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Alternatively, if you find my approach unpleasantly abrasive, you could watch as I attempt to wrench my cerebellum into the shape of that of the lovely and talented alas, using the legs of the headcrab currently covering my face as improvised spoons and shaping tools.
AAARGHHHHH!
AAAAARGGH!
FUUUUUUUUUUHHHHH!
GGGGGGGAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!
Woah.
Hi, Dragon. I understand that you don't think that people are being fair when they refer to your statements - not you, necessrily, but your statements - as racist, or as something that you are reading as racist, whether that's "nativist", "xenophobic" or other. That's understandable. Very few people want to be called racist - and the people who do want to be called racist are probably not people you'd meet on Barbelith, unless they were using it to mean that they had unexamined views on race, or they were profiting from a racist system.
Ultimately, though, "racist" is an ugly word for an ugly thing, and it's totally understandable that would not want to have people using it of you or anything near to you, like your beliefs.
But - and maybe this is something we don't think about enough - people don't want to call those things racist, either. They know that if they do, then the person they are talking to will feel attacked and judged, usually unfairly. They'll clam up, and the person who has called them or their beliefs racist will have made their own job - of convincing them to think about what they say or think - that much harder. I think you are thinking that people are waiting for the opportunity to call you and people like you racists. I don't think that's true. I think that in most cases you have to surprise somebody, catch them unawares or shock them, before they'll describe something with terminology as bald as the rankest, ill-thought-out, racist bullshit. Because they know that they just made the job of anyone who wants to talk to you about the numbers, or the programming behind your beliefs, just had their path made longer and rockier.
Speaking of long and rocky paths, let's talk about people who might have travelled long and rocky paths, metaphoricallly and literally, to get to America.
AAAARARRRRRRRARRRRRIO OOHHHHGOOOOODDDDMMYYYYYYBRAIIIIIIINNNNNNNN.
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. |
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