this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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And adding 0.081% to the population every year are stealing all the good jobs uh... checks notes, working in construction and on ranches where actual citizens usually don't want to work anyway.
Jobs is just a thing people talked about but was never the actual issue. The issue has always been fear of change. Depending on the list you look at right now, Peso Pluma is between the #1 and #12 artist right now in music. There are areas of the country where knowing Spanish has become a near necessity to own a business.
Depending on how racist they are, it might be some #WhiteGenocide nonsense, or it might be that they have some honestly kind of legitimate concerns about changing culture, or they just don't like seeing all the brown people around. It seems to vary a lot from person to person.
I'm not saying they're right and I'm certainly not endorsing that way of thinking. I just think it's important to understand the real reasons they're all freaking out. It was never really jobs and always plain xenophobia.
That's not an excuse to allow the wanton exploitation of migrant labor that does, whether you want to admit it or not, undercut US labor on the margins. Not to mention the tolerance of labor violations against undocumented workers undoubtedly trickles up to legal labor and harms a lot more workers than just the migrants.
Illegal border crossings are a serious problem and the proper solution is not to hand wave away conservative concerns about it. All that does is maintain the status quo wherein migrant laborers are kept in legal limbo, facilitating their continued exploitation. That's bourgeois shit and if I wanted to get a little conspiratorial about it, I'd suggest that maybe that's the whole point of the "Americans don't want to do those jobs" rhetoric.
The proper solution is to legalize the migrants, get them documented, and protect them with US minimum wage and labor laws.