Also, I was dissapointed to see this article here.

In reality, nearly every study of illegal immigration’s effects on wages indicates that there is no negative effect on wages, or even employment, except among the lowest tier of workers — namely, high school dropouts and manual laborers.

This statement is so shallow and so casually cruel, I can hardly believe it has appeared on Firedoglake.

The effects of illegal immigrants vary wildy by state, and should therefore be left more up to the states.

FD I’ll give you a prime example of why LindaR is right. I was a landscape designer trying to set up shop in a fast growing high-end southwestern town. Work of any kind over $7.00 an hour was impossible to get. (As a bizarre side effect, there were also very few working age men in this town.)
An ad appeared in the paper at a high end nursery. They offered half the wages of anywhere else, but required fluent Spanish.

In towns like this they look for two-fers: try to combine our talents in with having us also work as nothing more chain gang masters.

It makes an honest worker like me feel dirty. Because most these ‘American citizens’ also lie and steal from most of these slaving workers.

One other BIG point. I recent listened to some big mouthed ‘American’ latino leader
chide American women for not having given birth to enough ‘workers’.

“And we’re here to fill the bill”, he said.

Does he also think our open spaces are mistakes?
Just waiting for more of his ‘little workers’
to move in and fill them up?

He and other like him show a blatant disrespect and ignorance of U.S. environmental issues and policies.
He shows an ignorant disrespect of American women’s rights to do with their vaginas as they see fit.
But worse, he show a very dangerous and ominous attitude towards the minority clans of Mexico and Latin America.

WE need to put a stop to all that shit right now.

We’d be a better country if we protected, rather than exploited, people who work for a living. That is what Dobbs and his ilk are addressing, albeit in a manner coarser than many might prefer.

Remember when Dobbs’s hobby-horse was outsourcing, and he named the firms that sent jobs overseas? Why isn’t he doing that for his new obsession? Because the employers use ass-covering agencies? That applied to corporate manufacturers and tech firms too.

And I can call Dobbs a nativist because he talks like a nativist and acts like a nativist. That his wife is Mexican just means he’s a nativist with hypermetropia. I don’t expect born-in-the-USAers to hear the dog-whistle politics at work, but the rhetoric of divide-and-conquer is pretty clear.

If you stop the companies from hiring undocumented workers the downward wage pressure will ease. As will the flow of workers across the borders.

Dobbs argues this, too. He is firmly in favor of going after the EMPLOYERS. He recognizes that they are the reason people are willing to risk everything to come here in the first place. They are not rushing here to do 2 hours of lawn work a day for some guy that picks them up from the Home Depot parking lot, that’s just a side effect of the problem.

For all those saying ‘you don’t watch Dobbs’, that’s not all he says. The leprosy lies are all about foreign disease carriers; the opposition to bilingual ballots is not about illegal immigrants. The line between legal and illegal is sufficiently blurred to be a stalking-horse for pure nativism.

I’m one of those immigrants that doesn’t stick out too much until I open my mouth: I’m white, Anglo, college-educated. But I’m still an immigrant: I’ve still waited long hours at DHS, still been treated like a third-class human, still been subject to opaque and self-contradictory regulations. And Dobbs’s nativism has sufficiently blurred the lines for my wife’s colleagues to assume that ‘immigrant’ now means ‘illegal’.

Now, all of you complaining about evil employers: are you buying meat and produce from firms that use legal labour? Because those firms aren’t turning a profit out of thin air.

At the Port of LA they did a random search for the Dept. of Homeland Security and over 10% of the drivers they surveyed were not documented.

The Port did NOT want background checks on the truckers.

My friend (an independent trucker) would never work there, thinks $9-10 an hour with no pay for waiting to be loaded (sometimes hours) is not worth it.

Phoenix Woman @ 17

LindaR: What are you talking about? Did you actually read all of David’s column?

I am very bothered by the anti Lou Dobbs crusaders who don’t seem to watch Lou Dobbs or know what he actually talks about.

But it is not about Lou Dobbs. It’s about jobs, job quality, job pay.

Over the past 20 years, the trades have been flooded with illegal workers, and that has driven down wages. Ask a carpenter, a meat cutter, or a grocery clerk whether illegal workers have affected his or her pay or working conditions.

Undocumented, illegal workers are the inverse of closing down the furniture factory and sending it to China, but they have the same effect: to weaken the labor force, drive down wages and benefits, and destroy the labor movement generally.

This has nothing to do with racism or Xenophobia. It is all about the money.

What I find casually cruel about the comment I quoted is the underlying assumption that some people don’t deserve a living wage because of how much education they have.

That is aristocratic thinking, and it is the beginning of tyranny. And I say down with tyranny.

Right on, Lindar. David Neiwert loves to rock’n roll, and rant.

His last rant on fdl was just as bad … another fine example of the slippery slope fallacy.