Embed Notice

@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.