Proudly harboring the undocumented
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Anonymous
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The price point the domestic labor business charges in a market place where it is competing with undocumented labor is distorted and cannot be relied as a data point for setting the market labor wage. It is not that you are paying generously, it is that your laborer is pricing generously. And you are happy to take advantage of it. Prices paid are pretax to labor but labor makes economic decision on an after-tax basis. Dollars: Assume your guy is working 50 hours a week and 52 weeks a year. $30 * 50 * 52 = $78,000 per year. As an undocumented immigrant, the odds are overwhelmingly high that he is: *not properly business bonded and insured (that's 2-5% in costs) *he is not paying into SS and MC (that's another 15.3%) *he is not paying income taxes (that's another 10-15% depending on jurisdiction) *he does not have commercial (or consumer) auto insurance (around 12.5% of his revenue if you figure about $10,000/year--which is low for commercial auto) There are a bunch of other things like business licenses and compliance costs he is probably also skirting and you are already approaching an increase in 50% of his costs just to get him to the same place on an after tax basis. He would need to charge you at least $45/hour if he was doing everything above board just to get himself to the same economic outcome. You think you are generous because you are paying him $30/hour because it is in your economic interest to save the true cost differential of getting him to the same place economically. Your greed is blinding you. And the moment he charged $45/hour, he would lose so much business to the undocumented guy charging $30/hour that it makes no economic sense for your guy to ever get legal status. Of course the competitor cannot pay his laborers $30 an hour. He is likely paying full freight on the costs of running his business and the undocumented laborer is undercutting him. Your legal workforce guy would need to charge closer to $60/hour to get his crew near $30/hour and even that is cutting it thin. Most service business need to charge more around 2.5x what they pay their hourly laborers to get to a modest profit margin after accounting for all costs, so you would be talking in the ballpark of $75/hour price to get a domestic laborer to $30/hour (which will still be less on an after-tax basis than your undocumented laborer). Risks: Last week I helped connect three undocumented laborers with a good friend from law school. They had been badly burned on a job where a homeowner asked them to unsafely burn debris on his ranch. My friend has taken on several of these types of cases and achieved great outcomes against the home owner's insurance. My undocumented laborers are so scared of any contact with the legal system (as was the case pre-Trump) that they are going to eat the injuries themselves. And while you may be one of those nice white people that thinks so highly of yourself, I am a native citizen of and raised in the same country as these injured men came from. As you would expect, I speak the language fluently, and I am trusted a lot to help a lot of these people never at a gain to myself. It didn't matter how I explained the issue to them. They are going to eat the injuries. Undocumented migration by and large is an economic issue, not a social justice issue (in this country, at least). It always has been and always will be. There is a reason why Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers were hostile to undocumented labor. Chavez knew that this was purely an economic issue and rich farmers and wealthy people like you would use undocumented labor to undercut the wage and bargaining power of the domestic labor force. I know you think you are doing something noble. In reality, you are only perpetuating inequality and a permanent underclass. |
Anonymous
You should be paying that to an American citizen or lawful resident immigrant. Your humble brag only says you’re scofflaw, not that you’re generous. |
Anonymous
| I'll take "things that never happened" for $200 Alex. |
Anonymous
| I knew a wealthy family who did something like this for someone who worked on their ranch. He was “like family to them” despite them paying him in cash under the table. They helped shield him for deportation as well. But they and all of their wealthy friends always vote republican, including Trump twice. They, like you, don’t care about immigrants. They care about this one worker they don’t want to lose. If he got injured they wouldn’t pay his medical bills and long term disability would they? So spare us the sanctimonious savior stuff. |
Anonymous
God you people are so tiresome. Enforcing laws is not fascism. |
Anonymous
+1. This mass deportation scheme is just a whole lot of performative nonsense. Obviously you need to go after violent criminals. And a person is not a depraved violent criminal because of where they were born. I don't know if people in favor of this have any kind of relationship with an undocumented immigrant or any immigrant at all. Overall a bunch of very hard-working, resourceful people. This country should be figuring out how to get these people here instead of forcing them out. |
Anonymous
The Rapist does. So why not everyone else? |
Anonymous
So democrats want the U.S. to be a theocracy? I prefer my laws secular. |
Anonymous
You're trying too hard and it's not working. Trump is a corrupt con-artist hypocrite. An embarrassment to this country. |
Anonymous
Look, these are real people. We're not in economics class. Nothing that you just said changes the fact that if I put on my community's Facebook page that I was offering, say, $25 a hour for yard work I'd be inundated with responses from "domestic" workers happy to take it on. There's no requirement that I, hiring a guy to do yard work as an independent contractor and paying him under $2800 a year, have any obligation to withhold anything or pay the government anything. The responsibility falls solely and squarely on the guy doing the work. Were I paying $25 an hour to some "domestic" guy down the street to do shitty work, which I can virtually guarantee to be the case, and he took doesn't follow the law and pay his taxes or social security either, am I responsible for that too? Or are you saying I should only hire workers who work for companies and not themselves regardless of their legal status? |
Anonymous
The American citizens in this area do a shitty job at this kind of work, and any lawful resident immigrant doesn't even do this kind of work because it's not the kind of work that the government is likely to allow anyone to enter legally to do. I've struck out time and again with "domestic" workers. They are almost uniformly unreliable, cut corners, are lazy, and do a bad job. You don't know how many times I've tried. It's not what I'm paying my guy that's undercutting them -- it's his work ethic that is. |
Anonymous
You can say that all you want, but it doesn't make it any more true. Here is my last text exchange with the guy, translated from Spanish: "Hi, you can expect me on Monday around noon. Hi, ok perfect, I won't be here when you arrive because I'm taking the grandkids to a matinee but I'll be back before you finish I'm sure." That's how we operate. I have no reason to make this up. Why in the world would you think it's so unbelievable? Because I actually pay him well? |
Anonymous
If, and it's a HUGE IF, then you are stupid beyond belief to brag about your altruism! Expect ICE to be breaking down your door and murdering all of you! |
Anonymous
And what's so backward is that the reward for that work ethic is to round them up and ship them out. The work ethic of someone that actually has the wherewithal to uproot themselves travel to a far away country and start over, learn the language, get a job, support their family is usually pretty impressive. I don't think I could do it. And yet we voted to discard these people. It makes no sense unless you're an out and out racist. |
Anonymous
I don't vote Republican, never have, and never will. I also don't treat him "like family" and don't pretend he's my family. I simply treat him with respect and pay him well. There are no pretensions involved. |