Didn’t say that.
Not with that attitude.
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If a transaction is criminalized, when is the less powerful participant ever treated better than the more powerful participant? It doesn’t happen. That’s not how it works. It’s not about anybody’s “attitude.”
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With that logic, America would have never abolished slavery. It would have never given women the vote. It would not have done a thousand things that it has done in the name of making a more perfect union.
Laws are written by people who demand them. Societies are made up of people who make collective agreements with each other that no reasonable person could refuse. Your perception that this is impossible is as lamentable as someone standing in a field during the age of kings and saying that feudalism will never ever ever ever ever ever change.
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The fine details of imaginary policies you make up in your head are not relevant
There are two paths availabe
One makes everybody more equal, and the other treats “citizens” better and everybody else worse
Scapegoating immigrants is cheerleading for Team Slave Camp
If that’s not where you want to end up, don’t march in that parade
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If immigration law is loaded with arbitrary and draconian measures, it’s our job to change it. Also, the idea that ICE does not go after criminals is disingenuous, as it suggests that living in a political jurisdiction without the consent of the citizens who comprise and make up that political jurisdiction is not illegal, when in fact it is.
Again, get on a plane and go anywhere in the world from Addis Ababa to Zaire, get off and loudly declare that citizenship is a fiction. You will be briefly laughed at and then escorted to a cell. In fact, in this hypothetical, you couldn’t even get on the goddamn plane without a passport.
I’m not scapegoating immigrants I’m putting the blame where it squarely belongs on those Americans who hire persons without papers and exploit them.
They tried that in Alabama, and it failed. “Americans” wouldn’t work the fields, so crops rotted. “Americans” wouldn’t work in the chicken plants.
Do you have a non-failed plan to propose?
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It’s not that there’s work Americans won’t do, it’s that there are conditions Americans won’t work under, and wages Americans won’t accept. Then employers hire undocumented persons who they can exploit and overwork. Make growing food and picking it pay a living wage, remove exploitable labor,and punish those who exploit non-documented labor, and you’ll see a significant change. Hell, if every employer just ran E-verify like they are supposed to, we wouldn’t have this problem.
Read the link before you pretend to comment on it next time.
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Nativism is so poisonous that you see often see naturalised citizens taking the side of a Nativist regime in just this way, despite their status (which the regime has threatened to strip from those it considers enemies). It’s an “I’ve got mine, Jack” attitude that I’ve seen mostly in white-presenting naturalised citizens that manifests in often willful ignorance and a pointless near-ingratitude to the country of which they’ve chosen to become citizens.
As an immigrant myself, it saddens me that so many of my fellow naturalised citizens haven’t sufficiently absorbed the history and civics of this country, to the point where they believe that acknowledging the crimes and betrayals of stated ideals that helped form it is somehow a negation of both it (as a nation-state) and citizenship in it.
It can’t all be put down to a citizenship test that most closely matches what a native-born citizen learns in 6th grade. It’s willful, self-serving ignorance that pretends that to mention all this country’s sins – the broken treaties with Native Americans, the slavery, the exclusion acts – is an act of bad faith, but that to refer to some immigrants as “illegal people” is peachy keen.
tl;dr: if one is gonna go to the (enormous) trouble and expense of becoming a citizen of a nation-state, one should do oneself and others a favour by studying the actual history and practical civics of the country ( for the U.S., Howard Zinn is always excellent for the former and the ACLU provides great resources for the latter).
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Every time this comes up, I pull out the fact that Georgia did this experiment. It has been done. We should really learn from it. And yes, any solution will pretty much inevitably result in higher food prices.
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Yet, you equated southern with stupid.
I saw what you said.
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Yes, absolutely. The reason we have this issue with undocumented workers in the first place is the Walmart problem - Americans are either unwilling, or in many cases, unable to pay more for goods, so the race to the price floor requires companies to cut corners to save money, leading to undocumented workers, safety lapses, etc. etc.
It’s easy to say “Ok, remove the workers then by means”, but it doesn’t remove the underlying reason the workers are there in the first place. Any solution that tries to fix the undocumented workers problem but does not fix the “can’t afford staples” problem is doomed to fail precisely because you can’t expect people to vote in a government that will raise the price of staples without having a plan to deal with that price increase.
Subsidies as a short term remedy along with a higher minimum wage and a path for undocumented workers to become workers would be a good start, but that also requires a knowledgeable electorate that gets this dynamic, but most just see the “Undocumented workers stealing jobs” angle instead.
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We do need a raise to the minimum wage, and higher taxes on the maximum wage.
We do need a path to citizenship for those people who have been exploited here for years, so that they can fully take part in the nation they have built.
We need a way to increase the value paid to people who pick food, and we need the people who eat food to understand that it’s current low low prices are unsustainable ecologically, economically, and morally,
And we also need to move the burden of punishment for labor violations from employees to employers, just like the fines and charges for safety violations, or the fines and charges for incorrect disposal of toxic waste.
I am actually in agreement with a startling number of the principles of people on this board.
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I don’t make any pretense of being a policy wonk. Immigration and economics are way outside my wheelhouse. But “just get rid of the brown folks” has been shown to not work. We need to get past that and find a solution that both respects our system of laws and our history of being a nation of immigrants, and respecting the humanity of our immigrants. (And yeah, I am well aware that we have been, less than faithful, to that last one. Truly I am. We need to aspire to be better humans than we have been.)
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But all of that is off-topic in a thread about ICE and undocumented workers. You want to kick them out by going after their employers. If all you have is to fall back on the general living wage argument, without any plan for amnesty or a guest worker visa, then you don’t really have a plan that’s different from the MAGA crowd.
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First of all, I dislike being told what is and is not on topic.
Secondly, I do believe in a path to amnesty. I’ve stated as such.
The reason why I want to inform this discussion with the idea that we need to start criminalizing the employment of undocumented persons, as opposed to simply criminalizing undocumented persons, is because the current system we have is not working.
That’s it. That’s all.
This topic has veered waaaaaay off from the original post. I am partly to blame for that. I apologize.
