“Americans won’t do those jobs” is the worst argument for mass immigration ever

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just stop subsidizing slave labor in China. Most of the stuff is garbage.

I agree with you PP, but the American economy thrives on overconsumption. And social media is fueling it with all the stories about Target “hauls” and Costco “runs” and the like. I’ve lived all over the world and have never seen anywhere else in the world the incessant shopping addiction that I see in this country. It’s part of the culture now. It would take a generational shift to change these behaviors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just stop subsidizing slave labor in China. Most of the stuff is garbage.

I agree with you PP, but the American economy thrives on overconsumption. And social media is fueling it with all the stories about Target “hauls” and Costco “runs” and the like. I’ve lived all over the world and have never seen anywhere else in the world the incessant shopping addiction that I see in this country. It’s part of the culture now. It would take a generational shift to change these behaviors.

Its fine. By the time Trump is done with the country, nothing will be affordable and the middle and lower classes will all be worker drones.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Meatpacking

Meatpacking used to be a stable, middle-class union job, with multiple generations of families working at the same plant. In 1960, the industry was 95% unionized, paying wages that were comparable to those in the auto and steel industries. Meatpacking was skilled labor. A meatpacker was trained like an old-fashioned butcher to take an animal from slaughter to final cuts.

In the 1960s, a company called IBP (Iowa Beef Packers) figured out that you didn't need skilled labor if you didn't care about your workers. Instead of workers doing a variety of jobs, IBP had workers do one cut all day long, maybe separate the hind quarter from the carcass, or slice a single cut of steak.

Meatpacking wages across the industry stayed high through the early 1980s, but then started to fall, as more companies adopted the IBP method. After all, anyone could be trained to do a single cut. By the mid-80s, wages had plunged and unions were disappearing. It was a race to the bottom and meatpacking was quickly becoming the worst job in America.

One reason it was now so awful, was that the IBP method resulted in a huge rise in repetitive stress injuries and debilitating knife cuts caused by inattention and fatigue. Doing one cut all day long on a speeding factory line was good for corporate profits but disastrously bad for actual humans.

Today, Places like Tyson Chicken and Smithfield Ham need an endless supply of 3rd world immigrants to keep wages low and unions busted, but also because it's a job that destroys the human body and spirit. Even if you're not injured, the work is so grueling that most immigrants can only do it for a couple of years before they move on. That's why you'll see that the ethnic composition of rural meatpacking towns goes through successive waves of foreigners-- Mexicans, Somalis, Sudanese, Guatemalans, Haitians-- as each group gets brought in and burned out, while management goes looking for another group of suckers.

Shutting down the immigration pipeline and deporting the illegals will go a long way to restoring the balance between workers and corporations. Likewise, we need to go back to a system with lots of small-scale regional meat processors staffed by skilled workers, something that will require breaking up these abusive corporations and overhauling the USDA inspection program.

Yes, prices of meat will certainly rise, but you already shouldn't be eating factory-farmed meat and you shouldn't be patronizing corporations that are actively wrecking America.

This is exactly the sunshine and rainbows BS the GOP wants you to believe is their plan and intention. "Get rid of all the illegal immigrants and all of a sudden corporations will stop being greedy and raise wages and improve conditions!" The reality is that it is utter nonsense.

The GOP does not care about illegal immigrants, we all know that. But they also don't care about the middle class or really even the upper class. The billionaire class is the only demographic they care about and the billionaire class does not get richer by raising wages and improving conditions.

What will actually happen is that once the undocumented are no longer doing the jobs, the GOP will have eliminated all social safety nets and wrecked the economy to the point that millions of Americans will have no choice but to work those jobs at whatever (extremely low) wage the corporations offer as there will be no SNAP, Section 8, unemployment insurance, or government healthcare left.

And call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but personally I believe they'll go even further than this. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if they try to make unpaid debt a criminal offense as well as criminalize homelessness and enact other fascist policies to essentially make it illegal for unemployed people not to work for slave wages.

At no point in the modern history of the Republican party have they ever even attempted to enact policies that help anyone but corporations and the very rich other than token misdirections like giving pennies of tax cuts and deductions while transferring trillions to the ultra rich. There is literally no reason to believe they will do anything differently now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just stop subsidizing slave labor in China. Most of the stuff is garbage.

You pay 10x more for the exact same "China garbage" when it has a brand name on it at a store. But it's often the exact same item that can be found being sold no-name on Aliexpress for 10x less.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We created this problem ourselves.

