[olecapt]

Originally Posted by Buzz123

So basically you're breaking the law by hiring guys outside of Star Nursery?

I won't tell.

I pay my cleaning lady $80.00 to come every other week. She can do in 3½ to 4 hours what it took Carol and me the whole weekend to do. So I guess she makes $20.00 or more per hour. But I don't care. She doesn't bitc* about having to clean like we do.

There is a lot of misconception about immigrants going around. When they say illegal aliens they mean Mexicans. Don't anybody bother to deny it to me because you're wasting your breath; but I will never believe you when you swear that you are not prejudiced against all Mexicans, legal, illegal, or Mexican/American.

What law?...you of all people should know the laws on day workers.

Now your cleaning lady? You witholding?

[Buzz123]

Originally Posted by olecapt

What law?...you of all people should know the laws on day workers.

Now your cleaning lady? You witholding?

You can get a ticket for stopping to hire day workers in areas like Star Nursery or on Bonanza. The State has a casual labor office on 'A' and Washington where you can hire day workers and not have to pay payroll taxes. All you have to do is call them. The workers hang out there all day waiting for jobs, taking sponge baths in the restroom, and playing cards, and generally smelling up the place.
Casual Labor, 1001 North "A" Street, 486-3441, Office hours 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Since the cleaning lady runs her own business she is responsible for things like Soc. Sec. for herself and her employees.

[ParkTwain]

Olecapt's casualness about hiring apparent illegals as day laborers is interesting. Small businesses and their clients are not going to police themselves as part of any reform of the current illegal immigrant problem. The enforcement has to come from the top AND must be adequately funded, which is not the case today (see the Federal records check process and "centralized" database), and there are many special interests to mitigate against the motivation to enforce even the present laws. Some folks call it widespread greed, but of course that's what made the West, and America, what it has always been and is today. Grass-roots pressure on elected officials is likely the only means to effect change on this issue.

An aside: read how Eisenhower handled illegal immigrant enforcement in the 1950s.

How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico | csmonitor.com
Jim R. Schwiesow -- The real motive behind illegal immigration is greed
How to Deport Illegal Immigrants (or Not) - Associated Content

[ackackack]

I find it interesting that Olecapt, for example, freely admits to hiring illegal labor, knowing that this practice is illegal (he must, he knows everything about everything else), while also not hiding his identity or his real estate practice. I guess this is a sign that if our citizenry don't care, why should our goevernment? I wonder if illegal labor were available to offer their real estate services to potential clients of Olecapt's, would he still feel the same? Then of course there are the ignorant comments like those from Buzz123 who claims that everyone in here is a racist if they have a problem with breaking the law. These comments are made about people who he has never seen and doesn't know anything about them their race or their creed. I guess that according to Buzz123, I am a racist because I value the importance of a licensed contractor and all the responsibilities that come with earning and maintaining that license. I don't doubt that it is true that there are countless licensed business owners here that do hire illegal labor. I guess it really comes down to one's ethics (that's ETHICS you hyper-sentitive ones, not ETHNICS), and no one is willing do much about that, so here's to people like Olecapt and their cheap, illegal labor!

[Chest Rockwell]

This is the interesting part about the whole illegal immigration debate. Many of the same people who feel like the free market should dictate prices when it comes to everything else don't feel the same way when it comes to cheap labor.

I agree with ackackack that it has to do more with ethics than the law. The illegal workforce is as huge as it is because society has basically looked the other way for decades. The laws will not work on their own. Having illegal workers at low wages is good for business, because it keeps costs low, precisely the reason we buy most of our products from China. Does it bother anyone that your TV is made by a worker making pennies an hour in terrible working conditions and that factories in the United States close because they can't compete with foreign labor?

The workers are the victims, even though they may be willing victims. No health care, no insurance if they're injured on the job, no social security benefits, etc. Yet they're treated like the bad guys, not the boss men who are profiting from this cheap labor.

Everyone is responsible for their own ethical decisions, so we all have to decide where we stand individually on this issue. The gov't is not going to step in and settle it, because they operate on the same principles that have created this whole situation: profit over everything else.

I respect both sides of the issue. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. However, hiring illegal workers is perpetuating the system that keeps their wages low and keeps willing Americans from being able to work at a living wage.

[Buzz123]

Originally Posted by ackackack

I find it interesting that Olecapt, for example, freely admits to hiring illegal labor, knowing that this practice is illegal (he must, he knows everything about everything else), while also not hiding his identity or his real estate practice. I guess this is a sign that if our citizenry don't care, why should our goevernment? I wonder if illegal labor were available to offer their real estate services to potential clients of Olecapt's, would he still feel the same? Then of course there are the ignorant comments like those from Buzz123 who claims that everyone in here is a racist if they have a problem with breaking the law. These comments are made about people who he has never seen and doesn't know anything about them their race or their creed. I guess that according to Buzz123, I am a racist because I value the importance of a licensed contractor and all the responsibilities that come with earning and maintaining that license. I don't doubt that it is true that there are countless licensed business owners here that do hire illegal labor. I guess it really comes down to one's ethics (that's ETHICS you hyper-sentitive ones, not ETHNICS), and no one is willing do much about that, so here's to people like Olecapt and their cheap, illegal labor!

