Immigrants, they get the job done. (with credit to Hamilton, the Musical).
Our experience mirrors @musicprnt when it comes to home improvement work.
There is a significant difference between what someone who is looking to eat will do compared with someone looking to be in the middle class.
And from my observations during my time in a rural college town, thereās far too many rural White town locals who feel entitled to be part of the middle class without putting in the time/effort to gain the minimal education/skills(talking doing a bit more than barely graduating HS with minimal/no skills or worse, dropping out altogether) required and spending far more time kvetching about how minorities, welfare queens, liberals, [insert any favored scapegoat du jour] have screwed them out of their rightful place in the middle class without them looking in the mirror or scrutinizing the conservative local/state politicians they kept voting/revoting for who passed policies which did precisely screw them over. .
Worse, they scoffed at the fact I and most kids in my old NYC neighborhood actually performed many manual labor jobs they disdained ranging from an attempt at being a dishwasher at a restaurant, stockboy/cashier in retail, waiting/busing tables in restaurants, selling ice cream bars in the summer*, etc.
- One older HS alum from a low income Jewish immigrant family did this with several other of his classmates as a part-time/summer job. Ended up graduating from Swat as a CS/bio double major and is now working as a senior tech developer in a fortune 500.
I think every parent owes it to their kids to make sure they have at least one really sucky job. Provides a lot of motivation to avoid being in a position where sucky jobs are your only option.
I donāt know if anyone follows news in the Restaurant & Hospitality sector, but the BOH (back-of-house) is DESPERATE for employees willing to work hard under tough conditions & accept those low wages.
In the 80s, part of the 90s, there was an endless supply of eager, young, labor coming up from Mexico. Not any more.
The wallās been built already! Itās very expensive to cross illegally and quite dangerous. Penalties for getting caught, primarily in the form of time in a detention center, are much more severe than in years past.
Or one may find the jobs arenāt nearly as sucky as one thoughtā¦but is far more labor intensive/taxing than ābetter jobsā one gets later on which tends to foster more respect rather than the disdain/scoffing of such work from those who think itās ābeneath themā.
My sucky job was in landscaping, specifically. I never wanted to do that again.
I grew up near a border ā in fact, I used to ride my bike back and forth across it regularly starting when I was 8 or 9. This happened to be a border that was relatively ā but only relatively ā easy to police, especially back then when no one really cared about policing it hard.
In my experience, people who are in love with strict border controls are rarely people who live anywhere near a border.
"Or one may find the jobs arenāt nearly as sucky as one thoughtā¦but is far more labor intensive/taxing than ābetter jobsā one gets later on which tends to foster more respect rather than the disdain/scoffing of such work from those who think itās ābeneath themā.
"
EXACTLY! I waited tables throughout HS, undergraduate and graduate schools and the lessons learned there are invaluable. More Americans need to work service sector jobs to gain a true appreciation for other people and if it helps them approach those workers with more humility and appreciation for the work done so much the better I say.
As to āillegal immigrantā laborā¦
I live in a rural pocket of a large metropolitan area where farming is the primary industry. Many of the workers are undocumented and do jobs nobody will do. They are hard working, industrious, family centered and contribute to our small community. The ādocumentedā or Americans amongst them are ever grateful for their labor and donāt look down on these workers understanding perfectly well they are the backbone of the local economy. There are many local non-profit organizations that provide service gaps for this community. My son assisted with one every Sunday making sure day laborers had toiletries since grocery stores are far away.
They arenāt taking away jobs from Americans.
If you want to point fingers at the real culprits of greed just set your eyes towards DC.
@cobrat:
āAnd when I was attending undergrad in a rural NE Ohio town in the mid-late '90s, there were plenty of rural White town locals whoād condemn urban āwelfare queensā while subsisting largely/completely on public assistance and feel entitled to a highly paid skilled factory job despite barely graduating HS with minimal/no skills or worse, being HS dropouts with minimal/no skills.ā
There is a lot of truth in this, part of the big myth that I can remember be promoted in rural areas (always has been), back in the 1960ās and 1970ās when Urban America exploded, kept reading about how rural america complained how this was the cost of welfare (welfare queens didnāt come about with Reagan, it was a myth long in the making, often by people who had no clue about the realities of welfare, welfare recipients driving cadillacs to get their checksā¦), that they were tired of paying for lazy people who didnāt work,etcā¦and if you look at the reality of rural areas, especially these days, they depend very heavily of federal support of programs like medicaid (was reading how the GOP senator from West Virginia was upset with the cutbacks in medicaid, how it would hit his state hard because they depend on it heavily), farmers talk about being self reliant yet many of them rely on subsidies, the reality is rural America is a small part fo the population (about 15%), yet they take a disproportionate amount of federal money, a lot of this is because the support for rural areas is hidden in block grants from the federal government and the like.
What is truly ironic is that rural America is now facing the same scourges they condemned in the inner city, the dissolution of the family, kids being born out of wedlock, rampant drug use, especially opiods, lack of good paying jobs in large part because the minimum skill jobs that once paid well are gone and educational levels and opportunity are such they arenāt good enough for what jobs there are, dependency on welfare and the likeā¦and suddenly, they are angry at all this and asking āwhy are we being affected like thisā, the same anger that drove the riots of the 60ās and 70ās in the city, but they donāt see that, because their anger is justified at āthe systemā, āthe governmentā that did them to this sigh.
