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Quotable
Monday, April 20th, 2009DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano, on immigration:
What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor…
Wow. Providing jobs and pay to impoverished people who come to the U.S. to work is now . . . evil?
I think Napolitiano needs to go back to singing sad songs about her alcoholic boyfriend.
Hiring illegal aliens is not, in of itself, evil.
But it’s a lot easier to be evil to illegal aliens, and many companies who hire them are exactly that.
the sad fact is the majority illegals get better pay and are treated better than they would be in their shitholes of orgin.
This is why they come.
If we didn’t have artificially high labor rates, we wouldn’t have an illegal worker problem and you wouldn’t have U.S. companies going to overseas contractors for manufacturing. Are you listening, Low Dobbs, you dumb ignoramus?
@#3 | Dave Krueger
You mistake my “commercial ventures” with my “beliefs”. I’m in the entertainment business, no more, no less.
Illegal aliens are criminals! Please put some money in my collection tray when you shout “Hooraah!” in agreement.
What kind of comment is that to talk about the alcoholic boyfriend? What does that have to do with immigration?
@#5 pris,
Um, we weren’t talking about immigration. Napolitiano was demonizing heroes of our economy with no facts, just name calling. Evil. EVIL!
There is no immigration debate going on here, just name calling. I find it fair-play to ask old Janet to get her house in order before passing judgment over the rest of us. But hey, I’m not a politician, what do I know?
Evil! Great. The imaginary line in the desert means the imaginary god will make me imaginary burn in imaginary hell.
Luckily, Napolitano has actually aged a bit (but, just a bit…jeesh I hate goth) better…
http://www.johnettenapolitano.com/
It probably means something that few of us would be surprised if the singer from Concrete Blonde were actually heading up DHS.
If you want to stop people coming here illegally for work, penalizing the employers who provide that work is a pretty efficient way to do it. I don’t see your objection to the tactic, although calling the employers “evil” is a bit OTT. And bear in mind that “Providing jobs and pay to impoverished people who come to the U.S. to work” may be being done at the expense of impoverished people who are native-born.
Obviously, illegal immigration is the fault of capitalism and rich business owners. If it wasn’t for them, these people who look different from us would back in their own countries poor and destitute as they should be.
What a bitch.
@#7 PersonFromPorlock
Providing jobs and pay to impoverished people who come to the U.S. to work” may be being done at the expense of impoverished people who are native-born.
That’s only true if you believe the amount of wealth in the world is fixed, only to be divvied up between us in the most fair way possible.
If you believe that, you just failed high school economics. It’s also possible you are a time traveler form the middle ages.
omar: You missed the theft–in the form of taxes–that happens to citizens that gets transferred to illegal immigrants in the form of welfare benefits. (See also, infinite free ER care.)
Now, the correct answer is to stop the wealth transfer by government fiat, but it is not incorrect to note that under the current system, illegal immigrants have a wider impact than on just the job they are doing.
And in other news,it seems the former head of m.a.d.d will be in charge of vehicle safety standards.The hits just keep coming.More villians to be announced.
@#11 | perlhaqr
You missed the theft–in the form of taxes–that happens to citizens that gets transferred to illegal immigrants in the form of welfare benefits.
And praytell how much of our precious stolen cash is going to finance the freeloading of beaners? 10%? 20%? That is who “we” are talking about, right? The Mexicans? goddamn mexicanz stealing my welfarez.
Because that number is tiny in comparison to the amount of economy these people create in the country.
I had an “illegal” friend who had a fake social security number. That dude paid real taxes to several real governments on his fake SSN. So while he wasn’t freeloading, he was illegally supporting some legal lazy person.
But regardless, even if the numbers didn’t add up, two wrongs don’t make a right. Let them work because it’s the right thing to do. Let them work because it helps us.
“…the freeloading of beaners?”
“Beaners”. Really?
I think it is completely rational for a socialist country to want to restrict immigration.
One reason, just one, why I think socialist countries are an irrational idea.
“I think Napolitiano needs to go back to singing sad songs about her alcoholic boyfriend.”
“What kind of comment is that to talk about the alcoholic boyfriend? What does that have to do with immigration?”
“I find it fair-play to ask old Janet to get her house in order before passing judgment over the rest of us.”
Apparently that was too subtle for a Monday morning, Radley…
Most people hate illegal immigrants for the same reason they hate Nike’s overseas “sweatshops”. It’s not out of any concern that anyone is getting exploited. They couldn’t care less about foreign workers welfare and certainly don’t give a shit whether they or their families starve to death or have a job. All that matters to these people is that these jobs are filled by ‘Mer’cans at their inflated pay rates.
That’s why, even if I had to start biking to work everyday, seeing the UAW in dire straights would be worth it. The one thing I’m most thankful for in my whole life is that I lived long enough to see that happen. The rust belt industries, governments, and unions reveled in their arrogant greed for 75 years and now Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is coming around and smacking them right in the nuts as hard as it can over and over delivering a dose of the very reality that they thought only applied to other people.
