You fail to consider the economic realities of the South as it was then. A small number of people owned large plantations and slaves. A large number of white people lived rural agricultural lives as sharecroppers or small businesspersons. The minority plantation owners produced the commodities most under scrutiny by the North, since those commodities of cotton, tobacco, textile dyes and other agriproducts "fed" the North. I am not defending slavery as a moral system or an economic system. But I will compare today's average American wage-earner to the average non-slave-holding Southerner of the times. And I will compare today's corporate owners and shareholders to the South's plantation owners and textile exporters of the times.
Are you, if an average wage-earner, deserving of moral scorn because today's corporate classes favor importing illegal aliens as cheap labor? Are you responsible for the tiny handful, relative to our population, of Governors, Mayors, Senators and Congressmen who have made "sanctuaries" for illegal aliens so they may be economically exploited in today's economy? If you believe you are deserving of such scorn, should you be punished and painted with a broad brush of human rights violations for the next century and a half, relinquishing your state's rights or even your national rights so that Mexicans can rule this territory in retaliation for this crime against illegal hispanic immigrants who are actively being economically exploited by a small handful of today's "plantation owners"?
By a totally amazing and no doubt unrelated coincidence (/sarc), our friend Ferfal describes on his blog (ferfal/blogspot) the mass-importation of descamisados from other countries by the Argentine Kirchner despotism (first Nestor, now Cristina Kirchner presiding) to push Argentines out of their jobs, displace good-wage jobs with minimum-wage bottom-feeders (mostly Bolivian Indians who can barely speak Spanish), and facilitate land expropriation by government-protected squatters, who are promptly given the franchise so they can outvote native Argentine conservatives and patriots.
Argentines who object to this process are promptly denounced as "racist" and face government retaliation.
Sound familiar?
Cheap labor? Latin American laborers are exactly like all piecework people in the South. They earn based on what they do (picking pine straw, harvesting crops, tending our fern nurseries, etc.), but Latin Americans do it faster and better than the locals, because they don’t show up stoned, don’t consider the work beneath them, don’t expect the boss to pick them up and drive them to work, and don’t try to rob the boss on the way out.
It was the unions that killed the bracero program under LBJ, a big union sympathizer, because these people were not here long enough to join the union and the unions were busy promoting the type of work rules that led to mechanization. This can be a good thing in the long run, but it’s sure not going to lead to employment of American born unionistas either.
Braceros needed better protection because they were often housed in places where the owner of the farm wouldn’t let them leave the farm, so they had to shop at the company store. By the time they went back to their countries, they could end up owing practically their entire salary. This was an evil thing and should have been and sometimes was stopped by law.
Employment practice control shifted to the states, with better or worse results. Here in Florida now, the farms bring the migrant workers in a bus to Walmart once or twice a week, the workers pay normal prices, they go back to their compounds (which certainly aren’t very nice, but are liveable) and then they send some money back home and save the rest of it. I don’t think this is a bad thing.
But the whole point of destroying the labor program nationally was to protect the unions, not American workers.
We need a good immigration program that gets us good permanent residents (*hint: not Muslims or from Muslim countries) and good temporary residents who come here to make money and then go back home and buy a patch of land or open a store. Most Latin Americans don’t like living in the US, which they perceive as cold and hostile, and would like to be able to come and go to their countries as needed. And for those who have been here for a long time and love our country, why shouldn’t they get a way to stay?
They’d be a heck of a lot better than our nasty, dog-in-the-manger former involuntary servitude group that has never accepted responsibility and freedom.
It is amazing the mental gymnastics some perform in order to justify evil. If all four of you believe the “Yankees” started corrupting the South starting in the 1850’s so that the South can keep enslaving other humans, than all of you are no better than leftists.