If I could ask powerful world leaders a question and get an honest answer the question that interests me the most is "How do you see the future of your country? Who is a part of it? How are they a part of it?"
In the US Republicans are peddling a vision of a white, English-speaking, Christian America. A nation with very few or no non-citizen residents.
America is currently a largely white, overwhelmingly Christian nation with a significant population of non-citizen residents.
1/
11 million people out of 326 million people, who live in the US, aren't citizens and will never be citizens (unless we change something.)
They are here because US companies can pay them lower wages. A non-citizen is less likely to complain. Not because "Americans won't do those jobs."
I hate when people say that. These people are essentially Americans. How can we make *that* argument while also saying they are somehow mysteriously able to do exhausting, work for low wages?
2/
From most Democrats the "vision of the future" is murky, but amounts to "just leave things as they are" far too often.
I think we should be a diverse nation, as we have always been. A nation that both assimilates and is changed by the people who live here.
I don't think we should have a significant portion of the population who lives here indefinitely but will never really be a part of America.
It's OK to visit, but if you live here we need your help with running the government.
3/
The Republican project to eliminate undocumented Americans is either a fake out: that is, we will look around in 10 years and there will still be millions of undocumented people working in the shadows with no path to citizenship.
OR it's the same kind of eliminationism that leads to some of the worse crimes in history.
I want to hear someone say NO. There should be a path to citizenship. Requirements should be reasonable. Become a part of America if you want to stay.
4/
I think a lot of people would agree with "Become a part of America if you want to stay."
A friend of mine works in roofing. He's been doing the job for 20 years which is amazing because it's a very dangerous job. From time to time I've had to talk him down from supporting Republicans because he sees directly how his wages are lower, his job is less safe because most of the other people doing the same job are here illegally.
It's easy to blame immigrants for "not following the law"
5/
Blaming immigrants for "not following the law" is also BS because the US laws have been contradictory. They way the laws are enforced ranges from random to incomprehensible.
This is obviously because there are business owners who want to hire people for lower wages, but don't care about them beyond that. We can all see this happening.
There have even been attempts to make government programs to codify this arrangement.
6/
Things like "guest worker" programs that let people work in the US in agriculture for two years but then they need to return to their home country for a time before they can return to do two more years. Basically an exception just so farm owners can get their field workers without those workers ever becoming a part of the country.
Just keeping a thumb on people pressing them down.
7/
And that downward pressure doesn't just impact immigrant workers, it has an impact on the whole industry.
Everyone acts like it's unthinkable that picking strawberries or roofing could be a job that pays a decent wage. We really need to stop doing that and acknowledge the people who have been doing this work. Show them some respect.
8/8
The Democratic version of "doing something about immigration" can't just be the same thing Republicans have been doing but "less and more polite" --
ICE rounds up people who have been in the country for years. As far as I'm concerned these people are Americans. In the past the same industries just offer more jobs and bring in new people to replace them. That's the choke point no one will talk about, from the "room rental" landlords to the field captains to the contractors.
There is a conservative black youTuber who is pretty obnoxious but he pulled a stunt once where he went to Home Depot here in the Bronx and tried to wait with the construction day laborers to get work. He didn't really understand the system and made a big deal about being rejected and ranted about immigration ruining everything.
But his segment exposed how there are a lot of "understandings" and social infrastructure in place to supply cheap labor to these industries.
All of this because someone wants to pay a little less for their workers.
I was horrified when I heard ICE was going after people "at Home Depots" but I can also understand how to some people it might sound like "wow finally someone is doing something about this"
Paying a human person $80 a day to lay roofing is unreasonable. That job is too dangerous and requires too much skill for such low pay.
That’s why we can't talk about immigration without talking about wages and working conditions.
Excellent thread, gets to the heart of it.
It's useful to reframe the question as "why are employers getting away with violating labor laws and paying substandard wages?"
You can sometimes get people to think differently about the "immigrants taking our jobs" argument (assuming it's made in good faith in the first place) by suggesting that employers should be fined, not for hiring undocumented people, but for paying substandard wages or for labor law violations. Without getting into questions of immigration, that makes it very clear who's at fault if Joe Sixpack can't get paid well for a roofing job.
Oh, I'm kinda facepalming right now to have not considered that part. I'm an employer, so there's not just what the employee takes home, there's all the money that the employer takes out for social security, taxes and so on, plus what the employer matches, plus worker's comp insurance (based on total reported payroll). Yeah, it's really cheap to hire people under the table, even if paying the same take-home pay as someone on the books.
Basically the transaction and overhead costs of entering and exiting the labor market incentivize undocumented labor.
@futurebird I would emphasize that whether or not the pay is unreasonable should be up to the worker. It disempowers them for me or you to impose our idea of reasonable onto them, taking away their ability to choose for themselves based on their own lives.
This is about workers rights. They can choose for themselves. They aren't children that we need to be paternalistic about.
The ideal that Republicans (and far too often, Democrats) are shooting for is to maintain a permanent underclass of people who will work for starvation wages because they cannot organize to negotiate for better wages and conditions.
We've been there before. We fought a war with ourselves over it, because that was a bad situation.
