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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   29562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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I just feel like being excessively harsh on illegal immigration is punching down.

But this isn't being excessively harsh - this is complying with the laws (and punishments as written). There's nothing "excessive" about it.

Do you feel intense competition for jobs or homes from illegal immigrants?

That's the thing about national economies - we all experience warped market conditions (for employment, housing, healthcare, and basic goods) because of illegal immigration. That these experience may be more acute in TX,NM,AZ doesn't mean they are not experience elsewhere in the country.

A massive percentage of the American agricultural workforce is of questionable legality. Yet they've become so endemic that any agricultural concern that tries to play fair and not hire illegals finds their production costs are too high and gets competed out of business. Think about that for a second; there is a large American industry wherein the only way to remain viable is to flirt with legally dubious hiring practices.

I would like to see swift and stubborn crackdowns on that. Excessive would be letting illegal employment continue to be de facto all across the country.

Well if a huge portion of ag labor is from illegal immigrants, perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty in deporting them. Most of us still, uh, need to eat every day.

Issue is that other Anglo ex-colonies have legal migrant farm worker visas, like Aus and Canada. It’s called “wuffing”. While we don’t have that at all, we just had an unspoken agreement that you let in some amount of illegal workers to fill the massive need of agriculture help come harvest time in California and other states. Effectively it does the same thing

any agricultural concern that tries to play fair and not hire illegals finds their production costs are too high

It’s not that their production costs are too high- it’s that they are unable to find legal workers at any reasonable wage for the skill level.

There are parts of the American economy where the only people ‘doing the work’ are 1) on a management track(this is a minority and they will not be doing the actual work for very long) 2) here illegally or 3) working there under court order(often parolees, child support delinquents, etc). Plenty of construction trades(especially roofing), most of agriculture, meatpacking plants, etc. I would rather have meat on the shelves and roofs on the houses than live in a 100% white society(not that deporting the illegals will get us there anyways) and republican lawmakers agree with me.

Also tagging @HughCaulk.

I agree with you. I'm not advocating for deportations because of race animus. I'm advocating for 1) deportations of illegal immigrants AND 2) a massive overhaul of labor laws.

Here's is my big post on that point

I don't buy the idea that natural born Americans "just don't want to work" - I believe that combination of the welfare state and labor laws actively prevent them from easily getting basic level jobs. The only way for these basic level jobs (exactly the ones you listed) to get done is to illegally employ foreigners. To be blunt; we have outlawed cheap labor in this country, so the only way to hire cheap labor is to do it illegally one way or another. Who is going to have an easier time accepting and illegal job; someone who is already violating US law or someone who is not?

It would be perfectly legal to pay your workers less than illegals are making on a roofing crew. This isn’t 2005. People willing to work for low wages just don’t exist in America. Increasingly, Americans won’t do physically difficult low status work at all.

This is a major problem with post scarcity societies like the modern west. Somebody has to nail shingles and dig ditches and slaughter animals and pick produce. But you have to be willing to let people starve if they don’t. People without scarcity won’t do that. People are perfectly willing to buy strangers a hot dog outside of seven eleven. ‘Literally starve to death’ isn’t a realistic bad outcome in a society where food is a trivial expense to people.

Increasingly, Americans won’t do physically difficult low status work at all.

Well, the solution is to make the work well paid, and high status. Let Hollywood make flood of movies about brave and manly construction workers and vegetable pickers.

Yes, Soviet efforts to do this completely failed, but Hollywood is Hollywood. If you can make cool and prestigious as hard, dirty and dangerous profession as cow herder, you can do anything.

Agree with all of your points.

People willing to work for low wages just don’t exist in America.

In this case, I'm going to defer to you as your post history (assuming a stranger on the internet isn't lying!) does demonstrate a more consistent exposure to these realities.

People willing to work for low wages just don’t exist in America.

Well, then capitalist solution is to raise the wages. There is no problem in finding oil workers, no matter how remote is North Dakota and how dirty and dangerous work it is.

Quoting a quote is fucking stupid, retard.

Banned for one week. You seem to be on an unfavorable trajectory.

Oil work is high status(in the circles the workers come from) because of the pay. Obviously, you can’t do that with every socially necessary but unpleasant job- you’d just wind up at universal basic six figures and then paying very well no longer makes working on a rig high status.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if a business isn’t getting the employees it needs in the numbers it wants them, then the business isn’t paying high enough wages. ‘Reasonable’ is something that potential employees decide collectively through the market.

Whether the meat industry can survive paying true market wages for meat packing jobs is another matter. But importing millions of indentured labourers every generation is not going to work as a long term solution.

But importing millions of indentured labourers every generation is not going to work as a long term solution.

Hell, what happens if, by some nebulous social mechanism, the immigrants just stop wanting to do the shit jobs for sub-par pay, but keep coming anyways?

The "nebulous mechanism" is the welfare state, and what happens is Europe.

Trucking used to be a well-paying job with excellent safety standards, and now it's been destroyed in the US and Canada by illegal immigration. How many parts of the American economy are we going to sacrifice to squeeze an extra few cents of labor costs while the costs get shifted onto society in general?

What's the net gain when we have truckers blasting past construction signs into oncoming traffic because you're allowed to bring an interpreter to the commercial license test now?

There’s still natives that want to do trucking, and it’s still a well paying job. On this specific issue, no, we shouldn’t let immigrants do it. But I wasn’t talking about trucking- I was talking about fruit picking, meatpacking, construction, etc.

at any reasonable wage

How high have you tried?

These concerns pay well enough for ambitious bilinguals on a management track to grind out; still can’t get people.

...I hate to just ask again, but, uh, how high have you tried? My general belief is that supply curves slope upwards.

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