Here's The Real 'Tide That Raises All Boats'

Want to stop people from entering the country illegally? Really simple, but for obvious reasons you'll never hear anyone talking about it. 

Neither republican nor democrat will ever attempt to do the one thing that is guaranteed to reduce the number of people entering the country without a visa. 

Ready to hear how simple it could be? 

Okay. Here it is: Make it a felony to hire an illegal for any reason. And enforce the damn law! Once word goes back to the families in the home countries, pretty soon it will dry up. 

Oh sure, there are still some that will keep coming for whatever reason, but most of these people are wanting to work, to better their lives, and the lives of others back in their home country. If they know that the incredible effort, and for a lot of them, the expense is a waste, they will look elsewhere. 

Not to worry though. Never going to happen. The oligarchs who run the major corporations rely on the cheap labor, and the lack of need for any sort of social responsibility, other than maybe forcing locals to educate their kids and once in a while patching one of them up in an E. R. it is a total win. 

Unless it's your local taxes paying for the schools. Or you paying more for medical care because hospitals are spreading out the losses. Or employers in your area are holding down wages, because even if they are doing jobs that Americans won't do, (bullshit) it still drives down wages for all jobs.

If I knew that I could make a good living working in construction, do you think that I would be vying for a job at a burger joint? That used to be the case, by the way. Back in the seventies, construction workers were paid very well! When I was a teenager, long ago in the sixties, I could work on the farm in the summer and earn enough to buy clothes, school supplies, and still have enough money to last most of the school year.

Looked at from another perspective, if burger restaurants are competing with higher paying entry level or uneducated jobs, they won't go out of business. Not as long as people want to eat hamburgers. But they are going to have to pay more for labor! 

If corporations and mega farms still want to have imported labor to harvest their crops, no problem! Just regulate the businesses. Streamline the green card process to make it easier and faster, and enforce the laws regarding minimum wage and the rest of the labor laws.

But what about automation? It's inevitable. Sooner than later everything that can be done by robots is going to be done by robots. The argument that if the wages are too high, companies will just automate whatever job people are doing. Guess what? It's happening now. 

It doesn't matter how cheap human labor is, robots are always going to be cheaper. If a robot was able to do any specific job a human is now doing, said human will be unemployed soon.

As a nation, we will very soon be confronted by a future where we will have more and more people without work. We will need to be able to deal with that too, but that's going to be a discussion for another time.