Politico – Sponsor An Immigrant Yourself.
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The problem posed by migration is that the benefits are not evenly distributed. They flow to the migrants themselves and the corporations that hire them. …
That’s true. But let’s not look at those corporations exploiting cheap labor through immigration policies that they wrote to benefit themselves. Instead expand it for “ordinary people” to benefit. Just like the early settlers did and called it what it was: indentured servitude.
That only sort of worked because the rules limited the period of servitude and payment at the end of the contract. IOW — that labor wasn’t as cheap as the sponsors desired. So, they went the next step and created an abomination. A legacy that continues to negatively impact this country more than a hundred and fifty years after it was abolished.
And two bozos seriously propose to put this country more firmly back on that slippery slope. What we should do is get off it entirely.
Wait until someone invents the hundred year contract or “until mutually agreed upon”.
And G-S will start trading contract futures and derivatives.
But of course. And a replication of the institution of slavery can be sold the same way it was done the last time. Indentured servitude was accepted because it was a way for “ordinary people” to increase their wealth. Once deemed legal, slavery didn’t quickly replace indentured servants, but over the next few decades it became apparent that slaves were treated better than indentured servants. (The death rate for the latter was horrendous and most didn’t willingly sign those contracts either.) A quick step for all those god-fearing christians to make the case that slavery was the more humane means to increase the number of workers. –heh– that also squeezed out ordinary people from that wealth accumulation goal.
wrt to your second point — nothing too low for those with bucks to seek another way to increase their holdings.
Remember back when teens could find summer jobs? It was never all that easy, but the J-1 summer work/travel visa program (US winter for students from southern hemisphere countries) has made it more difficult. (And the work and life conditions for many of those foreign students is dreadful.) Just one aspect of J-1 visas that pits US workers against import workers. Those sponsoring organizations would relish the “big idea” of not having to pay minimum wage for import labor — no doubt they’d figure out a paperwork scheme to adjust that “big idea” to serve their purpose.
The ignorance, irrational thinking, and immorality of the two bozos that concocted this “big idea” is astounding.
Yes, I worked my way through college working summers at the Motorola television plant in Franklin Park IL. As I recall my wages were around two dollars an hour. I recall starting at $1.75, good money for the time equivalent to around $20 now.
That plant has been vacant for about 20 years. Last year it was torn down. After Matsushita bought Motorola and subsequently closed the plant it was periodically used for storage but not for the last two decades.
Yes, Virginia, the USA used to design and build television sets and right here in flyover country.
It wasn’t all that hard. I got a work permit at 15 (needed my High School Principal’s endorsement) and worked full time summers and part time during the school year as a yard boy in a lumber yard. Illinois minimum wage was 75 cents an hour. I got 85 cents. My future wife started after school and summers as a clerk in a small ladies’ boutique at Illinois minimum wage 75 cents. Yes, the female got ten cents less than the male but didn’t have to push heavy carts across an icy street in a winter snow storm or work summer in a loft heaving solid oak doors and endless rolls of roll roofing. OTOH, I’ll acknowledge that a male could get a clerking job but a female wouldn’t even be considered for a job that involved heavy lifting and pushing back then.
Factory jobs were plums. Now they are all in Osaka or Shanghai. And the software jobs that were plums in the eighties or nineties are now in Bangalore or Hyderabad.
Those clerk and lumber yard jobs are filled more often than not by Mexican immigrants. The hospitals are full of Filipino and Russian staff. At least the Fillipinos speak good English. I can only understand about one word in three of the Russians. More and more doctors are foreign because US Med schools have restricted admissions even if one can afford them. I wonder what native born young people do. Dodging student loan bill collectors and living on the street or their parents’ basements if my oldest grandson is typical. I do have one grandson with a job – a 30 hour minimum wage clerk at Walmart and lucky to have that. He wanted to be a network technician and seemed to have talent but there are no jobs as ISP’s keep cutting jobs to improve the bottom line. Illinois is losing population and according to WTTW (PBS) losing black population faster than white. Put this all together and wonder why Booman is astounded that the Midwest is going Republican.