You can't push every graduating HS senior to go to college and then get offended in 4 years when they graduate college and refuse manual labor jobs because they feel overqualified for those jobs.

Maybe we shouldn't have vilified service industry jobs for the last 20+ years and looked down on those holding them as uneducated and lesser than.

College-for-all was promoted all the way back to the GI Bill, and it was then and still is a fact that jobs for college-educated people typically pay more than blue collar jobs. Sure, there are rich plumbers who make more than many college-educated people and so on, but they are in the minority - they are typically folks who own the business and have several crews, as opposed to the guy on the plumbing crew.

But from there you took a hard right into the ditch to say blue collar jobs are "vilified" while also ignoring how in the last 20 years, the college educated workforce has been completely vilified by rural America, mostly because of grossly distorted rhetoric from folks like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage, playing through radios in trucks or on shop floors all across rural America. From them you have all of your deranged lore about millions of "useless degrees in womens studies and underwater basketweaving," and how if you go to college you will be indoctrinated into becoming a communist and so on.

The only person I ever heard denigrate blue collar work was my mom when I was growing up, who kept saying I'd end up a ditch digger if I didn't do my homework. She's a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter by the way.

I'm the only college educated person in my family and I make less than my siblings. I make $75,500 as a teacher. My brother is a bartender/manager and he makes $35k salary + tips, which means he typically makes $110-125k/yr. My sister worked her way up to a District Manager at Victoria's Secret and she makes $110k/year salary + bonuses. Almost all of my cousins also make more than I do. They are some kind of lineman or technician at Verizon, general contractor, plumber, and two do roadwork/paving.

The only thing that helped me is that I received nearly a full ride to college. I graduated with less than $4k in student loans that I worked to pay off during my first year of teaching. But a lot of my colleagues who have substantial student loan debt live very paycheck-to-paycheck.

[Anonymous]

^ white people left the meat packing jobs when they could. It's hard and dangerous work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The argument is not and should not be that "Americans won't do these jobs" but that we have inadequate citizen applicants to get the job done when the job is important and needed from generating food to nursing care.

From inception, the U.S. was built on free and then underpaid labor. Indentured servants > slaves > sharecroppers/Jim Crow blacks > Irish/Italian/Polish/Chinese immigrants > illegal immigrants from Latin America. Our food and several manufacturing sectors have ALWAYS paid below market-rate wages.

OP here. Yes, I read The Jungle. I thought we were supposed to be progressing past that. A lot of people on this thread are fine with those jobs continuing to suck as long as it’s not them who has to do them.

My point wasn't to make a value judgment about who should be doing the work, it was to point out that America has quite literally never operated without an exploited underclass.

Yeah and it’s been great right? Slave insurrections, a civil war, riots, labor unrest, maintaining a surveillance state, welfare state, etc… Those are some real costs there that end up on taxpayers books.

If employers were bearing those costs directly that exploited underclass doesn’t look like such a good deal anymore.

If you go back to the 50s, 60s, and 70s, a single earner could pay a mortgage and put kids through school on manufacturing and what you consider underclass jobs today.

Then, our society had to go to two income households just to get the same effect in the 70s and 80s.

What changed? Well, we eroded the value of the dollar. So while you will talk about a "living wage", ask yourself why people can't live on that wage? It wasn't always like this.

You're getting the cause of the problem wrong. Globalization and just having easy money policies by the government caused this.

And by the way, is every person who is earning big bucks as a project manager, administrator or a "lead" really worth the salary they command? We have a lot of jobs that pay high, but don't add much to the bottom line.

DP. The income gap wasn’t as wide today. CEO pay has gone through the roof. It’s as much, if not more, about corporate greed than government policies. But, the government should bill Walmart for every dollar it uses in public assistance. Then, we’d get somewhere. Look at the billionaire class.

No the government should not bill Walmart for public assistance.

The government should cease all public assistance. Then the market signal will get back to Walmart in short order. They will raise wages or have labor shortages.

You are in favor of subsidizing failure. I'm for cutting it off. My solution brings much longer term sound finances.

Oh, is that what happened in the gilded ages? People just stopped working for horrible businesses? You’re a fool. Also, it’s not public assistance if Walmart is paying for it, mmmkay. The government helps to police businesses behaving badly. That’s exactly how we got to the new deal. You’re acting like a poor person with a scarcity mindset.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We created this problem ourselves.

