Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Nowhere Man]

I started a new thread to move from the day of boycott to the issue in general. I'm also borrowing off a thread posted in Off-Topic, since I think this is a more appropriate place to discuss the issue.

Honestly, I hold little vested interest in illegal immigration, one way or the other. I'm not really bothered by the status quo. Of course, people dying in various ways because of how they're smuggled is disturbing. However, the actual presence of illegal immigrants seems mutually beneficial to me.

Reading over relevant discussion of there being "Jobs Americans won't do", it seems that, by and large, there are no such jobs. I will note though, where I come from, Mexicans are primarily hired to pick cabbage. Anyone who's smelt a cabbage field might understand why this is a less-than-desireable job. It's also seasonal. Nevertheless, it is fair to guess that the cabbage farms also hire Mexicans because they get them below the minimum wage.

Then there comes the argument that there are "jobs Americans won't do at that price". I think this is a better, more refined argument.

Mind you, type "Jobs Americans won't do" into google and you'll have a gaggle of conservative sites with people assailing this "myth".

In reading them, they note a couple of things:

1) When migrants were forced out of the tomato industry, the industry adapted by automating tomato harvesting.

Flip side: Which also means that eliminating migrant tomato-pickers didn't create jobs for Americans.

2) They note that illegals only make up 4% of our labor force.

Flip-side: Fair enough, but 4% could also be considered a significant part of the labor force. It's a matter of how you see it.

3) They note that the prices of produce would

[igotthisguitar]

Most i feel are naturally supportive of immigration, provided of course it's done by the book ( i.e. "LEGAL" )

[Ya-ta Boy]

[wannago]

[Octavius Hite]

Well not to be to out there but the US has invaded most Latin American countries over the course of its history so maybe people have a point?

[Wangja]

[Gopher]

[Privateer]

This has been suggested many times before: enforce the laws requiring employers to hire legals and pay at least minimum wage, thereby removing the incentive for employers to hire illegals, and thereby removing people's incentive to become illegals.

It seems like an effective solution people from all parts of the political spectrum ought to be able to get behind.

It won't solve the problem overnight but then nothing will.

[Nowhere Man]

[Bulsajo]

Mexican Immigrants in America
Embassy, April 12th, 2006
COLUMN
By Gwynne Dyer

Two things about American immigration are different. One is that the United States is the only large First World country that has a long land border with a Third World country. The other is that only the United States, amongst developed countries, possesses a politically powerful domestic lobby that actively wants a large, steady flow of unskilled immigrants, preferably illegal ones. Taken together, these two oddities explain why immigration in America is such an explosive topic, and why Congress is unable to pass any new law regulating the flow.

The collapse last Friday of bipartisan negotiations in the Senate on a new immigration bill probably marks an end for this year of the attempt to impose some order on what many Americans see as out-of-control illegal immigration. What split both parties and ultimately doomed the law were President George W. Bush's proposals for an amnesty for nine million of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the United States, and a new programme to admit an extra 400,000 temporary "guest workers" every year.

The House of Representatives recently passed a much tougher law involving serious penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants and the construction of a 700-mile (1,100-km) fence along much of the Mexican border, but with Congress now in recess for two weeks, that is probably dead too. There is probably neither the time nor the political will for the Senate to have another go at the issue before the elections that are due this November.

What this is all about is Mexicans. The United States, contrary to local belief, does not have a particularly high proportion of recent immigrants compared to other industrialized countries. No more than one person in eight is foreign-born in the U.S., considerably less than in neighbouring Canada (where the ratio is one in five) and not much more than in large European countries like Germany, France or Britain. But nowhere else has so many illegal immigrants, nor so many who are unskilled workers, nor such a high share from a single country.

Mexican nationals make up the great majority of the "undocumented workers" (illegal immigrants) in the U.S. economy. Their large numbers and high visibility give rise to paranoid fears among some longer established Americans that the United States is becoming a de facto bilingual country. They also stir a wider concern that this large and vulnerable work-force of illegal immigrants is deliberately maintained by employers as a way of keeping the wages of unskilled workers down.

The language issue is largely a red herring: most newly arrived Hispanic families have become fluent in English by the second generation, just as previous waves of immigrants did before them. But the argument that illegal immigrants take jobs away from many equally unskilled native-born Americans, and drive wages down for the rest, has never been convincingly refuted, even though it remains politically incorrect.

It's not that native-born American high-school drop-outs "won't do those jobs." They just won't do them for five or eight dollars an hour -- or at least, a lot of them won't. Many poor Americans simply have no choice, however, and end up working long hours in miserable jobs for half the money that an unskilled French or German worker would earn for doing the same work.