Depends on the year and location. In SoCal mid-sixties, summer jobs for girls were practically non-existent. Can’t recall even one among all those I knew that had one (excluding baby-sitting).
True enough. An example of the sexism of the sixties.
Gir;s were expected to work as babysitters, store clerks and waitresses. I knew lots of guys that had summer jobs in construction. That took pull because those were the best paying jobs. No one in those days even dreamed of hiring a girl to work in construction although there are now a lot of female carpenters. I haven’t met any plumbers but I know they exist. Nor any concrete layers. Those last two are pretty yucky work.
Ross Perot predicted all of this. He didn’t see this particular detail, but it is part of the overall NAFTA-like picture he drew in 1992
From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates:
“…there will be a giant sucking sound going south.”
Followed eventually by furshlugginer ideas like this one:
Nice.
AG
That last sentence doesn’t make sense. The introductory clause suggests that “American citizens” can’t make a living because the jobs have been off-shored. No work and therefore, no income. Then he skips to “we can always bring the least favored of those peoples back.” What “peoples” and “back” from where? He’s mixing apples and oranges and tossed in “indentured servants” as a boogie-man. As if not having jobs would lead Americans to demand increasing immigration of poor peoples to fill the non-existent jobs for $2/hour.
The stopgap in all drives for cheap labor is housing (including potable water and sanitation) and food costs and transportation infrastructure. Surplus labor anywhere that will work for cheap is quickly exhausted when housing, etc. doesn’t exist or is so mean that worker misery index leads to an unstable work force.
The “sponsor an immigrant” “Big Idea” does an end around that stopgap by including room and board. (The same is true with the J-1 summer visa program.) But that’s not unique as farm labor contractors also include some very minimal (very mean) housing. As if these ordinary people and wannabe capitalists who would “sponsor an immigrant” have the means/space to house their immigrant labor. As proposed this is a stupid idea, but it’s clever as a bait and Americans are suckers for baits.
The last sentence does indeed “make sense.” There will be still be people in the U.S. for many years with enough money to make more money with it, any which way they can. If they can entice scuffling third world people to come here as “indentured workers,” people who would work for less money than third world workers elsewhere…say starving Venezuelans or refugees from the terrible wars going on in North Africa, the Middle East and places like Afghanistan…and have them sign their lives away over a given period of time? That’s almost free labor, minus minimal room and board. It would be a legalized prison labor system not too different from the cancerous private prison system now rapidly metastasizing in the U.S.
If der Trumpers aren’t taken down in time, this would be right up their alley. Plus, anyone who objected strenuously enough could be sent to join the ranks of the indentured.
Practical fascism.
Nice.
AG
–sigh–. Perot didn’t say any of what you are claiming was in his statement. All you’re doing is trying to claim that back in 1992 Perot foresaw a 2018 “Big Idea” and in one garbled sentence forewarned Americans of what would come.
As it is, corporations (and very wealthy people) already import cheaper labor that both holds down US labor costs and reduces the jobs available to Americans and during the same period (1992-2016) more jobs were off-shored which has had a similar effect, reducing job availability and holding down wages. (The last increase in the national minimum wage was in 2007 to further sweeten the pot for employers.) More people (19%) kinda, sorta recognized the path the country was on in 1992 than at any time since then. Even though it’s become a reality for many and Trump kinda, sorta echoed Perot ’92 (anti-immigrant and anti-NAFTA (which he and the GOP, or Democrats, have no intention of reversing)), he barely won in three key rust belt states. At the same time, the Trump bozos believe that they would do better without minimum wage laws as long as that stupid wall gets built.
I don’t think any part of Perot’s statement is “garbled.” It’s quite clear to me, and it has been clear to me since I first read it.
Which part is “garbled” to you, Marie? I’d be interested to know. Maybe…if of course you were open to the idea that Perot made good sense while up against two early internationalist neocentrists…I could “ungarble” it for you.
AG