[lelio]

The new car wash with its foreign workers then drives the old car wash with its American workers out of business. Taxpayers are then forced to subsidize the newly unemployed—and pay for the medical care, food stamps, rent supplements, welfare, and schooling of all the new immigrants and their families, provide legal services when they get in trouble and pay for more cops to police their neighborhoods.

Good point, and is probably why the Kennebunkportians of this world are all for this amnesty: they don't live in the real world that the blue collars inhabit. They're not going to be affected by this as their own salaries won't go down, but they'll reap the benefits of cheaper services.

[jpl]

Good point, and is probably why the Kennebunkportians of this world are all for this amnesty: they don't live in the real world that the blue collars inhabit.

They're doing it because the sad truth is that they're simply too damn lazy to mow the lawn, and too damn cheap to pay the Anglo neighbor teenager eight dollars an hour to do it.

[elli1]

The new car wash with its foreign workers then drives the old car wash with its American workers out of business...

and then the new car wash is a smoldering pile of ashes...

[MattAMiller]

Good point, and is probably why the Kennebunkportians of this world are all for this amnesty: they don't live in the real world that the blue collars inhabit. They're not going to be affected by this as their own salaries won't go down, but they'll reap the benefits of cheaper services.

What are all these potential fruit pickers and hotel maids doing now? This isn't a question of Americans being unwilling to do these jobs it's a question of Americans doing other things. You could hiring them away with fantastic salaries for fruit picking but you'd have fewer people working for more money and that would result in fewer businesses. You also wouldn't be using the skills that most blue collar and white collar workers have.