So if we all agree that we NEED immigrants

[rainy]

Can we move on to taking better care of them? I've seen guest after guest on tv this morning saying my parents came here..., agriculture needs immigrants, meat packing needs immigrants, so when as a decent humane nation can we agree we need them and stop treating them like animals?

[RKP5637]

1. Well said! Far too many view them as cheap labor to be exploited IMO. n/t

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. I think that it's kind of wrong to say "agriculture needs immigrants"

since what agriculture and meatpacking etc in the US need isn't "immigrants" but "undocumented immigrants who won't complain about being paid below minimum wage in cash off the books with no benefits whatever". What the US food industry needs to keep prices low is a constant supply of quasi-slave labour.

[rainy]

4. Thisis what upsets me the most

that NO ONE ever talks about. ICE rounds up these poor people and labels them illegal but never goes after the ones who hire them.

[RKP5637]

5. Exactly! The people that hire and exploit them never get reprimanded, and the poor people trying to

survive get punished.

[JoeStuckInOH]

7. Sure they do. But the headlines aren't usually getting much exposure.

A restaurant near me just recently closed and the couple that owned it sentenced to 18 months in prison and then deportation back to their home country. They were illegally harboring more than a dozen undocumented immigrants in their own house, paying them way below minimum wage, and also not even reporting the tiny wages to illegal employees to the IRS. They might have even been laundering money using the cash-paid orders.

All this and it was still only buried in the local paper - so unless you read the local papers here or frequent that restaurant... it flew completely under the radar. Nobody's heart strings are pulled by locking up scumbag capitalists, so the stories get little fanfare. So you usually only hear about the poor immigrant victims caught up in it.

I only noticed because my sister told me due to the fact it's somewhere we occasionally ate.

[safeinOhio]

6. I have a great idea.

Raise the minimum wage to $20/hr. Only problem is the same people want to lower it or get rid of it all together. It's like the harder, more back breaking the work, the less money they want to pay.

[rainy]

8. So true