Barbelith Underground > Switchboard > Illegal Immigration and borders

Can we all remember that this is the Head Shoop, and try to think our posts through a bit more before posting here? Thanks.

Dragon: Thanks for starting this thread. I think a good place to start might be by addressing the considerable amount of time and effort others have already spent asking you about this topic since you introduce it. Alas, for example, said:

Nothing wrong with the standard of education in the US insofar as only teaching English goes, in my opinion.

So, despite the fact that we are dependent on the labor and resources of the rest of the world for most of the products and many of the services we use every single day, we should not trouble ourselves to learn at least one other language? You don't see anything problematic about this at all?

People who are here without proper documentation are a complex and diverse lot. Your broad-based swipes against them lack proper documentation. I could, using your logic, say that you have no respect for the basic rules of the headshop, where we require evidence for claims and generally favor arguments that make some effort at careful analysis. I might even be tempted to say that, therefore, you deserve no respect as a human being.

However, I do not believe that is the most ethical stance. Instead, what I do is try to assume that perhaps you have good but flawed reasons for your stance, which I therefore believe to be a flawed stance. I do not assume that, because you're not really following the rules for this forum, you disrepect it. I am willing to assume that you are here in good faith, that you're enthusiastic to be here or you would not be participating in our public life. I assume that you may, in fact, be victim of some bad propoganda, and that maybe I should talk further with you before leaping to the conclusion that your behavior results from some fatal character flaw that makes you nearly subhuman.

(By the way, the term "illegals" is dehumanizing. Do you mean to imply that these persons are less that fully human?)

I hear you saying that you believe these workers are getting one over on you because they are using services that they refuse to pay taxes on.

Actually, many of them do pay lots of taxes: sales taxes, for one, and rent (most landlords who I know make sure that the rent they collect covers their property taxes--and they still can take many tax benefits from that property that are not available to renters. E.g., despite the fact that they probably bought the real estate with the hope and in many places an expectation of increased property value over time, real estate values gets depreciated every year--even when it may well be demonstrably true that the property is increasing in value.)

Federal taxes, the ones taken out of your paycheck, do not usually really go to local projects like schools and hospitals--not in any direct manner. Schools are usually funded by property taxes and state-local budgets depend heavily on sales taxes. If the persons without proper documentation are living here in an apartment and buying food and other goods, then they are almost certainly paying a larger portion of their own salaries in taxes--directly or indirectly--to pay for many of the services that they use--than do many of the extremely wealthy persons in this country.

In fact, Arguably, those who really get out of paying taxes in this country are the wealthiest Americans and corporate interests, who are shouldering less and less of the total tax burden.

What I'd call this, Dragon, is a successful divide-and-conquer strategy. My guess is that your total income and assets are closer to those of an immigrant family--yes even an illegal immigrant family--than to those of Bill Gates. However, it's in the interest of the wealthiest people in this country for you to feel both vaguely superior to but threatened by those workers that, actually, you and I depend upon every day. And with whom we should perhaps feel solidarity.

Do you know any illegal immigrants? I know several people who are here in this capacity: they are threatened by US law on a regular basis. I'd venture to say that they do, deeply, respect it--more than, it would seem to me, many CEOs do. Most of them are, however, poor. That is why they are here. They are here doing work that we depend on, but that employers do not want to (or, in the case of some small businesses, possibly cannot) pay a liveable or even sub-poverty wage to do, by US standards.

I accept that some workers probably do default on their insurance. But I wonder how much more prevalent this practice is amongst undocumented workers than amongst other similarly poor people, who are also trying to decide between paying for food, rent, and school supplies and paying insurance? Have you ever faced such a choice?

If anything, I put forth the claim that it is the wealthiest Americans, some of whom are the employers of illegal workers, who most shamefully lack a respect for our laws, and for US workers. And, in fact, many of those employers are also the ones who can pay fancy accountants to make sure that they can hide all their assets and avoid paying federal and state taxes.

But even more than most of these regular employers, many of whom are small businesses struggling to make it in an admittedly messy and difficult world, I'm particularly concerned about the lack of ethics of the multinational corporations who can outsource their work from country to country, without a visas, often on massive "tax holidays" (i.e., they pay no taxes while providing jobs that are frequently the economic equivalent of sharecropping--young workers often wind up owing their souls to the company store because they're not being paid enough to get out of the work they're doing). Here's a summary of this basic argument, with a variety of statistics to back it up.

Let's face it: most workers are trapped, including you and me, to some degree. Ask anyone who has moved to another country to work--or tried to. These massive corporate entities, meanwhile, know no borders and can move on a moment's notice, thus driving down wages all over the planet, putting pressure on smaller, more stable businessnesses back home, on workers from places like Mexico who find themselves competing with even more poorly paid workers from China. 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.

I added:

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.

I'd like it if you could address these posts at a satisfactory level of detail before we move on, with reference to the work of Michelle Malkin if you feel it would be helpful. I'd also appreciate it if you stopped calling people "illegals" - illegal is an adjective, not a noun.