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And on people, perhaps like yourself, seeking secure employment in the "developed" world, who find themselves stuck with less job security, fewer benefits, and less pay than previous generations.
Well, quite. alas has already fairly comprehensively debunked the idea that migrant workers don't pay tax, but actually we can look further at just how much tax they don't pay. To look at a common form of employment for migrant workers, agricultural labour, we see that the amount of money being earned is pretty low - poverty-line wages, so not much federal tax woould be paid on them.
On the other hand, the presence of a large number of socially disadvantaged workers is a great money-saver for big business. Not only do you get to pay illegal workers less, you also get to pay legal workers less, because more people competing for the same jobs creates a buyer's market for labour. By playing up the threat of the migrant worker taking your job, your employer gets to keep a registered, licensed, experienced employee, but can steadily deprive you of your benefits and pay, shrugging shoulders and blaming the flood of migrant labour. Without doing this, how can the company remain competitive?
I have a feeling I shouldn't leave a rhetorical question undefused around you, Dragon, so just to clarify that question:
While the average farmworker in the U.S. earns $7,500 per year, Archer Daniels Midland, the world leader in producing soy meal, corn, wheat, and cocoa, reaped $1.7 billion in profits in 2003; its CEO, Allen G. Andreas, received over $2.9 million in compensation. Dole, the world's largest producer of fresh fruit, vegetables and cut flowers generated $4.8 billion in revenues in 2003.
So, immigrant labour is driven by fianncial inequality - GDP per capita in the US is four times that of Mexico (source: the CIA world factbook), and, far from being undesirable, is actively sought by the wealthy in the US, as it provides a pool of cheap labour for the truly shitty jobs which, not having a legal status, will be unlikely to be able to unionise or strike for better conditions, and meanwhile relatively low-paid workers can be bludgeoned into accepting pay freezes, union-busting and so on under the guise of maintaining competitiveness against those other companies who are taking advantage of cheap, illegal labour.
Now, I think that the status of immigrant workers in the US is a topic for yet another thread, possibly in the Switchboard. If we want to carry on with this, I suggest we copy and paste our content over there and go from there, as this has nothing much to do with language, official or no. |
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