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The guest worker program also is/and has been, an invitation to undermine the entirety of America's labor compensation structure. From Wiki: "Under the (bracero) program, total farm employment skyrocketed, domestic farm worker employment decreased, and the farm wage rate decreased." On the other hand, I think it's past time to close the door to all foreign labor coming here. But, politically, that's not going to be a substantial part of the two parties agenda, serving corporate America is the real task of politicians, so lost jobs for US citizens is simply a collateral damage they are willing to risk.
That move should end the vitriolic debate surrounding the suspicions of both side regarding the prospects of obtaining enough American workers to fill all the available job openings. I've been saying for years that the wage floor was dropped a few stories by the presence of foreigners coming here to find their slice of the American pie. Closing the door would drive up wages and prices, but, that's the system (capitalism) most say they want..
The biggest obstacle to any real change lies in the fact that labor immigrants serve the profit motives of American capitalism. Trump's wall is simply a political sloganeering attempt to garner party support by exploiting the anger over perceptions of foreigners taking jobs from Americans. A wall has been dismissed as something doubtful at best, and useless at worst in the face of "guest worker" allowances, day trippers who just overstay their welcome, and those smuggled in under the radar of border patrols at the various crossing points. Stopping ALL, legal, and illegal from coming here would certainly bring the most pressing questions of immigration VS American labor to the fore.
Extraordinary post, Jer. The political elites on both sides love to keep us debating the legal vs. illegal question when in fact, ALL immigration needs to stop, period.
I'll add my $0.02. Farm labor, in the "golden age" of American agriculture, the early 20th century (period used for farm parity price was 1910-1914) farmers' children by and large stayed on the farm. The children married young, and created more such children. That gradually ended as the long secular decline in farm prices began after WW I, interrupted only by brief spikes during WW II, the Korean War and 1972-3.
Farm children increasingly migrated to the military and to urban employment. This was fueled by the development of the automobile, high-speed highways and ultimately air travel. Farm children "saw the world" and many wanted to live outside the farm. The bracero program was created in part to fill that hole.
The problem is that many well-intentioned people have a vision of a world without borders. In many ways it is a beautiful vision; all people living at peace and harmony. It is also an impossible vision. The people who envision and practice peace would be defenseless against the people that simply want to win.
The people who oppose protecting our borders, or any borders, want all nations to "devolve out of existence." This is similar to the view of the Withering Away of State: Meaning, Engels, Lenin and Stalin's View (with Evaluation). Frankly, the espousal of this view borders on cynical. The productive class of the world gets milked; thugs reap the benefit. There is no way that the impoverished masses benefit.
I disagree with ending all immigration. I agree with stopping illegal immigration.
To end all immigration would be cruel. That would mean that if someone met and fell in love with someone in another country online, they could not marry them and live here. Immigration by marriage should be allowed. Also, immigration of highly skilled people like scientists and doctors. That's how the law stands now and I don't think it should be changed.
The illegal problem is a major issue. How to solve it though. Yes, we should build fences and add more border control, drones, electronics, etc. But they are still going to try to come here and the issue of compassion remains. Mexico has a new government with an extremely popular president.
Hopefully, this new government, which is, for once, FOR the people, will solve many of the problems. The new president is providing jobs, rebuilding infrastructure...let's be supportive of him and hope his plans work. He sounds like an honest man, hard to believe, but he does.
I would still allow the guest worker program. Most people don't seem to know what it is but it's for temporary jobs. Where I live, in the fall, the college kids go back so soon that there's another month crammed with tourists and the restaurants and motels need workers--that's for the guest workers. They come, they earn money, they go back.
And most importantly, if this new Mexican president is willing, then make some kind of a deal where Mexico will STOP the people to the south of them from pouring into Mexico to travel to the US border. This chaos needs to stop.
Mexico should prevent these people from using their country as a passageway to the USA. It may seem non compassionate but we can't afford it. Too much diversity breeds resentment and division too. If anyone's been paying attention to what's happened in the UK due to generous immigration, well, we don't want that here. The stabbings, the terrorism, the strain on their social welfare system. They've stopped most immigration. We need to enforce our immigration laws--we already have good laws but they are not enforced. Get Mexico to stop allowing illegals to use their country as a gateway to ours.
Last edited by in_newengland; 03-12-2019 at 02:30 PM..
Farm children increasingly migrated to the military and to urban employment. This was fueled by the development of the automobile, high-speed highways and ultimately air travel. Farm children "saw the world" and many wanted to live outside the farm. The bracero program was created in part to fill that hole.
A problem that I see in NH, is that in a rural setting, the school children are being encouraged to only consider STEM academics, and not offered options to consider a career path in the SKILLED trades or agriculture. Consequently, these children go away to college, acquire massive college debts and move to the urban areas with the better paying jobs as they try to pay their loan debts.
And it isn't financially sound for NH to try to appeal to young families to live here, since their children cost so much to put through our public school systems. Instead, NH needs to appeal more to empty nesters, retirees and vacationers. We just can't afford large amounts of school age children.
What I don't understand is how one civilization can rise up to great heights of culture and development such as the Roman empire did while so many others were living in huts. We see the same today when comparing First world countries with Third world ones. What keeps people living in filthy squalor and others in warm houses. Is it money? infrastructure? the want and need for more and better? is it education?
We have a slice of the world in America in most cities. Cities have bustling down towns with skyscrapers and commerce but as we move away from the centers the cities devolve into filthy crime ridden zones where drugs, trash and graffiti are rampant but then you move further out and you are in the suburbs where the houses and neighborhoods are nice.
I don't understand the mindset of the city dwellers that trash their own neighborhoods and prey upon their neighbors.
The thing is today we are moving from the great mixing pot mentality and the "Haves" are being forced to pay more and more to the "Have Nots" to raise their level of living for them without teaching them and expecting them to do it themselves.
