I still can’t get past my coworker who hates immigrants because (according to her) they’re unvaccinated and spread disease. And she’s also antivax.
Immigrants started SO many small businesses too btw.
no immigrant has taken your job
In fairness, the more common modern practice is outsourcing. Send the Capital to the large labor pool, rather than sending labor to existing capital stock.
The landscaping company my HOA contracts with is having trouble finding people to do the work, after, of course, many of their employees were rounded up.
My idiot neighbors are whining about how their yards look like shit, because the landscapers aren’t coming around once a week, like they used to. The same idiot neighbors who urge everyone to “vote red” and are absolutely certain that only “illegal” immigrants are being “deported”.
There’s a sketch in Family Guy where Abe Lincoln confronts his neighbor about his un-mowed yard and the neighbor says “yeah, I used to have a guy for that”.
The premise of MAGA was always that we’d have a permanent impoverished servant class. But the message got distorted as it moved from the middle class liberal PMC to the lower class industrial/service sector serf.
Turns out “Every Home A Castle, Every Man A King” doesn’t play out in practice so well.
Probably thought landscapers were a part of nature. Like landscapers are deer but instead of walking through yards to eat berries they cut hedges into clean shapes
This isn’t all that true. For many blue collar jobs, at least.
It’s very hard to be a roofing company and stay in business without using immigrants in many area, for example. No one in the US will work for less money than the immigrants who are mostly sending money back down to Mexico. Everyone wants to pay as low a price that they can for their roof job. Not using immigrants means you have to charge a higher price. That loses you work because you’re constantly underbid. You either use immigrants, or you struggle to keep the business and employees going.
I worked blue collar for quite a few years around new construction homes. I’ve literally watched this go down and making an Office meme doesn’t make it less true. In a perfect world it wouldn’t happen and no one would hire immigrants and pay them less money, but we don’t live in that world, so once a few people start doing it the option often becomes “Do it as well, or go out of business”
You’re not wrong, but what you described is only a problem because even if you don’t abuse paperless immigrants and pay them below minimum wage, your competition will.
The solution isn’t to let everyone do this, it’s to stop everyone from doing it.
I agree. If companies had their license to operate removed for doing it, the problem would solve itself. Be shut down if you get caught.
This is also why they gleefully shipped all the manufacturing jobs/skills and tech to other countries (mostly China).
They’re unbelievably giddy you think China did something wrong in accepting all this work and then building a country that is lifting more and more of its billion+ people out of poverty.
No, China did what we should have done and should have been doing the whole time; but we did the opposite and you blamed the Chinese instead of the wealthy industrialists who sent the jobs there. You wept and cried over China’s one-party offering no freedom “like we have here” except here they took away our protections, our rights, and gave all the military spending money to defense contractors who designed more and more outrageously complex systems that take forever to build, cost more than a billion dollars each, and then apparently can just be taken out.
We’re not safe anymore, we’re not rich anymore, we’re not asked for help anymore, we’re not smart anymore, we’re not comfortable anymore, we’re all struggling to make ends meet even if we have good income, all the water is dirty, all the roads are failing…but at least we still got football and Jesus right?
Everything is Nazis and gambling now.
Whose mad? My mad?
Who’s hiring immigrants for less. Equal pay, my dude.
If maga could read above a 5th grade level they’d be very upset
My response to this is always: if a homeless person with no money or credentials wearing their only set of clothes with no friends or connections unable to speak the local language and requiring the boss to risk legal fines asks for a job and the boss chooses them over you… What does that say about you?
What does that say about you?
I mean… not much? Everything you listed except for the part about the employer risking fines is a positive to the capitalist. And the fines are just a cost of doing business.
The employee not speaking the local language is a positive? Then why are the homeless not employed? If not having a stable home or clean clothes a positive… Where the fuck do you work so I can i avoid it? The smell alone.
Yes they are all signs of desperation. Maybe you could argue they are indicators the person will accept lower wage and as such less expense to the employer. That said it’s hardly a positive… If I owned a laundry mat and hiring an attendant(easy job, no real requirements) I would want a person who can interact with customers, who didn’t have an odor, who had a stable way to pay. It may cost more, but I’d likely get more customers.
I’m not saying immigrants are less then local people(how ever you interpret that) but native citizens have a huge advantage. If I move to India and don’t speak Indian, don’t know anyone there, have no training, don’t have a place to live,l, barely can cloth myself… I don’t expect many job opportunities. Nothing against India, same with Germany or Gambia or any country you pick.
