John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Stephen King mocks Donald Trump over US border wall payment
“Wait a minute, wait! Wasn’t… um, Mexico going to pay for Trump’s useless, just-tunnel-under-it wall?” the best-selling author asked”
Yes, indeed, but there are, in fact, so many absurdities around Trump's Wall, that it would take an effort just to list them.
Rarely discussed is the simple fact that a lot of American businesses, and the politicians serving them, have never wanted a wall because they profit handsomely from the existing situation.
It has nothing to do with principles around migration, although people may take that pose if it suits them. It’s just plain old-fashioned greed at work.
Illegal migration has provided a continuous supply of low-wage labor for a large number of American businesses.
It is not easy to find numbers of Americans willing to do many of the jobs some of these people do, especially at the wages they receive for doing them.
And it's a flexible supply of labor because it is vulnerable.
It comes with no trouble from labor unions.
It's labor which can treated harshly in terms of conditions and benefits with just the well-understood threat of a call to the American enforcement authorities. In some cases, too, these workers are simply cheated by unscrupulous employers and have no way to seek justice.
It’s labor that in tight times can be sent back wholesale, as the American government shamefully did in the 1930s, rounding up many, many thousands and deporting them in masses.
