I read this interesting post from Andrew Sullivan. Its a pretty cool take that I thought this board would enjoy.


One does not quite know what to say about Pat Buchanan's latest. Is it too predictable to note? Or too ugly to record? Or too stupid to ignore? Upon reflection, I'll go with stupid. Take one simple point. Notice that for Buchanan in this column (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=113463), it is axiomatic that America was once defined by its whiteness. This is what he means by "tradition." America - once uniformly white - is now, for him and those he speaks for, bewilderingly multicultural and multi-confessional. Hence the anxiety. Hence the panic. Hence, in some ways, the confluence of fear and paranoia among the 20 percent of Americans who seem to feel this way and see the federal government in some way as the enabler of this destruction.
But this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue. And this "country" that white Americans are allegedly losing is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing.
From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.
This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it's so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England's roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples - the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.
The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land - stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan's or John Derbyshire's fantasies.
It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)
From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?
That some cannot see Buchanan's cartoon as a travesty of history remains America's tragedy of self-forgetting.

Andrew needs to spend some time down Southwest and learn how mestizo a nation we are as well :). Don't forget that Texas started its war of independence from *Mexico* after the Mexican constitutional convention and subsequent disagreement over what rights Mexican states (of which it was planning to be one) were going to have, and California all the way up to Monterey (whose first mayor was an Alcalde) was in Mexican hands until 1848 as well :).

Alien invasion? Hardly, even though much of it might be illegal by current borders and laws...

One of the things I like about my adopted hometown, San Antonio (or should I say I have finally come full circle, as I was conceived, if not born, here while my parents were stationed at Lackland AFB) is how gracefully the city handles its bi/multicultural history and that one really gets a sense, given that this was a historical waterline, that all powers/cultural backgrounds are given their due respect - our Spanish flavor isn't grafted on or mere window dressing but woven into the basic fabric of the community. Viva Fiesta, y'all!

Regards,
Nydia

Being in Asia makes one appreciate how completely awesome that the USA is the hodge podge that it is. Asians are not cookie cutter by any means, but if you are Caucasian, Hispanic or of African decent, you might as well be walking down the street naked because its about as subtle.

Lum, you forgot Middle Eastern. Now there will be a Jihad against you. Praise Allah!!

I got this today from someone who voted Obama, oddly enough:

We're moving to Mexico. I wrote to the White House:

Dear Mr. President:

I'm planning to move to Mexico for my
health, and I would like to ask you to assist me.

I'm planning to simply walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico ,
and I'll need your help to make a few arrangements.


I plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration
quotas and laws. I'm sure they handle those things the same way you do
here. So, would you mind telling your buddy, President Calderon, that I'm
on my way down?

Please let him know that I will be expecting the following:

1. Free medical care .

2. English-speaking government bureaucrats for all services I might
need, whether I use them or not.

3. Please print all Mexican government forms in English.

4. I want my grandkids to be taught Spanish by English-speaking
(bi-lingual) teachers.

5. Tell their schools they need to include classes on American culture
and history.

6. I want my grandkids to see the American flag on one of the flag poles
at their school.

7. Please plan to feed my grandkids at school for both breakfast and lunch.

8.. I will need a local Mexican driver's license so I can get easy access
to government services and be able to vote.

9. I do plan to get a car and drive in Mexico , but, I don't plan to
purchase car insurance, and I probably won't make any
special effort to learn local traffic laws.

10. In case one of the Mexican police officers does not get the memo from
their president to leave me alone, please be sure that every patrol car has
at least one English-speaking officer.

11. I plan to fly the U.S. flag from my house top, put US. flag decals
on my car, and have a gigantic celebration on July 4th. I do not want any
complaints or negative comments from the locals.

12. I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes, or
have any labor or tax laws enforced on any business I may start..

13. Please have the president tell all the Mexican people to be extremely
nice and never say a critical things about me or my family, or about the
strain we might place on their economy.

14. I want to receive free food stamps.

15. Naturally, I'll expect free rent subsidies.

16. I'll need Income tax credits so although I don't pay Mexican Taxes,
I'll receive money from the government.

17. Please arrange it so that the Mexican Gov't pays $4,500 to help me
buy a new car.

18. Oh yes, I almost forgot, please enroll me free into the Mexican
Social Security program so that I'll get a monthly income in retirement.



I know this is an easy request because you already do all these things for
all his people who come to the U.S. from Mexico ..

I am sure that President Calderon won't mind returning the favor if you ask
him nicely.

Thank you so much for your kind help. You're the man!!!

I'm trying to figure out how that letter is incorrect. Not that I am anti-Hispanic, but if Mexico was offering to Caucasions all that the U.S. does to Hispanics, I'd probably move south of the border, myself.

I guess the wrong part is addressing it to President Obama. Congress is the one that really got all these perks in place.

I'm amazed the immigration issue has been put off as long as it has, although if healthcare was any indication then entrenched corporate interests are capable of delaying things for unfathomable spans of time over public mandate. We probably ought to have a moratorium on it while we find some way to address the grey-market of Mexican and other labor being brought here under the table by large businesses, particularly agribusiness, before getting too too upset at the Mexicans themselves.

Unfortunately what's probably going to happen is reactionary hate against Mexico with no analysis of how it went from a sleepy subtropical republic to a parasitic state, and the real source of the problems will get to go home and sleep on their beds of money.

(the hidden answer for the question we're not asking, by the way, is War on Drugs).

That's right. I was reading, I think in Stossel's last book, that the number of businesses raided and penalized for employing illegals was massively higher under Clinton than under Bush.

Trying to prevent/remedy individual illegal immigrants is like herding cats. Eliminate the incentive.

You just can't get much more cynically contradictory than the contrast between the anti-illegal immigrant hatred (and subsequent 'get tough' noise) being whipped up and promulgated by the Right's spokespeople and its convenient use as a means to provide cover for the rampant and systematic recruitment of these immigrants as a lever to force wages and working conditions down in those fields/industries that it's more or less impossible to outsource to other countries. On the other hand, it's a great way to divide and conquer, by ensuring the old and new oppressed laborers don't talk to each other (the language barrier comes in handy there too ;) )...

