Reply #76: Most contractors can't afford the risk of hiring undocumented [View All]

[Tansy_Gold]

workers. Here in Arizona, most of the workers on major construction sites are legal, they're getting paid the going (if inadequate) rate for laborers, and their employment taxes are being paid.

Subcontractors like electricians, plumbers, etc., have to have dependable and trained employees, meaning legal.

The undocumented day-laborers, at least in the Phoenix area, aren't working on the big construction projects. They're doing menial work for landscape companies or for the guy who's trying to squeeze a little extra out of his insurance settlement by putting the new shingles on himself. They borrow a friend's legal social security card and driver's license -- all them brown folk look alike to the white guy filling out the I-9 anyway -- and they get a job washing dishes at the Chinese buffet restaurant.

The fear of immigrants is an irrational one for the "working poor." It's not the immigrants who are 'taking jobs away' from "working Americans." The same companies that are building factories under NAFTA in Mexico to take advantage of the poor people there are also pushing people off the land they've lived on for generations, pushing them into cities that can't provide for them, pushing them north to a border that they see as the threshold to a new life.

If there's a common enemy, it's corporate capitalism and a fascist government alligned with the corporations. But the immigrants are not the enemy -- though the fascists who convince the American workers to vote GOP are happy when people think that way.