Illegal immigrants are not a majority of the workers in most of the fields where they find jobs; unskilled Americans are. (The only job in which there are almost no native-born Americans is seasonal agricultural stoop labour.) Professors George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of the National Bureau of Economic Research recently calculated that the real wages of U.S. high-school dropouts would have ended up eight percent higher in 1980-2000 if unskilled (and mostly illegal) Mexican workers had been kept out, even if higher-skilled immigration had continued at the existing rate.

One of the most ridiculous myths of American political discourse is the argument that the U.S.-Mexican frontier is too long to police effectively and humanely. Here is a country that has landed people on the Moon, and that currently maintains an army of 140,000 soldiers in a hostile country halfway around the planet, claiming that it cannot build and maintain a decent fence along the Mexican border. Instead, we have been treated to a 30-year political charade in which little bits of fence are built in the traditional urban crossing places, thus forcing illegal Mexican immigrants out into the desert where many of them die --but enough still get through to keep America's low-wage industries fully manned.

Living right next to Mexico, a country where a large proportion of the population lives in Third-World conditions, does create a special immigration problem for the United States, but it is far from insoluble. It has only remained unsolved for decades because powerful economic interests in the United States, with great influence over Congress, do not want it solved.

All the other business that has been so earnestly debated in recent week in the United States Senate -- quotas for guest-workers, amnesties for long-resident illegal immigrants, and so on -- is just the political cover that is needed to keep illegal immigrant labour plentiful and unskilled wages low.

[Nowhere Man]

[igotthisguitar]

Immigration Sweep Brings Fear to Community
By ELLIOT SPAGAT, Associated Press Writer
Sun Jun 18, 5:28 PM ET

SAN DIEGO - Fewer parents are walking their children to school in this border city's Linda Vista neighborhood. The crowd of day laborers huddled in a parking lot outside McDonald's has dropped by half.

A sense of unease has spread in this community of weather-worn homes since immigration agents began walking the streets as part of a stepped-up nationwide effort targeting an estimated 590,000 immigrant fugitives.

Other illegal immigrants are being rounded up along the way.

Juana Osorio, an illegal immigrant from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, said her neighbors have largely stayed indoors since agents visited her apartment complex June 2.

"People rarely leave their houses now to go shopping," Osorio, 37, said as she clutched a bottle of laundry detergent in a barren courtyard. "They walk in fear."

Her husband, Juan Rivera, 29, has stopped taking their two children to the park on weekends. "We want to go out but we can't," said Rivera, a construction worker.

In a blitz that began May 26 and ended Tuesday, federal agents arrested nearly 2,200 illegal immigrants, including about 400 in the San Diego area � more than any other city.

It was the latest salvo in a crackdown on illegal immigration that has included arrests of nearly 1,200 workers at a supplier of wooden cargo pallets and the deployment of National Guard troops on the Mexican border. Meantime, Congress is considering a broad overhaul of immigration laws.

All this has immigrants on edge, even in places such as San Diego that are home to thousands of illegals, many of whom have lived openly for years.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said about half the 2,179 people arrested in the 19-day nationwide raids � dubbed Operation Return to Sender � had criminal records, including convictions for sexual assault of a minor, assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping.

While criminals were targeted, agents also asked neighbors and curious onlookers about their immigration status and, if they were in the country illegally, they got hauled away for deportation, too.

"We can't just turn our heads away from people we find along the way," said Lauren Mack, an ICE spokeswoman in San Diego.

Agents staked out homes to determine when best to come knocking, interviewed apartment managers and checked credit reports and loan applications.

Since last fall, the agency has increased its fugitive task forces nationwide from 18 to 38, and plans to expand to 52 teams by the end of the year. The Bush administration has proposed a total of 70 teams.

San Diego's Linda Vista is a hardscrabble neighborhood of two-story homes favored by Mexican, Filipino and Vietnamese immigrants. As in other cities, the fugitive task force arrived in unmarked vehicles and agents were dressed like civilians. Mack said agents wore something to identify them as law enforcement, perhaps an agency insignia on a shirt or a bulletproof vest marked POLICE.

Day laborer Fredy Calleja said his uncle was arrested about two weeks ago while watering plants outside his home. An agent asked him about someone suspected of selling drugs in the area. When the uncle said he didn't know the drug dealer, the agent asked if he was in the country illegally and arrested him when he said he was.

Calleja said his uncle was deported but then sneaked across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. He was back in San Diego a little more than a week later.

Since the blitz began, Serafina Morales has been looking for unmarked white or black vehicles whenever she leaves the house.

"We're all scared to go to school," she said. "Many of us are letting our children walk alone."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060618/ap_on_re_us/immigration_arrests_fallout

[daskalos]

[bucheon bum]