|
The illegal immigrants are simply the most visible symptom of a larger and more deadly problem. They're also the least painful symptom of the problem. Maybe it offends your sense of pride to see some dude from Honduras filling your job, or something, but it's not as if he collaborated with your employer to throw you out as some sort of grand conspiracy by the to toss you, and you in particular on your ass.
Of course, that sort of reactionary fist-shaking is a hell of a lot easier to package and market than actual causes, and it's better for business and politics to spread hatred than to fix the issue. So it's no wonder that so many people seem to take it up, without apparently realizing it.
The problem is over two decades of dissolving American labor, and just as long dismantling and assaulting nascent labor movements in other nations. Reagan kicked it all off, with his diehard union-busting and pandering to the wealthy elite. He made it an ownership society, provided what you own happens to be 51% or greater of a company's shares. Wages fell, prices rose, because they could get away with it. Taxes were diverted from the "welfare queens" (that being anyone without a fat 401k) and diverted to trickle-down economics (the trickle-down is, in fact, the sensation of urine creeping down your neck as the corporatistas piss on your head). In other nations, we supplied and formulated right-wing rebellions, police states, and enforced union-busting with an iron fist. We made deals wherin Latin America would owe us billions if we sent them a pittance of medical supplies. We were then told these nations were destitute because of left-wing politics, attempts at unionization, and hey, them brown-skinned people just aren't as good as we are! All this wrapped up with Clinton signing NAFTA - Perhaps the only piece of legislation I've ever seen that reads, verbatim, "We will fuck you up while fucking ourselves up. Sign on the line below"
So now we have a dissolution of the American job market. The wages are no longer worth the work given. Employers don't have to pay more than they want, so they don't. They are actively encouraged to pay their workers as little and work them as hard as possible, with fat welfare baskets if they generate so much money. If they fail in this pinch-and-stretch method, well, they get another welfare basket to keep them afloat, like so many airlines and auto companies. There's no incentive at all to maintain a strong work force. The unions today are a bare shadow of what they were - a fair number of them are simply sellouts that toe the corporate line at the expense of their members, because it's profitable for the leadership. What does this do to the American job market? Ir cornholes it. With a pinecone. And not one of those nice smooth pinecones from the Pacific northwest, but one of the hugeass longleaf pine cones from Florida.
Men and women quit because their wages are a pittance compared to the work they put in, or because their benefits are eroded away. Some are "laid off" or "downsized". Sure the company's turning a profit, but if we ditch half the workforce, we'll make MORE money because we have to pay fewer people. And the ones that are left will work harder, right? The American worker is exhausted now. Their wallets are empty, their pride is fractured. When once your average working joe or jane could, with pride, state that they manufactured, or gave good service, now they're chucking DVD's at blockbuster or learning how to make a triple latte mochachino decaff with extra nutmeg grande for the people who once employed them. Lack of wages, lack of benefits creates fractures in a society that's been weaned on the suburban lifestyle. There are entire towns in America that look like they could be somewhere in Somalia, because the factory moved, because the plant shut down, because Tyson Foods bought the land, because Wal-Mart went in downtown and sucked up all the money and paid far less than the other shops that once existed did.
Beyond our southern border, these neoliberal "free trade" policies have ruined an entire swath of nations, from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan. People starve to death because of the lack of work to the south of us. Shantytowns spring up at the promise of a single job changing tires. And when word comes to these people about there being jobs - money - food up north, no matter how vile or degenerate those jobs may be, they will move in, and they will take those jobs. When the option is starving in Honduras, I suppose the thought of being locked in an immigrant concentration camp in south Texas is an acceptable risk.
This has the unfortunate side effect that, once the employers get these desperate workers, who have perhaps never heard of "unionization", for whom a benefits package might be a free bag of chips on friday, this becomes the standard. There is no legal imperative for these employers to set their work standards any higher, and so even if American workers finally do break down and crawl back, they have to start again, at the very bottom, alongside the folks from down south who were being exploited and used up before.
It's a pattern that has repeated itself through American history. Rich men in government rig the economic system to benefit themselves and their friends. The American workforce collapses. Immigrants from a part of the world rendered destitute by these same politicians - or the local equivalent - move in, regardless of any legal statutes, in order to fill their own bellies. And so the cycle continues, where these people learn about unionizing, workers' rights, benefits, fair trade, and become prosperous - so prosperous that, once again, the "bootstrapping" myth rears its ugly little head and they decide to screw the latest batch of low-income workers by stripping the unions, ruining the economies, and selling tax breaks to the highest bidder - inevitably shooting their own feet from under themselves, only to become the latest in a long line of reactionary fist-wavers screaming about immigrants and how they "terk ur jorbz!!!"
The fault does not lie with the men and women crossing our borders to get a job, any job, to feed themselves and their family. It lies with the American system that speaks of the "self-made" rich man as if he were an independent and isolated pioneer who "never needed no help from no one", while the "welfare queens" are social scum and leeches and communists who need to be purged from the formers' firm young teat. The problem is not desperate people who steal identities and fake for tax reasons (it's a problem, but not THE problem), but rather the remains of a Eugenicist immigration policy, wherin a British person with all the use of a tissue paper doily is welcomes with open arms, but a skilled man from Pakistan has all his cavities searched five times before being sent back and told to try again in three years. Our immigration laws are some of the most archaic, screwed-up things that are still in the books, and the hamhandedness of their enforcement necessitates criminal activity in order to protect yourself from it, if your alternative is going hungry, or watching your kids die from some disease a tube of antibiotics and a bowl of warm soup could clear up.
The people are doing what people do. Caring for themselves and their families in whatever way they can. If you want to shake your fist, shake it at the laws, politicians, myths, and systems we've put in place that makes our job market a ruined shamble, that makes theirs even worse, and that makes them need to conduct harmful activities just to eke out basic survival in this world.
|