U.S. workers sacrificed in favor of illegal immigrants

[Elwood P Dowd]

"As the story now goes, American workers must be gouged due to humanitarian regard for Third World migrants. It is the siren song that seduces the keepers of the multicultural flame." David Podvin

http://makethemaccountable.com/podvin/more/060423_TheRapeOfTheWorkingClass.htm

Yet the operative color in the illegal immigration debate is not brown…it is green. American workers of all races are being economically raped by profiteers. In Southern California, which is the epicenter of illegal immigration, African Americans were once a significant presence in the construction industry. Today black participation in that sector is scant because contractors prefer sub-minimum wage foreign hirelings.

The same phenomenon holds true for the Hispanic American citizens who were heavily involved in the manual trades. Jobs that were once working class are now subsistence level and are held either by undocumented workers or by desperate Americans compelled to accept artificially low wages. This situation exists in industries ranging from textiles to agriculture to meatpacking. On April 10, chicken processing conglomerate Tyson Foods had to close numerous plants because its predominantly illegal alien workforce was attending immigration rallies. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, undocumented workers currently hold over seven million American jobs. Most of the employees they have displaced are females and minorities, the very people liberals have sworn to protect.

The argument made by corporate sophists is that there are some jobs Americans refuse to do. Left unsaid is that those jobs offer noncompetitive wages or provide insufferable working conditions or both. The problem is solved by requiring business to honor market forces and obey the law. The grape grower who refuses to pay the going rate should witness his crops rot in the field. The manufacturer who creates a treacherous workplace should be incarcerated. Absent accountability, employers have found that hiring illegal aliens provides carte blanche to circumvent labor standards.

There are many victims in the illegal immigration saga, foremost among them blue collar American workers who are besieged from all sides. The right wing disdainfully views them as mere fodder for the corporate juggernaut. The left wing empathizes with employees’ angst while sacrificing their interests at the altar of political correctness. Trapped in a thirty-five year trend of falling real wages, working class Americans are steadily losing ground. To make matters worse, whenever workers bemoan the pernicious effects of illegal immigration they are smeared as being nativist, as though demanding a fair wage in exchange for hard work somehow reveals malice.

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[leftstreet]

1. "Corporate concubine George W. Bush"

another great snip

"It is a tribute to the political sophistication of the monied elite that employers can brazenly violate labor laws without incurring liberal wrath. In almost any context, a brutal assault on the working class would provoke vigilant opposition from progressives. However, the business community has learned the disarming effect of playing the race card, and now the mainstream media equates opposing illegal immigration with fostering ethnic bigotry. Business is reaping the windfall profits of camouflaging corporate predation as inclusiveness."

[Solon]

2. "...sacrificing their interests at the altar of political correctness"

What a load of shit, I swear, people keep on taking these FUCKING SIMPLISTIC VIEWS and people will believe it, talk about shooting ourselves in the fucking foot. Look, liberals haven't HAD POWER IN ALMOST TWO DECADES, so DON'T blame US for this motherfucking shit. Sacrifice labor for the sake of free capital, and this shit happens, NEO-LIBERALS and CONS are to blame, no one else.

[sendero]

17. Hey guess what..

... all you have to do is read 10 threads about the issue RIGHT HERE and you will find that the "popular" opinion is "they are coming here to better themselves, leave them alone, they are taking jobs Americans won't do, it's all about racism" and other such bullshit nonsense.

Count me as agreeing with the OP. This is a serious issue, one the Cheap Labor Republicans have been playing both sides of for long enough now.

[JohnnyRingo]

3. I agree...Though opinions on undocumented workers varies widely here

I'm adopting my union's position that illegals drive down the general wages of all workers by allowing an unfair competitive advantage for those companies that choose to employ them.

I don't agree with the notion that they "do the work that Americans wont do". If you pay a citizen of this country a living wage he/she will not only do the work, they'll invest that money right back into the community.

