I know who Mrs. Cain was. We don’t talk about her or her family much, but things just wouldn’t have been paradise without her or them.
She was one of the many illegal immigrants in Paradise that did the actual work of tending the Garden of Eden–you know, the hoeing, planting, weeding, landscaping. And later, when Adam and his family needed a new roof on the hovel or new siding, it was Mrs. Cain’s family that put it all up, underpaid of course to keep costs down. When Cain took a fancy to one of the comely daughters with the exotic foreign accent and Abel went all homeland on him, the altercation…
Well. That’s one explanation.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies [1], in 2000 there were between seven and eight million illegal immigrants in the United States. Growth of that population is roughly half a million a year. INS estimates–for the use of Congress to pound pulpits with–about eleven million today.
We, according to Congress, have to Do Something about this. We’ve had to for a long time and nothing effective has ever been done. How come?
The CIS site has some useful material debunking popular myths. They don’t come here to get on welfare, they don’t come here to get free medical attention. They come here for jobs. Always have. And the biggest magnet is that there are jobs for them. So we occasionally hear about new laws to target businesses that hire illegals.
But the problem never goes away. In one of the only lucid policy initiatives Bush came up with, was the suggestion that we admit the situation, issue guest worker visas, and bring it all out in the open. Publicly, a lot of people hate that idea because “It will take jobs away from Americans.”
They say that with a straight face.
Here is the thing that no one I’ve heard yet will actually talk about. Why are Americans not filling those jobs? Why will businesses hire illegals, with the concommitant risks, rather than Americans? Is it that there are no Americans to take such jobs?
The actual phrase ought to be: “We can’t find Americans to fill those jobs at the wages we wish to pay.”
No one says that. They never finish the sentence.
And who, (he asks rhetorically) is the We who do not wish to pay those wages?
Pretty much all of us.
The low price of vegetables and fruits at the supermarket are kept low because of poorly paid illegal workers. The siding on your house doesn’t cost twice as much because, industry wide, a lot labor is being done (underpaid) by illegals. Menial factory jobs keep a variety of material costs low because Americans aren’t in them getting paid $12.00 an hour.
We, the United States, subsidize paradise on the labor of undocumented workers who work for a hell of lot less than resident Americans would accept.
And that’s the problem. We don’t want to pay to fix it. Everything would cost more if we did.
So we use this as a campaign issue, an issue to get exercised over, to vent about, and play a blame game.
But if we enacted laws that dictated minimum wages per job and enforced them, Americans would probably fill those jobs, and force out the illegals now doing them.
But then it wouldn’t be paradise anymore–it would cost too much.
Print this post [2]
[3]