You can't push every graduating HS senior to go to college and then get offended in 4 years when they graduate college and refuse manual labor jobs because they feel overqualified for those jobs.

Maybe we shouldn't have vilified service industry jobs for the last 20+ years and looked down on those holding them as uneducated and lesser than.

College-for-all was promoted all the way back to the GI Bill, and it was then and still is a fact that jobs for college-educated people typically pay more than blue collar jobs. Sure, there are rich plumbers who make more than many college-educated people and so on, but they are in the minority - they are typically folks who own the business and have several crews, as opposed to the guy on the plumbing crew.

But from there you took a hard right into the ditch to say blue collar jobs are "vilified" while also ignoring how in the last 20 years, the college educated workforce has been completely vilified by rural America, mostly because of grossly distorted rhetoric from folks like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage, playing through radios in trucks or on shop floors all across rural America. From them you have all of your deranged lore about millions of "useless degrees in womens studies and underwater basketweaving," and how if you go to college you will be indoctrinated into becoming a communist and so on.

The only person I ever heard denigrate blue collar work was my mom when I was growing up, who kept saying I'd end up a ditch digger if I didn't do my homework. She's a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter by the way.

I'm the only college educated person in my family and I make less than my siblings. I make $75,500 as a teacher. My brother is a bartender/manager and he makes $35k salary + tips, which means he typically makes $110-125k/yr. My sister worked her way up to a District Manager at Victoria's Secret and she makes $110k/year salary + bonuses. Almost all of my cousins also make more than I do. They are some kind of lineman or technician at Verizon, general contractor, plumber, and two do roadwork/paving.

The only thing that helped me is that I received nearly a full ride to college. I graduated with less than $4k in student loans that I worked to pay off during my first year of teaching. But a lot of my colleagues who have substantial student loan debt live very paycheck-to-paycheck.

But your job is not as hard on your body, and you will have a decent pension and healthcare in retirement. Some of the blue collar workers you know will also have a pension, but because their jobs are harder on the body, they may end up having to retire before they can start getting pensions.

FWIW, my parents were blue collar workers. Dad was a machinist who retired at 62, but this was decades ago when he could get a full pension at 62. Company asked him to stay longer because he was a good worker, but he said his body just gave out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let’s be real, cheap labor has always played a big role in how countries industrialize. Capitalism kind of runs on it. All the major economies we know today got to where they are by relying on low-cost labor, and honestly, they still do.

If you want to survive in a competitive capitalist system, you need access to cheap labor. If it’s not available at home, businesses usually turn to outsourcing and find it elsewhere.

That’s just how the global economy works. It’s not exactly fair, and yeah, it can be pretty messed up. But it’s the reality we live in.
Capitalism tends to go hand-in-hand with inequality and some level of labor exploitation. It’s not ideal, but it’s part of the system.

So, you're saying if we implement tariffs, globalist capitalism will go away and take their money with them, and we'll be left with a fairer more equitable economic system?

Long live Trump and his tariffs! Lets' do it!

Look, when globalist capitalism pulls out and takes the money with it, our economy is going to take a serious hit. We’ll end up poorer. Our standard of living will drop. Maybe the system will be more equitable, but being equitable is not the same as being prosperous.

Fairer and more equitable systems like Socialism struggle to create real wealth or long-term prosperity. History has shown.

Capitalism isn’t perfect, it’s got plenty of issues. But at the end of the day, it’s still the best system for driving progress and lifting people up economically. You can’t win in capitalism without exploitable cheap labor.

By your own metrics some large number of people shouldn't see capitalism as beneficial. Let's be real here. I personally try to remove Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Tesla from the companies I use. They could all ride off into the sunset for all I care.

You got it wrong. it's the opposite. People should see capitalism as beneficial. It has its flaws but it's the best.
Capitalism would fail without the big corporations.
You are trying to ditch big tech companies? You sound ridiculous because you are here enjoying an internet forum that wouldn't exist without those tech companies that you despise so much. If you are serious about what you just said, you should cut off your internet connection and go back to the dark age.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:California and the rest of the west coast have relied on Mexican labor for their crops since before they were part of the US. Just because the names of the countries changed doesn't make the traditional nature of this migratory farm worker population change. Pretending this is new or more predatory now or whatever is just rewriting history.

What is new is California's virtue signaling, like what they are doing is somehow more "humane". When in fact they are taking advantage of illegal immigration at an industrialized scale that we have never seen before.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let’s be real, cheap labor has always played a big role in how countries industrialize. Capitalism kind of runs on it. All the major economies we know today got to where they are by relying on low-cost labor, and honestly, they still do.