According to me, Buzz, yes you are a racist if you are one of those who are screaming about illegals. When I said I wouldn't believe you I meant it. Nobody is screaming about illegal Muslim terriorists, they are all screaming about Mexicans. Even when they deny it, they obviously mean Mexicans once you hear their "opinion". So when I meet someone who isn't a racist when it comes to brown people, I will appologize. Until then, I'll stick to what I said.

[Buzz123]

This is my standard reply to the daily emails I get about "illegals".

I get these Mexican bashing emails every single day and they mostly (not all) come from people who don’t even live where they have much of an immigration “problem” and haven’t really thought it through.

I suppose I have prejudices like everyone else, but I don’t go in for Mexican bashing, especially since my adopted granddaughter is of Mexican decent, and other of my relatives are of Latino origin. Plus, cliché or not, I have many, many Spanish speaking friends from all over the world, including Mexico. Some of these friends are not even Hispanic, but because their native language is Spanish they are sometimes discriminated against too. Americans tend to think that everyone from Central or South America, or Cuba is a Mexican; and Americans obviously hate Mexicans, I don’t care how much they protest the accusation. And in my opinion, the more they protest the more I don’t believe them, so I hope they can try not to scream when they reply to this.

A few Mexicans have lost some of my support with that Mexican flag waving thing but I do admire most of them for tenacity, courage, and hard work. And the myths that are being spread are so obviously nothing more than prejudice towards Mexicans by people who probably have never even met one that it’s getting embarrassing for me to talk to my housekeeper. Who, by the way, I don’t know and I don’t care if she is here legally or not, as she isn’t my employee. She is a contracted service provider, so I don’t have any legal reason to ask for ID. She is like most Mexicans that I know that can outwork all of us Anglos; she does in 3 or 4 hours what it would take Carol and I doing together the whole weekend. And that’s why we hired her; to get back our weekends. She sometimes brings her beautiful little daughter who is just staring the first grade, and both of them are working like crazy to improve their English. She sometimes borrows my Spanish/English dictionary to help them find the right words, such as for her husband who is trying very hard to find a find a better job that doesn’t lay him off every other day as his present employer has been doing.

I think I probably do have more experience with Spanish speaking people than the average non-Hispanic person in this country and I know it must be more than anyone in the entire state of West Virginia where the email below came from. I lived in Laredo, TX where the population was 93% Hispanic. That includes both Mexican-Americans and Mexican Nationals. I lived in New Mexico where the population is about 40% Hispanic and 10% Native American. Here in Las Vegas the Hispanic population is 25%. I worked for several years with the State of Nevada Employment Security Division where a high percentage of our clients were Hispanic.

Not all Hispanics come from Mexico, but since they are the ones that these vicious emails are targeting, I have to say that in my considerable experience with Mexicans, and other Spanish speaking people, most of them work their butts off to support the family, sometimes working two or three jobs. They pay taxes like everybody else because the employer deducts it from their wages unless they are self employed. They also pay into Social Security and if they aren’t legal they’ll never get it back. But the rest of us will be happy to spend it for them.

Most of the men work like dogs in construction, landscaping, etc. and make much more than $5.00 or $6.00 per hour. I don’t know where anybody got the idea they can’t be fired because they get fired all the time. Especially since employers are taking advantage of them and they can’t do anything about it. Usually everyone in the family works to help pay the bills. They of course spend money on goods and services just like everyone else so if all the illegal Mexicans were rounded up and sent away our economy would take such a hit it may never recover. Not to mention the companies that would go under just because they couldn’t find enough employees to keep going. Round them all up and send them back and we’ll have an economic disaster on our hands that will make 1929 look like a slight dip in the stock market.

As for crime, etc. I don’t know if Hispanics are responsible for any more crime than whites, or blacks, or Asians, or anyone else. Most of the Hispanic street gangs here in Las Vegas come from LA, not Mexico, and they are American citizens. Just like the white and the black street gangs are.

As far as welfare goes, in my state job I can’t tell you how many hundreds of white people I spoke to who were told by the Welfare workers to come to our office and waste our time by just going through the motions of registering to look for work so that they could get welfare. And, I can’t say how many I wanted to choke to death because they were mostly white trash who told me they had moved to Las Vegas from somewhere back east just to collect welfare in Nevada, paid for by my tax dollars.

I’m not turning this around and bashing white people, but employers in Nevada have been begging for workers for the last 20 years. If you can’t find a job in Las Vegas you just aren’t looking, and these WHITE people from non-Hispanic states, will never take a job as long as they can collect welfare. But, I don’t remember even one Mexican coming in to do that fake registering for work just to make Welfare think that they are trying to find a job when they aren’t. I’m sure some did but I don’t remember seeing them out of all the hundreds that I’ve talked to.

Illegal immigration is definitely a problem everywhere, but even more so for us in the southwest, and something needs to be done about securing the borders,. But it isn’t the problem that most people think it is, and I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting the government to come up with the correct solution. But the correct solution doesn’t include targeting only Mexicans and rounding up 12 million of them to send back to Mexico and crashing our economy. It wasn’t Mexican farm workers who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center.

