It’s Labor Day today in the US, And we can look back and see how many great strides we’ve made toward employee safety, fair wages, and reasonable work hours. Of course, there are horrible companies and horrible managers who will cheat and lie and steal from their employees, but they are in the minority.
But, there’s a group that no labor union protects and who managers can abuse easily: Undocumented immigrants.
Now, it’s illegal to hire people who are not authorized to work in the United States, but people who willingly break that law are willing to break other laws. While, technically, everyone–regardless of immigration status–is entitled to things like minimum wage and overtime payments, people are scared to report bad bosses for fear of being turned over to ICE.
If you want all people to be able to support themselves and their families, we need a change. And the biggest change would be this:
Make illegal immigration extremely difficult and make legal immigration easy.
If you want to vote for me (I would never run for any office, but pretend!), my immigration policy would be based on the following questions.
- Do you have a criminal record?
- Are you willing to learn English at this free class we will provide for you?
- Do you understand that you will have to leave the US if you commit a serious crime?
- Do you understand that you will not be eligible for any welfare until you have been here for five years? Unemployment payments, reduced/free school lunch, and food stamps are not considered welfare.
If the answers are No, Yes, Yes, and Yes, then we let you in with proper documentation and a social security number.
Who cares if someone wants to come to the US for a year or two to earn money to send home? If they want to move and make this place their new home, great! Let’s get out the welcome wagon.
If we want to change labor conditions in the United States, ensure every worker can go to the Department of Labor or EEOC with no fear. Let’s make sure that our policies don’t make people vulnerable.
That would be a great Labor Day.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
That list of questions, I thought was part of the immigration laws in place, but it appears there are loopholes around this that have been encouraged to bypass this, most probably to get cheap labor for key sections using the “temporary” status visa. But relying on the individuals to self-reapply to renew the visa status, is also not working well. I have a feeling that if current immigration laws were enforced correctly for all entering the country, which does require a form of vetting, instead of pushing everyone in and worry about the problem later, would eliminate a vast number of the problem of documentation. Especially when it appears that the mass majority of individuals entering are needing to get us to provide them a form of documentation. You can’t tell me that the majority of big businesses operate by hiring workers that receive only cash payments for work in 2021. E-Verify should be the best method of helping employees get the correct documentation.
Even temporary workers have to have documentation if anyone is to blame for the lack of documentation, it would be businesses that only work cash-only transactions to avoid reporting true costs and expenses. The biggest offenders on this are seen in those who hire people without papers and cause the abuse we read about. In this respect, I would not blame Walmart or Amazon but their subcontractors.
This is one of the reasons, that businesses don’t want to hire American workers at required American wages and labor laws, because the costs drastically affect their bottom line profit.
I would vote for your platform. The only way America will be able to — effectively — address the aging of its workforce and overall population will be to allow increased immigration of those who want to come here to work. Immigrants tend to be younger, have more children, be more entrepreneurial and more law-abiding than native-born Americans. So, it would be a win-win solution, all the way around.