If you want to survive in a competitive capitalist system, you need access to cheap labor. If it’s not available at home, businesses usually turn to outsourcing and find it elsewhere.

That’s just how the global economy works. It’s not exactly fair, and yeah, it can be pretty messed up. But it’s the reality we live in.
Capitalism tends to go hand-in-hand with inequality and some level of labor exploitation. It’s not ideal, but it’s part of the system.

So, you're saying if we implement tariffs, globalist capitalism will go away and take their money with them, and we'll be left with a fairer more equitable economic system?

Long live Trump and his tariffs! Lets' do it!

Look, when globalist capitalism pulls out and takes the money with it, our economy is going to take a serious hit. We’ll end up poorer. Our standard of living will drop. Maybe the system will be more equitable, but being equitable is not the same as being prosperous.

Fairer and more equitable systems like Socialism struggle to create real wealth or long-term prosperity. History has shown.

Capitalism isn’t perfect, it’s got plenty of issues. But at the end of the day, it’s still the best system for driving progress and lifting people up economically. You can’t win in capitalism without exploitable cheap labor.

By your own metrics some large number of people shouldn't see capitalism as beneficial. Let's be real here. I personally try to remove Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Tesla from the companies I use. They could all ride off into the sunset for all I care.

You got it wrong. it's the opposite. People should see capitalism as beneficial. It has its flaws but it's the best.
Capitalism would fail without the big corporations.
You are trying to ditch big tech companies? You sound ridiculous because you are here enjoying an internet forum that wouldn't exist without those tech companies that you despise so much. If you are serious about what you just said, you should cut off your internet connection and go back to the dark age.

I had internet net before those companies; it was better then.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:California and the rest of the west coast have relied on Mexican labor for their crops since before they were part of the US. Just because the names of the countries changed doesn't make the traditional nature of this migratory farm worker population change. Pretending this is new or more predatory now or whatever is just rewriting history.

What is new is California's virtue signaling, like what they are doing is somehow more "humane". When in fact they are taking advantage of illegal immigration at an industrialized scale that we have never seen before.

I bet you complained about high grocery prices.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let’s be real, cheap labor has always played a big role in how countries industrialize. Capitalism kind of runs on it. All the major economies we know today got to where they are by relying on low-cost labor, and honestly, they still do.

If you want to survive in a competitive capitalist system, you need access to cheap labor. If it’s not available at home, businesses usually turn to outsourcing and find it elsewhere.

That’s just how the global economy works. It’s not exactly fair, and yeah, it can be pretty messed up. But it’s the reality we live in.
Capitalism tends to go hand-in-hand with inequality and some level of labor exploitation. It’s not ideal, but it’s part of the system.

So, you're saying if we implement tariffs, globalist capitalism will go away and take their money with them, and we'll be left with a fairer more equitable economic system?

Long live Trump and his tariffs! Lets' do it!

Look, when globalist capitalism pulls out and takes the money with it, our economy is going to take a serious hit. We’ll end up poorer. Our standard of living will drop. Maybe the system will be more equitable, but being equitable is not the same as being prosperous.

Fairer and more equitable systems like Socialism struggle to create real wealth or long-term prosperity. History has shown.

Capitalism isn’t perfect, it’s got plenty of issues. But at the end of the day, it’s still the best system for driving progress and lifting people up economically. You can’t win in capitalism without exploitable cheap labor.

By your own metrics some large number of people shouldn't see capitalism as beneficial. Let's be real here. I personally try to remove Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Tesla from the companies I use. They could all ride off into the sunset for all I care.

You got it wrong. it's the opposite. People should see capitalism as beneficial. It has its flaws but it's the best.
Capitalism would fail without the big corporations.
You are trying to ditch big tech companies? You sound ridiculous because you are here enjoying an internet forum that wouldn't exist without those tech companies that you despise so much. If you are serious about what you just said, you should cut off your internet connection and go back to the dark age.

I had internet net before those companies; it was better then.

Haha. No, it wasn't. I have a love/hate relationship with the internet, but it was not better before Google, Netflix, Apple.

You sound like my old FIL who lamented how computers were taking over typewriters.