Did Hoover and Eisenhower really round up Mexicans and send them home? Yes and no. In the early 1920s we needed farm workers so badly that we literally threw the Mexican border wide open and begged them to come in to help us out. Then when the stock market crashed in 1929 all of a sudden we had to get rid of all these nasty Mexicans so Americans could have those jobs that nobody wanted before. So we started tricking Mexicans into going back to Mexico with promises of land, etc. But when they got back there they discovered they’d been had by the US government one more time.

Then came WW II and all of a sudden we needed them again to work in the factories. And guess what, after the war when the troops came back home, the Mexicans weren’t needed anymore so they had to go. But if it took Eisenhower 2 years to round up 1½ million, starting eight years after WW II, think how long it would take to round up 12 million. And since the economic factors aren’t the same now as they were after Korea and WW II, we would be committing economic suicide to try.

Also, in case people don’t know this, here’s some info about IDs. I can’t walk up to you and ask you to show me some identification to prove that you are an American citizen and not an illegal alien. The Border Patrol can’t legally do that either. So even if it is suspected that someone is an illegal they might be an American and Americans have rights. This is not Nazi Germany…yet. If I hire you the law now says I have to ask you to show certain forms of ID and to put a copy of it in your personal files. If you tell me you are a citizen and show me a driver license and Social Security card I can’t give you the third degree about it and accuse you of falsifying them. I have to accept them as real unless it’s very, very obvious that they aren’t. If you are an honest guest worker and show me your Social Security card and your green card, as long as it hasn’t expired, I can hire you. I can’t ask you where you got it from though. If it is expired and I want to hire you I’d tell you to go get it renewed and come back with the new one. If you let your green card expire, you can go to Immigration and get it renewed for $95.00 which will be hard to afford if you aren’t working. INS doesn’t make it a big deal to let the work card expire and it’s easy to forget just like it’s easy to forget to renew your driver license. Or people put it off because of the expense. It takes a while for the renewal and in the meantime you can’t collect unemployment insurance even if your wages were legally earned. To get unemployment benefits you have to be able to look for and take a job if offered. But because you need that card to get a job you would be automatically disqualified to collect your benefits.

Since most of the people that I have been getting these Mexican bashing emails from probably have never even seen an illegal alien, I think maybe they need to get their facts straight. The problem is not what the press has told you it is. Folks, we have a TERRORIST problem to worry about. Close the borders to THEM…kill them on site…torture them until they spill their guts…I don’t care, they deserve it…but make it easy for the workers we need.


Buzz
“The world is carried on the backs of a desperate few. Unfortunately, it is these desperate few who are often the most neglected." LRH

[ParkTwain]

Originally Posted by ackackack

I don't doubt that it is true that there are countless licensed business owners here that do hire illegal labor. I guess it really comes down to one's ethics (that's ETHICS you hyper-sentitive ones, not ETHNICS), and no one is willing do much about that, so here's to people like Olecapt and their cheap, illegal labor!

No, this is not an issue of individual ethics, it is an issue of unfunded enforcement, and of laws constructed so poorly that enforcement is not feasible at ANY level of funding. Doing nothing about the present illegal immigrant problem is de facto amnesty (to use the G.O.P.'s most recent obfuscatory term).

[ParkTwain]

These posts about Mexicans who are willing to "work like dogs" in America are missing the point. Those same people OBVIOUSLY are not willing to "work like dogs" in Mexico because now they are in America after deciding they can't make an acceptable living for themselves at the OBVIOUSLY VERY LOW WAGES available to them in Mexico. So this "working like dogs" comment is an observation that relates to the RELATIVE VALUE OF WAGES and RELATIVE WORKING CONDITIONS in America versus Mexico. So the situation is showing you that in a given society THE LEVEL OF WAGES MATTERS. Please get that straight.

The fact that successive American political administrations (of both major political parties) haven't yet adequately addressed this national problem is causing a continuing significant DEVALUATION of American labor. Should you as a citizen care about this? Does this economic reality actually affect your life? Does it concern you that there are millions of workers in America without basic legal rights, basic protections against exploitation and victimization, etc.? Does it concern you that the presence of these illegal immigrants affects the delivery of services, adds to dangers on the roadways (hit and run accidents, absence of insurance, etc.), promotes criminality by those with no legal identity, inefficient delivery of health care, fire, police, and other necessary services, etc.?

[Chest Rockwell]

Doing nothing about the present illegal immigrant problem is de facto amnesty

Perhaps the illegal immigrant problem is less obtrusive to national interests than a labor shortage problem or a severe inflation problem, which is why it's been largely ignored for the better part of a century.

I put it with the list of illegal activities in which laws are largely ignored because the majority of the people are not in agreement with the laws. Laws alone cannot dictate behavior, people must dictate their own behavior. Until people choose not to hire undocumented workers, the supply will continue to fill the demand. Unfortunately, in capitalism profit will always outweigh ethics and social responsibility.