Yea, I didn’t get it. Jumped the gun defending Radley against someone who didn’t get it either (I think).
What can I say? I’m of a younger generation.
@#14 | Boyd Durkin
“Beaners”. Really?
Just putting it out there, you know, so we all know what we are actually talking about. Janet is not talking just about illegals. She’s taking about dirty filthy brown people “takin’ er’ jerbs” and the evil cigar smoking industrialist fatcats squeezing the poor white people.
I mean, WTF do I know about barely-spoken and back-door racist fear-mongering used by our government officials exploit emotions to get a dumb policy enacted? I’m just a simple fucking arab-e’merican from the deep south. It’s pretty common for the PC (yes, PC) conservative “terrorism-hating” folks to tiptoe around their flat-out disgust with my skin.
When dobbs says “illegal immigrants are evil”, and janet says “employers who hire illegals are evil”, what’s the first thing popping into your head? Mexicans. Hoards of fucking mexicans rolling across the Rio Grande like an unstoppable flood of white-chick sex having brown people and their welfare children.
While that image is obviously bullshit, if you to ask a 10 year old white kid to “draw an illegal alien”, I have 10-1 odds the alien would wear a sombrairo.
When we talk about illegal immigration, we are ALWAYS talking about brown people in terms of them vs. us.
In the same interview link…
Sen. Ensign: “I believe that marriage should be defined as that between one man and one woman. You want to do what is ideal for children…”
“And the government should strive for the ideal, for children especially.”
Ha! It really is “for the chillren!” JUST NOT CHILDREN FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS IMAGINARY LINE CALLED A BORDER! Hence the limits of the morality of socialism as practiced by every country in the world.
They also cover how Obama won’t prosecute “front line” CIA (the working man) agents for torture. Oh, he won’t prosecute their bosses or anyone else, either.
I still think they screwed up the name. It shouldn’t have been Homeland Security. Fatherland Security would have been more fitting.
Omar,
Because “deh tek our jebs!”, the solution is for us all to have gay sex…hopefully with Lou Dobbs!
I’m as much a fan of South Park as anyone, but I’m not sure the face of illegal immigration is as you described for most people. For me, I just think of the syrup-chuggin Canadiens coming down and being all nice while slipping you a bogus quarter (which is the same size as ours!). Go to NYC or Boston and Mexican “illegals” don’t make the top 10 for most people. As you travel across the USA, you notice that each region has a dominant ethnic hotel maid…that usually matches the local illegal immigration “problem” (just observing here) and there are many variations.
But I will grant you that if the only illegal immigration was from Ireland (and mostly the ginger-kind that Cartman hates), we wouldn’t have the immigration venom we have today. Besides, talk to Spike Lee about the hipocracy of a US crack down on illegal immigration. 40 acres and a mule! Not that I agree, but worth noting.
As a person of size, and grandson of a celebrity (Big Daddy Don Durkin was a competitive eating champ in Central Canada), I’ve had to withstand prejudice. I’ve been kicked out of buffets and moved to the middle seat on small planes. I validate your pain.
I don’t know why anyone is surprised that the word evildoer is being associated with people and companies that hire illegal aliens. We’re led to believe that pot smokers and other drug users are evil. Gay marriage is so evil, we have to pass laws that define what a ‘proper’ marriage is. Evilness and evildoers are so rife on the streets of America we have to equip our civil police forces with tanks and other weapons that could be used in a full frontal assault in a war zone.
It’s a smokescreen. It’s the old bait and switch. It’s a case of them not wanting us to look at the man behind the curtain. They consciously and subconsciously alike label what they want to as evil to get you to look at that instead of all the evil they are perpetrating. It’s not THE problem but is a symptom of the much greater problem that is a corrupted at it’s core government.
Wow, great thread today! Usually, we don’t get one like this!
OK, I’ll throw my hat into the ring. Companies that hire illegals do so to cut costs, or more accurately, shift costs to taxpayers. The circumstances that allow this may be illogical and should be changed, but I find companies that do this to be evil as well.
//Throw rotten fruit as needed… (but be aware of who picked it for you.)
well, to re-iterate a statement above (but in this case as something I do believe) I think it’s pretty rational for a state to control immigration and its borders. The philosophy behind that shouldn’t be too hard to grasp…and yes, part of it is to protect American jobs. The immigrants picking produce (like I used to) and cleaning floors (like I used to) aren’t taking jobs from the “evil union workers making forty bucks an hour to sit on their ass” (which, by the way, is a pretty good description of the only union job I ever worked).
