Illegal Immigrants Do Jobs Americans Don’t Want to Do?
There is a strange idea that illegal immigrants do jobs Americans don’t want to do because the jobs are too icky, strenuous, or difficult for the delicate sensibilities of modern Americans coddled from birth. Things like meat-rendering and fruit-picking. Huh? Has no one noticed that these jobs come without benefits or often even minimum wage? The only people who could want these jobs are illegal immigrants who are prevented by law from even thinking about better options.
These are jobs that have been designed for illegal immigrants. This is not an accident. This is not a failure of the American work ethic. This is a business plan built in the finest traditions of Gilded Age capitalism: the deliberate and brutal exploitation of labor with the connivance of state power. Decades of lobbying on the part of these industries has shaped the rules and regulations responsible for the monstrosity now before us, from half-assed immigration enforcement, to special exemptions from health and safety rules and minimum wage legislation. These companies want to maximise the benefits of their low low wages in the form of low low prices for the consumer, and so they have brought China’s sweatshops into America’s fields and industrial parks. Strange that it has taken a wave of irrational and rather racist nativism to bring this into the light of day.
Here’s an idea. Why don’t you test whether it’s the work that American’s don’t want to do, or the job that’s not good enough. Try paying wages that can support a basic standard of living and then see.
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