You see the effects of this currently in the deep South, where the black and white poor had finally gotten their minds around the fact that they were all in the same boat (the town in northeast georgia I lived in about a decade ago, where the dominant employer was a poultry processing plant, had very cordial black/white race relations), only to have the dinghy upset in these plant towns by the tide of illegals - only rarely are people able to step back and ask 'why is this happening'? when they're fighting for their economic lives.

Regards,
Nydia

I'm trying to figure out how that letter is incorrect.




"I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes, or
have any labor or tax laws enforced on any business I may start.."


There have been a number of comments made both during the campaign and throughout the inter-tubes regarding the fact that a very large proportion of those illegals working here do in fact pay income taxes, social security taxes (albeit to the real holder of the SSN#'s account) as well as any other sales taxes, license fees, etc., that are applicable.

Like it or not, illegals are an integral part of our economy. If they want to come here and pick strawberries as "contract hires' than so be it. An illegal making an honest living doing a beneficial, if menial service, outside of the law beats the alternative...which is to get on board with a gang sponsored by a drug cartel. Take a trip to El Paso along I-10. Look across the Rio Grande right by the last Burger King before climbing the plateau to cross the border into New Mexico. You will see a Tale of Two cities, only its literal. Ciudad Juarez looks like what you get at face value as you look across the river. A shit hole. It offers plenty of unscrupulous means of making a living that will harm the USA much more then if they came here and suckled the government tit while doing honest labor.

Like it or not, illegals are an integral part of our economy. If they want to come here and pick strawberries as "contract hires' than so be it. An illegal making an honest living doing a beneficial, if menial service, outside of the law beats the alternative...which is to get on board with a gang sponsored by a drug cartel. Take a trip to El Paso along I-10. Look across the Rio Grande right by the last Burger King before climbing the plateau to cross the border into New Mexico. You will see a Tale of Two cities, only its literal. Ciudad Juarez looks like what you get at face value as you look across the river. A shit hole. It offers plenty of unscrupulous means of making a living that will harm the USA much more then if they came here and suckled the government tit while doing honest labor.


? How is an illegal making an honest living? Especially if they are stealing a SS# to do so.

They aren't shooting at our border patrol or running with a cartel. They know where they they stand and so do the people who employ them, who ultimately are the ones responsible. No one forces you to hire illegal labor. I don't think they should draw equal benefits as citizens, but locking them out would be a mistake. The US has no other source of cheap labor and in order to have a viable economy we need to produce tangible goods to sell on the global market. Considering that our competition in Asia can do that legally just fine thanks to under valued currency and dictatorial governments who have no regard for human life other than what appears on a spread sheet, I think the USA is getting a bargain by cutting illegals a bit of slack as well as offering a honey of a deal to get people in our country and spending money on US soil. An illegal getting limited benefits is still vastly cheaper than unionized labor bankrupting the few globally viable companies we have left.

You still didn't answer my question. How is it making an honest living when even the term "illegal alien" precludes them from making an honest living because they are here (now say this with me, and think again about it being "an honest living") illegally?

I'm not discussing any merit or value of cheap labor (or whether we need it or not to be globally competitive). I'm specifically discussing the comment that they are making an "honest living."

To build on Nydia's post:

The US's goal should be this:

Not to pay better than our parents but to pay better than the outsource regions. Making a so-so wage in the States, equal with India or China but perhaps just a tick better will assure that:

A) Americans (or illegals) have A JOB as opposed to unemployed and sucking the dole which is a NET LOSS for the US government because all that tax revenue is gone. While they are here, they will buy groceries, internet, cell phone service, fuels, utilities, pay sales tax, duck tape, toilet paper, and loads of other things that are MADE RIGHT HERE in the US of A. A job lost to Asia, regardless if its filled by an illegal or not is all the lost income of businesses and the taxes THEY pay to foreign shores if they are not here and part of some local economy. Shit tickets, shampoo, broccoli and other such things tend to not make sense to buy from China.

So to me an honest living is they are putting in something in exchange for getting something out, even if they don't know it. Its not so much that people think that illegals are taking jobs away from those that don't even want them to start with. Its that running them off our shores removes whatever it is that they would otherwise spend on legit shit.

There's no way we'll ever really compete with outsource regions. And we're extremely naive to think its only "cheap labor" that is going to get outsourced. I just read a book "The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment" by A.J. Jacobs (both mind expanding and hilarious, I recommend this one to everyone!) and one chapter is dedicated to the month where he outsourced his entire life - his job as a reporter for Esquire (and all the research associated with it), his shopping, his arguments with his boss and his wife, reading his son bedtime stories, picking out his netflix and weekly entertainment, answering his phone and his mail, even his therapy: all for $1000 for the entire month. That is 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, four weeks ... $6.25/hour for a college educated Indian woman to not only do everything he asked of her - but do it dramatically better than your average American or European would have, at least in regards to their work ethic (no gossiping at the water cooler or extended lunch breaks or browsing Ayonae.Com or Twitter or Facebook or whatever random website while at work). Post-experiment he's kept her on retainer ($10 / month and $10 / hour) for research, booking him hotels and travel, etc.

If you can outsource your executive assistant, why can't you outsource your executive? Honey (the name of his Indian assistant) had a number of great ideas and helped A.J. write his Esquire columns, there really isn't any reason the roles couldn't one day reverse where she's the author and he's making less than $7 / hr.

A job lost to Asia, regardless if its filled by an illegal or not is all the lost income of businesses and the taxes THEY pay to foreign shores if they are not here and part of some local economy. Shit tickets, shampoo, broccoli and other such things tend to not make sense to buy from China.

That might make sense if we didn't spend so much tax money subsidizing everything from their emergency room visits to their kids' meals at school.

Kel, that's all fine and dandy until you discover you can't afford to pay your outsourced labor anymore because they have discovered they can in fact...do your job for just a bit less than what you get paid but VASTLY more than what you pay them and thus your job no longer exists. Its like a computer or robot becoming self aware. China and India are export economies which means they get their money externally...AKA they can't derive a solid tax base for their governments based on revenue from their own people consuming things in country. Well, China and India are working hard to change all that, and they have numbers to their advantage. All they have to do is learn all the jobs that we currently consider to be our advantage....and do them cheaper. The End.

