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Yep, exactly: construction, hotel cleaners, fruit pickers, meat packers … all of them are complicit in this blatant end run around the law. To be fair, though, many immigration restrictionists need to take a good, hard look in the mirror and come to grips with the fact that if a genie magically granted their stated policy goals, a trip to Disneyworld, or even just to the grocery store, would suddenly get a whole lot more expensive.
It doesn't even have to be that way.
The illegals staffing some of our most crucial industries are a tacit admission that labor "protections" are too restrictive and burdensome to at least these businesses. It's a weird role-reversal where conservatives insist on keeping the strict labor practices and instead enforcing them better (for benefit of citizen laborers), and liberals recognize that illegals are better off when they're not priced out of the labor pool (as would low-skill citizens if they were allowed to lower their bids to the same level).
I don’t entirely disagree, but another aspect of the problem is that low-skill citizens can just get on disability or welfare, which effectively acts as a wage floor, while illegals generally have no such option. Hence the phenomenon mentioned upthread, that US citizens dysfunctional enough to want these jobs are too dysfunctional to actually do them (penal servitude, perhaps, excepted).
Now I’m by no means opposed to making welfare and disability less accessible to people who could work but just don’t feel like it, but in the Year of our Lord 2026, do you really think that even if we could wave a magic wand and stop paying (native) bums and layabouts to bum about and get laid, they’d just march off to the stockyards of Chicago or the fields of Salinas, roll up their sleeves, and do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?
I actually do think that. What I don't believe is that America wouldn't tear itself apart over whether to wave the magic wand.
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