It has long bemused me that conservatives take a hardline against immigration when they were so enamored of it when illegals were driving down labor costs and driving up profits. I guess that things have leveled off and now that illegals have served their purpose, they are no longer needed. Besides,they might stay, become citizens and vote! With nearly half of eligible citizens voting, the last thing we need is more pesky voters to thwart! But, I digress...
I've never really blamed illegals for coming here.If you are lucky to make a dollar a day in your home country but can make $5 an hour in America, why wouldn't you go there? Much of life is at least taking an imaginary stroll in the shoes of others and, as a young man in the bar/restaurant business, I realized that if the circumstances were reversed, my friends and I would have been going to Mexico to bus tables and wash dishes.
That was in the late 70's and early eighties. By the mid-eighties, construction contractors were discovering that those busboys could be taught to swing hammers and sling paint at low, low prices. It wasn't about migrants doing the work Americans didn't want to do any more, it was about them doing the work that Americans wanted to be paid to do. Illegals, primarily Mexicans, were a bargain. Everybody loves a bargain!
However, those low, low labor costs were rarely (if ever) passed on to customers or consumers. Nobody ever advertised that they could beat anybody's price because they used cheap labor. For some reason, business doesn't work that way. The way business does work is that if you build a half million dollar house using largely cheap labor, you make more profit. Duh! It's still a half million dollar house you are buying. You'll just sleep better knowing that the contractor saved thousands in labor costs? I guess that's it....
Maybe back during the Reagan years some conservative think-tankers engineered this but, I doubt it. Cheap labor is pretty much the history of the world. It's nothing new. The novelty, I think, was this country's experiment with the middle class. This was something the world had never seen before. We exported it to the rest of the world and they seem to like it. Our corporate overlords think it's "not cost effective".
So, no genius conservatives discovered cheap labor in Latin America and tapped into that. Probably. It did come in handy though for them with their plan to decimate unions.I think they caught on to that pretty darn quick though.
You see, folks, America is a business and the business of America is business. Need I remind you to buy low and sell high? I trust, not.
The busting of unions and the insane fight over a minimum wage (whether to raise it or shitcan it) is the most important issue we have to consider in America. It's even bigger than BENGHAZI!!!! Our whole future rides on what we pay the least of us. It doesn't really effect what we pay for Big Macs as I mentioned here before. Ronald McDonald will get his. We are dealing with Americans here, nearly half of which (voting wise) are republicans and believe that businesses only hire when generous tax breaks free up enough cash to hire people. Fuck that supply and demand shit you've heard about in business school. Tax breaks and low, low wages now make this country great.
Tax breaks for the wealthy free up more profits is all. Same with low, low wages. The new business model is the old business model of screwing as many people as you can to get ahead. There have always been slaves, toiling away their existence for the man, whether paid poorly or not at all. It's really the only way the rich can get by. They can't do it without us or just with tax breaks alone. It's always been this way, except for a 35 year period after WWII when, much to the horror of the wealthy, we learned it didn't have to be that way. The American Dream just turned out to be too expensive to maintain. The big money is in exporting it. Tax breaks and low wages, ya know. The new business model for America. They haven't been pissing on our backs like we thought. Turns out it was just raining.
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