A poor but hardworking Latino with an American citizenship makes $7 an hour or so. Don't give him the citizenship, and he'll do the same job for $3 an hour, because it beats the alternative. People have valid, bad reasons, for hiring illegals.
And yeah... it is pretty scummy to go hire a batch of illegals instead of possibly unionized Americans. It does screw Americans. But it's pretty scummy to go put your manufacturing facilities everywhere else in the world so that you can avoid hiring unionized Americans, and you notice nobody's screaming bloody murder about that one.
Plus yeah. They are illegal. They aren't paying into the system, and that screws people too.
So there are very real issues and yeah, some sort of solution that'd make legal immigration or even shorter term legal work more feasible would be a lot better.
But then you get into the emotional issues, and the whole thing is a gigantic distraction - and I feel like a lot of very high placed people in this country profit by distraction better than by actually resolving issues.
I feel like the winners here are the Republicans and their cronies, but the big losers in all of this are the American working class, who get scapegoats when they deserve solutions, and the illegals, who get to be the target of all this abuse when they ought to be getting social services and visas.
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Date: 2007-01-03 05:58 pm (UTC)And yeah... it is pretty scummy to go hire a batch of illegals instead of possibly unionized Americans. It does screw Americans. But it's pretty scummy to go put your manufacturing facilities everywhere else in the world so that you can avoid hiring unionized Americans, and you notice nobody's screaming bloody murder about that one.
Plus yeah. They are illegal. They aren't paying into the system, and that screws people too.
So there are very real issues and yeah, some sort of solution that'd make legal immigration or even shorter term legal work more feasible would be a lot better.
But then you get into the emotional issues, and the whole thing is a gigantic distraction - and I feel like a lot of very high placed people in this country profit by distraction better than by actually resolving issues.
I feel like the winners here are the Republicans and their cronies, but the big losers in all of this are the American working class, who get scapegoats when they deserve solutions, and the illegals, who get to be the target of all this abuse when they ought to be getting social services and visas.