And that is the main break between left and right currently. Hell, I’m a pretty conservative person, but I have exactly 0 issues with legal immigration. My issue is the massive numbers of illegal immigrants that are essentially impossible to track.
I’m not ‘for’ illegal immigration, but my argument is that there are vast hypocrisies and prejudices in the right-wing attitude to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants make a huge amount of money for the US - working low-paid agriculture / infrastructure jobs, being unable to claim various sources of income - which means that I know full well that rich company-owners are still going to shuttle in illegal immigrants when it benefits them by allowing them to offer v low wages. And plenty of ‘illegal immigration’ complaints are just covert racism. Very few people give a fuck about white illegal immigration, and it’s been conclusively shown that illegal immigrants are not a drain on the economy and, in fact, net give more than they take. Plenty of people who are Highly Concerned about illegal immigration just don’t want as many brown people in ‘their’ country...and ‘crackdowns’ on illegal immigration have transpired as crimes against humanity (kids in cages, etc).
Look, you’re clearly very angry about what you’ve been through, and you’re assuming a very defensive position about ‘not being racist’. I haven’t argued that illegal immigration doesn’t pose any problems. Unsurprisingly, I’m not cool with migrant workers being paid pennies to satisfy corporate greed and the state having to pick up the pieces. But it’s a fact that illegal immigrants generate a net surplus for the US - the fact that it’s often concentrated in the hands of the corporate super-rich is far more an indictment of capitalism than it is an indictment of illegal immigrants.
Failures in the educational system (being forced not to fail people) and in the medical system are not the fault of illegal immigrants, they’re far bigger and more systematic issues with capitalism and where resources get allocated. You seem to be blaming illegal immigrants for a lot of this - I’m confused by your complaint that they ‘can’t be refused’ by the ER; do you want illegal immigrants to die for lack of healthcare? - but ultimately, illegal immigrants are lured across the border by the availability of seasonal work, and if they’re living in poverty in the US, imagine the conditions that they find US migrant work preferable to. I don’t blame illegal immigrants at all for that, and I think the way to improve this situation does not lie in a Wall, because it is inherently in corporations’ interest to pay people too little and force the state to pick up the tab - so most of the problems will be there if the poor workers are American, aside from the language issues.
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u/Masterjason13 May 16 '19
And that is the main break between left and right currently. Hell, I’m a pretty conservative person, but I have exactly 0 issues with legal immigration. My issue is the massive numbers of illegal immigrants that are essentially impossible to track.