If you fail to cross even that minimal bar then… If you can cross that bar great, be welcome. It like a game of say super smash bros and the immigrant has a mandatory handicap of -100(should probably be higher) …its much more likely for you to pick the non-handicap person then the handicap one. If the non-handicap still fails to win with that advantage they are not a good player.
Yes they are all signs of desperation. Maybe you could argue they are indicators the person will accept lower wage and as such less expense to the employer.
Yes, that’s my point exactly. These are workers with no social safety net, no knowledge of local labour laws, no union membership and a desperate want to not have to go back to where they came from. They are ripe for abuse.
Then why are the homeless not employed?
Because the reason they’re homeless to begin with is that they could not find or hold a job. Usually this is because of untreated mental illness and substance abuse problems.
On your second point I agree. My initial point was that should encourage them to change/get help and not blame immigrants. If you have those issues and don’t fix them you will still be unemployed regardless of immigrants. You can fix them and improve your situation but even if we had 0 immigrants, no one will voluntarily hire a meth addict who shows up 10% of the time.
I’m pro-immigrant. My point was against people against them. If you are native to your country and can’t compete vs an illegal immigrant that’s a you problem. A native has so many advantages and the immigrant has so many struggles, it’s like the lowest bar.
“they are taking are jobs” people are basically complaining about the mice taking droppings from their feast.
I’m not arguing against immigration, just against abusive employment practices.
A lot of the present-day immigration is facilitated by neoliberal globalists looking to drive down the price of work by introducing competition for unskilled labour (well, all labour really, but this is especially common for unskilled labour). They first offshored their production to countries with lax labour laws and cheap labour, and now that they’ve offshored everything they could, the only way they can further drive down labour costs is by driving them down locally.
In other words, the “they are taking the jobs” people are not entirely incorrect, though they are still barking up the wrong tree by blaming the immigrants rather than the people hiring them. But the rest of us must also not be blind to the fact that the current model of immigration is built to benefit multinational companies and billionaires, not so much anyone else.
The “no friends or connections” comment isn’t true because they have a network already setup and if they aren’t interacting with the customer directly then why would they need to speak the local language?
I don’t blame the immigrants for their goals of a better life, it’s logical to take advantage of the situation. It’s also logical for the employer to take advantage of cheap labor. It’s also logical for me to offer something that the immigrants can’t to keep myself employed if I working the same field.
Ok, they may know people local, I’ll grant that. They need to speak local language to understand written instructions, to interact with co-workers, to understand what is needed for them to do.
I think your last point is the same as mine. You should offer something that is advantageous compared to an immigrant. You have a massive advantage. If you can’t do that it doesn’t matter since you definitely won’t be able to compete with natives with whom you don’t have a massive advantage.
I just saw a video lat night of some Jan 6 dork dressed in full military cosplay, literally saying he was afraid of the 8 year old brown children replacing him 🤦♂️
They are such losers
Something something litter boxes in schools and your grandkids are coming home with secret forced gender transition surgeries done in one day by underpaid public servants!
And also, you know, consumers create jobs by their very existence so the whole idea is economically nonsensical.
YES, it is all about regaining the narrative. We need culture, we need community.
The MAGAs are not the enemy, they are the victims of this unscrupulous machinery of brainwashing the Zuck, Murdoch, Musk…
They MAGAs are the weak, the susceptible too influence, and we have to reach to them, break this fabric.
The revolution is in our hands, we ‘just’ need to find the message.
I wish I could get on board with this initiative. I used to believe that to be MAGA, you had to be either incredibly cruel, or unfathomably stupid.
As things have developed, I was dismayed to realize: You have to be both.
They are the weakest and loneliest among us, hence why they are so susceptible to even the dumbest of narratives. If it weren’t for their hatred I’d feel pity for them. But what you’re suggesting is no small feat, we would be up against literal decades of brainwashing.
Something I’ve noticed is that whenever a maga says their political take, simply asking them for details sends them into a rage, cuz they don’t know any lol. Watch some Isaiah Thomas clips, the man has the patience of god. Maybe there’s something in that we could use?
The more I see of the world, on a macro and micro level, the more I believe that the generational task young people will face is stepping into a dying world, the effects of which they did not cause, and be the ones to deal with every mess the boomers are leaving behind. And the only way they succeed in that, is together. And of course the world is seemingly as divided as ever right now.
What do you think?
