Illegal Immigration: From My Perspective

In a recent article I quoted Mark Krikorian as saying that we truly don't need illegal slave labor. I'd like to expand on that a little bit from my own experience.

Whenever my wife and I stand in line at McDonald's or Burger King I can't help but count the number of people working behind the counter. it's usually somewhere between twelve to fifteen employees bumping into each other in the cramped spaces behind the registers.

I'm a chef, which is why I notice things like that, but there's another reason too. Starting out, one of the first places I worked was a hot dog stand. It was actually one of the best and tightest run businessess I've ever worked for. We made almost everything from scratch and won a number of best of the region contests in the local papers.

For the first several years I worked there we employed no illegal aliens. The total staff ran to about twelve employees and on an average day we had 3-4 employees doing the same work that it takes 12-15 employees to do today at one of the major chains.

Why is that? The larger chains pare each job down to the bare minimum. A burger flipper flips burgers, a cashier cashiers. At the hot dog stand every employee learned the entire business from top to bottom. You started as a dishwasher and worked your way up. Everybody started as a dishwasher and worked thier way up into other positions, usually through attrition.

This was an excellent system and built a lot of espirit de corps into what was an otherwise quotidian job. People took a lot of pride in thier work, I know I certainly did. But then something changed. They started hiring illegal aliens, in short order the whole system broke down.

Instead of the boot camp like training that had predominated in the past, now, when we lost an employee, instead of hiring a dishwasher we would hire a cook. Instead of hiring a dishwasher we hired managers, when up until that point every manager had started as a dishwasher and had literally worked every position in the restaurant and knew every position in the restaurant.

Before hiring illegals we had never had a bad health inspection. we usually received a perfect score and we took a lot of pride in keeping the place clean. That went rapidly downhill after hiring illegals. Suddenly instead of perfect scores of a hundred, we were getting sixties and fifties, that hurt, a lot.

Before the influx of illegals we were very well compensated, and the owners made a sack full of loot. I know how much they made from a single hot dog stand and it was a pretty damn healthy profit. As it should be in a capitalist society. However, we are told that businesses cannot survive without illegal slave labor.

I think we need to make a distinction between what a business owner would like to make and what they ought to make. I think ethics should play a part in operating a business. Ethics and capitalism shouldn't be mutually exclusive terms. Captain's of industry have used illegals to batter American employees into accepting horrible wages and even worse working conditions. I know because my industry has been dismantled by the influx of illegals.

Wages are low, working conditions are more dangerous, benefits are a thing of the past. Historically this was not the case, at least in my lifetime, and yet I'm told these businesses cannot survive without taking predatory advantage of thier employees. yet they did in the past, so what's changed.

I will admit it's harder to start a business without illegals, but is that a good argument? Does the pursuit of capitalism remove all moral questions from the table except profit? I submit that businesses do better when they have happy, healthy, loyal staff. Make more money and operate more smoothly when the staff is composed of citizen employees who have ties to the community.

But it's easier to have slaves. Always has been. A commenter told me to get real, be realistic he said. Who will pick the crops, who will do the low pay work?

I'm sure people approached the original Republicans with similar entreaties. "be reasonable" they would say, "how will we get along without slaves?" they would ask, acting all hard headed pragmatic. But it wasn't true was it?

Worker productivity soars when employees are treated well, it's a proven fact. yet we're told that slaves work harder and are more reliable. I am putting it out there. If you support what is in fact de facto slavery, I need you to make that case to me without euphimisms and excuses. If you truly believe that the greatest nation on earth can't think it's way to a better system than slavery, well, I find that pretty depressing.

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illegal immigration
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