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Save the Economy - Save the Immigrants

October 3rd, 2008
By NED LIPS

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Throughout time immigrants have driven the growth and prosperity of this country. The concept of illegal immigrants is a relatively recent one. The idea that we should keep out those who don’t look like us, however, is an age-old effort. Whether we like it or not, immigrants are critical to the future of the US economy. There is a simple way to solve this problem. Make them join a union.

Who comes to the US? Immigrants are people with the guts to leave their families, cultures and traditions to venture into a new land in search of a way to improve themselves. They are tough, clever and self-sufficient.

Most people fear the risks and stay home, no matter the desperation of their native situation. Immigrants bear these great burdens and still send most of their often meager wages home. Immigrants are truly special people. This has always been what defines Americans. This applies to Mexican immigrants as completely it has to all other nationalities.

A Bit of History: As always, we should learn from our past or suffer the same errors. Immigration laws are a recent concept. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was the first broad immigration law. Still immigrants were generally welcomed and helped by Americans to adjust to and become part of society.

Laws of Exclusion: Prior to 1952, “immigration laws” were designed solely to exclude certain ethnic groups. The Naturalization Act of 1790 excluded blacks except as slaves. After that there were acts specifically excluding Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, and others. Isn’t our current policy strikingly similar? http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/USMigrat.html We became a melting pot despite our white ancestors’ best efforts.

The Baby Boom: In 1965 we first began to prefer immigrants with skills. The Baby-boomers were coming of age. Births rose dramatically from 1945 to 1957. After that rates fell. The Baby-boom generation officially extends to 1964. A graph of births per year can be found here.

There was a glut of new 20-something workers entering the marketplace to fill the less-skilled positions at the bottom of the growing corporate pyramid. Unskilled immigrant workers, therefore, would further overfill an overflowing population.

1990 was the tipping point.
The youngest Baby boomers turned 26 and wanted to move out of the lowest-level jobs. The problem, there were simply not enough young workers to replace them. Businesses found they could not fill the unskilled workers with Americans. They had two choices:
1. Hire immigrants, or
2. Outsource to other countries.
Based on the needs and resources of their business, they did both.

As time passed, the situation worsened. There was pressure to outsource as China found a great new way to drive its economy. There was pressure for Mexicans to come to the United States to fill the jobs left vacant. For years we ignored them as we always had.

Immigrants are Critical to Our Economy.
When a corporation outsources jobs overseas, it no longer needs the supervisors or managers above that group of workers and those jobs are lost as well.

When a corporation hires immigrants, all of the supervisory and management jobs are retained in the US to oversee those workers.

9/11
Then the Bush Administration slammed the door using 9/11 as the excuse. By some accounts there are around 10 million “illegal” aliens in the United States. They have been here for years helping to fill the critical jobs at the bottom of the corporate pyramid.

Mexican immigrants could not go back home, as they had for years, for fear they would not be able to return to the US. The vast majority, like all Americans, had good steady jobs and paid their taxes and even contributed to Social Security and Medicare without hope of benefiting from them.

The Solution is Simple
You cannot remove ten million people, even if you could find them. We cripple US businesses struggling already to compete by denying them Mexican workers.
Pure amnesty is simply politically impossible. A fence is just silly.

Undocumented Workers Must Join a Union
If we provided that any illegal alien could secure all necessary working papers to become “legal” so long as they join a recognized American union and remain in good standing, we would solve all of the problems associated with Mexican workers.

Then employers have no excuse. If they need more low-skilled workers, they need only turn to the unions. Any illegal alien who chooses not to join a union, will not be able to find work.

Unions will help workers adjust to our culture, language and work ethic. They will help them secure training and better wages, make sure they are not competing with Americans, and help ensure they have health and other insurance.

American workers, whether in guilds, trades or unions, have always been there to help immigrants adapt. They will do it again.



This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under USA, Mexico, Hispanics, Integration, Latinos, Minorities, Latin America (Central/South), Politics, Economy, Immigration, Society, Business. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Viewing 16 Comments

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    this in one of the dumbest pieces I have read in a long time.

    California is running a huge budget deficit and does not have the cash to pay its bills because the millions of illegal aliens in California consume more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. If poor mexican immigrants were good for the economy, El Paso Texas would be a boom town instead of an arm pits.

    Middle class Americans are stressed by the downward pressure of wages created by millions of both legal and illegal aliens. Look at the career fields in California that are now barred to whites and blacks because of their domination by immigrants. Look at how much the middle class and upper middle class spends to that there children are not sent to schools that are overrun with illegal aliens. Look at the drop in white birthrates in the U.S. becasue whites to not like the future they see.


    The middle class would have to be idiots to add millions of illegal aliens to the welfare rolls, the voting rolls, and the unemployment rolls.
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    superdestroyer, your comments are so ignorant, and yes, they are racist. California is running a huge budget deficit because we have an exaggerated version of the same real estate bubble/crisis being experienced everywhere else. The OMG it must be the Mexicans! line is old, and again, racist. Knock it off.

    This is totally ridiculous: "Look at the career fields in California that are now barred to whites and blacks because of their domination by immigrants." What fields are you talking about? The actual, literal fields? Do you think you wouldn't be able to go get a job doing ag work or washing dishes? Do you feel "barred" from those areas? Or is it that migrant workers are clogging up your path up the corporate ladder? They bought all the nice suits at Barney's you had your eye on?
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    Hey, California is telling Paulson that California may "have" to get an emergency loan from the federal government. Never mind that there is no obligation on the part of the federal government (nor on the taxpayers) to give the loan to California. Parasites.