I think the fact that some large companies had to shut down today should be a "heads up" for an enforcement agency that claims they can't determine where these undocumented workers are employed. (I'm talking to you Tyson and Purdue).

If the low wage and illegal hiring of carpetbagging, union busting, "guest workers" evaporated they would emigrate themselves and immigrate properly to claim their own share of what used to be the "Great American Dream" that anyone who is willing to work and pay taxes deserves.

Maybe if jobs that paid a living wage weren't becoming scarce this wouldn't even be an issue, but this is the economic base that drives the Republican party

[fasttense]

4. It ain't the liberal's fault corporations are hiding behind immigrants

in order to get cheap, cheaper, cheapest labor and break up Unions. We have lower wages today than we had seven years ago. How come? Because of outsourcing and in-sourcing by major industry. The liberals didn't push this.

[alcibiades_mystery]

5. Nostalgic bullshit

The American blue collar worker grew fat on nationalism. So global capital adapted and cut the floor out from under the American blue collar worker. Then the American blue collar started killing Japanese people in the streets of Michigan and cooperating with the CIA. Disaster. This is not about multiculturalism. It is about the free flow of labor, the only thing that will counter the new global capitalism. Anybody who thinks we can return to the nationalist blue collar worker is a fool, plain and simple. Workers are now either international and borderless - just like the capital they confront - or they are dead. Period. The American left will pretend that the old methods are still going to work. It's laughable. Anybody who forwards this argument will be a laughingstock in under twenty years. There is no such thing as an "American" blue collar worker any more, at least from the perspective of global capital. The problem is not that people who cling to this idea are nativists. It is that they are nostalgic, and thoroughly unable to invent weapons for the form of oppression that confronts them.

[Jim Warren]

10. Great screed

with elements of powerful insight, however I can't characterize my immediate needs with family, wife and kids, simply as nostalgia. I don't have the luxury to be absolutist in the day-to-dayness of family finances, or suffer an over-reaching vision.

[alcibiades_mystery]

11. If you care for your family

Just as the workers of the nineteenth century who confronted an entirely new form of oppression cared for their, then you'll get busy inventing new forms of resistance, just as they did. Not just you. We all must, and damn quick. On the fly. Just as they did. But they did so by addressing the material conditions that they faced, not by appealing to absolutism. They did so by turning the capitalists' invention of work time against the capitalists. It appears that we must turn the capitalists' new invention of work space against them. The capitalists invented open borders to address the problems of worker solidarity on matters of time, just as they invented wage labor (work time) to address the forms of factory production. But that means we must 1) accept their redefinition of work space (just as we accepted their new definition of work time), but 2) transform it to our advantage. Open borders is certainly a trick of capitalism. But that doesn't mean we reject it. Wage labor was a trick of capitalism, and the workers sei8zed on it and turned it against the capitalists class, using it first as a locus of a scene of struggle for shorter working days, then for increased wages. The form of the strike depends on the capitalists definition of work time, but it is transformed through resistance. In the same way, we have to seize on the redefinition of work space - open borders - and transform it to our advantage. Going back is no more a viable alternative than was the dream of organic communities for the working classes of the 19th century: that nostalgia got them nowhere. These are not "absolute claims." These are claims that demand that we turn precisely to the material conditions of existence, to the local, the wife, the lover, the family, the food we put on our table. It is only by confronting our material conditions that we invent new weapons. The sad thing is that the nationalist view is precisely the one that turns away from the new conditions of production, precisely the one that operates on a dream, a vapor, nostalgia.

[Jim Warren]

13. There is more light than heat in your argument

Which is good, with this issue wavering on the emotional for many and so hotly debated.

If I'm understanding correctly then, you're advocating open border worker solidarity. Sounds great in the hypothetical, however I know there to a huge contrast to the 19th century working class struggle to which you refer. I can assure you, you will be extremely hard pressed, at least in the present, to find the complement of similar solidarity among Mexican workers, rather a fierce nationalism all of their own.

