There is undocumented labor all over this area. It has always been laughable to me how two faced we are about this issue. We talk about the wall, close the border, send them home-- but it's *wink wink* when it comes to illegal labor. It's not my imagination. I know people who employed illegal labor because they couldn't get people to do the jobs. My late wife went and photographed people who worker in agriculture. She spoke with the roofers who did our roof. She and I visited little bodegas out in the sticks where these people lived.
I'm not an open border person. We should have nailed the borders shut after 9/11. But I'm also not a let's talk shit until it's normalized person. We are obviously dependent on illegal labor. It's not like these people are coming here and all starting businesses. And we are obviously increasingly dependent because labor from south of the border is increasingly common in more places. I remember my wife talking with guys in her hometown in rural Wisconsin. The economy had imploded, but it was ripe pickings for people willing to work back breaking work with no benefits and no protections for a few bucks.
I remember Alabama chasing out the illegal farm labor. An Alabama university did an economic post mortem on it. Rotted veggies. Check. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Those workers paid rents, bought shit. Because of their economic class, they spent basically every cent they earned. Walmart. Fast food. Gasoline. Home shit. A total of a billion.
Never a mention of the American citizens who employ these peeps.
It sounds like this is a solution discussed long ago and long abandoned for the cultural war. Finding immigration categories where workers can have some basic human dignity and be afforded a classification where they have responsibilities to, and rights afforded by, society. And the ability of employers to have labor they can depend on.
