Posted on 06/12/2007 8:18:05 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Rush Limbaugh has been expecting liberals to start "whining" about the $5000 fine undocumented immigrants will have to pay to gain citizenship under the new immigration bill, but most liberals have been too busy chortling about the immigration-induced split in the GOP to make their own case against the bill. So let a mighty whine rise over the land: Undocumented workers shouldn't be fined; they should get a hefty bonus!
All right, they committed a "crime"--the international equivalent of breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists for elite private nursery schools?
In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.
The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring straight from the soil onto one's plate.
Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it's far worse in the case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical purposes, nameless. In the recent book There's No José Here: Following the Lives of Mexican Immigrants, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction company manager who says things like, "I've got to get myself a couple of Josés for this job if we're going to have that roof patched up by Saturday." Forget the Juans, Diegos, and Eduardos - they're all interchangeable "Josés."
Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers forget their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada's Governor Jim Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented nanny. And as the Boston Globe revealed late last year, Mitt Romney's lawn in suburban Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from Guatemala.
The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant workers. First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old age in America will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to Medicare and Social Security, and here I quote the website of the San Diego ACLU:
Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than they take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into Medicare.... A study by the National Academy of Sciences also found that tax payments generated by immigrants outweighed any costs associated with services used by immigrants.
Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to "illegals" for wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner who tells his or her domestic worker that the wage is actually several hundred dollars a month less than she had been promised, and that the homeowner will be "holding" it for her. Or the landscaping service that stiffs its undocumented workers for their labor. Who's the "illegal" here?
Third, there's the massive compensation owed to undocumented immigrants for preventable injuries on the job. In her book Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, Jennifer Gordon reports such gruesome cases as a Honduran who died from inhaling paint while sanding yachts in Long Island and a Guatemalan worker whose boss intentionally burned him with hot pans of oil for not washing dishes fast enough. "Death rates for Latino workers," Gordon reports, "have risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality rates for non-Latinos have fallen."
When our debt to America's undocumented workers is eventually tallied, I'm confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the immigration bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original "crime." If someone breaks into my property for the purpose of trashing and looting, I would be hell-bent on restitution. But if they break in for the purpose of cleaning it--scrubbing the bathroom, mowing the lawn--then, in my way of thinking anyway, the debt goes in the other direction.
In the good old days, teenagers used to do these jobs.
Sometimes, though Chevy Chase is the one singing it. =8-0
Apparently the author considers identity theft to be a victimless crime. I feel so....enlightened.
It’s Barbara Ehrenreich and The Nation, automatic double barf.
Barbara Ehrenreich thinks fast-food workers should be paid the same as salaried engineers, but she doesn’t want to spend $250 for a burger.
Lol, that’s good! Bull meaning Bullheaded I suppose? Or you may have a different meaning entirely as you often do.
What we owe to the illegals is a swift kick in the pants back over the border.
Quite a few judging by the width of her fat @ss.
It's obvious that she don't leave her sanctuary very often. I wold just love to drop her off in the middle of a illegal criminal nieghborhood with no money, phone,ID and make her walk back out, passing through the nieghborhoods which border these areas. maybe her opinion of "poor illegal Mexicans" who cut grass and pick vegetables, clean toilets will be altered to include reality.
In the good old days I mowed lawns and washed dishes for spending money. And I am an American citizen. Shocker.
So if they can tap our generosity by doing jobs Americans won't do, why not just let in the poor from Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and a score of other countries who need the jobs more and will do them for less?
Is there any limit to the number of people this country can hold?
Just a little quiz:
.
Try the other end of the bull!
Yes, I saw the BS’er in another post.
Now how can that possibly be true when there are so many "jobs that Americans won't do." /s
Sounds like the author has illegals working for her, and hates the thought of having to pay a legal worker legal wages. Either that or she’s smoking some darn good pot.
Last year, after Hurricane Katrina and my business being destoyed in Biloxi MS; I moved to Dallas/Ft Worth and was hired as a supervisor at the employment & welfare office. The “clients” receive: TANF (cash money), food stamps, gas money or bus passes, laptop computers w/Internet access, job counseling, clothing, Section 8 subsidized housing, Medicaid, and lots more!! Illegals are eligible for all these benefits.
That’s why I say “we the people” should have a tax revolt. They can’t throw us all in jail, and they can’t kick us out of the country.
Enough is enough.
We should give illegals jobs as journalists. The crap the media churns out now would is worth about a nickel an hour....
And they were paid for it. They didn't come into the country to work for free. Illegal aliens are not Mother Teresa.
They took a risk in order to reap benefits for themselves and their families. The risk to them is being caught and deported, and it's a very low risk at present.
If we want to reduce the number of illegal immigrants, we need to increase the risk or decrease the benefits. Ms. Ehrenreich wants to do just the opposite. Yeah, that will help.
They would make a better effort at it than they do against border jumpers. Slaves are better subjects than independent thinkers.
hahaaaha no, you gotta put him up forever and pay for his food, for his clothes and for his healthcare and if he has kids.....well me bucko........ you gotta pay for them too...
kum—bye—eeya.... gringo-man.
She must be one of those "run into a corner, dial 911 and hope for the best" liberals.
Where I'm from, breaking and entering gets you SHOT. You don't get a chance to rob or rape, cause you're DEAD.
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