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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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