A Shrewdness of Apes

An Okie teacher banished to the Midwest. "Education is not the filling a bucket but the lighting of a fire."-- William Butler Yeats

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Right, what HE said.

"The kinds of immigration policy we have been pursuing, both legal and illegal, lead to an economic outcome where those on the low end of the labor market are suffering and all that extra wealth is being redistributed to the employers. Such a huge amount of wealth is being redistributed away from the poor toward the upper-middle class and people who use immigrant service workers-- the rich. So what immigration is doing is pouring more poor people into the US and making the poor who are already here even poorer."-- George Borjas, economist, Harvard University

Our country was built on cheap labor from unchecked immigration. It wasn't until immigration was regulated at the turn of the twentieth century that wages for the working class began to rise and the middle class began to really grow. Allowing "guest workers" in this country is just a way of manipulating the supply of workers to undercut wages, which eventually spreads all the way up into the middle class. Yes, we get cheap goods, but we don't earn enough to pay for them, unless we dig our grave with the copious credit that everyone inhales like oxygen-- I believe our own government's current debt ceiling is a whopping 8.2 TRILLION dollars. But remember, unless you're a a well-connected corporation, you can't file for bankruptcy. Falling or stagnant wages will make this house of cards collapse, people.

Of course, Vicente Fox is all for us opening the gates to illegal immigration-- that certainly removes the rightful pressure the Mexican government should feel to improve the Mexican economy for its gigantic segment of the population which has no future economically anywhere but in El Norte-- and they send all that nice, cold hard currency back home to further prop up the corrupt Mexican system. As long as Mexico can send excess workers up here, their economic policies will benefit their tiny but powerful elite. And so will ours.

4 Comments:

At 4/6/06, 6:02 PM, Blogger Dan Edwards said...

Keep in mind....those illegally immigrating from Mexico are welcome to leave Mexico.....they are the poor and uneducated of Mexico, and many are also sick (check out the increasing rates for TB in the US, most of it due to sick illegal immigrants !) And who pays for their health care? Who pays when their children are born here? Who pays for those children to be educated? Who pays for the victims of uninsured illegal immigrants when they have an automobile accident?

Bush and Co. ought to be tried for treason for their ignoring this invasion of our country. What the &^%# do those words they said in their oath of office, "To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" mean to these people. ACK ! It almost makes me sick what they are allowing to be done to our country.

 
At 4/6/06, 6:44 PM, Blogger "Ms. Cornelius" said...

You said it.

Let's also look at this from a humanitarian standpoint. Illegals can be exploited here, too. The jobs they take pay low wages-- sometimes illegally low wages, because what are they going to do?

I've said it before-- there is no such thing as a job an American won't do. There is such a thing as a job that Americans can't do and survive on the wages paid for that job.

Cesar Chavez himself opposed illegal immigration because it undercut the wages of workers.

 
At 4/11/06, 11:02 AM, Blogger James said...

This is one of those issues I've not given a great deal of thought to, but what little I have has been inclined towards your way of thinking. I have to ask why this guest worker thing is such a pull for Bush and company and the only thing I can come up with is that it's intended to keep wages down. It's not really some grand humanitarian gesture to let all these people stay and be "guests" or citizens, it's means by which business gets to keep its labor costs low and substantively unregulated, i.e. no one's looking over their shoulder to ensure decent working conditions, wages, or heatlhcare, as would more often be the case with citizens.

Then, to add it all up, I look at the 10 million or so people looking to be made citizens because they're here and why shouldn't they be made citizens, right? Well, but we've already done this once, about 20 years ago, and now we have some 10 million illegals here to deal with and I have to ask myself: What's stopping this from happening all over again in another 20 years?

Wages shouldn't be depressed with illegals, we should be made to pay for decent wages and benefits, and we shouldn't be allowing people to attain citizenship simply because they slipped through the cracks and haven't been caught - and indeed, Mexico should be put on the spot to get its act together so it's people aren't all trying to make their way down here. We don't have nearly the problem with Canadians trying to sneak in and that's not because Canadians by and large simply enjoy the colder clime of Canda and being with folks who like to say "Hey".

 
At 4/11/06, 9:53 PM, Blogger "Ms. Cornelius" said...

Not to mention that once these illegals become citizens, they will theoretically become voters so grateful to W and co.

You're right about the Canadians, too. Never thought about that-- although there is Michael J. Fox and Pamela Anderson and so on....

 

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