- 54 yr old in tech.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meatpacking

Meatpacking used to be a stable, middle-class union job, with multiple generations of families working at the same plant. In 1960, the industry was 95% unionized, paying wages that were comparable to those in the auto and steel industries. Meatpacking was skilled labor. A meatpacker was trained like an old-fashioned butcher to take an animal from slaughter to final cuts.

In the 1960s, a company called IBP (Iowa Beef Packers) figured out that you didn't need skilled labor if you didn't care about your workers. Instead of workers doing a variety of jobs, IBP had workers do one cut all day long, maybe separate the hind quarter from the carcass, or slice a single cut of steak.

Meatpacking wages across the industry stayed high through the early 1980s, but then started to fall, as more companies adopted the IBP method. After all, anyone could be trained to do a single cut. By the mid-80s, wages had plunged and unions were disappearing. It was a race to the bottom and meatpacking was quickly becoming the worst job in America.

One reason it was now so awful, was that the IBP method resulted in a huge rise in repetitive stress injuries and debilitating knife cuts caused by inattention and fatigue. Doing one cut all day long on a speeding factory line was good for corporate profits but disastrously bad for actual humans.

Today, Places like Tyson Chicken and Smithfield Ham need an endless supply of 3rd world immigrants to keep wages low and unions busted, but also because it's a job that destroys the human body and spirit. Even if you're not injured, the work is so grueling that most immigrants can only do it for a couple of years before they move on. That's why you'll see that the ethnic composition of rural meatpacking towns goes through successive waves of foreigners-- Mexicans, Somalis, Sudanese, Guatemalans, Haitians-- as each group gets brought in and burned out, while management goes looking for another group of suckers.

Shutting down the immigration pipeline and deporting the illegals will go a long way to restoring the balance between workers and corporations. Likewise, we need to go back to a system with lots of small-scale regional meat processors staffed by skilled workers, something that will require breaking up these abusive corporations and overhauling the USDA inspection program.

Yes, prices of meat will certainly rise, but you already shouldn't be eating factory-farmed meat and you shouldn't be patronizing corporations that are actively wrecking America.

I could actually see a lot of automation in that job. XRAY machines, automatic slicing and dicing. Think about it. The actual picture is a little scary.

Some of the automation of meat processing in Europe is truly incredible. It makes the US look practically medieval.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let’s be real, cheap labor has always played a big role in how countries industrialize. Capitalism kind of runs on it. All the major economies we know today got to where they are by relying on low-cost labor, and honestly, they still do.

If you want to survive in a competitive capitalist system, you need access to cheap labor. If it’s not available at home, businesses usually turn to outsourcing and find it elsewhere.

That’s just how the global economy works. It’s not exactly fair, and yeah, it can be pretty messed up. But it’s the reality we live in.
Capitalism tends to go hand-in-hand with inequality and some level of labor exploitation. It’s not ideal, but it’s part of the system.

So, you're saying if we implement tariffs, globalist capitalism will go away and take their money with them, and we'll be left with a fairer more equitable economic system?

Long live Trump and his tariffs! Lets' do it!

Look, when globalist capitalism pulls out and takes the money with it, our economy is going to take a serious hit. We’ll end up poorer. Our standard of living will drop. Maybe the system will be more equitable, but being equitable is not the same as being prosperous.

Fairer and more equitable systems like Socialism struggle to create real wealth or long-term prosperity. History has shown.

Capitalism isn’t perfect, it’s got plenty of issues. But at the end of the day, it’s still the best system for driving progress and lifting people up economically. You can’t win in capitalism without exploitable cheap labor.

By your own metrics some large number of people shouldn't see capitalism as beneficial. Let's be real here. I personally try to remove Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Tesla from the companies I use. They could all ride off into the sunset for all I care.

You got it wrong. it's the opposite. People should see capitalism as beneficial. It has its flaws but it's the best.
Capitalism would fail without the big corporations.
You are trying to ditch big tech companies? You sound ridiculous because you are here enjoying an internet forum that wouldn't exist without those tech companies that you despise so much. If you are serious about what you just said, you should cut off your internet connection and go back to the dark age.

I had internet net before those companies; it was better then.

Haha. No, it wasn't. I have a love/hate relationship with the internet, but it was not better before Google, Netflix, Apple.

You sound like my old FIL who lamented how computers were taking over typewriters.

- 54 yr old in tech.

Ironic that you say it wasn't better while spending time on an archaic platform life this discussion forum...which were much more common 20-30 years ago than now. Netfix is crap. Apple hasn't created a decent new tech product in over a decade now.