General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Far Too Many Businesses Would Embrace Slavery [View all]hunter
(38,719 posts)... would greatly reduce any incentives businesses have to hire undocumented workers.
Businesses hire undocumented workers and other desperate immigrants because they can abuse them by paying them less than living wages, subjecting them to dangerous working conditions, or by firing them en masse if they begin to organize.
I suspect many businesses employing undocumented workers have called ICE on themselves when their workforce becomes inconvenient, knowing that they'll be insulated from any serious consequences by unscrupulous labor contractors who simply vanish.
If someone who makes a good living wage and supports their family can't be considered a citizen because they are a recent immigrant then our entire economic system is bullshit. Just because the last of my immigrant ancestors arrived here in the mid nineteenth century doesn't make me a superior human.
My wife has Native American ancestors who'd been here for tens of thousands of years. Some of her ancestors returned to the United States as "immigrants" after their ancestors had been forced into Mexico by violent oppression. Others returned to Mexico again during the Great Depression when discrimination against Native Americans and other non-white working people once again became intolerable. My wife's grandmother deeply resented that and never sought U.S. citizenship. Yet she was a permanent resident, worked hard as a farm worker and in the canneries until she retired, and all her children were born in the U.S.A.. There was no reason for her not to be a citizen but her distrust of this nation.
I saw this sort of discrimination in my own family. One of my grandfather's had a fit that I was marrying, in his own words, "a Mexican girl." Men in his white Wild West family simply didn't do that. To his credit he got over it, but I was shocked.