work construction or do factory work? What about working as meat cutters in beef plants? That used to be a pretty damn good paying job until about 20 years ago, when they started hiring immigrants to do the job for a 3rd the wage.
My wife has uncles and cousins in the LA area who used to have a thriving concrete business. They had to give it up because they couldn’t compete with other business’ that used illegal alien labor. Oh, by the way, her relatives are Hispanic.
Every decade needs a smarmy right wing shithead. In the 80’s there was Morton Downey, then Rush Limbaugh, now we have Bill O’Really. My big concern is that they are getting more well-produced as they evolve. The shit they spew remains sadly the same.
If one refers to illegal Mexican residents as wetbacks, does that make him/her a redneck ?
I recall in the 50’s running home to momma because someone called me a DP. I didn’t know what in meant, but the tone was clearly derogatory. My mother patiently explained that we weren’t Displaced Persons because no one forced our family to emmigrate from our home in Europe. With this knowledge, I was no longer vexed by the derogatory taunts which subsequently subsided.
Sooner or later Americans may be able to erradicate "wetbacks " from the language and retain "illegal immigrants", but it is almost inevitable thatr this term would be shortened to “eyeeyes” and the controversy of whether the term is derogatory/acceptable will commence as before.
Now calling a displaced person a DP is clearly uncharitable and unwarranted as the displaced person had no choice for his/her particular circumstance, but I can see no problem in refering to Illegal immigrants as wetbacks. They willfully broke American law. Criticism should be reserved for those who use the term incorrectly to refer to all Mexicans and Americans of Mexican heritage. I believe that the distinction between legal residents and illegal immigrants should be emphasized for the sake of the legal residents.
Errr…aren’t you in Minnesota? IIRC, they don’t permit the death penalty. (Yeah, yeah, you pay for the federal courts that review death cases, and you paid to stick a needle in Tim McVeigh, but still…) 
FWIW I don’t see stupidity there. I’m ambivalent at best about illegal immigration, because it’s a complicated issue. I’m troubled at the very least by our degree of covert economic reliance on the the "shadow’ workforce. The ghastly bureaucratic mess of INS for people already here or applying is just another layer.
I’m not saying we don’t have absolute soverign right to control who passes our borders and takes up residency. I do think that the current system is pretty badly flawed. But quite beyond that I want my country to be big enough, true enough to our ideals, to shun using unneccesary violence against desperate people. We should be better than that.
The coyotes who traffic illegals can be hardcore badasses, no mistake. They’re primary predators on the desperate. Right now I genuinely pity the INS because I suspect they’re good folks muddling through a political quagmire, with all the associated buckpassing and bombast, but stuck with trying to enforce the unforeceable. anyway.
But this I do say: people just trying to come here to live and work, even illegaly, are vastly the moral superiors of O’Reilly and his ilk. Having every basic advantage in the world and many more besides, but still using them to spew hate and easy platitudes is evil, nothing less. O’Reilly is a goddamned waste of potential and resources. It’s disgraceful that this waste of skin and oxygen has an audience.
As to the “wetback” thing, common sense suggests there’s a world of difference in how the term’s received among insiders, sympathetic or at least familiar bystanders and deliberate baiters. Words are anything but context-free. No one size fits all. Most sensible, reasonably courteous people figure that out. “Wetback” in the mouth of a professional baiter like O’Reilly is of course an insult.
Veb
I don’t know for sure, but I think he probably has. Why wouldn’t he?
Are you?
You think paying minimum wage is a bad thing?
Uhhhh… There is still some disbute over this. His detractors try to say he grew up rich, while he claims he was “poor”. (Personally, I think he was lower middle class, the same as I was. We were never starving, but I tend to consider my childhood to be “poor”.) A recent documentary (A&E, I think) on his life apparently interviewed neighbors from the “old neighborhood” and they confirmed that yeah, none of them were “rich”, they were all “working class”. This is not to say that he was ever as mind-numbingly poor as the poor immigrants that try to cross the border, of course.
I’m still waiting for a cite confirming that O’Reilly advocates open firing on families trying to cross the border. Cite please?
This is all very emotional on your part, but you still haven’t addressed the fact that your whole contention (in the OP) was WRONG. You didn’t even quote him right. Does this mean that he’s an angel? Of course not. I think he’s a grumpy old guy who seems to get more and more arrogant every day. But damn—you couldn’t even quote him right, in your zeal to villify him! Yeesh!
Laws regarding employment have tightened up considerably in the past several years (my field is employment issues). People are required to prove they’re eligible to work in the US before being hired.
now, it is true that if the employer is paying cash or the person is considered a ‘contract laborer’, that may fly under the radar screen. Construction jobs often (IME) use the ‘contract labor’ dodge but it’s damned difficult to do if the employer is a factory. So I’d like to see documentation on your assertion that factories in the US hire any significant amount of illegals.
In the meantime, in most cases for construction work, if the worker is being paid under the table, etc, the employer themselves are acting illegally (there’s strict rules about who is considered a contract laborer and who is an employee, if the person is an employee, there’s documentation, taxes and insurances required by law).