Also, a note about high school economics. Maybe I should have failed high school economics but my perfect grade in college macro remembers the first rule of economics: Resources are limited. So yessir there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world at any given moment. You may suggest that exploitation of those fixed resources generates wealth…it does, but it doesn’t do it quickly, and for any given decade you can assume a fixed quantity of wealth that I sure as hell hope *someone* is trying to manage so I can work my ass off, make some money, and not suddenly find it all meaning nothing. Well, short of buying a bunch of gold bricks, growing a beard, and hiding in an old shack in the mountains until I die from the smell.
Full context:
NAPOLITANO: Well, you know, Sheriff Joe, he is being very political in that statement, because he knows that there aren’t enough law enforcement officers, courtrooms or jail cells in the world to do what he is saying.
What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor, the human traffickers who are exploiting human misery.
And yes, when we find illegal workers, yes, appropriate action, some of which is criminal, most of that is civil, because crossing the border is not a crime per se. It is civil. But anyway, going after those as well.
But the notion that you’re going to fill every prosecutor’s time, every law enforcement official’s time, and that’s literally what he’s talking about, on immigration, he doesn’t answer the other question, which he has been criticized for, by the way, in Maricopa County, because he is not going after murders, armed robberies, other more serious crimes, because he is so focused on this one.
A company’s mission is to make a profit. Companies have to deal with the realities of world competition, so finding cheap labor is part of their mission. Hiring cheap labor has nothing to do with shifting costs to taxpayers. Keeping labor costs artificially high is an attempt by government to defy economic rules and someone else (taxpayers, consumers, exporters, importers, etc) will always have to pay for it. Trying to rig the system in a way that defies the free market is always an attempt to shift costs to someone else. Always.
Responding to economic incentives the government inadvertently creates is evil. Pick a problem the government is going to try to fix and 8 times of 10 you’ll just find people responding to incentives.
They put money in drugs then blame the dealers. Force down the price of money for housing then blame lenders, make it impossible to immigrate and create then blame “Illegals” ecetera.
#4 omar, you may very well be right, but if walks like a duck…
@#27 | Dave Krueger
Dobbs’ articles belong page 6 of The National Enquirer right above Lindsay Lohan’s recent rehab photos and below the Kim Kardashian nip slip. No more, no less. Dobbs is tabloids for grownups. And there are people reading his books and voting!
What a mood I’m in today. You’d think it’s Monday. Sorry agitator commentators…A socialist country run by a communist party has again delayed my flight pending paperwork. I’m getting it out of my system before I show up there knowing it’s in my best interest to keep my freedom-oriented mouth shut the hell up.
again #27 | Dave Krueger
BTW, have you read Ed Anger? He’s a better writer than dobbs.
http://weeklyworldnews.com/author/wwnedanger/
a great exercise- act like a 22 yo mexican guy and see if you can legally enter this country. THEN, after you finally make it, LEGALLY bring your wife/daughter/mother etc over. Prepare for a very frustrating ten to twelve years out of your life. unless you’re wealthy, then it might only take three to five years.
I’ve hired illegals, knowingly and unknowingly. I’ve rented to people here illegally. I’ve seen families torn apart by daddy being deported.
I’m with Thomas Paine- good people should be able to go where they want, when they want.
It’s true, ya got me Omar, I hate them damned beaners. Like my dad, Manuel. Can’t stand him. *eyeroll*
I don’t have any idea what the welfare rates in your “Deep South” are, there, buddy, but my wife works are the ER here in Albuquerque, and yeah, a healthy portion of her patients are “No Fixed Address” and “Spanish Language Only”.
Her sister was working at a school where 90% of the students speak no English at all, and they don’t even bother trying to teach them anymore, per school district policy.
ER services and schools cost money. And as for your SSN example, I know people who’ve been on the other side of that coin, and it’s not all wine and roses when the IRS comes and audits you for never reporting your income from the chicken processing plant that’s 7 states away.
So let me again state that the answer is to get rid of all the government crap that infests our lives, but point out that since that’s not real bloody likely, it is correct to note that there are “societal” costs that the employers get to foist off on the rest of us.
“providing jobs and pay to impoverished people who come to the U.S. to work is now…evil?” No offense Radley but the guys “providing jobs and pay” are not kind hearted souls who hope to make life better for the downtrodden. They are cold blooded businessmen who understand that you can either hire an American for 10 bucks an hour, pay taxes and the like, and adhere to the 40 hour work week rule or you could hire illegals for 4 bucks an hour, pay under the table, work them like mules and deprive them (and their families) of any sense of normalcy, belonging and legal protections in the bargain.
My opposition to the drug war doesn’t require me to romanticize the operations of drug cartels, and my opposition to immigration restrictions doesn’t require me to romanticize what happens in the black market for immigrant labor, or the effect that exploitation has on the overall labor market.
[...] piece – here are some links related my ideas. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6599 http://www.theagitator.com/2009/04/20/quotable-16/ http://www.theagitator.com/2007/12/24/howley-on-guest-workers/ [...]