We Need to Talk about Immigration and Jobs (and Free Trade): Just One More Time (for Now)

I forgot to include one part of this whole mess. The argument is often put forward that immigrants just do jobs that native-born Americans don’t want. I used to believe that, mainly because I didn’t wanna go pick fruit in a hot field all day. That sounds like a horrible fucking job.

Even if that argument were true (which it’s not), what does that say about us? We should just let immigrants do the dirty work because we think those jobs are beneath us? That’s pretty fucked-up (and elitist) in my (current) opinion, but it’s tempting for the reason I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Really, I think that has been deployed as an excuse for treating immigrant workers like shit. If those jobs are so shitty, why not make them better? There’s more than enough wealth to go around to pay everyone a living wage (and, actually, much better than that). You could even employ millions of people to lighten the load. (Do you think all those office jobs are “essential”? I think the pandemic put the kibosh on that Capitalist propaganda.)

The only reason this doesn’t happen is not because it would lead to a supposedly communist dystopia. It’s because the rich don’t want to give up the smallest crumb of their wealth and power. If corporations didn’t have (esp. undocumented) immigrants to employ, they would have to pay higher wages and treat their workers better. And they don’t wanna do that.

Look at the economy right now. Corporations are raking in profits they haven’t seen since the 1950’s, and they still want the Fed to raise interest rates to crash the economy just to “discipline” workers, i.e., create a recession so we’ll take whatever shitty wages and working conditions the law allows them to offer (and some it technically doesn’t).

The Rich will take whatever they can get away with, including undocumented immigrants and H-1B visas for documented immigrants. This is partly due to their own greed but also due to the legal imperative we’ve imposed on corporations to maximize profits to the exclusion of all other concerns. We have to respond by disciplining the Market to recognize priorities more important than profit.