Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 10:31 am
I live in Phoenix, R/S. There is a Mexican area in the next town over. It's no big deal. I've even learned to read the signs.
I don't think your analogy holds at all. I grew up in NY where immigrants are a fact of life. My grandparents came over in 1912 from Italy. My dad's generation was fully assimilated. To this day, no one gets excited about immigrants....as long as they are white.
These people come here to work....not pillage. There are American employers who are only too glad to have them. I read a letter to the editor the other day in which the writer opined that the problem with llegals was that they depressed the wage scale. Something like, "there are no jobs that Americans won't do....they just won't do them for coolie wages." He's right in a sense. But he fails to look at the long term result of such thinking. If American farmers have to pay three times the wage for lettuce pickers then American-produced lettuce will cost 3 times that of Mexican produced lettuce. If you think that America's Soccer Moms are going to pay $3 for a head of lettuce instead of $1 on the next rack you are sadly mistaken. All this will achieve is to drive American farmers out of business and shift one more industry over the border where they will gladly export food to us.
I don't think your analogy holds at all. I grew up in NY where immigrants are a fact of life. My grandparents came over in 1912 from Italy. My dad's generation was fully assimilated. To this day, no one gets excited about immigrants....as long as they are white.
These people come here to work....not pillage. There are American employers who are only too glad to have them. I read a letter to the editor the other day in which the writer opined that the problem with llegals was that they depressed the wage scale. Something like, "there are no jobs that Americans won't do....they just won't do them for coolie wages." He's right in a sense. But he fails to look at the long term result of such thinking. If American farmers have to pay three times the wage for lettuce pickers then American-produced lettuce will cost 3 times that of Mexican produced lettuce. If you think that America's Soccer Moms are going to pay $3 for a head of lettuce instead of $1 on the next rack you are sadly mistaken. All this will achieve is to drive American farmers out of business and shift one more industry over the border where they will gladly export food to us.