We need to retain what we can with cheap labor in the States until we can re-invent ourselves with some unique commodity that people will pay good money for around the world and thus bring in the good salaries that we all expect. Otherwise we will be stuck with shit and its going to be take it or leave it.

And Sanchek....what is cheaper? Paying a Mexican 3.00 dollars an hour and giving kids lunch meals as well as doctor care or bailing out a whole industry that smothered itself in Union pension plans it could never afford to sustain in a market where the typical global autoworker makes at most...13 dollars US an hour?

People expect the Global Economy to play by "our" rules. Well, it doesn't. As long as we are locked into the mindset that people who will work as hard as Indian outsourced labor HERE in the States and for as little money are not deserving of some what of a break, then we are fucked, fucked FUCKED. The lines are long to take all those jobs away. Asia has 60% of the people of this world and they are starting to wise up that maybe they should get 60% or more of the pie. Planet only has so much. You all figure it out.

And Sanchek....what is cheaper? Paying a Mexican 3.00 dollars an hour and giving kids lunch meals as well as doctor care or bailing out a whole industry that smothered itself in Union pension plans it could never afford to sustain in a market where the typical global autoworker makes at most...13 dollars US an hour?

The estimated yearly cost for the California program that gives health care to illegals is already at $1.2 billion dollars every year, and growing. That's still not even counting all the emergency room visits for trivial stuff, because it's the easiest place to get away with that.

I'd much rather see that money put toward subsidizing a living wage for California's legal blue collar workers, if something has to be subsidized. Wouldn't you?

We can't even manage to get health care fixed for our own citizens, yet we're breaking the bank to pay for illegals? How can you possibly think that makes good sense?

Ok. I did not want to play this card...but I am gonna play it.

I LIVE IN CHINA.

I know what we are up against on a big picture scale. Average Chinese makes 7000 US dollars a year to do the job of a worker who gets paid 60k a year in the States and they have the rallying cry of Nationalism to fuel their desire to do this work for so little pay. If Nationalism isn't a motivation than the government tells them "Fuck you, are gonna do this or else". You seem hell bent on the fact that the rest of the world A) wants to play fair or B) gives a rats ass about blue collar workers in California. It does not.

Protectionism is NOT GOING to work against people who live in our OWN HEMISPHERE. Giving the Mexicans a break is still less of a hit then having the jobs GO AWAY COMPLETELY. That getting through at all??????

End of discussion.

IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'VE BEEN THERE TOO LONG.

Meanwhile, you completely avoided the entire discussion. What does playing fair have to do with anything? What does China have to do with the fallacy of cheap illegal labor in the US?

We're pouring untold billions into subsidizing the illegal labor you're so fond of. It's not as cheap as you think.

If we're lucky, their consumer activity might end up being a wash with what they cost us. Probably not. Not to mention the disproportionate amount of money they send back home, which leaves our economy.

If we're going to pour billions into a labor force, why not throw it toward our friends and family before we do illegals?

"End of discussion"!

I view it as a tax on keeping jobs in the US, Sanchek, and all the money that those people being here and spending money brings into the economy.

Friends and family wanting 10x as much money as a Indian or Chinese or the cost of the illegal only soaking in net terms the cost of 2 to 3x an Indian or Chinese might persuade a business owner to stay in country and with it keep those jobs here. The US is a land of immigrants after all and immigrants have been doing the shit work since there was a USA, only is this day and age the jobs of the skilled laborers and managers can now be done in the same lands where all the unskilled illegals used to come from.

Asia doesn't work circles around the US worker. They are actually quite lazy. They may work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day but you still only get 30-40 hours worth of work out of them. There is just MANY MANY MANY more of them and they work for much less money. In addition to that, they are not subject to the rules of a Union, or OSHA or even have a contract with their employer. That further reduces costs. China you are assured a job for life.....because there is a good chance that you will work until you drop dead =P.

Illegals are the closest thing we have in the US to drive wages and incentive in a direction that will allow countries like our own to compete against labor in Asia. If anything, making illegals more expensive might aid in closing the gap between what our "friends and family" get paid versus what an illegal might get because any government derived cost for an employee (Legal or not) gets passed to the business owner FIRST. If Illegals gets more expensive to hire due to the increase in what has to be paid into FICA, Workman's comp, and whatever healthcare comes about...then maybe offering a job to "friends and family" might be more attractive, although they won't get paid too much more than the illegals but the stability of the workforce not being deported at any random moment or fines from employing illegals might make the 2 dollars more an hour salary worth it.

Otherwise Sanchek I am not sure you really understand what China means.

They are a dictatorship...not so much communist...who are in charge of the most ruthless capitalist economy in the world. They know no rules and see no bounds. In a global economy they have the money to do anything and the ruthlessness to make it happen...almost over night with no 3rd party oversight etc. Orwell should be rolling over in his grave as this place is the last few pages of "Animal Farm" incarnate. So please, don't squawk at me that I have been here to long or have bought into how they do things. They are the competition and they don't see the game as having any rules. Better yet, there are SO MANY OF THEM and they believe that since China has been a civilized nation for 4000 years they have an entitlement and that all other nations need to give them their due. If Illegals keep jobs in the US that companies can afford and bring the over all cost of labor down in the US just enough to make China work just a little harder to put us all in the poor house, I am all for it. I would rather have a job that pays less than no job at all.

Your entire narrative in this thread is contradictory. You've talked about both driving US wages up and driving wages down. What is it you actually want?

If you think "is this day and age the jobs of the skilled laborers and managers can now be done in the same lands where all the unskilled illegals used to come from", then why is illegal emigration to the US even happening?

We may be foolish enough to sell some of our manufacturing down the river, but there's a huge amount of blue collar work that won't leave the country. We need to embrace that and support our legal citizens doing the work.

Or, perhaps I'll start shipping my cars overseas every time I get the oil changed. :rolleyes:

Keep in mind that ~80 million Germans produce the highest trade surplus in the world, not the billion+ Chinese. And, their manufacturing sector, which employs legal, blue collar Germans, is a significant portion of it. How do you explain that in your cheap-labor-rules-all worldview?

Careful that you don't drink too much of the globalization koolaid while you're there.

Germany is a controlled market economy, Sanchek. They are socialist and do not play by the same rules. They are also a member of the EU, which again requires certain employment quotas, trade deficits, nation debts etc be maintained or avoided in order to keep the Euro stable. Not exactly capitalism.

