When I was dating my wife she told me about her first job right out of High School. She worked at an electronics fabrication plant in Southern California specializing in manufacturing diodes, and they treated their employees terribly. The pay was bad, there were no benefits, they were nasty towards their employees, and working conditions were unsafe. My wife was injured on the job and had to stay home for a while. A tool used to lower parts into an acid bath broke, splashing her with acid on her neck. The company lied about it, claimed it was her fault, and she was denied Workman’s Compensation. She quit shortly thereafter rather than work for such a nasty and unethical company.
For obvious reasons this company had a lot of labor issues. Turnover was high, employees were always trying to unionize (strongly resisted by the company), and there were continuous complaints to OSHA complaining about unsafe working conditions, such as the one causing my wife’s injury. But finally the company found a way to solve all their labor issues - they fired all their American factory employees and hired only illegal immigrants*. Then, whenever one of them complained, they were turned over to Immigration and deported. Obviously these people worked in terror of being deported, and were cowed and submissive. The employees working for this company were nothing more than wage slaves.
I wish I could say that this was an exception, but instead I think it is at the root of our country’s immigration problems. Not just my wife’s diode factory but meat packing plants, stores, contractors, farmers, and other businesses lacking integrity are profiting by deliberately hiring illegal immigrants so they can underpay them, use and abuse them, then discard them. They profit by the current broken immigration system we have and want it to continue as is.
Everyone says our immigration system is broken. That is true, but it isn’t broken because we can’t police our borders, or because the issue is too complicated, or because Liberal Democrats are wusses – it is broken by design. Unscrupulous businessmen, contractors, farmers, and their Republican allies WANT illegal immigrants to be stigmatized and vulnerable to ICE deportation, which makes it easy to get, hire, and exploit them. That way the immigrants can be kept in terror and forced to stay cowed and submissive while working for far less than they deserve. Wage slaves, in other words. It seems that Republicans always want tougher penalties on illegal immigrants, but want to soft-play enforcement against American citizens that traffic these immigrants. That is a tell. They are in cahoots with Americans who traffic in Wage Slavery.
Yes, it is true that we need to do more to secure our borders. But the way we are going about it now is not only ineffective, it helps the Wage Slave industry flourish. Crossing our border illegally is only half the difficulty illegal immigrants face in getting into the United States. Once they have crossed the border they need food, transportation, and help in getting a job here. By themselves, they cannot do it. But most of them already have made at least preliminary contact with someone in this country who can help them BEFORE they cross the border. Someone who is an American citizen either helps them cross the border, or more often meets them on the United States side after they have made it across. That person then arranges to transport the now illegal immigrant to some location where they have already lined up a job for them, sometimes many hundreds of miles away. It can be very lucrative to do this. They frequently get a fee in advance from the immigrant, then get paid a commission by the person who wants to hire an illegal worker. The employer then gets someone who will work for him dirt cheap, and often in terrible conditions which the immigrant cannot complain about. And if the American facilitating this gets caught, he frequently gets only a slap on the wrist. That applies also to the employers. The CEOs of some of the meat packing plants that were raided by ICE a few months ago should have been hauled on the carpet for hiring illegal immigrants, but instead were not prosecuted. They were taken at their word that they didn’t know their workers were illegal. And if you believe that I want to sell you some ocean property in Kansas.
We need to break this cycle. We need to not only stop the people crossing the border but go hard after those people who facilitate them after they cross. We do that now, but only sometimes and frequently they get let off easy. We need to prosecute them to the full extent of the law, and toughen up the laws we do have. I would not be above giving some illegal immigrants a path to citizenship in return for testimony against some of the Wage Slave Traders, which would turn the tables on the people who are exploiting them. And we also need to prosecute the employers who have knowingly hired them.
If potential illegal immigrants found out that they couldn’t get a job once they cross the border, the number of people trying to cross into this country would fall, making securing our borders that much easier. Perhaps we could finally get our borders under control. And if unscrupulous farmers and businessmen no longer had access to a steady stream of Wage Slaves, maybe they would be more amenable towards considering real immigration reform.
American citizens have a right to be concerned about illegal immigration. Immigrants into a community put stress on the resources of a community. As one example, the children of immigrants need to go to school (it would be immoral and unethical to refuse them schooling), and on the meager salaries they are paid they may not generate enough tax revenue to pay for the government services they use. That means average Americans are picking up the tab, causing understandable resentment. But frequently the people screaming the loudest against illegal immigrants are the unscrupulous businessmen and farmers who are benefitting from employing them. That keeps the immigrants cowed and frightened. And they sure aren’t paying them well. Nor are they paying mitigation fees to the local governments to defray the additional costs the immigrants create. The whole issue is presented in a dishonest manner.
I admit to mixed feelings about immigration. I think the United States has enough people, and we should be trying to stabilize or even reduce our population. More people means more air and water pollution, more mine tailings, and more stress on the land. As a result I am not in favor of large-scale immigration. But I am also not in favor of allowing the current system of Wage Slavery to continue. It is not as bad as the chattel slavery we practiced before the Civil War, but it is still a blight, and needs to be eradicated.
*Postscript: I thought for awhile about how to refer to foreign nationals who are in this country without permission. Right-wingers love the term “Illegal Alien”. They love stressing that they are here illegally. The word “illegal” stays up front, and the additional word “alien” sounds like a monster from a sci-fi movie. Liberals like “Undocumented Immigrant”, but that is too tame, as “undocumented” sounds so innocuous. I decided on “illegal immigrant”. The word “illegal” is important for context in order to stress the threat they are under from possible ICE deportation.