So, please save some righteous indignation for the employer who intentionally skirts labor laws, ok?
I knew one of the lawyers would call me on this. Yes, I was referring to the federal death penalty, but I think my point holds true, at least rhetorically for the state DP.
Actually not. People are legally required to present documents(which may or may not be authentic) to employers before they are hired. But not all employers ask for them. Even if they do ask, there is no way to tell for certain if the documents are true and authentic. And I also believe it is against Federal law for an employer to question a prospective employees documents, unless they are obviously fake.
As far as fake documents, ie SS cards, birth certificates, phony green cards. There is a thriving black market in these items.
You’re right. These employers of illegals are even worse than the illegals themselves, because they are acting out of sheer greed. While they richen themselves by hiring cheap labor, they leave the problems associated with illegal immigration on other peoples backs. The employers fatten their profits, but everyone elses taxes go up.
And also, wring, there was an article in the LA Times that estimated that up to 30 percent of all workers in LA county were working under the table for cash.
The article came out in March, 2002. I had it bookmarked for a long time, but the last time I went to access it, the link was gone. I’ll look around for more corroboration.
They’re required to submit these documents, you admit this, which is what I said.
employers who fail to be able to prove their employees are eligible run risks. If they have great quantities of illegals w/o documentation, it’s a serious risk. Can you substantiate that any significant number of employers run that risk?
(*Plus especially for factories, they often do drug tests which require a positive proof of ID)
Still haven’t demonstrated proof of your allegation that any significant number of illegals work in factories.
Again - I work in the field of employment, talk to employment counselors all the time etc. Documentation is routinely required for over the table jobs.
Does a black market exist? yes. (which by the way substanitates the concept that most employers routinely require documentation, why else would you bother to buy expensive false papers if you weren’t asked to produce them).
But that doesn’t prove your statement regarding where illegals are working.
IME most do the contract labor type of thing (under the table jobs) in agriculture, construction, in home help etc, places that routinely act as ‘independant constracting agents’ vs. ‘employers’, because (again IME) most employers do actually require proof of eligibility.
And again, my point was that in many of those cases, the ‘independant contractor’ status is a sham, and the employer themself is as guilty of criminal action as the illegal. So, again, please toss some of the indignation over their way.
This has turned into a very informative thread! Thanks, everyone.
Heres that link I promised:
http://www.immigrationshumancost.org/text/cash-economy.html
[quoteThey’re required to submit these documents, you admit this, which is what I said. [/quote]
No, you said this:
Anyone can submit documents, authentic or fake. Proving that they are legal to work is quite another thing.Since the Feds refuse to set up a system to verify employment documents, any illegal who manages to obtain counterfeit documents can work in the US.
I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of folks working under the table. what I seriously doubt is that it’s happening in factories. (keeping in mind that not all folks working under the table are illegals)
agribusiness can easily set it up that folks are independent contractors, paying them by the yeild vs. by the hour for example.
construction often does it by simply calling some one an independant contractor.
Ditto for the in home help.
Factories - not at all in my experience (except perhaps for an occasional person hired to ‘fix stuff’ for example vs. work on the line).
IIRC, the general rules were such that if you determined where some one worked, what days and hours and the work performed, they were an employee, requiring documentation, insurances etc.
In most cases it’s my opinion that construction co’s, and households are skirting the laws since they routinely set the hours, days, start time, end time, tasks performed, where (and in the case of the construction site, provide supervision), especially if the pay is by the hour or day.
An example (as was told to me) of the difference was: If I, as the person building the house hire you to do the paint the house, offer to pay you $15 per hour, you will perform this task starting this day at this time etc. then you’re an employee. If I hire you to paint the house, that I’ll pay you $1000 and want it done w/in a month, then you may in fact be an independant contractor.
:rolleyes: I say they’re required to prove it. Law says they’re required to prove it. Is it 100% infallible? no. But if they cannot prove it, the company can refuse to hire. If the company hires w/o requiring proof and some one checks, the company can get sanctions.
But, the statement that they’re required to prove it is true.
A few!? If it were a few, nobody would be complaining. I don’t consider 8.7 million (2002 Census Bureau estimate) a “few”.
I’m not vilifying, demonizing, or dehumanizing anyone - the illegal immigrants I’ve known are as fine morally as the people whose wages they’re undercutting, and they of course have human rights. You are, however, being presumptuous when you imply that those opposing illegal immigration “never had to face the same desparation [sic].” In fact, those who are being hurt most by illegal immigration are precisely those who face desperate circumstances already. Just ask any black janitors in LA, if there are any left. Places like South Central LA and Compton have gone from predominantly black to predominantly Mexican in the last ten years.
Regarding the OP, what little I’ve seen of O’Reilly leads me to conclude that he’s an intellectually slack, smug sonofabitch. Also, corporations who hire illegal immigrants, as well as those who replace American workers with H-1B visa holders under the pretext of a skilled labor shortage, can eat a steaming length of turd.