As for wages going up and down in the US.....

You can pay a Mexican Illegal 3 bucks and hour and have no other associated costs or you can pay them 3 bucks an hour and still have to pay a higher share into Workman's comp, FICA and health care leverages against your legal employees to cover the illegals. They money does not just appear out of nowhere. Over all, a business owner's labor costs will go up if they hire legals or illegals. My argument is that if you have business owners facing paying legally hired staff less money as salary because there is a larger chunk being taken out in the form of payroll deductions, then it might be more incentive to keep the legals around just out of stability's sake. The cost of an illegal employee versus an illegal for a large company that might employ both is going to have a gap that will close if the amount the government collects in order to pay out more subsides increases.

Bottom line is more taxes going out of an employer's till to cover employee expenses is going to mean less salary paid to legal workers.....which means that your friend might have to work for 8 dollars an hour instead of 12 but that' still better for an employer looking to avoid the hidden costs of hiring an illegal for 6 dollars an hour. Either way, we are talking about a job kept in the US. And if you have a friend that is unemployed and won't change oil for 8 dollars an hour when the alternative is to make no dollars an hour...well, that's fucked up. Many of these blue collar jobs go unfilled because "white people" won't do the menial and dirty tasks that the pay is associated with. An illegal will. Take home pay ultimately is what people are going to look at and if an illegal or legal is taking home the same pay and will work with similar motivation....I would rather hire the legal worker. The only way that playing field gets leveled is if illegals become over all more expensive to employ by the business community as a whole.

There have been a number of comments made both during the campaign and throughout the inter-tubes regarding the fact that a very large proportion of those illegals working here do in fact pay income taxes, social security taxes (albeit to the real holder of the SSN#'s account) as well as any other sales taxes, license fees, etc., that are applicable.

I don't disagree with that statement, but the rest of the letter seems pretty spot on.

What we need to get American corporations to understand is that hiring illegals actually costs them money in the long run. Whether it be in increased taxes to cover all the things they don't; such as healthcare, ect. or because the INS is breaking down the door, and fining them for the illegals they have working for them.

Insofar as China is concerned, they have always used their sheer numbers to overcome any problems. I'm not too sure this is any different.

Germany is a controlled market economy, Sanchek. They are socialist

That may come as a surprise to many Germans.

But even if it was true, that still provides specific and incontrovertible counter evidence. As the fourth largest economy in the world despite a small population with a very high standard of living, whatever you want to call whatthey're doing, it works.

Germany is a controlled market economy, Sanchek. They are socialist and do not play by the same rules. They are also a member of the EU, which again requires certain employment quotas, trade deficits, nation debts etc be maintained or avoided in order to keep the Euro stable. Not exactly capitalism.

You're going to feel silly when you figure out that 1) Germany isn't socialist and 2) they have a very similar government to India, which further contradicts what you've been saying.

As for wages going up and down in the US.....

You can pay a Mexican Illegal 3 bucks and hour and have no other associated costs or you can pay them 3 bucks an hour and still have to pay a higher share into Workman's comp, FICA and health care leverages against your legal employees to cover the illegals. They money does not just appear out of nowhere. Over all, a business owner's labor costs will go up if they hire legals or illegals. My argument is that if you have business owners facing paying legally hired staff less money as salary because there is a larger chunk being taken out in the form of payroll deductions, then it might be more incentive to keep the legals around just out of stability's sake. The cost of an illegal employee versus an illegal for a large company that might employ both is going to have a gap that will close if the amount the government collects in order to pay out more subsides increases.

Bottom line is more taxes going out of an employer's till to cover employee expenses is going to mean less salary paid to legal workers.....which means that your friend might have to work for 8 dollars an hour instead of 12 but that' still better for an employer looking to avoid the hidden costs of hiring an illegal for 6 dollars an hour.

It's a zero sum game. You can try to sweep the subsidy costs under the rug if you want to be that short-sighted, but the business owners will still end up paying for these things in the form of taxes.

It's astonishing to me that you're advocating what amounts to government provided socialism for people who aren't even citizens of the country in this thread, while simultaneously deriding government involvement in the net neutrality thread. Inconsistent much?

This is the same Germany where a business can't just have a sale whenever they feel like having a sale? Where all prices to the consumer have to stay at an amount that is withing a certain threshold of parameters?

Germany has a democratically elected government and the people are well represented, but that does not mean they have the free market economy we enjoy and that is by their own choice. They have a huge amount of government services provided and pay a heap of taxes. You might want to look up how much it costs just to drive a car in Germany.

My point with Internet...let the market decide.

As far as the Illegals....they are an expense regardless. Its a same that I have to add that most of them work circles around our "friends and family" and do so for less money, no representation or respect. We might want to learn a thing or two form them!Try kicking them all out. Try to get the crime out of Mexico that spills over across the borders. Build a big ass wall and man it with guards and technology. Raid strawberry fields and put business owners out of business and have crops rot in the fields? It all gets passed on to the rest of us anyway. WHAT'S CHEAPER ON THE LONG TERM is what I ask? What is going to keep our country competitive? I know that this is the new age of isolationism and its all a blow back against the Global Economy but still. Its not going away. Considering that thread was about "Being White" in America and how illegals give whitey the shaft...well that whole thread is a fucked up piece of shit anyway. It stinks of racism and fear and not much in the way of real solutions to problems that are not going away. I put "Independent" down as my party affiliation for a reason because it allows me to not be pigeonholed into just one view.

As far as the Illegals....they are an expense regardless. Try kicking them all out. Try to get the crime out of Mexico that spills over across the borders. Build a big ass wall and man it with guards and technology. Raid strawberry fields and put business owners out of business and have crops rot in the fields? It all gets passed on to the rest of us anyway. WHAT'S CHEAPER ON THE LONG TERM is what I ask? What is going to keep our country competitive? I know that this is the new age of isolationism and its all a blow back against the Global Economy but still. Its not going away. Considering that thread was about "Being White" in America and how illegals give whitey the shaft...well that whole thread is a fucked up piece of shit anyway. It stinks of racism and fear and not much in the way of real solutions to problems that are not going away.

The hyperbole certainly is ratcheting up into high gear, eh? Rotting strawberries? Really?

