Posted on 12/28/2019 7:56:44 AM PST by karpov
...
Mr. Grant clearly remembered Aug. 7, the day the Trump administration performed sweeping immigration raids on seven chicken plants in central Mississippi. He remembered the news flashing on his phone: 680 Hispanic workers arrested. He remembers seeing an opportunity.
“I figured there should be some jobs,” he said.
He figured right.
The raids were believed to be the largest statewide immigration crackdown in recent history and a partial fulfillment of President Trump’s vow to remove millions of undocumented workers from the country. The impact on Mississippi’s immigrant community has been devastating. For nonimmigrant workers, the aftermath has forced them into a personal reckoning with questions of morality and economic self-interest: The raids brought suffering, but they also created job openings.
Some believe that the undocumented workers had it coming. “If you’re somewhere you ain’t supposed to be, they’re going to come get you,” said a worker named Jamaal, who declined to give his full name because Koch Foods had not authorized him to speak. “That’s only right.”
...
[T]he belief that native-born Americans are not sufficiently motivated to work persists, even among some African-Americans. Jeff White, a Morton-based builder and rental property owner, said so many chicken plant jobs became available in the 1980s because American-born residents “didn’t want to work, period.”
He added that he quickly learned he was not chicken plant material after landing a job at one shortly after high school. “I worked there three hours and 20 minutes,” he said, chuckling. “I didn’t even get the check. It’s too hard.”
For a while, Juan Grant said the hard work was worth it. With his better wage, he was starting to finally save a little. He talked about buying a used Honda, and about getting serious with his girlfriend.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Amen!
I live in the middle of the area where all these raids happened, here’s my opinion on some of the points.
First, e-verify is a joke. It’s designed to be a joke so as to enable illegals to defraud the system just like the rest of our immigration laws. Mississippi actually requires employers to use it but it’s irrelevant if it’s a useless system that is designed from the beginning to allow illegals to slip through.
Second, there is a huge population in the immediate area of these plants that is unemployed and perfectly capable of doing these jobs. They’re all on welfare though and welfare pays better than working in a chicken plant. That’s why the plants bring in illegals instead of hiring locals. I remember in the late 80’s when the plants went from almost all black workers to all illegals, it happened almost overnight and my dad had to hire a Spanish interpreter at his tax prep business. The illegals live 20 to a trailer, work hard for low wages, and show up for work on time. They don’t back talk when told to do something hard. The locals show up drunk or not at all, slack on the job and balk at hard work. Given the choice between getting $50k a year in welfare for nothing and making $30k in a chicken plant working in hard, disgusting conditions they pick the former so instead of paying more the plants bring in illegals. Trust me, they know they’re hiring illegals, they’ve known it all along. The whole act of not knowing they were illegal is BS, everybody knew they were illegals but all the plants care about is plausible deniability, don’t ask don’t tell.
Any fix is going to have to involve huge reforms to our bloated welfare system so locals can’t sit at home watching TV for more money than they can make working. I don’t see congress having the guts to cut money to the welfare queens, it’s too politically unpopular.
Plus, there’s also the fact that illegals use STOLEN IDENTITIES of American citizens to obtain those jobs.
“Plus, there’s also the fact that illegals use STOLEN IDENTITIES of American citizens to obtain those jobs.”
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Yes, that’s one of the main reasons E-verify is useless. An illegal isn’t going to walk in and give their real name and ID, they’re going to hand over stolen IDs or the ID of their cousin that has a green card. Employers aren’t required to actually verify that the ID presented belongs to the person in front of them, they just type it into the e-verify system which says yea or nay. Since the employer knows he isn’t going to be prosecuted for accepting an ID that obviously doesn’t belong to the person in front of them they just wink, type it in and play dumb about knowing that something’s up when the 5’2” mexican in front of them just handed them an ID of a 6’3” black guy.
The E-verify system is designed for fraud because that’s the way politicians want it and they don’t want it fixed. It’s much like voter ID, the reason politicians are against it is because it might actually cut down on fraudulent voting and they can’t let that happen.
I don’t subscribe either, but I can read every article. WaPo, too.
Quickly Ctrl-a and Ctrl-c to paste into an application like OneNote. Strips off all the HTML and captures most images. I get the content the first time 3 out of 4 times.
The image of Juan Grant was telling, as was the next section header, “The New Cotton Fields”.
And what happened to the tax dodging compa6that hired them?
I don’t want to read their garbage even if it is free. Free garbage is still garbage.
And the NYSlimes is now advertising an “expose`” on Gallagher and how some of the cowards around him “were so brave in their unprecedented action of betraying the brotherhood, but it didn’t go how they expected”...
If they honestly had to compete for American workers they could manage to improve the conditions. They’d also pay more so more automation would be justified, too.
For the right price, even that kid who lasted only 3 hours would have done the job.
Every city in America has garbage collectors and they are paid well above what we’re paying illegals to do our chicken work.
Atlantic City is like that; buses bring casino employees in from Philly because AC residents won’t work.
Yet when Americans lined up for jobs years ago at Midwestern meatpacking plants (after ICE raids), they were asked by a reporter why we were told Americans won’t do those jobs; they responded they had worked those jobs until they were laid off and replaced by illegals.
“The illegals live 20 to a trailer, work hard for low wages”
As Americans we should have a problem with this; expecting low-skilled American workers to accept Red Chinese slave conditions is ridiculous. Too many American employers want to evade the natural supply & demand dynamic of wages, so they simply use open borders to suppress wages. The decline in our standard of living, and more importantly, OUR POPULATION, is clear for all to see.
I agree with you. It distorts the labor market and allows employers to end run the laws of supply and demand. I'm for closing the borders and deporting all illegals, then the people running these chicken plants will have to pay fair market wages to get workers. Don't want to pay enough, fine, go out of business. The welfare state has to be reformed in the process though, welfare is competing with employers for low wage workers.
The standard line from the chamber of commerce and cheap labor republicans is that the price of food will go up. That's fine, the price of food is already artificially depressed because of the illegals, you pay one way or another for that cheap chicken or cheap lettuce. Kick the illegals out, make the processors pay a market wage, and let the market decide what chicken or lettuce costs. I don't remember reading anywhere in the constitution that there's a right to cheap chicken or cheap lettuce.
I don’t have a friend at the Mt Olive pickle plant, so I can only tell you about the Butterball plant— the native born do not work. They sit back and collect EBT benefits.
I never bought into the “rising food prices” bit - primarily because millions of these illegals aren’t gainfully employed at all, and they are most definitely a financial drain here in NJ. Their anchor babies in particular cause school taxes to shoot up; they should be declining as our student body shrinks.
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