Thoughts on Immigration

We don't hear about many solutions to the “immigration issue” because without the "illegal" tag, American business would not be able to exploit them/fire them without recourse/etc.

I know it's oversimplifying, but when all these anti-immigrant shitheads are ready and willing to pay $20 for a head of lettuce, then we can talk about deportation. Oh wait, we won't even be able to buy lettuce for $20 because we just deported all the people who were growing and harvesting it.

I just had an interesting conversation with a co-worker. He has a green card to work here in the U.S. It took him 3 years to get the card. Additionally, the INS wanted him to show he had 3 years of U.S. work experience when he'd only been in the country for 6 months.

Essentially, the U.S. already has (temporary) work visas in the system. The problem is that to get a work visa, an immigrant must show that there is a job waiting for him in the U.S. through a declaration by a U.S. company that says, "yes, we will employ this guy for this period of time." Plus, the business has to show that they tried to hire an American worker but couldn't find one...and that this immigrant fits the requirements of the position the business wants to fill.

Trouble is, when a U.S. business does that, it can no longer pay the super-low, exploitive wage with no benefits/workers' comp/etc. Not to mention, the business owner must declare the immigrant worker and pay the associated taxes that go along with employing him. Businesses don't want to do that. According to my co-worker, many encourage immigrants to falsify W2 (or deliberately mislead the immigrants into filling out the W2 incorrectly).

Take American agribusiness (farming/ranching/meat packing) for example. The business owner would have to go from employing a workforce to which they pay $3/hour with no benefits whatsoever (no health, no breaks, real Draconian stuff) to affording them some workers' rights and paying them the requisite $6 minimum wage (or whatever it is).

Since business makes money and doesn’t lose it (unless there are tax breaks and subsidies to take advantage of), it will pass that increase on to the consumer. Hence the $20 head of lettuce. Or the $0.99 hamburger at McDickhead's will become the $6.00 hamburger. That’s an unHappy meal for more than just the cow.

Corporations--with support of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations--are really the ones who have created this situation. It's really horrible what's happened in the last decades with NAFTA, WTO/IMF and Enron scandals. Sad, really. Greed run amuck. And what frustrates me the most is not conservative vs. liberal...Republican vs. Democrat. What upsets me is that our government has abandoned their primary duty--safeguarding the welfare of citizens and of human beings--in favor of playing lackey to big corporations. They feed us all these "issues" to keep us polarized and ignorant.

But when we're bombarded with propaganda that these "illegals" are taking American jobs, are a burden on the healthcare system, and all that nonsense, it's hard not to villify these people. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. And it’s wrong.

An interesting aside: my co-worker was saying the term "illegal" has never been used as a noun in our legal system's history until it was used to describe immigrants. And that "alien" comes from the 1930s as term used to describe anarchists/communists. The words we use are inherently degrading.

The system is indeed broken. But I feel we need to look past the petty racism and urge business owners here to step up to the plate and not prey on immigrants, but treat them (and pay them) with dignity.

whew!