Trying to paint the rule of law as racism is the worst yet. You are the one that's bringing race into it. Legal citizen vs. illegal emigrant has nothing to do with race. You are the one that apparently equates cheap labor with not-white-people.

You shouldn't even be allowed to utter the words "LONG TERM" while promoting such short term thinking. We have a decision to make here, not an inevitable destiny of forcing our blue collar friends and family into this:

http://lebbeuswoods.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/slum-mumbai1.jpg

If a legal citizen would work as hard for what an illegal is paid, bitched a lot less, felt less entitled, had more respect for their family and had a work ethic...I would really give a shit. Plenty of jobs go begging every day because ole "whitey" doesn't want to do them. Illegals do our dirty work and one hand washes the other. Them getting a reach around while getting fucked in the ass is not going to cost us that much money on the long run.

And nice favela picture. Or is that from Haiti down by the beach at Port Au Prince? If you feel we are destined to live like that then we forced it on ourselves by choosing to live like animals instead of going out and taking a job at wages that are not 30 dollars an hour to unscrew an oil filter. I don't see any of you complaining on this board about how your high paying server farm maintenance job got taken away by a day laborer hired out the parking lot at Home Depot. You went to college, got a good job and now you make good money and sit around complaining about how the person who gets paid 2 dollars an hour to scrub your toilet bowl should be shafted.

Please. Give me a break. You should be more worried about how the Chinese guy making 2 dollars an hour could run your server farm.

Oh. I have one last thing.

You might want to look up how many Non-US Citizens serve in our armed forces and other government agencies. They are not citizens but they still get benefits such as health care, housing, food, transportation. Oh and in the military...we get paid shit wages too. I make as much per hour as an illegal immigrant.

Also, I don't think the government is going to just dispatch a representative out to the strawberry fields and construction sites with a bag of money and slips with their medical appointment either. They will have to get vested into the system in order to get anything out of it. There will be plenty of conditions. A true illegal, if he or she is a dirt bag, is not going to want to pop up on the radar of the USG unless they are planning on actually staying here and maybe even becoming a citizen. Then it becomes just become immigration. Until the borders are closed and the walls are built, guards manning the watchtowers fully locked and loaded, fangs filed to a sharp point on all the working dogs and infrared cameras calibrated and anyone who employs illegals shot on site, then this is what we have. If things got as bad as your picture, Sanchek, I dunno about you but I would be swimming south across the Rio Grande....heading for a golden new life in the land of opportunity:

Mexico.

4am here. Too sleepy to argue further. Gnite.

If a legal citizen would work as hard for what an illegal is paid, bitched a lot less, felt less entitled, had more respect for their family and had a work ethic...I would really give a shit. Plenty of jobs go begging every day because ole "whitey" doesn't want to do them. Illegals do our dirty work and one hand washes the other. Them getting a reach around while getting fucked in the ass is not going to cost us that much money on the long run.

And nice favela picture. Or is that from Haiti down by the beach at Port Au Prince? If you feel we are destined to live like that then we forced it on ourselves by choosing to live like animals instead of going out and taking a job at wages that are not 30 dollars an hour to unscrew an oil filter. I don't see any of you complaining on this board about how your high paying server farm maintenance job got taken away by a day laborer hired out the parking lot at Home Depot. You went to college, got a good job and now you make good money and sit around complaining about how the person who gets paid 2 dollars an hour to scrub your toilet bowl should be shafted.

That photo is Mumbai.

More importantly, it's anywhere that people take your advice and try to race to the bottom. Maybe it'll be Detroit soon. You can't lower wages even farther below a living wage without eventually having caused an outcome like that.

There's absolutely no reason that people should have to work for less than a living wage. You can't just pretend that countries like Germany don't exist. It's completely possible to have successful industry without forcing blue collar citizens into poverty.

Please. Give me a break. You should be more worried about how the Chinese guy making 2 dollars an hour could run your server farm.

It's a shame that you don't know enough about me or what I do to understand how far off the mark you are with all that rambling about server farms.

Personally, I've never been as professionally successful as I have been in the past few years. Even as the economy crashed, things could barely have gone better for me recently. I am in exactly 0 danger of any Chinese or Indian company taking my job.

However, I come from a working class background. Hell, we used to buy building supplies from your namesake (the one in Toccoa) all the time. So, I've had a first-hand view of the evisceration of the working class that you seem so happy to support.

I find it bizarre that you're fine with even further destroying these people, seeing as how you used to be in their shoes. Not to mention the fact that they pay your paycheck, while the illegals compete for your funding.

You went to college, got a good job and now you make good money and sit around complaining about how the person who gets paid 2 dollars an hour to scrub your toilet bowl should be shafted.


Well, this affects me directly. My wife and I actually get a cleaning person that "cleans our toilets" once a month. We made sure when we hired the cleaning company we use that they hire American citizens and have proper background checks.

Seriously, would I let a person that came to this country illegally into my house alone?

Wow! I went to go do my teaching evaluation lecture a short while ago while having a post underway in this thread and come back to find the vitriol level ratcheted up several orders of magnitude :).

The only way that playing field gets leveled is if illegals become over all more expensive to employ by the business community as a whole.

Bingo. I think it's undesirable and counterproductive to punish those illegals who were *recruited* to come here, openly or tacitly, by refusing them drivers licences, basic medical care and K-12 education, etc - and frankly, as the folks who have presided over welfare reform have found out, it costs more than it saves and nets... what? Unnecessary suffering in order to live up to some punitive Calvinist ideal? That said, I think we need to remove as much of the hypocrisy in our system as possible - if we aren't going to streamline or come up with some sort of viable *legal* immigration system for these workers, and we as a society have decided that this immigration is undesirable, then we have to de-incentivise it - stop our major agribuisness and other employers from actively subverting the law and punish the living hell out them and aggressively raid these large scale violators. Money is the reason people risk illegal immigration here, money and the fact that our enforcement is a joke, and once people realize that they can come here, but they *can't* work, it'll seem a lot less appealing. (By the way, try getting a permit to work in Mexico as an American citizen - they love our retirees and all their sweet sweet cash, but siphoning off "Mexican" jobs is another matter entirely :) ).

