Dukasaur wrote:Those "lazy ass freeloaders" are the engine of your economy. They do all the backbreaking jobs your native sons won't touch. Your grocery stores would be empty in a week if you didn't have Mexicans to pick your tomatoes. Close the border and get ready to pay $12 for a pint of strawberries.
No, they are not. Lazy ass freeloaders are by definition lazy ass freeloaders.
Hard working immigrants, on the other hand, aren't lazy ass freeloaders.
As Milton Freedman once pointed out, you can have open borders or a welfare state but you can't have both at the same time.
First of all, I live in small farm country. "YOU PICK" is so popular here no one realizes that it was used by Mark Twain in Huck Finn.
With that out of the way, let's go into the economic politics of racist bastards.
The original purpose of minimum wage laws, created in the early 20th century was to prevent minorities, otherwise prohibited from joining unions, from getting jobs by offering to work for less money. While that is no longer the case today, it still creates a dilemma that manifests itself in the "undocumented" immigrant.
The "undocumented immigrant" (or literally anyone who wants to work "under the table" although laws actually apply to non illegal residents) is able to work for a wage set lower than the minimum wage + all the required benefit costs necessary to hire workers. Thus they represent an abundant supply of near slave labor. Business that needs such labor (especially owned by the Koch brothers) definitely want the under the radar less than minimum wage workers working for them.
So some products are cheaper (and Koch brothers are richer) but instead of more money going "through the system" a smaller pot of money is instead mostly going back to the home country as the undocumented immigrants send it to their relatives in their native lands. It's really a massive loss for the economy in every way; too many workers claiming too few jobs and sending that money out of the local economic system.
Not to mention that these workers aren't always the best workers and given the near slave conditions they experience a lot of problems in the food chain are directly related to the poor sanitary conditions of mega farms that try to go under the laws and regulations by paying people shit and giving them no decent facilities on the job.
There is an argument for the lazy young American, but this problem is actually higher up the chain and is due to the mentality that everyone should be in college when most people might actually be better off financially by going to a trade school (and some people might actually like those kind of jobs). But seriously, if a lot of people had to pay a whole lot more (seriously, strawberry prices is based on imports since the season is so short) they would probably just drive 60 miles to the nearest U PICK, do all the work and pat themselves on the back for being so frugal.
When's a fella get a chance to whitewash everyday?
