The USA's Love/Hate Affair with Illegals

[dugaresa]

I just don't get it.

Americans just love to hate "those illegals".

However what brought them here? The corporate as well as the average american's love of a good deal.

So long as Juan and Maria are willing to sneak over the border to work in a slaughterhouse for below minimum wage, watch someone's kids, clean up their homes or offices, or landscape their yard, they are "welcome". But later at the backyard barbeque they are the object of derision even as someone stands on a patio built with illegal labor.

It makes me sick. Jobs that Americans won't do? Bullshit. They are jobs that people don't want to fork out real cash so that a legal US citizen can make a house, car and grocery payments. But for someone who has no options and who comes from a country where living in a shed without electricity or plumbing on some US Farm is a step up from where they lived south of the border, well any bit of cash helps them get a bit closer to their dream. They will swallow humiliation and the looks of disdain and just do what they can do to make it better for their kids (just like most of our grandparents did). They are men who will stand at corners and jump in trucks to work all day at some middle class home putting in new shrubs and helping to build a deck and then they have to cross their fingers that the homeowner or the site boss will pay them and not call the authorities to send them back to square one.

Used, abused and treated as if they are less than human and to top it off, if they get sick or hurt it seems that people are okay with letting them die.

Well perhaps one bit of atonement we can have for the sins of taking advantage of these folks is letting them perhaps get a bit of free healthcare? But nope, they are being upheld as "abusers" of our medical system, ain't that a laugh.