I don't buy that Americans wouldn't take those agricultural and construction jobs by the way - my own father picked cotton as a boy and one of my boyfriends in my early 20s was at that time (mid '80s) apprenticed to a bricklayer, and at that time it was still possible to make a very decent living in this skilled trade (that is, before it became completely swamped with illegals). Especially now that there are six applicants for every available job in this country, people tend to shake off their aversion to manual labor in a hurry when the wolf is truly at the door (and now that we're out of credit, the inconceivable has happened and people realize that it is. Americans' biggest problem is that for so long we've been brainwashed into thinking that we should give up whole fields of work/expertise because they're 'beneath us' which consequently made them easy candidates in the Race for the Bottom sweepstakes and so we slept while larger and larger segments of what remained of the 'real' economy was being outsourced to illegals.

Sanchek's already brought up the example of Germany, which takes in a sizeable number of legal (and some illegal) immigrants and has suffered their own growing pains of late with regard to integration of immigrants from the Islamic nations; but what Germany unquestionably does right is recognise the intrinsic value of manual labor, and they support it at all levels of the culture. A pillar of Germany's educational system is its trade schools, where those who wish to go into the skilled trades finish their education after the age of fourteen, rather than waste their time spinning their wheels in our crappy neither fish nor fowl educational system ostensibly in preparation for some vaguely defined white collar future (and which allows Germany to substantially raise the quality and rigor of its college preparatory high schools, I might add). A typical one of these schools will have the apprentices spending a *year* on... filing (the serrated triangular metal kind, not the storage kind). Why? Because after a year of filing, the student will have the necessary attention to detail and diligence to do precision work, and you can be sure that the kids won't think those jobs in the skilled trades are 'beneath them'. We need to start valuing, as a society, those jobs that literally build a community, and invest in them - and at the same time bring our immigration laws into some semblance of consistency even if that means allowing a larger number of *legal* immigrants into the country than we do now (much like we do with H1Bs) in those trades where there is a demonstrated shortage of qualified citizen applicants.

As I mentioned last year in the GM thread, most of our remaining autoworkers are working for 12-15.00/hour, with minimal benefits, comparable to that which Toyota line workers make, less when health care costs are factored in - so we *can* compete and still pay a (barely) living wage in that and many other industries.

Every other country in the Western world aggressively controls immigration and work permit requirements (seen Canada's residency application lately?) and just because we share a long border with Mexico doesn't mean that we can't do the same - and while I was in Laredo I knew several *legal* immigrants who were, frankly, *pissed* that they'd spent years jumping through hoops more or less for nothing, because the gamble of entering illegally was such a toothless one.

Regards,
Nydia

A typical one of these schools will have the apprentices spending a *year* on... filing (the serrated triangular metal kind, not the storage kind). Why? Because after a year of filing, the student will have the necessary attention to detail and diligence to do precision work, and you can be sure that the kids won't think those jobs in the skilled trades are 'beneath them'. We need to start valuing, as a society, those jobs that literally build a community, and invest in them - and at the same time bring our immigration laws into some semblance of consistency even if that means allowing a larger number of *legal* immigrants into the country than we do now (much like we do with H1Bs) in those trades where there is a demonstrated shortage of qualified citizen applicants.




Hear hear!!

Well, this affects me directly. My wife and I actually get a cleaning person that "cleans our toilets" once a month. We made sure when we hired the cleaning company we use that they hire American citizens and have proper background checks.

Seriously, would I let a person that came to this country illegally into my house alone?

From the age of 15 an illegal immigrant worked for our family at our family business.

That man I will to this day trust with anything from the cash in my wallet, to my car and my house and family. He is a good friend, and a good person who never once took the quick and easy path to make a life for himself in this country.

He always has a job when he needs it, and we have bought him a car on 2 separate occasions.

I have had less luck with some "Americans"

would you have accepted him from day one without ever meeting him knowing he was here illegally?

would you have accepted him from day one without ever meeting him knowing he was here illegally?

Would you accept anyone that way?

From the age of 15 an illegal immigrant worked for our family at our family business.

That man I will to this day trust with anything from the cash in my wallet, to my car and my house and family. He is a good friend, and a good person who never once took the quick and easy path to make a life for himself in this country.

He always has a job when he needs it, and we have bought him a car on 2 separate occasions.

I have had less luck with some "Americans"

I think this also highlights a bit of the problems. I too have had numerous encounters with "illegals" in my area, and many of them are great people and hard workers who probably came from some sort of horrible shit-hole of another country if they are willing to sit and wait in front of the U-Haul or Home Depot all day hoping someone will hire them for a few hours. The US work ethic in in decline and we need these people in the work force, but we also need them to pay their dues like everyone else. We should be collecting their income taxes and social security payments, they should be required to get health care so you and I don't pay for them, they should be required to learn English ... ultimately, the entire illegal class right now is costing us more than if we were to make them all legal citizens. We aren't keeping them out of the country and our half assed attempts are simply a huge waste of capitol and resources. We need to either commit to "illegal" being illegal and really make it impossible to get into the country (or make the penalties for getting caught actually mean something) ... or nationalize the lot of em.

How much of this is due to the dollar being (possibly) overvalued?

More importantly, it's anywhere that people take your advice and try to race to the bottom. Maybe it'll be Detroit soon. You can't lower wages even farther below a living wage without eventually having caused an outcome like that.

There's absolutely no reason that people should have to work for less than a living wage. You can't just pretend that countries like Germany don't exist. It's completely possible to have successful industry without forcing blue collar citizens into poverty.

Tell workers in India and China to demand higher wages from their employers. Better yet, how about asking the Chinese government to value the Remembi (Chinese Yuan) at what it is, instead of keeping it artificially low against the US dollar in order to fuel a huge trade and labor cost imbalance. The Dollar has gone up and down quite a bit but it still gets me 6.827 to 6.832 RMB every time I get cash. I know you are referring to trades people and not so much manufacturing, but we NEED to have manufacturing jobs in the USA for a stable blue collar work force. Manufacturing used to be the backbone of the middle class, and not tradeswork. We tried to prop up our economy with an artificial housing market since its was a segment of the national economy that the Chinese and others could not penetrate (other than with things like substandard drywall). It did wonders for the trades. Lots got rich beyond their wildest dreams no matter what color your "collar" was. It was all a sham though. You still need peopling actually living in all that speculated housing who can afford to be there 10-20 years to get the equity, but instead we got just speculators buying homes low and hoping to flip them later but otherwise not live in them or pawn them off on folks who can't even afford to live in a van down by the river. Here we are left with a nation that doesn't make much because the over all cost of our labor is way WAY too high to compete with other nations. To the manufacturing sectors credit, the few that we have left are striving to go for a higher tier demographic and market goods that are quite a bit more expensive but also far superior in quality compared to Asian crap. AKA: see Germany. Germany makes some good stuff, employs many hard workers who make good wages but their products are clearly aimed at the high income tier who want better than just what the unwashed masses crave.