It's still a bad situation (nuance: it's *better*, but it's still bad).
This needs to end.
Immigration reform needs to meet that goal.
@futurebird and you don't want a roofer doing a crap job
Pay for and get skilled workers
@futurebird Immigration as an issue was created to prevent "wages are too low" from being an issue.
Because wages are much, much, much too low, it takes a lot of violence to keep the politics focused on immigration instead of "why aren't I being paid more?"
The useful response to "make them all go home" is "why don't you get paid what you're worth?"
Democrats (party of the status quo) can't do that because it destroys the status quo.
(The status quo is dead; pick a future.)
@futurebird thanks for those wise words.
I might use them in my next discussions with people who buy into this "we have to keep our passport guarded or anyone could get it"
like. what if anyone could get it? would that really be that bad?
I am all for some sort of rules, like living in a country for some time (probably years), working or studying or caring for someone
and maybe a certificate of language knowledge
We can absolutely have rules. We could even be strict about new entires to the country. In fact we might need to be strict with employers who will try to bring in new people if their current labor force naturalizes.
This should put an upward pressure on wages in these industries and that's why politically it's so hard to do.
But, now we are seeing the danger of not addressing this issue because it can seem like only Republicans are "at least doing something" about it.
@sarahtaber wrote about some of this recently, with some actual numbers for how much (or, rather, how little) paying farm workers a sensible wage would impact prices.
@futurebird
It even has an impact across industries; as a software engineer, I could be programming a robot to pick strawberries, but it wouldn't be able to compete with exploited labour
(Strawberry-picking robot is hypothetical, but this actually happens with pick-and-place robots for electronics assembly)
@futurebird When I was a kid, my dad complained up and down about other farmers and other roofing contractors (he was both) and their immigrant workforces. He complained both about the immigrants and the people who hired them. He also loved to complain about OSHA.
Then he would make his own kids work for him, pay us a pittance, and put us in horrifically dangerous working conditions. He loved the farm loopholes in employment law that let you make slaves out of your kids.
@neckspike @futurebird I heard this yesterday on The Daily Beans podcast. Do you know why immigrants being deported do not have to be read Miranda rights when they are grabbed? Because it is a civil violation and not a criminal charge.
You know who is a criminal? Employers hiring people below minimum wage, and not paying their taxes. Those are the criminals. Arrest them "it is only common sense".
Oh wait. People who break the law avoiding regulations are mostly white Republicans.
Since he works in roofing his wages have gone down because while the team he's on might get a contract they will bring in extra undocumented workers who are paid much less to catch up the slack.
Democrats talk about how wonderful immigration is in the abstract and don't say anything about what it's doing to wages to have undocumented workers who can't form a union in the market.
If there weren’t any immigrants, the two ways the bosses could react would be paying all their workers more, or figuring out how to pay their workers less *anyway* — I feel like historically some industries have managed the first but we’re moving pretty hard toward the second.
“Just world “ worldview can’t see the second possibility. Although who trusts the big bosses?
well, I like that one!
*technically* it's the first way with extra steps, but a hell of an important reframing
After convincing the guy in question that undocumented immigrants aren't the root of the problem? I mean, ideally, labor could do it starting from our loaded system and in doing so convince this guy.
@futurebird @clew you’re right that it is technically the first. I think the agency of advocacy is important, too.
Every time I react and blame big D Dem messaging, I remember that the small d dem messaging is as, if not more, important. Especially when the stakes are democracy or authoritarianism.
That by all means we might save some, to quote somebody.
We've talked about what I've explained here: not only is what the Republicans are doing morally wrong and just cruel they don't have any intention of addressing the downward pressure on wages, or the fact that a buildings in our neighborhood are rented rooms (rather than rented apartments) which crowds too many people into a building ... this of course being also connected to the aforementioned low wages.
There is a whole ecosystem profiting off of this.
It is that. I worry that in saying so some people might tune me out as saying something too radical for them to process.
At the same time we need to call things what they are.
@futurebird @arclight If they don't know, it's because they don't want to know.
I'd say using the right names is a necessary but not sufficient part of articulating an alternative. The status quo cannot hold, as a matter of inevitability. (Field agriculture is failing in inescapable ways.) Embracing facts involves acknowledging that and finding a way to talk about desirable futures.
@futurebird 100% this.
…I tried just now to compose sentences in agreement with your point, but all my attempts to put into clear, concrete language the implications are so horrifying and depressing that even thinking them makes me nauseous. I can’t write such nihilistic things before breakfast, I just can’t.
Never again IS now. _Here_ and now.
And it didn’t have to be this way.
One likely version of the Republican plan — and it’s important to keep in mind that even they don’t really have a clear picture of what their plan really is — is keeping people in the country and essentially renting imprisoned immigrant Americans back to their former employers as slaves, under even •worse• labor conditions. I don’t hear people talking about this enough.
@futurebird Honestly? They should be kind of automatic.
I say this as a Canadian who was born here, and has never had to worry about a citizenship test - only hearing about it from people I thought were already Canadians in my classes or workplaces that ended up planning to take it, or doing any of the Permanent Residency stuff.
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