Part of the rejection of the ACA (and this has been documented) is that the people who got coverage under this, either private plans or expanded medicaid, assumed that they were getting something different than those on āObamacareā (many people against āObamacareā when asked, didnāt know that ACA was Obamacare), that Obamacare gave gold plated service to those who didnāt work and didnāt pay for it while they struggled to pay for ACA careā¦
This ādivideā is not new, it was the same story back in the days of William Jennings Bryan and the cross of gold/farm populism with their anger at Wall Street and the bankers, heck in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn Mark Twain pokes fun at the views of education among the rural folk, where the heros are the kids who hate school, and while they admire the wealth of people like Judge Thatcher or a real life representative to the congress, there also is an attitude of how people like that āput on airsā.
As I wrote in another post, Studs Terkel explained where this came from, where people in their anger over their lot in life look for someone else to blame, whether it is blacks (as with poor whites down south), or illegal immigrants, or āliberals who donāt get usā, because they donāt to believe that the things they believed in werenāt true, the whole if you work hard and behave you will get a good paying job and whatnot, when myths die they die hardā¦rather than, as the ex KKK guy told Studs terkel, his epiphany came when he realized that blacks were in the same boat he was in, or even worse, and realized they faced the same problem with a corrupt system that exploited them.
And in many cases, the local/state politicians who have passed policies which undercut the rural working-classes in the last 4 or so decades.
You donāt need $30 an hour to live well in rural areas. The biggest issue that has been pointed out is transportation to get non-food sundries if you canāt afford a car Water comes from the well so you donāt have water and sewer costs. Solar or wind supplements and cuts down electrical and wood burning generates heat if you canāt afford propane.
Not having a reliable/working car is also an issue for job seeking/commutesā¦especially in rural towns where jobsā¦especially for those with limited education/skillsets are few and far between.
When I attended undergrad at my rural LAC, the biggest local employer was my LACā¦and most of the jobs they had which were available and desirable* required a minimum of an Associateās/Bachelorās or higher.
- Cafeteria food service/dishwashing was considered so undesirable even by US citizen college students on work-study that nearly all the students doing them were internationals(Lots of Mainland Chinese students and after the 1997 Asian Economic crisis....they were joined by an influx of South Korean students who suddenly found the financial rug pulled out from under them/their families) because the more desirable/less laborious work-study jobs were closed to them.
@musicprnt , you are only correct in saying that Americans will not take the jobs at current rates. So pay rates have to go up. That is what happens during a labor shortage, which would be introduced by deporting the 10-30 million illegal aliens we have in the USA, many of who work in unskilled labor. All of those vacated jobs would also let poor citizens move off of welfare and other assistance programs, plus span new jobs in farm automation due to higher wages, and would have a ripple effect reducing tax rates, increasing unemployment of public workers with lower demand for public services (not a bad thing). I just donāt see a downside to this.
We donāt need new immigration laws. We just need the current law to be properly enforced. We have the unholy alliance of agribusiness and socialists promoting lawlessness for their own reasons. Only the law abiding citizens suffer.
Most, if not all those jobs would require far more education/technical skillsets than those possessed by most of the rural un/underemployedā¦especially the ones on public assistance.
TooOld4School: Could you please elaborate? I know socialists supporting CSAs, but none supporting agribusiness.
I donāt see how family farmers can raise wages where I live, unless there are price supports of some kind for their crops. They donāt have cash flow to watch the market increase over several years with no cheap labor. I think they would have to sell out or go bankrupt.
Edit: agribusiness seems able to easily raise wages and still make a profit. The link I posted upthread says it would cost the average family $16 annually to raise wages 40 percent iirc
You keep saying the same thing in all of your postsā¦ where are your sources?
I currently live in a rural desert community and I just donāt see what youāre talking about. We have hardly any federal or state funded services that we make use of. Our parks/pools/etc are paid for entirely by the community (local taxes), and our public schools are funded primarily by local property taxes.
Thereās really not much else out here.
Do you have interstate highways? Airports? Military protection? Agricultural support? Federally backed mortgages and loans? Does your state accept federal money for Medicaid and disability? Anyone on SS and Medicare? Federal funding for schools? Land, water, forest management?
I heard an interview the other day with someone from the FCC and she mentioned the federal subsidies that go into providing service in rural areas. Itās no oneās fault, just the economies of scale when people are further apart. What we pay is āevened outā to make service affordable in rural areas.
Here is one piece of that:
https://www.law360.com/articles/875556/fcc-announces-50m-in-new-subsidies-for-rural-broadband
Highways: We have one state highway that connects two larger citiesā¦ no federal highways. And I would argue that the tax revenue collected by everyone in the town easily pays for the dinky little strip of state funded road we use.
Airports: One uncontrolled, tiny airport, complete with rolling tumbleweeds everywhere.
Military protection: We all take equal advantage of military protection, so this is a dumb suggestion. Furthermore, if thereās one federal tax most of the people in my town support, itās defense spendingā¦
Federally backed loans: Iām not sure how rural/urban differences play into any of this. Land and housing is cheap out here, so loan amounts would be lower, and applicants would still need to qualify for their loan the same way anyone else would.
Medicaid: Again, how is this relevant to urban/rural? My guess is most of the people on medicaid here would not be the ones complaining about the āurban elitistsā.
Federal funding for schools: Hardly if any. In fact, I bet we probably pay more towards the federal education budget than we take advantage of.
Land/water/forest: Thereās the BLM, but they are more of a nuisance to people, especially the ATV/camping crowd.
So overall, Iād say we either pay more towards the federal budget than we actually take advantage of, or itās a wash.
I guess itās a feature of rural thinking that they āpay more toward the federal budget than they get backā even in the face of evidence to the contrary.