1srelluc
Diamond Member
'Jobs Americans Won't Do': The Lie That Broke a Nation and the Economic and Social Devastation It Hid
Explore the economic and social impacts of illegal labor in America.
pjmedia.com
I grew up forty miles north of Louisville, Ky., in a one-stoplight town held together by tobacco, construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s character. My dad ran a small construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco. My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12 or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old enough to hold a hammer.
Those jobs weren’t easy. Tobacco paid around $10 an hour in the early-to-mid 1980s, the equivalent of $30 today, and you earned every penny. The work was filthy, exhausting, and dangerous: Sticky sap soaked into your skin, July sun cooked you alive, and harvest season meant hatchets, long metal spikes, and dark, dusty barn lofts where one bad step could break a leg. But we did it gladly because the pay was good and the work meant something. Every kid I knew in high school worked tobacco, along with a good share of the adults. It was the backbone of the community.
Then illegal labor arrived, and things began to shift. The first wave hit the tobacco farms. Farmers who had paid teenagers and local laborers fair wages realized they could hire adults from Mexico and Central America for far less and house them in the kinds of conditions Americans would never tolerate: eight men to a sagging, leaking trailer with no electricity, no running water, no insulation. They were paid in cash, they didn’t complain, they worked year-round, and they had no leverage because they knew their employers could always get them deported.
Within a few seasons, American teenagers were no longer hired. Within a few more, the full-time local farmhands, many of whom had been in the area for generations, were gone, too. My parents saw exactly what was happening when one neighbor proudly moved an entire illegal crew into a run-down trailer on their property on a hillside, right in the center of a dairy cow pasture. They thought they had found a clever solution to their labor costs. My parents were disgusted, because they understood what it meant: the beginning of the end for the community’s economic life.
Every country on Earth is allowed to protect its culture and economy except one and it's by design.
The American work force was broken to break the political and economic power of the American citizenry.
Illegals artificially depress the wages of any given job/service. They will work for a low wage and live 10 people in a 3 bedroom apt.
They don't buy much stuff with their wages either, they send it out of the US to their home country.
