Thank you, and feel free to use it. All I did was give articulation to some common sense ideas which are shared by a huge majority of Americans.gwashorn wrote:TAM, that was great. Much appreciated in your building the logic and demeanor. May I pass this to some friends to read? I find your approach to provide insight very compelling. Thanks for a great write up.
Gary
I remember talking to a co-worker who is a middle-aged black woman living in a pretty run-down area of Dallas, populated primarily by blacks. We got to talking about illegal immigration one day, and she was pretty angry about it. And according to her, what she felt was not at all uncommon in black communities, particularly those at the lower economic margins. Now, there are plenty of other social pressures affecting the quality of life in black ghettos, but one of them is undeniably chronic unemployment — which is also the root cause of some of those other pressures. And for better or for worse, those "jobs that Americans don't want to take" used to be filled primarily by black Americans who otherwise lacked the skills to raise themselves up financially. They weren't getting rich, and many were not even getting to the middle classes, but at least they had jobs, and they could count on a small modicum of financial stability.
When illegals really arrived in large numbers, they became available in large numbers, and at very low wages, to the labor pool — wages lower than even the pretty low wages being paid to black Americans who lived near or at the poverty level. The natural consequence of this is that lots of employers were willing to look the other way to hire illegals at lower wages than what they had been paying to black American citizens. Unemployment in black neighborhoods, which had always been higher to varying degrees than in their white counterparts, began to skyrocket. With vastly increased unemployment came an increase in other baggage. So that is at least one group of American citizens who have been measurably and negatively impacted by the influx of people who broke our laws to get here.
I have to ask.... As an American citizen, to whom do I owe more loyalty: my fellow citizens of color who have been hurt by illegal immigration, or the illegal immigrants who took their jobs? The answer is a no-brainer. The solution is to enforce penalties against knowingly hiring illegal aliens, and to require employers to verify a prospective employee's residency status.
I am a self-employed businessman, and I am generally against imposing additional burdens on capitalists. But it just isn't that hard to confirm whether or not a job applicant is a legal resident. You have the job opening. The applicant wants the job. Make them prove by verifiable means that they are eligible for the job. If they cannot do so, then hire the one who can. End of story. If enough jobs get filled by those who can prove their eligibility, then those that cannot prove it will go back to where they came from. If enough jobs go unfilled because not enough job applicants can prove their eligibility, then employers have to raise wages enough to attract those applicants who can prove it.
That is capitalism at its finest. But introducing illegal workers into the system to compete unfairly against those who have a right to be here pollutes that system and bogs it down. THAT is the one of the best answers one can give to the paltry argument that illegals are "merely" economic immigrants and that we should ignore our laws out of some kind of misguided sense of pity.
