Employers say the Obama administration is leaving them short of labor for some low-wage work, conducting silent raids but offering no new legal immigrant laborers in occupations, like farm work, that Americans continue to shun despite the recession. Federal labor officials estimate that more than 60 percent of farm workers in the United States are illegal immigrants.
via Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in ‘Silent Raids’ – NYTimes.com.
This is the whole goddamn point! Americans work in mines. Americans work in fields. Americans work in chicken processing plants. Americans work in textile mills. Americans work in dumps, and sewers, and subway tunnels, in floating sardine processing plants… Americans will work anywhere, just like anybody else! The key, and infuriating, part of this paragraph is the phrase “low-wage jobs”! What the hell is a low wage job? Why is the market supposed to obey all the laws when we’re negotiating with farmers over what to buy their produce for but they don’t have to obey the laws when they are negotiating what to pay people to grow it and pick it!
I mean, this is the whole fucking point! It is the whole point. The flood of illegal immigration hasn’t just happened. The government has deliberately turned a blind eye to it for decades, at the behest of farmers and other unscrupulous business people, because politicians don’t mind 10% American unemployment when 100% of Americans benefit from the lower prices on produce we can have when it is grown by, essentially, slave labor!!
We have laws about minimum wages, and worker protections, and social security, and benefits, and overtime, because we think they are the right thing to do! But we turn around and ignore them if it means we can buy lettuce for $.25 a head less!
I’m fine with providing the illegals with a path to citizenship if we actually seal the border. And when they become citizens they can work in the fields if they want, protected by all the laws that protect every other American worker and when we go to the grocery store we will pay for our food what it costs to grow it without treating people like animals!
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