Thread: Endorsing plan to farm out dirty work creates moral problems

Endorsing any plan that farms out our dirty work creates moral problems, says DAVID PERDUE

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... c8499.html

December 28, 2006

The 80th Texas Legislature and the 110th U.S. Congress will convene early January, and one important issue each body will address is immigration reform. In finalizing new laws, lawmakers must avoid promulgating laws that conceal the presence of slavery. That may result either in granting amnesty to all or part of the estimated 12 million Mexican immigrants illegally residing in America or by implementing guest worker programs.

Neither is the solution; they only create new immigration problems.

The types of employment such guest worker programs will affect differ greatly from the H1B INA program that allows hiring nonimmigrant aliens with a bachelor's degree or equivalent to work in specialty occupations. H1B applies to various professional occupations (teachers, doctors, etc.); guest worker programs being considered today are for low-end employment – "jobs American workers don't want to do."

What happened to the gumption Americans once had in working hard for everything we have? Why do we need a select group of people to do our dirty work? Isn't that what Southern plantation owners did that eventually started a civil war?

When did we become incapable of mowing our lawns and doing municipal, construction or factory work? Thousands of people from the so-called Greatest Generation spent years working in Swift & Co. meatpacking plants – many in Fort Worth – and many retired from those plants. Now, because American workers don't want to do that kind of work, we farm those jobs out to illegal immigrants – or, with anticipated guest worker laws, to uneducated nonimmigrant aliens. We created the very problems our local, state and U.S. governments are trying to fix.

To single out a specific class of individuals to do America's dirty work is slavery. This sends a message to the rest of the world that Americans are lazy and looking for cheap slave labor from our neighbors south of the border. Such amnesty or guest worker laws will complicate existing immigration laws by inviting more falsified documents for obtaining legal U.S. employment, and they will spread our immigration agents sparsely in a crowded field.

Although a true system of slavery requires official, legal recognition of ownership, widespread tacit approval (with a wink and a nod) with local authorities and employers will exist in such guest worker and amnesty programs. Explicit ownership of a Mexican individual will not exist on paper, but it will in principle. Mexican immigrants will become America's newest source for slavery. Lawmakers and Hispanic advocate groups should resist that.

Federal immigration laws must apply to all nationalities. When new laws open the doors to one specific group of immigrants, they must ethically and morally open the doors to immigrants from any country and have proportionally balanced quotas in place, neither obliging nor disobliging a particular nationality. How can such laws be selective and make distinctions based on class, category, religion or nationality without being discriminatory?

People of other nationalities are waiting for the opportunity to come to America and start new lives or to join family members already residing here legally. It is unfair to deny them that opportunity in favor of others who illegally jumped ahead of them and who are willing to work for inadequate wages.

It's a good guess that American Civil Liberties Union lawyers are waiting in the wings to challenge such reform laws. Who could blame them? It would be another embarrassing moment in America's history when a contemporary government is tried and found guilty of the same crime thousands of Americans died fighting against in the Civil War. Those legal challenges would be costly, tied up in court for numerous years, and most likely confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Immigrants are an essential part of building America's posterity. We should welcome an immigration policy that is fair, sound, all-inclusive and legal.

Yet we must avoid the reality of utilizing slave labor simply because our southern borders conveniently provide the resources for filling jobs we don't want to do.

We don't need another embarrassment the magnitude of what we had with southern plantation slave owners. We don't need to give the world another reason to censure America. We don't need another civil war.

David Perdue of Arlington is a retired GM assembly plant worker and a Community Voices volunteer columnist. His e-mail address is mygen40@yahoo.com.

Wow, I really don't know where to start.

Kind of a catch 22 isn't it? Get the feeling this is is a no win situation?

Slave labor my foot...most of them make more than many Americans!

Boy these people are using every word in the book they can find to further their propaganda. Racist,Holocaust,Slaves, Nazis,Hitler. One thing that is never mentioned is that when people are victims of said subjects you never see them flocking to the country that is the culprit as they are flocking here. Talk about them putting their foot in their mouths. And they are coming here illegally to be slaves and the victims of Holocaust? What insanity!

I can't believe this POS columnist has the unmitigated gall to blame this illegal invasion on "lazy" Americans who will no longer do "dirty work"!

What, no mention of the formerly well paying employers, who have systematically replaced their American workforce with cheap illegal alien labor who don't dare demand health benefits (because they already get them for FREE!).

What, no mention of our Government, which has, for 20 years (since the last "amnesty"), turned a blind eye to these escalating slave labor practices....by it's utter failure to enforce ANY of the "strict" employer sanctions that it promised?

We, the people, were set up by a government that now consists of a who's who list of America's weathiest elites (how else to explain Ted Kennedy's eternal post). Unless, or until we admit that we, the people, have NO control of our destiny as long as these self serving freaks are in at the helm, we are simply spinning our collective wheels.