Rod Hilton
Okay obviously mass deportation is awful and racist but if I'm being honest I'm increasingly uncomfortable with taking the position that deporting immigrants is bad solely b/c we have industries that rely on being able to exploit their illegal status to pay them below what our laws dictate is our definition of a living wage.
Maybe if farming and construction can't survive without exploiting people with no access to labor protections, they should not survive.
Darnell Clayton :verified:
@benroyce @Pineywoozle @drahardja @rodhilton That is what I suspect will happen. Basically labor camps & a repeat of what happened with Japanese Americans less than a century ago.
Ben Royce 🇺🇦
it's a tighter loop than what you describe
deporting people faces these hurdles:
1. identifying what country a person is from
2. getting a country to agree to take them
3. paying for the huge cost of mass #deportation
so your "they will replace #migrant #labor with #prison labor"
is more exactly
"they will remove migrant labor, imprison them, then put them right back in their old workplace paying them far far less"
that's their insidious game
Dave Rahardja
@rodhilton I totally agree that we should pay everyone living wages, and our status quo isn’t getting us there, but deporting undocumented immigrants isn’t going to get us there either, and it will cause millions more people to suffer.
Deporting undocumented immigrants will not remove the demand for low-wage labor. What I fear will happen is that we will use the slavery loophole in the constitution to use prisoners to backfill that labor, and pay them NOTHING, not even a low wage. That will incentivize imprisoning more people to use as slave laborers, so we’ll start criminalizing more and more things that marginalized communities do. Followed to its conclusion, deportations will bring back large-scale slavery.
The better way IMO is to give a path to these undocumented immigrants to have a legal right to stay in this country so we can give them protections and rights, so they can unionize and demand higher wages.
Nonya Bidniss :CIAverified:
@drahardja @rodhilton It's been pointed out in other conversations that the slavery loophole will be used for the concentration camps full of immigrants who previously were paid for their labor, and in fact taxes were paid on that income, which will no longer happen, so you see the 2nd/3rd order effects to the American people and the economy will be far reaching and disastrous. But private prison industry stocks will be out of this world.
Rod Hilton
@drahardja I hadn't really considered the prison slavery loophole but you're right, that's exactly what's going to happen.
It's clear these industries are built on having access to a labor force that is not paid properly.
Dave Rahardja
@rodhilton I think the industry needs an exploited labor force *if it were to maintain its profits*. I believe it’s entirely possible to provide food to the public with well-paid labor *if you remove the profit motive*.
The problem is, once again, capitalists exploiting labor to extract profits from a monopolized audience.
Dave Rahardja
@rodhilton I know this sounds like a slippery slope, but I can totally see it happening if crops go unpicked for even one single season. People are not going to care how their food is picked, as long as it shows up on supermarket shelves.
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