"...jobs American workers won't do."
These words, repeatedly used by Butch in this morning's press conference responding to a question about "immigration reform", are the meme.
Jobs Americans won't do. As if, somehow, these Americans are at fault for not taking work that is available. This is the secret text encoded within the meme. The poor are poor because they won't work, and thus, noble American entrepeneurs are willfully being deprived of manpower.
We need a counter-meme.
Really begs the question, doesn't it? Why, do you suppose, won't Americans do these jobs? Could it be that the pay offered to do these jobs is inadequate to live as an American? Wages so low that only desperate people, living under intolerable conditions, people too frightened to complain, will accept such degradation?
In actuality, there has been a long term, low-intensity labor strike going on in this country for decades. A strike for higher wages for menial work, by the people that traditionally did that work. They have been exercising their right to strike, to walk off the job if conditions are too bad, or the wage is too low. They may not be organized labor, but they are definitely on strike.
The reason Butch won't do anything effective to stop the flow of immigrant slave laborers is that these people, unbeknownst to themselves, are strikebreakers, scabs, brought in to allow the exploiters, those who refuse to pay an adequate wage, to break this strike by American workers. Thus the cycle of poverty in this country is perpetuated, a permanent underclass to keep the workers fearful and the upper classes served.
Let me disclose, before some feel the need to brand me as anti-immigrant, that I am the son of an immgrant, and that for the last thirty years have worked, intimately, with Mexican immigrant workers both legal and not. I speak their language and I respect their culture and I enjoy their company. I have known their families; their tragedies and joys. I have also seen that all in the context of the region where I live and the cultural and economic effects the immigrant poohas on the more established population, which is also immigrant, primarily, it all being a matter of how long ago one's people immigrated to this area of the southwest.
I, and many other people in my position, try to pay these workers well. It is actually a better deal for the workers to be paid under the table, with no taxes withheld, because the vast majority of them will never see the benefits this taxation will bring them. There is, as I understand it, although I do not have a reference to loink to, something on the order of 10-20 billion dollars in the SS Trust Fund that is, essentially, unclaimed money, benefits that the workers who have returned to Mexico have never bothered to make a claim for, despite having paid into the fund.
But I have to say that, at least right now, I'd rather see these jobs going to Americans who need them, and that the wage structure get pushed up enough to adequately pay them; that we finally honor the strike that has been going on and give those folks a damn raise, already. We got enough slave-labor immigrants already. We can always open the door again if we need to. We need to take care of our own, right now.
Thanks for listening. Anybody think of a counter-meme?