    As for immigration, we need to control our borders and revise our immigration policy to end the sappy "family reunification" practice in favor of evaluation, a "points system" and an individual basis for admission to the USA.
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    Just like businesses, people, and any other entity whose money comes in at one time and needs to go out at another, California regularly takes out and shortly pays back loans. The credit crunch is killing that for everyone, including government bodies. Have you tried to get a car loan in the last week -- damn near impossible, even if you have decent credit. That's happening in Cali on a very big scale. Blaming any of that on Mexicans is over-the-top crap.
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    roto80,

    Try opening a dry cleaners in California or getting a job in a medical lab or in medicine if you are white. Many writers have begun to notice that California has a defacto caste system where certain ethnic groups work certain jobs and it is not all agriculture or fast foot. The total number of whites is California has been going down for about two decade bacause of massive immigration.

    I wonder if "Ned Lips" have ever visited El Paso, Laredo, or Brownsville Texas to learn first hand what large number of illegal aliens really do to an economy.

    The wealthy really like immigrants because they are used to eliminate blue collar whites. If you look at cities from Los Angeles to DC, you will notice that there are few if any blue collar whites. If you open the borders to unlimited immigrants, where are the blue collar whites support to immigrant? Canada?
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    sd -- I've lived in California most of my life, both in the Bay Area and in the San Diego area. I don't personally know anyone in the dry cleaning business, but most I have seen in my area are not run by latinos. As for the medical field -- I do have a lot of friends in that field, and there's a diverse mix of races, and even if there are a number of Mexican Americans, that doesn't make them illegal. There are, of course, certain fields certain ethnicities of people go into, but have YOU ever applied to open a dry cleaners? If you were denied because of your race, I suggest you sue for discrimination.

    Why does it scare you if there aren't as many white people in California? Does it bother you to hear different languages, see brown faces? White people aren't having as many babies, it's true, but that's not because of a fear of the brown-people future, it's because birth control is awesome.

    I've never been to El Paso, but I grew up a few miles from the border in California. Lots of wealth down in San Diego, let me tell you -- lots of racism, too, but lots of wealth. Maybe the Texas locations are crappy and poor because they're in the middle of the dusty desert, have little state support because Texans don't pay income tax, and those who are educated or successful want to move somewhere better. I don't think you can argue that San Diego has a less prominent Mexican immigrant population than any of those places, but it's beautiful and the weather's great, and the ocean is warm and swimmable, so people with money want to live there, bring jobs there, retire there, and put their wealth into that area. Again, you're ascribing to Mexicans something that has nothing to do with them. Most people would call that racism.

    Also: wealthy people hate poor white people more than they hate poor Mexicans? Where do you get these ideas? Would you mind rewording this so I can understand the question: "If you open the borders to unlimited immigrants, where are the blue collar whites support to immigrant?"
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    roor80,

    Places like DC and NYC function the way they go by replacing blue collar whites with immigrants and minorities. The culture of the minorities allows them to live in conditions that whites can not/will not do such as cramming extended families into a single dwelling. Having large number of immigrants allows placed like DC to have high paying jobs for white collar whites while maintain cheaper services. If you look at a place like DC, the District itself has no blue collar whites and the surrounding counties have few if any. Blue collar, white tradesmen drive in from 50 miles away or more to work in government licensed industries like electrical, plumbing, and HVAC because illegals and recent immigrants cannot break into those fields. My guess is that LA, SF, and SD work about the same way. It is also probably the reason that the total number of whites in California is going down.

    since the white elites in California or the East Coast never interact with blue collar whites, they despise them because the elite whites seem them as being lower than immigrants/minorities.

    Oh, San Diego county is actually whiter than California as a whole, so it does not support your your thesis. It is 51% white versus 43% for all of California. Compare that to El paso Texas that is 14% white. I wonder how many white kids in San Diego attend a school that is majority Hispanics. My guess is few to none. Where people send their children to school shows you want they really feel about other ethnic groups.
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    Ah, sometimes it's just like talking into the void...

    "The culture of minorities..." holly heckfire, dude. They don't live in those conditions because it's part of their culture. They live in those conditions because they are POOR. When white people have no money, they live in poor conditions, move in with relatives, in their car, on the street, as well as immigrants. That there are adults who don't understand that blows my mind. It's incredible to me that the very standard Republican argument you give in that first paragraph is somehow supposed to jive with the whole "the market takes care of everything" de-regulatatory, anti-union, no minimum wage Republican argument. I haven't gone back to your other comments to see if you are one of those free-market folks, so maybe that doesn't apply to you.

    For this: "since the white elites in California or the East Coast never interact with blue collar whites, they despise them because the elite whites seem them as being lower than immigrants/minorities. " I think the only answer is, er, no they don't. Again, where are you getting this information?

    As for San Diego's white/non-white ratio, the difference between that area and the other urban parts of California is that the non-whites are all Mexican (obviously not ALL, but far and away), whereas LA and the Bay Area have huge black, Asian, Indian populations, San Diego really doesn't, except on military bases where there is a significant black population. The Mexican population in SD is huge, and makes up almost all of that 49% of non-white people. I was a white kid, and I attended a school in an upper-class suburb that was about half white and half Mexican. My graduating class was about 500, evenly split between white and Mexican, 2 asians, and maybe 6 blacks. My mother is an administrator for English Language Development in a larg-ish middle-class city there, and there are many schools in her district that are more than half English Learners. My point here is not that white people and Mexican people live there in perfect harmony in SD, but that having extremely large Mexican populations does not mean that you're economy goes down the drain. If El Paso's has, maybe that's the fault of something besides just the ethnicity of the residents there (all the stuff I mentioned above). And not to put too fine a point on it, but to suggest otherwise is racist.
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