Here we are, watching atrocities being committed, parents hanging themselves in cells over the loss of their children, government enforcement agencies operating in secret, trafficking children around in the dead of night without oversight, private militias patrolling our borders with semi-automatic rifles, and withdrawing from the U.N. over Human Rights violations. All of this is happening, and so many people are entertaining this, even in their outage.
Here’s the rub, people. Immigration is a non-issue. Period.
We should have never gotten anywhere near this point, and the argument needs to stand there, and stay there. Immigration, ‘legal’ or otherwise, is a non-issue.
Decades of studies have been done on this non-issue. It’s a non-issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/…/immigrants-arent-taking-americans…
https://www.vox.com/…/172…/undocumented-immigrants-pay-taxes
Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, pay taxes, often more than ‘native-born’ citizens.
Immigration has an effect on employment in some areas, but it is wildly misrepresented.
This is the ratchet effect. The right pulls its weight so far to the right that liberals then ratchet its movement, but do not pull back to the left. They stop the movement towards the right, like a ratchet, and the right takes a small break, gathers up its strength and does it again. Don’t entertain this. Don’t entertain that this is a real issue, even in the interest of ‘trying to find common ground’.
I’ve seen multiple people try to take an approach of understanding, “well hey, look, I can see how we need to deal with the immigration problem.” Even Sanders keeps saying this. No. We don’t. It’s a non-issue.
If you have a problem with immigrants taking jobs at reduced wages, stop for a moment and consider the reality of the situation.
- Immigrants are not driving wages down, capitalism is. Owners are choosing to pay immigrants lower wages in order to increase a profit margin and keep it for themselves.
Even the one guy who actually claims that immigrants DO drive down wages says this, (although he says it all sideways):
“Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants — from the employee to the employer.”
https://www.politico.com/…/trump-clinton-immigration-econom…
But that statement is broken. Immigrants aren’t redistributing that wealth, because immigrants aren’t CONTROLLING it. Immigrants aren’t the ones owning the means of production, and choosing to pay those wages. Capitalism is funneling wealth from the bottom to the top, just like it was designed to do. Claiming that immigrants are redistributing wealth when they’re being paid pennies for their labor is enough to drive one mad.
- Immigrants are not driving wages down, unions drive wages UP, and immigrants’ status as non-citizens prevents them from utilizing them.
Homeland security, INS, and ICE serve as tools of capitalist owners to terrorize workers, and continue to exploit their labor and subject them to poor conditions. They get called in by managers in workplaces where the workers start to organize and lobby for higher wages and better conditions. For all of these people that claim to be so stringent about immigrants supposedly ‘breaking the law’, why are they completely unconcerned with owners paying people under the minimum wage? The problem is not people coming to this country. It is exploitation by the upper class.
We could open our borders today, and not only would we not suffer ill effects, but things would be better. If people are allowed, legally, to come here and work, owners aren’t able to use American gestapo to bust unions.
I’m going to repeat that: we could open the borders right now, and conditions would improve drastically.
No more union busting via ICE. No more children ripped from their families. No more sub-minimum wage jobs when owners are not subverting wage laws by hiring people our country decided aren’t people.
Immigration is a non-issue.
Another statement I saw someone make: we especially need to control immigration if we ever get socialized medicine! No we don’t. Oregon and Massachusetts both have essentially free healthcare for people in poverty already, and a californian can move to oregon or massachusetts right now, without causing a crisis. (Sure, Oregon bitches about Californians, but Oregon has a long-standing history of racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy. They been bitching about californians since I was a teenager, at the very least.)
The problem is power, exploitation, and capitalism. Capitalism tricked people into thinking other people in their same class were their enemy, and that their owners were the good guys. And that the owner’s thugs: ICE, the Police, etc, were looking out for them. Capitalism and colonialism utilized racism to do this. The people willing to work in harsh conditions for too little money aren’t your enemy. The people choosing to pay them those wages are. The people backing the immigration issue. The people profiting from children in cages.
REFRAME THE ARGUMENT. It is on the right to explain themselves, as to why they are so frightened of Latinx people coming to this country. Make them explain themselves, and when they say the things I’ve addressed here, give them the fucking receipts. It’s a bullshit issue.
Open borders are not that radical. We do it internally in our states, and the EU does it.
The only thing truly radical about open borders is that they challenge white supremacy and capitalism…
GOOD.
Open them and abolish ICE.