[flying Elvis]

The lawyer for the four former workers, Bobby Lee Cook, is who the character Matlock was based on. If he's going after the carpet mills for hiring illegals, then they are in big trouble. I hate what the carpet mills have done to North Georgia. Everyone wrings their hands in fear of the carpet industry leaving North Georgia and going to Mexico. It really does not matter, for the industry has brought Mexico to North Georgia in the form of illegals.

[lentulusgracchus]

If you had to choose, then having your state back and being able to control your own destiny would be the preferred outcome. You can always find something to do......or invent it if necessary, like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison did.......but if your future is in the hands of the lords of money who don't care a whit about you, then perhaps it were better if they hied themselves off to Mexico, to batten on the people there.

After all, they came to Georgia in the first place, just to jilt the New Englanders they'd used and abused for 100 years.

In hiring illegals, the employers are participating in the illegals' arbitraging of living costs in the States versus Mexico. In Mexico, living costs were held down for a very long time by government subsidies of an assortment of staple goods, foodstuffs, and services. The cost of living still reflects the effects of those subsidies in the Mexican wage structure, which hasn't yet risen to reflect the removal of the subsidies because Mexican labor has little bargaining power -- because of high birth rates which were subsidized for 75 years by low living costs.

So, in effect, Mexican wage structures still reflect the effects of three generations of state socialism, and U.S. employers can participate indirectly in the socialist low-wage/labor-cost subsidy by hiring Mexicans in preference to Americans.

And of course they say things like "Americans don't want to work" -- and they always leave out the rest of the sentence, ".....at the Mexican labor-cost arbitraged wages we want to pay."