Sunday, June 24, 2018

Capitalism, Politics and Immigration: A Tale of Profitable Suffering

And excellent article. Molly


As Republicans in Congress hurl claims about immigrants stealing jobs from US citizens, it’s clear that lawmakers on Capitol Hill continue to be in deliberate denial about the fundamental hypocrisy of the US’s chaotic, cruel immigration policy.
As immigrant organizers laid bare in February 2017 by shutting down businesses nationwide with a “Day Without Immigrants” strike that exposed the inability of restaurants, construction companies and other businesses to function without their immigrant workforce, the US economy would collapse without the labor of the very immigrants that Republican lawmakers are trying to push out of the country.  
“We want to make sure that people understand that this city would stop functioning if we weren’t there to build, or cook, or clean,” Ligia Guallpa, an organizer with the Worker’s Justice Project in Brooklyn, told Labor Notes at the time of the strike.
In a blog post titled “Under the Volcano,” legendary celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain also eloquently summed up these uncomfortable truths about the United States and its chaotic, cruel immigration policy as it pertains to people coming from south of the border: “Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, look after our children.”
“As any chef will tell you,” Bourdain continued, “our entire service economy — the restaurant business as we know it — in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are ‘stealing American jobs.’ But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position — or even a job as prep cook.”
Despite his erroneous use of the word “American,” Bourdain nailed the crux of the issue to the shed: The United States, despite all the strategic nativist political demagoguery from its politicians, is economically dependent on the massive pool of low-paid, often undocumented laborers who come north every day seeking work.
That dependence is why achieving a coherent, just immigration policy is a practical impossibility today: So long as this nation keeps lying to itself about the basic nature of its national economy, no solution will be found. The problem, in short, is all business, capitalism in the raw, humanstreated as disposable to keep prices low and profits high.

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