Who will do the “jobs Americans won’t do”? I mean, we pay our indigenous low skilled population welfare to NOT work, and then complain there’s nobody to do the job. This isn’t something new. We’ve been paying people to sit on their sorry butts and do nothing but breed more of the same for decades now. Those people don’t want a job. They however, expect EBT cards.
We can be idealists, and deny the role of government in public welfare, but until there is a change of heart among the people, the welfare state is with us.
In “The Unheavenly City”, sociologist Edward Banfield observes that there are two types of poor people:
1) Those who are poor by accident, i.e. job loss, injury, divorce, etc. They are industrious people who have been dislocated and dispossessed. They are not happy about their condition and want to get back to work and relative prosperity as soon as possible.
2) Those who don’t want to work, and who simply want to get by on the welfare system.
The two groups are not mutually exclusive. Depending on the structure of the program, welfare programs may give incentive for people to move from group 1 to group 2.
The challenge is how to design welfare programs to provide a safety net for very temporary assistance, so that a shock does not put people on the street, while not giving incentives for people to move from group 1 to group 2.
In other words, embody the moral intent of the program, without encouraging deterioration in other morals.
"They do the jobs Americans won't do" has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What it really means is that Americans won't do these jobs for Mexican or Guatemalan wages, since illegals can be paid under the table at a dollar or two an hour.
When I was a kid, there wasn't a single Mexican or Central American "migrant worker" in my town. Yet as I recall, somehow the berries and vegetables in the local farms were picked, the landscaping got done, and the trash cans were emptied.
If you buy the “jobs Americans won’t do” meme BS then you don’t belong here.