Quote:
Originally Posted by johnfreyan
"It would make everybody in America poorer — you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids? I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer."
And they weren't even talking about guest workers. You know what they were talking about? VISA EXPANSIONS (as in, increasing the limits on legal immigration, or even deleting the caps). Or, as Bernie calls it, "doing away with the concept of a nation-state".
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Bernie has voted time after time again against increasing work visa caps that doesn't affect us because guess what - you won't ever get said visa anyways. We had a few people eyeball getting H-1Bs, but that shit won't fly without an 212(d)(3)(A) waiver.
It's like you can want to legalize the ones who are already in the country and not want to import further indentured servants (H-1s, H-2s, etc), but for some reason that's a position you completely choose to ignore. You treat immigration as an all or nothing field, as do a lot of other people, and they like to lump us together with the indentured servants, even though they hate us because they think we took the easy way into the country.
He has a point, unemployment sucks especially when companies go around the law, delete stacks of resumes because they found a guy in India willing to do the work. Granted, the US applicants may be a little underqualified but it's rare to find someone who knows 100% of everything and in the end you have to train, even a little.
Maybe my own position is impacting my judgement here, but when me and all my college classmates are currently unemployed, or working part time jobs not in the field, and you see headlines like "Google/Microsoft calls for 50,000 more stem workers" from where, not from US that's for sure; you just can't help but laugh. They just shill for more worker visas and want more worker competition, and they enter in agreements to not take workers from each other to depress the wages.
So please, stop treating calls for less worker visas as some horrible anti-immigrant stance. Foreign workers aren't our friends here, we aren't their friends. We should focus on calls for our own legalization, and the indentured servants can fight their own battles because they sure as fuck won't fight ours.