Here is a link to what we have been recently reading and discussing in class. It shows how throughout history and even now Mexican Immigrant workers have almost no choice of where to work and very little employee rights. As discussed in Walls and Mirrors The United States has always needed a supply of labor for jobs that most people do not want to do. This reports compares to the books be detailing the value and necessity for foreign-born laborers.
Americans feel like these jobs are below them or they are too good to be involved in agriculture. Without this cheap exploited labor our economy would significantly drop. Manufacturing and services are becoming dominated with immigrants labor. People are complaining about immigrants but are not taking the time to realize their value and how much of a necessity they are to our economy.
http://www.ailf.org/ipc/ipf0902.asp
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I agree that many Americans do not realize the part immigrants, especially illegal migrant workers, play in our economy. One reason I think the issue has been ignored by the executive branch for so many years is because any solution is going to hurt the economy. If you give the workers rights under a guest worker program, you raise their wages and their access to social services, decreasing the benefit to businesses that hire them. If you try to deport them, you waste billions of dollars in resources in what would be a never-ending battle, and you lose the benefit of cheap labor. It seems to me that no President is going to want to start a policy that hurts the economy during his term. The problem with this is, like you said, the illegal immigrants continue to have little to no rights in a system that on the surface considers them criminals but in practice is inviting them here.
Post a Comment