Saturday, February 10, 2007

How Could I Agree With National Review Online ??

You don't suppose aliens abducted me and replaced me with another bearded one? I tell you, I am chagrined. But then, here's a Rove quote (attributed to an un-named Republican Congressman's wife) that you've got mull over:

Regarding BushCo amnesty/worker nonsense, "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

Mark Krikorian poses this conclusion "This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad."

Am I going to find fault with this? Maybe the security thing is a bit overblown, I don't have a real serious opinion on that, we've had a real hit from people who used visas to get in... How the left cannot get this through their heads is beyond me. There is nothing progressive in crushing blue collar wages. The "progressives" will talk about wealth disparity, they'll note that this "wonderful" economy isn't for the bottom end, and then they'll advocate cutting the throats of the workers because illegals are....special? they're picked on? they're what? They'll parrot the Free Marketers "it's not a zero sum game," when it is just exactly that, in fact it's a negative sum game. The damn jobs are being exported and insourced and there are a decreasing number of them and increasing competition for them.

Sure, right this minute the jobs with health hazards that include eye strain, carpal tunnel, and paper cuts are fairly safe. But if you think your wages aren't going into the toilet when the bottom falls out, you don't realize what your wage/salary is based on. A growing blue collar wage pushes up salaries and drags up low wage earnings. The numbers are all there, what you haven't seen in recent history is the bottom falling out, until the last dozen years, and now lower middle income is starting to slide. The plutocrats are doing well, this is all in their benefit. If BushCo is in favor of an economic model and you're not a plutocrat you'd better object. They're cutting your throats and getting you to smile about it.

What is particularly infuriating is for my stance to be lumped into racism, the major losers in this scenario are minorities! My industry, construction, was the gateway into decent paying work for minorities for decades. Now it's to be avoided unless all else fails. The largest concentration of illegal hirings is in construction. I don't give a damn if they pay taxes or not, the labor glut is killing this work. That's right, Americans won't come out, it's hard dangerous work and it doesn't PAY anything anymore. If you want to do a wage search by job descriptions you will find the same is true of just about anything that is comparably hard dangerous work.

I'm real sorry, there is no feel good solution. It's way past that time. Maybe after Ronnie Reagan's amnesty slamming the jobs shut would've mitigated itself, but that's not what was done, the flood gates were opened and now somebody is going to take a real beating. I feel rotten about this, I understand the plight of people fleeing crap countries, I admire a work ethic, and I don't care the least about ethnicity, but I do care about American workers more.

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