It's Not Just Undocumented Immigrants "Stealing" American Jobs
The tech contractors outsourced from India are taking some of the best jobs - and it's perfectly legal. Why?
Let me get something straight, which might take some people a little bit of untwisting in their brain to realize it’s something they already know, but might not want to believe.
Undocumented immigrants aren’t “taking American jobs”.
American business owners who hire them and pay them under the table are criminals who are giving American jobs away.
Do you get that?
Has even ONE PERSON EVER on the news, in government, anywhere thought to themselves:
“Well, maybe if we prosecute business owners who allow undocumented immigrants to work for them, we’d have more jobs available for unemployed Americans.”
Can you imagine the headlines?
“Patriot Lettuce Farmer Jailed For Employing Illegals: Crop Destroyed by Drought With No Americans Willing to do Backbreaking, Dangerous Work for Minimum Wage.”
That’s never, ever going to happen.
This is not to say that there are no business owners who are “paying” for their choices. It’s just that most of the time, that’s all they are doing.
In many cases, for the first, second, and third offences for employing undocumented immigrants, penalties or fines are usually as far as things go, unless the business owners were doing other illegal activities, and then only the worst of the worst serve jail time.
If you really think about it, we don’t have a problem of “immigrants coming to America to ‘steal’ American jobs”, we have a problem of too many Americans committing the crime of employing undocumented immigrants.
America has done a great job over the years hiding its shame over callous disregard for anyone who isn’t white, and there is no reason to believe that will change now, even though there’s an orange person “running the country”.
All things considered, I am fucking sick and tired of hearing this old, untrue trope.
There’s something else everyone should be thinking about.
My boyfriend works for a well-known, international company, in a branch of its IT department.
His boss is an accomplished white woman, probably ten years younger than him who seems too busy or important to be in the office much, natch.
His coworkers?
Mostly Indians.
In India.
Of course, I’ve known this for years, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago when he had to take a work call at 6:00am that some switch flipped in me, and I flipped out over the whole thing.
“You have to get online at 6:00am? This guy is in India, isn’t he? What time is it there?”
“About three in the afternoon,” he said.
What the fuck? I thought.
This is where we are now?
This is how massive American companies with global reach get their work done?
“Let’s make our American employees wake up hours earlier than usual so they can cater to the contractor’s time, because they’re working for a fraction of the cost.”
Well, you young ones who will never learn how to think in college because you’ve never known higher education in a world without AI, get prepared to struggle for the rest of your lives, because if jobs aren’t going to be outsourced to countries where people will work for so much less, they might go the way of AI instead.
So, okay.
We talked about how American business owners are the ones who should really be considered criminals for illegally employing undocumented immigrants.
Can we agree on that? I hope so.
Why is outsourcing work to other countries so they can pay “contractors” lower wages and without benefits so legal that it’s the norm?
Yet, if a person from a country in Central America wants to risk life and limb making the trek to and through the border of Mexico, just so they have the fortunate privilege of finding work on a farm, they’re treated like violent, hardened criminals?
If they’re “taking” any jobs, they’re “taking” the positions that farmers, restaurant owners, and factory managers know they will never fill by paying Americans the minimum wage - which is exactly what they want (or need) to do.
California’s minimum wage is currently $16.60 an hour, and a few dollars more for fast food and medical workers.
So let’s consider Bakersfield, California. Rent for apartments can range from $1,000 - $3,000 a month, but we’ll say our undocumented family or group of workers who rent together are paying $2,000 a month.
If a person worked 40 hours per week making $16.60 an hour, their monthly gross earnings would be $2,656 dollars.
After tax, let’s call it a generous $2,300 net.
If you live alone, or if you are one person supporting a family, what the fuck are you supposed to do when you pay rent and have $300 left to live on for the entire month?
You will rely on social services, food pantries, thrift stores, and your deep inner strength, because not only do the people who set this minimum wage not know a fucking thing about what it’s like living on it, they don’t care, so they’re going to make life even harder for you and then shame and blame you while they do it.
My boyfriend has an awful lot of stress in his life, but losing his job to a contractor in India who will be paid half as much to do what he’s currently doing shouldn’t be one of them.
But it is, and it always will be in the tech world whether you’re on the hardware or software side.
Well, you know, until AI replaces those cheap foreign contractors, and the foreign contractors take my boyfriend’s job.
He’d probably argue with me about that because he’s enamored by his chatbot friend, who probably gets more attention than I do at this point, but I still think I’m the one who’s going to be on the right side of history when it all comes down to us and the robots.
But for the sake of all the undocumented immigrants in this country just trying to live their lives without fear of death, please consider this:
The contractors in India are doing the same work that entry and higher level IT employees do here, but they’re doing it for a fraction of the pay.
So, once again, it’s not the outsourced contractors or undocumented immigrants we should be angry with.
We should be angry with the companies that choose to hire them and put corporate profit over the lives and livelihood of Americans who are qualified to do that work, and just want a fair wage to compensate for their knowledge, and the tens of thousands of dollars in student loans it took them to get that far in the first place.
We shouldn’t be angry at the undocumented immigrants farming our extremely overpriced produce.
We should be angry at the people who are hiring them instead of any American willing to do that work.
Most of all, we should be angry at our government for allowing all of this to happen.
ICE shouldn’t only be pulling the brown people out of workplaces.
If ICE shows up at a factory, a farm, or anywhere they raid to catch “illegals” in the workplace - they should be dragging the owner of the company and the managers that hired them out to the paddy wagon with their wrists zip-tied as well.
Because there probably wouldn’t be undocumented workers with jobs if there weren’t Americans willing to illegally hire them.
With that, I shall drop the mic.
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