The United States, on the other hand, is rich and needs workers who will take jobs Americans don’t want, for lower wages than Americans will accept. (Try this thought experiment: Imagine suggesting that your teen-ager take a summer job picking melons for 12 hours a day in California.) If, by magic, the Minutemen’s dreams were granted overnight — if the border were sealed and the estimated 11 million people living in this country illegally were deported — America would most likely be unrecognizable, and not in a good way. Crops would rot in the fields, bathrooms would stay dirty, mothers of small children would be stuck at home. America is addicted to cheap labor, and withdrawal is beyond contemplation.... is the most rank, murky and still fuming Bovine Excrement.
A total lie. A complete delusion.
The thought experiment suggests that there aren't American teenagers already working 12 hour days in hard jobs -- there are, there always have been, and will be. The awful propagandist's trick employed in such a bald lie of a suggestion is that many readers wouldn't themselves have their own children in such postion and are loathe to imagine it -- yet it is the case that American teenagers are as hard-working as any illegal!
Nor would fruit or produce rot in the field -- I remember nearly fifty years ago hearing the same argument for providing cheap farm labor. Back when we had far less illegals. In the ebb and flow since not one crop has so rotted. Farmers are quick to adjust and new technology is rarely adopted when labor is so cheap. We would likely improve our yields if we removed the incentive to not improve manual harvest techniques.
There are NO jobs Americans will not do.
It truly was. I'm printing out and saving that article in case I ever run out of toilet paper. I'm going to quote it below, so hide your eyes:
"The United States, on the other hand, is rich and needs workers who will take jobs Americans don't want, for lower wages than Americans will accept. (Try this thought experiment: Imagine suggesting that your teen-ager take a summer job picking melons for 12 hours a day in California.) If, by magic, the Minutemen's dreams were granted overnight — if the border were sealed and the estimated 11 million people living in this country illegally were deported — America would most likely be unrecognizable, and not in a good way."
"Crops would rot in the fields, bathrooms would stay dirty, mothers of small children would be stuck at home. America is addicted to cheap labor, and withdrawal is beyond contemplation."