This is not going to end well for America and when it is knocked off its perch and becomes like so many other places where will the world look for inspiration?
What I don't understand is how one civilization can rise up to great heights of culture and development such as the Roman empire did while so many others were living in huts. We see the same today when comparing First world countries with Third world ones. What keeps people living in filthy squalor and others in warm houses. Is it money? infrastructure? the want and need for more and better? is it education?
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Now that we retired to a developing nation, this is a fascinating conundrum we discuss frequently.
But before that issue, let me tell you, WE had to PROVE we could support ourselves and invest money in the country, before we were allowed residency. With ALL kinds of criminal reports, FBI checks, etc. And this is little ole Ecuador.
But, what I've noticed is a difference in values. Our locals put family first, not work. They generally don't have the work ethic of No. America, but prefer to relax and "manana"---what's the rush? Children are not always educated; still a fair amount of illiteracy. The people seem content and happy with what they have; little as is it (to our eyes).
Content with less; lack of ambition. They don't feel any need to "better" themselves. Sub-standard infrastructure and throwing trash, or letting it accumulate, is OK. (some of this is changing, though)
Families all live together, so can get by with less, individually.
But their values do include health care for all. And there's no homelessness.
I’m biased. The milieu in which I was raised and in which much of my career unfolded, consists in large measure of people who were raised to be multi-lingual, who have strong international ties, who have scientific or business collaborations spanning the continents, who might own property in various countries, who invest heavily in stock markets in various countries. National borders are more a matter of culture: cuisine, accents, music, quirky rules/mores/trends such as stretches of speed-unlimited highways in Germany, 11pm dinners in Spain, the gun-culture in America, clothing-optional beaches on the Baltic coast, driving on the left in former British colonies, and so forth. Borders are just a place where you show your passport and practice chatting-up the security officer in his/her native language.
I must confess difficulty in making distinction between a lily-white person of English ancestry, who claims descent from the Mayflower, and whose forefathers have been in what became the United States for 15 generations… and a brown person from Pakistan, who’s a devout Muslim and who speaks only Urdu, with the utmost difficulty saying “thank you” and “hello” in English, who arrived in the US illegally 6 months ago, and now drives a taxi-cab. When riding in said cab, I want an aggressive driver who weaves through traffic and who gets me to the airport on time. I don’t care about his/her legal-status, religion, ethnicity,… whether that person wants Sharia law, or Roman law, or English common law, or vapid anarchy.
There’s a trans-national kinship that I feel, with say a professor at TU-Berlin, one at the Technion in Israel, one in Melbourne (Australia), or in Cambridge (UK). These are “my people”. My immediate geographic neighbors are not “my people”. Yes, we speak the same language (one of them), we’re almost all of the same race, we fill our cars at the same gas-stations, and grumble about the same heavy snowfall on our roads. But the thought-process is shocking different. If a Somali or Bolivian or Vietnamese villager were to be dropped into the house next door, I’d likely have more in common with said villager, than with my neighbor… because neither the villager nor I much care about football, or American celebrities, or Thanksgiving or Halloween… but maybe that villager and I both like spicy food.
If tomorrow there were an Angela Merkel-style “welcoming” of 100 million immigrants from Syria, Iraq, North Korea, Nigeria, Libya, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia and Yemen, I would welcome it. Why? Here in the Midwest, we have too many cattle and not enough people. We have empty houses and emptying towns. We need the people. Second, I very much welcome a punctuation of the monotony and monotonicity of local life. I’d love to see a mosque here and there, instead of the ceaseless carpet of churches. I want to hear other languages, besides the stilted, garbled, untutored “English” spoken by the locals.
And while I don’t condone breaking laws by illegally crossing borders, I regard this as minor and forgivable crime, like speeding or spraying graffiti or cheating on a drivers’ license exam.
We need more immigrants, not fewer.
You are very unique in this perspective. Most people in more developed areas (not in rural Midwest) don't feel this way. Why on earth did you move to Ohio rather than more urban centers (most cities have mosques for example) if this type of milieu is your real wish?
Threads on immigration such as Ocasio-Cortez: Trump "operating concentration camps on our Southern border." Really? and It's All About That WALL (I have to site at least one thread for which I did not write the OP) present the OP's issue in sharp relief. Whatever our policies on hearings for undocumented aliens, the wall, the caravans, or the "Muslim ban", these are all symptomatic of the waves of misery sweeping the globe. These in turn are generated, in part, by misgovernment, anarchy and/or tyranny in former colonies. This issue is right, front and center in current debates over immigration.
1. I'm breaking my own rule responding to this.
2. My post was in response to another poster's proposal to annex a large part of Mexico. First, that would be illegal under any international law that I'm even vaguely familiar with.
3. Second, were we to annex a large part of Mexico that wouldn't eliminate the border issues, just move them.
That's what my post was about.
Annexation doesn't have to be by force. The Louisiana Purchase is a perfect example of this, as is the state of Alaska. I explained my thought fully, that if the United States is going to take the poor of the world, there needs to be territory with it. Land is the second most important natural resource, only behind water.
The issues we are having have nothing to do with the border. The issues we have are directly related to the failures of many countries within our hemisphere, and our imposing neighbor who has decided to allow their country to become a temporary campground for hordes of illegal immigrants.
I fully realize that Mexico will never voluntarily become part of the U.S., they have a perfect system where they are able to export all of the people they don't want, into the rich neighbors yard, and pass the bill to the American people. Meanwhile, the rich in Mexico get to claim that they are the victims, and the U.S. is just a bunch of racist, greedy people. Then, to top it all off, we have thousands of Americans protesting all over the country about how the poor migrants are being mistreated, and how we should all have compassion and help the poor in need.
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