[alcibiades_mystery]

15. Solidarity had to be constructed

It was forged in struggle, and never came near being total, but it was provisional and effective.

No doubt the Mexican workers have their own issues with nationalism, no less nostalgic than the American worker. Nationalism cuts both ways as well. This is the field of struggle in which new weapons will have to be forged. We are left to diagnose it, then to build. It took the working class 100 years to gain even a foothold against the last form of capitalism, and this against massive waste. The future struggle will be no less dangerous or arduous, to be sure. But the first step is to correctly diagnose it. The immigration debate is a joke, akin to people arguing today about who should have won the World Series in 1956. It's already over, done, finished.

There was a period during the onset of industrial capitalism when many workers simply refused the form of time invented by the capiytalist class, calling it wage slavery. Nobody remembers these workers today, of course, because their approach was nostalgic. One almost has to laugh at them. The same will be the case for the anti-immigration forces of today. They utterly misdiagnose the problem; they naively believe that the old forms of space still apply, just as the anti-wage-slavery movement believed that the old forms of time still applied. We are in the transition now. The nation state is all but defunct. Borders mean less than they did even ten years ago. We can be the anti-wage-slave movement, or we can be the movement that understood that the form of time had changed, and addressed it directly. We can be reactionary, in other words, or progressive.

[Kolesar]

6. Okie vs. Okie in "The Grapes of Wrath"

Owners encouraged people to emigrate to California to pick produce. The more that showed up, the more competition there was for jobs, and the prevailing wage was driven down.

[autorank]

7. Oh boy...I was waiting for this. Get ready for the wedgie.

Do you read history? Read about Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia prior to the Revolutionary War.

The amazingly powerful and greedy British land owners put modern corporate farms to shame.
They controlled every thing.

A group of citizens, including slaves and black free men, united and fought under the banner
of economic justice; get rid of monopolies, allow people to compete on the basis of talent and
hard work, no more discrimination.

The British crushed this, to be sure. Then they had a bright idea...never, never let whites and
blacks align on issues of politics, particularly economic equity and justice. Thus was born
the ORIGINAL SOUTHERN STRATEGY. Pit blacks and whites against each other on the basis of race and
they'll never unite politically.

Well, it's worked since before the Revolution here. It's working again as per your post.

[juajen]

8. I so agree with Podvin. Illegal immigration is a two-edged sword

Democrats need some new old-fashioned ideas about labor. We are sinking fast into a stinking morass.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Another great argument for amnesty and open borders.

If the "illegals" were citizens they would demand higher wages and drive them up. Of course the capitalists prey on them and use them to undercut wages. So, what else is new? They did exactly the same thing with every wave of immigrants who came here.

[smoogatz]

12. It's simple, for fuck's sake. Enforce existing labor/immigration laws

as they apply to employers. Start with big companies like Tyson and work your way down. Don't demonize the undocumented men and women who just want to give their families a decent life. Insourcing is an EASY problem to solve, given the political will. The democratic party needs to get off the corporate tit--otherwise they'll never be able to do the right thing.

[Kansas Wyatt]

22. We have a winner!

Massive fines for employers who work illegals. Three strikes against that employer, and the employer will have it's business and assets seized and sold by the Feds. All proceeds from fines and seizures shall go into a new Extended Unemployment Fund for unemployed or under-employed legal workers who are being screwed by this illegal business practice. Employers will no longer risk losing everything to cheat workers out of employment for a fair wage and conditions, if the workers they cheat will end up drawing unemployment proceeds from the employer's fines and assets.

Working class citizens are watching the Democrats suck on the corporate tit, while the Republicans at least talk "tough" about it. I know it's only "tough" talk, but millions of working class voters are not seeing it that way. Yet the Democrats just keep wondering why so many from the working class vote against their economic best interests.

[Marie26]

14. Sigh

I can't even work up the effort anymore.

