Undocumented workers must be valuable to the economy. The people who employ them tend to be business owners who vote Republican, so they know the people they’re employing are creating profits, because those workers are creating profits for them.
In the early 2000s I had long conversations with a Republican-voting business owners who railed against ‘illegal immigration’, while employing them and therefore producing the conditions which incentivised them to become undocumented workers. His intellectual response was simply one of denial. He denied that his actions were hypocritical, or that he was creating the problem that he hated.
That was one of many important events that has led to me not assuming that compassion or moral integrity are commonly shown by humans.
The people who employ them tend to be business owners who vote Republican
It’s funny how Republicans absolutely never mention the most obvious solution to the “problem” of undocumented workers: pursuing and prosecuting the American citizens who hire them. It’s always useless walls and deportations and bullshit like that.
What he couldn’t articulate, is that his individual actions don’t have any effect the larger systemic problem.
He can’t fix anything by not hiring a dozen undocumented people.
He’s taking advantage of the problem he complains about. Which might make him a hypocrite. But nothing about the problem would change if he stopped doing either.
“It doesn’t matter whether I do or do not beat my wife and children. It would still happen anyway.”
Society is all the individuals within it. Its output is the sum of all those individuals. If Republican business owners stuck to their principles and did not hire undocumented workers to make more profits, the amount of undocumented workers they are unhappy about would go down.
They are, quite literally, profiting from something they like, but then saying they don’t like it and it’s a reason to vote for shitty politicians. It’s not just hypocrisy, it’s wilfully making the world worse for other humans. Which is quite popular.
“If everyone just does the right, thing instead of what’s best for them …”
That never happens. That’s not how people work.
Systemic problems need systemic solutions. Your example isn’t a systemic problem, it’s an individual one. As such it can be solved by an individual.
I agree that there’s a systemic problem at the root cause of this and, of course, I agree they’re a fraction of a fraction in size.
However, I don’t think we take that attribute with any other crimes, big or small, right or wrong.
I hope we can agree that a lot of theft is a symptom of the problems caused by systemicpoverty. However, it wouldn’t excuse theft, simply because you wanted a bit more, despite already having enough.
Not just you, by any stretch of the imagination, but we’re so quick to minimise the wrong doing of wealthy people doing illegal stuff to make just a little bit more money for themselves, purely out of greed. I feel like we’ve been almost groomed into some kind of “Well that’s just good business” mentality, for this ne specific kind of law breaking.
Even if it was a starving person, we would say “I understand they’re starving. However, we also can’t have them stealing everything they want to eat from one small, family owned mini mart, all the time. Yeah, yeah, no I still think that even though doing something about it might not contribute that much to the wider, systemic issues leading to poverty.”
I think you’re looking at my argument too specifically.
It applies the same to climate change, and people buying cheep junkfood instead of more expensive healthy options.
Blameing people for doing what’s better for them in the moment, instead of what’s immediately difficult but ultimately better for everyone, is always wrong.
I’m not sure that’s true, a lot of the undocumented workers I’ve met have worked in restaurants, and MANY of the owners there are absolutely champagne socialists that push Democratic rhetoric.
Would love to see data on it, but that’s got to be hard to gather, undocumented and all.
Like with everything it’s a spectrum. I’ve known republican restaurant owners who also hire undocumented people, as well as warehouse, construction and field jobs. The difference at least usually is that the left leaning owners vote in a way that would help those undocumented people vs Republicans that vote in a way that would hurt everyone that isn’t exactly like them and in plenty of cases even hurt people who are exactly like them.
Tax experts, economists, and union organizers say it is unfair for workers to pay into a system without a legal status to be able to reap its benefits
Wasn’t there some sort of skirmish in US history that involved the slogan “no taxation without representation”? Hmmm, what was that all about again?
That’s probably $100B more than the top 100 richest contribute.
Well, the top 25 wealth hoarding dragons paid 13.6 billion in federal income taxes in a span of 5 years. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
So you were likely only very mildly exaggerating that claim.
And before some class traitorboot-licker squeaks up about * the article looks at wealth which isn’t taxed, only income is taxed.* 1 that wasn’t the point & 2 you don’t need income when you have that kind of assets. But they built their wealth by massively benefiting from the society they pay so very little back to.
Probably not. Berkshire Hathaway alone is paying like $10B in taxes every year, and that’s just the income taxes of one company. Given how the article considers total taxation, you’d have to think about e.g. all the VAT taxes even the rich cannot totally avoid.
Closing all loopholes and making taxation fair is a great goal though.
They paid my welfare!
Is that more than the billionaires?
It depends how you define “billionaire”. They may not actually make a billion dollars in income annually. With that said:
Even if you drill down to the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers — data that was publicly available on an annual basis until President Donald Trump killed the report — they paid an effective tax rate of 23.1 percent in 2014. These taxpayers — with $127 billion of income — that year paid $29.4 billion in income taxes, or more than 2 percent of all income taxes, the IRS said.
Makes sense. A lot of billionaires assets are on paper, as in stocks. And the stock is effectively worthless until you sell for tax purposes. That said that is a huge difference, however I think the estimate is 11 or 12 million Undocumented in the US. Obviously not all are working.