Also, China ranks 2nd in the total of Billionaires. Most of them made money in property and construction and not in the widget manufacturing biz. The difference here is that there are actual people with jobs that provide enough to sustain moving into all these projects that will provide solid equity. They don't make much money but the housing and everything else is priced in a manner they can afford. It helps that the demands of their lifestyle do not require a big paycheck.


It's a shame that you don't know enough about me or what I do to understand how far off the mark you are with all that rambling about server farms.

Should I really care what you do for a living? Whatever it is apparently it makes you the subject matter expert on anything technical.

Personally, I've never been as professionally successful as I have been in the past few years. Even as the economy crashed, things could barely have gone better for me recently. I am in exactly 0 danger of any Chinese or Indian company taking my job.

Well good for fucking you. Pat yourself on the back. Oh wait you just! Please, get richer. Someone has to pay for all these elephants in your livingroom you that you find easier to politely ignore the wealthier you get. Eventually you might see that getting illegals integrated with society is cheaper on the long run than going "Oh Noz teh brown peoplez are coming for my lewtz" or "They Took Ar Jobs!" ALA South Park style.

However, I come from a working class background. Hell, we used to buy building supplies from your namesake (the one in Toccoa) all the time. So, I've had a first-hand view of the evisceration of the working class that you seem so happy to support.
If you did construction in Atlanta then you know that most of those in the rougher building trades are illegals. Be it on organized crews or day labor. They dominate the trades there, yet they have no representation, health coverage (other than a few underground networks sympathetic to their cause) or advocates, unless they have a caring employer. They DO have a work ethic and a strong sense of family as well as community and an upbeat attitude of Can Do. They are there because they do more with less and employers don't have to offer them anything but a much lower wage which they will take readily. The lower wage is created because employers don't have to pay any form of deductions to the government for having illegals under their employ.

So what if suddenly employers now had to? Well, it would level the playing field and pay might get determined based on how well someone performs or the skill level required for the job and not so much on what side of the fence by the Rio Grande they came from.

I find it bizarre that you're fine with even further destroying these people, seeing as how you used to be in their shoes. Not to mention the fact that they pay your paycheck, while the illegals compete for your funding.

As long as people like you boast about all your good fortune during a recession, the USG will collect plenty of taxes to pay for Illegals and getting them integrated LEGALLY into the work force. That is unless you pursue dodging paying your taxes which seem to happen a lot the richer people get. Then once they start having to pay taxes themselves, things will only get better. And Nydia, yes many jobs are going begging but it still seems a lot of people are out of a job still. Its not because, IMHO that illegals will work for less. I see its more along the line of it costs less to move a factory to China, India or Mexico where the cost of doing business overall is VASTLY less. Undervalued currencies in places like China sure don't make matters any easier for our unemployed work force. It all adds up to making foreign labor far cheaper than hiring illegals in the States. I'm white. I have worked on an under the table basis before (illegally) in order to be able to compete with illegals. Still even then, large scale employers move over seas all the time. No environmental regulation. No OSHA. No FICA to pay. No Workman's comp. No need to pay a pension or worry about health care. No need to worry about payroll taxes. Heck a Chinaman dies, carry his carcass out and another one comes in fresh to take his place. Granted, some blue collar work can't be outsourced. Such as the trades and lower skill technical work (that oil filter again) but again, getting illegals vested into the system will put pressure on employers to be responsible for their workers no matter WHO they hire. It means an employee will cost about the same no matter what. If that is a race to the bottom than at least we are looking to fall into a more shallow well.

Stop, take a deep breath, walk away from the computer for a minute, then come back and read my post as a whole. Your response is almost completely non-sequitur. Are you just trolling?

I think this also highlights a bit of the problems. I too have had numerous encounters with "illegals" in my area, and many of them are great people and hard workers who probably came from some sort of horrible shit-hole of another country if they are willing to sit and wait in front of the U-Haul or Home Depot all day hoping someone will hire them for a few hours. The US work ethic in in decline and we need these people in the work force, but we also need them to pay their dues like everyone else. We should be collecting their income taxes and social security payments, they should be required to get health care so you and I don't pay for them, they should be required to learn English ... ultimately, the entire illegal class right now is costing us more than if we were to make them all legal citizens. We aren't keeping them out of the country and our half assed attempts are simply a huge waste of capitol and resources. We need to either commit to "illegal" being illegal and really make it impossible to get into the country (or make the penalties for getting caught actually mean something) ... or nationalize the lot of em.

It's an easy problem to fix. Just go back to properly punishing employers that disregard the law. The laws are already there, but we stopped enforcing them after Clinton.

Take away the carrot, and problem solved.

I read your post. No I am not trolling. I am disagreeing.

I think I agreed with you on the Germany bit, be it indirectly. Germany is also not pretending to be a mass market, lowest common denominator economy either, unlike the USA which is just now waking up to that. They make good products and by golly...you will pay good money for them! A Mercedes Benz is a great car. Even Volkswagen products are great but they are not cheap. The US is just not in a good position right now in the global market to make the highest quality stuff, due mostly to trying to position ourselves as a service economy and that is where our schools and other such tools focus their attention. We try to champion "Buy American" but that is a tough sell if our products are crap and our work force still demands top dollar to churn out rubbish.

As for Detroit.....they deserve whatever they have coming. Thank the labor unions for that as much as you can thank GM and the USG. Its unfortunate, but people should have wizened up a bit on the fact that the rest of the world can build better cars for less money.