[midnight]

16. The complexities of this issue a used at various times...

John McCann said that there was no one to pick lettuce for 50.00 an hour or some outrages amount of money. It sounded like his issues was than no matter how much wage was offered ,here in America, there still would be no-one willing to do this type of work. Visa's are given for foreign Doctors, and nurses, and professors why can't we give visa's to these people to work. Because there must be a pay off for someone? And that someone is moving us emotional like a well planned distraction.

[amandabeech]

18. Does anyone else here think that the economy is going to tank

in a big way within the next 2-3 years? I read the Stock Market thread regularly, and the consensus there is that we are in for big trouble.

If the economy tanks, so go the jobs. I'm concerned that there simply will not be enough jobs for those who are here now, let alone the 2-3 million immigrants, legal and illegal, who may enter the country in the same time period.

Widespread unemployment and severe underemployment can lead to ugly social conditions of all kinds. I'm concerned that if immigration continues at the current rate, no matter where the immigrants come from and without regard to race, ethnicity or national origin, it will only exacerbate what may be a very bad situation. Might it be wise to move to lower immigration until we see how the next few years play out?

Anyone else have any thoughts along these lines? Are my concerns misplaced?

[Jim Warren]

19. No

not misplaced, imho. The passion and emotions being displayed now will come to bite many in the ass later.

[amandabeech]

20. Thanks for the support.

Well, if any ass gets bitten, I hope that its not yours.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out where the water will come from for all those new sewer hookups. The southwest does not look promising. Chicago and Milwaukee have cut off new hookups in the outlying 'burbs. One of the rivers near Boston runs out of water now in the summer. Global warming droughts all over the place.

Well, you get my idea.

[Jim Warren]

21. Interesting that you mention water.

I've been checking NOAA drought monitor recently and the season so far is setting up in a bad way. Too early to tell right now of course but here in the Northeast and my region in particular the rivers are running at mid-summer level NOW. Call me gloomy but I got a bad feeling about the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, temps up including sea temps and that does not bode well for the storm season, IE hurricanes and tornadoes.

For me over-population is and continues to be THE main problem facing the planet. As to immigration, without some control, where does the number go? 20M? 50M? To me it's sobering to think the US is at 300M and Canada with a shitload of land area is just 30M people.

[amandabeech]

23. I, too, check the drought monitor every week,

and things don't look good.

I'm here in s.cen.PA, and the rivers and streams are all very low. I had to go out driving around last weekend to charge up a dead battery, and I can tell you that the fields look pretty dry too, and this is top-notch soybeans and corn country. I'm expecting rationing this summer (if I'm still here, which I doubt)l.

I see population as a monumental problem here and abroad. If the entire world reduced family size to replacement levels when reliable birth control became available, we'd all be in better shape. That includes Mexico, where families consisted of mom, dad and six or seven children well into the seventies. In the U.S., families had 2.1 or so children in the '70s which is the level at which is replacement rate. I have read that but for immigration, the U.S. population would have stabilized at about 220,000,000 by now, which as you probably know was the U.S. population in 1980. I'm old enough to remember 1980 very, very well. I must say that congestion and housing prices in many major cities which much more manageable then.

Frankly, the Canadians may run up against population pressure, too, because so little of their immense landmass is truly habitable. Something like 90% of the population lives within 120 miles of the U.S. border. The only major city above that line is Edmonton, and its an oil capital just to the north.

You don't have to go too far north of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal to get into the Canadian Shield geological formation, which means very thin, acidic topsoil over frequently pink bedrock. With an extremely short growing season, anything but a few cattle and hay and some berries is about all agriculture that is possible. And people simply do not like freezing cloudy weather.

The plains of Western Canada, i.e., Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, are all suffering the same dry, dry weather as the neighboring U.S. states. In fact, Alberta tar sands extraction may be limited by lack of water unless better methods of recycling can be developed. Of course, that will mean more financial problems and less net energy, because any recycling will use some of the energy contained in the tar sands to clean and pump the recycled water.