President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Who said the progressive element of society is hiring immigrants?

The jobs aren't just unloved because they don't pay well. They're often unpleasant and dangerous. Take Wisconsin dairy farming, which has shifted to a factory scale and where immigrants make up 40% of the labor force. Work starts before dawn, and it involves working with powerful, 1100-pound beasts that can kick you in the face if they're in an unpleasant mood. The meat packing industry is very similar. One slip of a knife and you could end up with an infected wound.

There's nothing new about using immigrants as expendable fodder for industry. My great-grandfather came to this country in 1899 and died in 1904 when a timber in a UP iron mine gave way. But there were many more where he came from.

 

So much economic anxiety …

 

I didn't say the progressive element of society was hiring immigrants. The progressive element of society isn't typically involved in manual labor workforce, unless it's at the CEO level.

Second, all of what you wrote is duly noted. It is nevertheless not much of a moral argument for immigration. Let's bring these refugees to America because even our most dangerous, shitty jobs are better than where they came from. The dangerous, shitty jobs could just pay better, and, as a result, draw more American-born workers. But then we're back to the "hey my lettuce costs more" conundrum. Which is also not a moral argument.

As a side note, immigration has been "a thing" for a long time in America, often for disreputable reasons - the move Gangs of New York, and the culture that created that movie is an example - but, in recent years, towns mostly in the Midwest started finding 15, 20, 30 40% of the population being refugee/undocumented immigrants who couldn't speak the language and whose kids needed significant attention (for good, perfectly acceptable reasons) in schools. Attention that wasn't free of charge, either, either in costs, personnel or instructional bandwidth.

There was - and there is - no particular national programs in place to find common ground at least in language. I, for one, would be in favor of a nationwide initiative that teaches all American schoolchildren Spanish the way European nations tend to learn English. Let's accept the nation we live in - accept English is strange and nowhere near as sensical as Spanish - and start teaching both.

 

I think it's an American failing that we don't require our kids to learn a second language. I don't care what that language is, but the truth is since I was in high school many years ago, language requirements are actually less stringent. And in the district my daughter just graduated from if you wanted something other than Spanish you had to pick a school based on that. My high school offered Spanish French and German, and it was not a large district.

 

How about we teach it to them as kids, like they do all around the world, and it's not so much central planning as it is, you know, like learning math.

 

Every school would be better teaching at least one year of "conversational Spanish" or perhaps French instead of the strict vocabulary/tenses. My wife took three years of French, and yet it was almost useless in rural Quebec. And I just needed to someone to explain "hombres and mujares" in Mexico City before I walked into the wrong restroom.

 

“The progressive element of society isn't typically involved in manual labor workforce, unless it's at the CEO level.”

Based on what? Stereotypes of construction workers?

 

Trump's lawyer says he's not worried prosecutors named Trump personally in the tax-fraud indictment against his namesake company

 

Hm, progressive CEOs. Can you name me a couple?

Thirty years ago I worked at a paper with a village in its circ area that abutted a large vegetable farm. The workforce had a sizable migrant element that moved between said village and the South (Texas, I believe) as harvests required. The children in those families never completed a school year in either place. I remember that the school district tried to adapt a lesson plan for those kids. The effort was well-intentioned, but obviously inadequate. I doubt that the district that schooled the kids down south did as much. Like so many institutions, they were probably happiest when "those kids" were moving on.

I guess the "moral" argument for immigration is that people who live in fear of violence are searching for a safe haven. Since many of the gangs that terrorize them have roots in the US, like MS-13, or grew powerful by feeding this country's appetite for drugs, like the Mexican cartels, we should feel somewhat responsible for their plight.

Not that all immigration is driven by violence -- corporate farming in Latin America has thrown a lot of the rural population out of work. They can stay home and starve, or they can come up here to work for the Green Giant. Again, the shift from subsistence agriculture to factory farming is our economic model imposed on a foreign economy. What is our moral obligation for that?

Beyond morality, the movement of people is just a matter of survival for them. I think you'd agree that families are not uprooting themselves and traveling several thousand dangerous miles as a matter of convenience.

 

This was still in my reply window. It makes me sad. Neanderthals were mostly good people.