this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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But I also don't want to lock up the person employing another one out of goodness. Hiring 1-2 people shouldn't be the thing to punish.I want the people and the industries who make a habit of using and abusing undocumented labor to deal with a rule like this. Agriculture and meat processing, especially.
Tbh, I don’t think what I suggested was an actually viable solution, I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of the anti-immigration people. They just want a permanent class of vulnerable workers to exploit. If I had no morals and ran a business who exploited these low wage vulnerable workers, having the fear of being deported would certainly “keep them in line”, continue to work in these horrible conditions, and accept my low wages.
Of course none of the “illegal immigrant” discussions from the GOP touch on stemming the business side of things.
I think you're totally right about the permanent underclass thing. And it has been for a long time. This week I was looking into the history of education migrants' kids in the US. Our current stance of educating kids came from Texas passing a law in the 70s to strip state funding for schools which chose to enroll the children of undocumented people. (Another case of Texas using its state power to bully people; it's always fucking Texas). That law was challenged and in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled against it; Judge Brennan wrote an opinion specifically citing the creation of a permanent underclass of illiterate people not fit to contribute to any country. He called it "bad public policy." It was crazy to see like, reasonable ideas about society come through in a supreme court ruling, that's a long time past.
I think it could be viable to lock up/fine into oblivion employers hiring migrant labor specifically to be abusive/cheap. But of course a lot of monied interests would be against it. America always seems terrified about scaring corporations off. And it's so much easier to blame individuals and have them internalize the pain than to deal with the systems which set the situations.