Labeling people as “Illegal Immigrants” benefits capitalism and corporations.
As long as America continues to threaten migrants, it will benefit economically. Now, many naysayers and tea partiers will disagree — the rhetoric of “they took our jobs!” etc. The fact is, as long as people are threatened about their paperwork status on being here, they can be mistreated and forced to work shit pay — and companies routinely do this. It is cheaper and more “cost effective” for them to keep a lid on the status of their workers so they don’t have to pay for things like health benefits, an actual fair wage, and compensation for injuries (since majority of the jobs in factories and agriculture are labor-intensive and full of risk).
One of the best reasons to buy organic when it comes to fruit that must be hand-picked (all berries other than cranberries; grapes; cherries, apricots and many other stone fruits; most melon varieties; figs; and the list goes on, but you can usually infer from how delicate the fruit in question is) — besides the fact that those are also some of the most-poisoned produce, between insecticides and herbicides and fungicides, and besides the fact that they lead to significant soil and water pollution when grown “conventionally” — is that it’s common for agribusinesses, and even some smaller farms, to spray assorted poisons on fruit fields while there are migrant workers in the field picking fruit.
Yeah; on top of
- the illegally-long shifts without breaks;
- the inadequate provision of water, for drinking or otherwise;
- the inadequate provision of sanitary facilities, i.e. toilets or port-a-potties (even after multiple e. coli outbreaks led to thousands of dollars’ worth of produce needing to be recalled and destroyed, and thousands of dollars more lost due to consumers’ fears after the outbreaks were contained);
- the complete lack of overtime pay, sick pay, vacations, etc.;
- the complete lack of workers’-compensation coverage for injuries or illnesses due to / during work;
- the complete lack of healthcare coverage;
- the typical lack of a first-aid station on premises, or even a handful of band-aids, despite frequent occurences of heatstroke, heat exhaustion, severe dehydration, heart attack, and other work- and/or working-conditions-related medical emergencies among farm workers;
- and the illegally-low pay;
- migrant workers get poison sprayed directly onto them, typically without any warning, and without any way to wash themselves off until many hours later.
There’s a reason why so many migrant farm workers are undocumented (“illegals”); most people who are citizens, or legal residents with work permits, won’t work under illegally-dangerous, illegally-unpleasant conditions for illegally-low pay!
If you want strawberries badly enough to pay $2 for them, then you probably want them badly enough to pay $3 or $4 for them…
(via feministwerewolf-blog)
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