Immigration: Manipulation at its Best

It was back in the years of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that discrimination against immigrants was born. Factory owners would recruit workers from other countries to work in their factories. Innocent, if you consider that the agrarian culture structure had not yet declined enough to warrant the mass exodus to cities that will come, and there was not enough of a labor pool in place to draw from.

Once capitalists invested in manufacturing machinery, the two other costs of production – labor and raw materials – become the dickering points that directly impact the bottom-line profit margin. In the end, it was far easier to reduce labor costs than get much of a break in raw materials, especially when immigrants would come to work for pennies on the dollar earned by the workers already manning the machines in the factories.

In order to control the labor force, industrialists would import far more people than actually needed and blatantly announced to existing workers that they will work more and accept less pay or they would lose their jobs to the immigrants, which were more than happy to accommodate.

Discrimination was born, raised and matured in the drive for higher profit margins.

This scenario is no different today than it was 100 or so years ago. In fact, the whole immigration system is set up as a means for employers to import cheap labor. Discrimination, along with the accompanying cultural stress, grows as the economy drops and reducing labor costs becomes paramount to a business to stay afloat.

“The jobs that [immigrants] take for the most part are the jobs that not many other populations are reading and willing to do — very taxing and very high-risk jobs, very low-paying and without many benefits,” said Dr. Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, founding director of the Center for Reducing Health Disparities at the University of California-Davis Health System. Based on this argument, the good doctor believes it is important to increase immigrant access to education and health care for the 44.3 million people of Latin decent now living in the US.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services' Texas Service Center in Dallas outlines the process. To bring an immigrant in to do a job, an employer has to prove that they couldn’t find an American suitable for the job and has to agree to pay the prevailing wage. The immigrant has to have the skills and ability to perform the job that Americans don’t or have an extraordinary ability. According to their numbers, there were 235,000 employer initiated immigrant applications submitted in 2007, 104,000 in 2008, and fewer than 36,000 so far this year.

So, you have the intellectuals saying that immigration has increased and needs attention and the government saying that immigration has significantly decreased. Both groups appear to have their heads stuck in the sand as neither considers the fact that employers don’t always follow the procedures or rules! There wouldn’t be massive immigration raids on factories resulting in huge deportations if they did.

Think about this before you start jumping up and down in rage over the immigration issue. The immigrants were manipulated into believing they could come to the US for a better life just as much as you were manipulated into believing that they came here to take your job.

Lay the blame on where it belongs: on the business owners greedily and myopically focused on only their profit margin.