I heard an interesting bite on NPR the other day. An individual who was being interviewed made the statement "if you hear illegal immigrant enough times, they cease to be people, they become animals and so you have situations like this where some Ecuadorians are hunted down and beaten on the street." I had to admit, he had a point, after all, we've been doing this for as long as we've been around. Dego, spic, wop, kike, dyke, nigger, spook, chink, dink, mick, kraut, dot-head, towel-head, wet-back, cracker, honkey, peckerwood, faggot, freak. These are just a sampling of our efforts to reduce someone else to where we can justify "targeting" them for blame, regardless of whether they deserve it.
One very interesting point of fact with the current "Immigrant problem" is that we only blame the immigrants and not the entities responsible for bringing them here. Immigrants from south of the border (Mexico, Central & South America) have been coming here for a very long time to work, originally in the fields of California then on to other miscellaneous jobs in factories, warehouses, construction and kitchens. There is the argument that they are taking jobs away from U.S. Citizens, but the rebuttal is that no citizens wanted to do these jobs, which was true for a large part. Things have changed a bit over the past 5-10 years. More and more jobs are being done by immigrant workers, many of which may be here illegally, and it is becoming more difficult for U.S. citizens to obtain jobs where they must compete with these workers. The problem, however, is not the fault of the worker who in my personal experience, rarely misses work, works long hours and works hard, usually does a decent job. In comparison to Domestic employees who have a tendency to call-off often, don't want to work 10+ hour days (which is stupid anyways), complain often and demand higher wages. If I'm a business owner with no ethical dilemma on the subject, I'm hiring the immigrant worker, illegal or not.
Basically it boils down to a simple formula, this is a Capitalist country, i.e. we aim for the highest profit margin. Immigrant workers do more work for less money than domestic employees. this means lower cost to consumers (that's you and I) and higher profits for the business owners. A good example of this formula at work is our food system (yeah, I brought it back to food). The workers in the field planting and harvesting your fruits and veggies, the slaughter house employees butchering your meats and packaging your seafood are being paid a wage that is probably well below minimum wage. These people are working long hours with no overtime pay and no health benefits. This allows the company to produce, package and ship foods at less expense which in turn means we will buy more because it is so affordable. Furthermore, the "rotating door" employment of immigrants allows the flow to be virtually never ending. If a worker is ill or injured, there are five more waiting to take his place, if a group is picked up by INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services), there is a group waiting to start today. These jobs typically are simplified tasks repeating the same thing over and over again so it's relatively simple to train a new worker with little or no lull in the work line.
If for some reason there ceased to be jobs available in the U.S. (wait, I think this is already happening), don't you think our citizens will begin to look elsewhere for employment? If you answered no, well, come see me when you wake up from your nap because we already do this domestically. People travel from city to city or even state to state so they can have a job. Workers in Cleveland can't find work so they move to Columbus or from Pittsburgh to Ohio and so on. What's to stop us from finding work in Canada?
The simple fact is this, there are few good paying jobs south of the border and the U.S. has a lot of work that pays well (comparatively), not only that, they are willing to hire illegal immigrants. So the problem isn't really the people coming here to work is it? No. The problem lies with our greed driven business owners and with our "cheaper is better" mentality that we apply to everything from food to people. So please think about that the next time you feel the need to blame someone for this so called "Immigrant problem".
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