Running off the lower end laborers who take whitey's jobs is still not going to solve the bigger problems. It might make us as crackers feel better about ourselves but not really do a whole lot to get people paid more nor is it going to save much in the way of public resources. Folks have to want to do the work, be willing to take some pay cuts and also apply themselves. There also needs to be good training for those who never dreamed of wanting to run a server farm or just were not smart enough to. Even then, many of those jobs are not in any danger of going away. India still employs American IT people to go over to India and do work for them.

Anyway, Nydia said it all much more elegantly then I ever could.

One last thing though:

It's an easy problem to fix. Just go back to properly punishing employers that disregard the law. The laws are already there, but we stopped enforcing them after Clinton.

Take away the carrot, and problem solved.

I think we can both agree that making employers responsible is the key here. The only way to get illegals honestly vested is to get them plugged into the same system that a legit employee is now in, regardless if they have a green card or not. It is almost like making drugs legal at that point because you now offer illegals an avenue to demand the benefits of the system and to demand making their employment "legit". There will no longer be the easy money that comes from doing something illegal. So either employers get them vested or they run them off and hire a legit American citizen because its less of a risk then getting caught with an Illegal. If it gets easier to get a illegal employee onto legal status than there is no excuse for not doling out some harsh punishment for those who are not in compliance if they so happen to get caught. I wish there was a post or information on how this whole thing would work and be policed at the employer level while still not putting smaller firms out of business or drastically raising prices at the consumer level to cover it. The money just doesn't come out of thin air regardless. Again it comes down to what is better on the long term. Letting them in or locking them out.

Oh goodness, get over that "white" guilt".

Likely not a one of you has had to deal with living as a minority, other than a small subsection who pretend to be a teacher..

Quit feeding into that bs....quit playing the Al Sharptons and pushing the pain into racial divisions...most of you haven't a clue......

I read your post. No I am not trolling. I am disagreeing.

I think I agreed with you on the Germany bit, be it indirectly. Germany is also not pretending to be a mass market, lowest common denominator economy either, unlike the USA which is just now waking up to that. They make good products and by golly...you will pay good money for them! A Mercedes Benz is a great car. Even Volkswagen products are great but they are not cheap. The US is just not in a good position right now in the global market to make the highest quality stuff, due mostly to trying to position ourselves as a service economy and that is where our schools and other such tools focus their attention. We try to champion "Buy American" but that is a tough sell if our products are crap and our work force still demands top dollar to churn out rubbish.

As for Detroit.....they deserve whatever they have coming. Thank the labor unions for that as much as you can thank GM and the USG. Its unfortunate, but people should have wizened up a bit on the fact that the rest of the world can build better cars for less money.

Running off the lower end laborers who take whitey's jobs is still not going to solve the bigger problems. It might make us as crackers feel better about ourselves but not really do a whole lot to get people paid more nor is it going to save much in the way of public resources. Folks have to want to do the work, be willing to take some pay cuts and also apply themselves. There also needs to be good training for those who never dreamed of wanting to run a server farm or just were not smart enough to. Even then, many of those jobs are not in any danger of going away. India still employs American IT people to go over to India and do work for them.

Anyway, Nydia said it all much more elegantly then I ever could.

One last thing though:



I think we can both agree that making employers responsible is the key here. The only way to get illegals honestly vested is to get them plugged into the same system that a legit employee is now in, regardless if they have a green card or not. It is almost like making drugs legal at that point because you now offer illegals an avenue to demand the benefits of the system and to demand making their employment "legit". There will no longer be the easy money that comes from doing something illegal. So either employers get them vested or they run them off and hire a legit American citizen because its less of a risk then getting caught with an Illegal. If it gets easier to get a illegal employee onto legal status than there is no excuse for not doling out some harsh punishment for those who are not in compliance if they so happen to get caught. I wish there was a post or information on how this whole thing would work and be policed at the employer level while still not putting smaller firms out of business or drastically raising prices at the consumer level to cover it. The money just doesn't come out of thin air regardless. Again it comes down to what is better on the long term. Letting them in or locking them out.

That's much better.

I strongly disagree that you can't buy quality American products though. I go far out of my way to buy American when I can possibly choose, and have never felt like I was sacrificing quality to do so.

Sometimes you have to pay a bit more, but I see that as well worthwhile. Especially since it all comes back around in the end anyway. The word protectionism is absurd, when it's just common decency that we should try to support our neighbors before we support people on the other side of the world.

Similarly, there's no shortage of legal citizens eager to do the work for a fair price. The guy that does my yard can barely compete with the illegals, and is happy to have the work. You should definitely come tell him that he's too lazy to do his job and that we need to have illegals to do it for him... :rolleyes:

And, it's silly to make it a "whitey" issue as you keep trying to. People of all races were doing those jobs before enforcement became so lax. Painting this concern as racism is not only a cop out, but flagrantly inaccurate.

If you don't believe businesses can be run without illegals, how do you explain that they managed to survive the Clinton administration, which was harshly proactive in raiding and penalizing employers breaking the law? Why are you making excuses for these people?

Sanchek, I try to buy American too, but unfortunately I just can't afford top of the line American stuff or even German stuff. As a result I shop eBay for used stuff made back when the US still made good, solid, affordable and reliable everyday things. I own 2 US built motorcycles and I drive a GM truck. When I do choose to buy a US made product new, its a tough decision. I try to get stuff that will hopefully outlast me and maybe hand down to the next generation.

I also have the unique perspective of having worked on a crew as a supervisor consisting of illegal workers. They were great guys. I even had dinner with some of their families. Great folks. I sometimes felt that yah...I am probably aiding and abetting in breaking the law right now but truth be told I was being paid under the table myself and I NEEDED THE JOB. I was in college. This was in a time where home builders would just not hire or pay for Legal workers for rough work like landscaping, framing or even masonry because they would not get any better a quality of work out of legal crews than they would get out of a Mexican one for half the money. It sucks, but its reality. No Trade Unions in Georgia allowed this to happen. Yes, I do hate Unions but in this case the lack of Unions and strict enforcement of licencses and oversight allowed it to happen. Yes, enforcement was lax and it allowed alot of bad habits to become entrenched, but it IS entrenched and it would be horrible to just give these people the shaft for the mistakes of employers and government in the past. Now is the time to "grandfather" and then get tough. Adding more workers to a market looking for jobs is always going to drive wages lower...so more "legal" workers looking for work serves up the damage to be taken on that.