Hi all,
I want to relate to you all an event that happened to my friend the day before Thanksgiving at his mfg plant. My buddy stopped by a few nights ago to say Hey, and for one reason or another, he told me what happened at his plant. His company makes heavy duty shelving, the kind that you see at Home Depot or Menards, you know the kind. Well, INS paid a surprise visit and he said he never saw so many guys running around for the exits! He likened it to the time he drove for a medical supply house and dropped a box of white mice at the lab he was delivering to! Of the 350 employees at his company, the unofficial undocumented workers are approximately 200! These are not guys that are sweeping floors and unloading garbage. They're working lathes and other heavy duty equipment! They're making from $14-$17 per hour, according to my friend. They're all legal on the surface because the company contracts with some outfit which facilitates green cards and SSAN numbers? Yeah, right!
My friend is a tool & die maker there and he and a few others work in a little area off from the main floor. He told me it was like a circus when the INS came. The company has four workers whose only function is to keep a lookout, N,S,E, & W from inside the plant for the INS!! In spite of this, the INS caught 52 of the 200 questionable employees. What really freaked my friend out was the fact that there was one dude who worked a lathe just outside of his shop who went by the name of Hernandez, and a month later the same guy was back working at the same lathe, but only this time his name was something else, I don't remember what my friend said his new name was. I told my friend he was putting me on and he said it's been going on for the four years he's been there! Unbelieveable!
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's not only the jobs Americans may not want because it pays the minimum wage or it may be beneath them, which is the standard pap that we've all heard for years, it's also the jobs we should be giving to the 8 million unemployed Americans who are fighting to stay alive!
If this were a "full-employment" economy, i.e., unemployment less than 4% or so, I'd say fine. No, that's wrong too. The whole idea of having an employee's market/employer's market, is supply and demand! That's how it should work. If there's a dirth of Nurses in this country, then by all means raise the wages of Nurses! The system will adjust in time. This is how it works.
The Headline in the Chicago Sun-Times two days ago had a caption saying, "$10 BILLION SENT SOUTH TO MEXICO THIS YEAR". The money undocumented workers send south to Mexico is second only to the income the country receives from their oil exports! DUH! Mexico is not part of OPEC (I think) but they peg their prices to coincide with them. The paper also stated that 5 or 6 other countries derive more than half of their foreign exchange from workers in the US sending back money. No one can ignore the fact that there're people in Mexico and other Central & South American countries that are hurting. That goes without saying. But why at our unemployed's expense?!
The Bush Administration is worried about "jump starting" our economy. Greenspan cannot lower interest rates any lower. The problem is that money keeps leaving our economy! If that $10 billion had been spent here in our economy instead of going south to Mexico, it would have represented income to sellers of automobiles, homes, washing machines, gambling, trips to Disney World, etc. All the goods and fun things that Americans buy each year. And the government would have gotten a piece of the action along the way and the states too! I guess that's all I have to say on the subject. I apologize for being so long-winded.
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