Immigration - Americans won't do the work?

[pampango]

As much as I support immigration (legal and otherwise) on the basis that we are a nation of immigrants and for the sake of the poor of the Third World looking for a better life, I have to admit that the argument that "Americans won't do that kind of work" has some holes in it at times.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07017/754517-28.stm

After a crackdown on an chicken processing plant in Georgia "75 percent of its mostly Hispanic 900-member work force" left. The employer than raised wages and hired local employees, many of them black, to fill the positions.

While there may indeed be jobs that "Americans won't do" not matter what you pay them, there is difficult to content that immigration, at least in some cases, does affect the jobs of blue collar Americans, at times. I still support immigration for the reasons I sited above, but I have to admit that there is an economic cost that is paid by low income workers and not by me.

[ClassWarrior]

1. Americans will do the work if the corporations will pay its worth.

It's the free market - the one that they profess to adore.

NGU.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. I have worked on a chicken "farm", where they chickens were given a

life that they would have departed from if they had the means... this was many many years ago. I have shook the dirt from the roots of trees, worked in a 100 degree plus kitchen in the middle of winter, done janitorial work and worse. As another poster said, it is the freedom to not pay healthcare and proper wages that creates this sort of situation.... in God We Trust to bring us disadvantaged people who we can abuse as long as the law looks the other way.

[treestar]

3. It all boils down to a double standard where capital can cross

borders at will but labor cannot - or is restricted.

The capitalists have the workers convinced that they distribute jobs by country but they don't. They go where it is cheapest for them to churn out the product.

The U.S. immigration law is not enforced against the Mexicans specifically so that capital can have a work force that has no rights - organize and we deport you - that threat is always there.

The average American falls for it because they are "illegal and not supposed to be here," as if the employers in question ever intended to employ Americans in the first place.

Every country has restrictive rules on immigration, supposedly to protect its workers, as if the capitalist were stuck in that country - but the trouble is, the capitalist is not. So you have to compete with those workers abroad anyway.

[blonndee]

4. The whole "Americans won't do this kind of work" argument

is a load of shit, IMO. In addition to being appallingly racist and elitist. The issue is FAIR WAGES.