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Spot on. 2006-09, I worked for a company that owned several precision-machining factories in US, Canada, Mexico, China and UK. We had Vietnamese, Hispanics from all over, others too, working for us in skilled jobs. Bottom line: a union, US worker would get at least $22/hr. starting pay for these jobs. We paid our immigrants $8/hr. starting. The plant managers were in charge of hiring; we at corporate looked the other way. We were all non-union, by the way. Even though I hated what I was doing to these people, I was a single mom and needed the $ and health insurance. White people get forced into being 'complacent' because the threat is always there; 'If you don't like it, leave.' I was the only woman executive in the company. The senior management was all Republican; voted for John McCain because they thought Sarah Palin was 'hot.' Yup, that's the mentality we're dealing with.

Watch the Frontline documentary on chicken farming; all undocumented, living in squalid trailers, shoveling chicken poop all day, picking up and disposing of dead or diseased chickens.... Horrible. The owners couldn't care less.

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I think Thom Hartmann is brave to write this column. A wide ranging examination of immigration seems to be taboo, but Thom has done it. I greatly appreciate Thom's knowledge of history, the way he relates his wide experiences from around the world, and his ability to explain complex issues like immigration. We need more like him.

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You are so right Thom. The capitalists have been using immigration (population growth) as a means of raising property values which fuels capitalism. Biden should be using his bully pulpit to educate the American voters unless he is a corporate whore himself. Merrick Garland also needs to explain why he has not prosecuted about 206 Republicans for sedition. As a liberal leftist who's non-religious I have always supported zero population growth since the '60s. We are on a finite planet and reproducing like rabbits, it will end in a huge train wreck with billions of people suffering.

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The joke is, in some years close to half of undocumented immigrants may be people who came in quite legally and then never left. But nobody is losing sleep over illegal Irish or Canadians, nor are they building border walls around airports.

That 1986 law had other ramifications. For one thing, Reagan granted amnesty of almost 3 million border crossers, something Republicans conveniently forget. On the other hand, it essentially created a national ID card system, something Americans free to work when and where they wanted never had before, and it forcibly deputized employers as border cops to enforce it. Of course that created a massive industry in false identification papers.

And once this system was in place it was an easy step to demand such proof in various situations, notably commercial air travel (actually put in to avoid black marketing tickets but excused as an anti-terrorist measure). So citizens are now reviewed with a virtual “internal passport” before traveling in their own country, a situation any dictatorship would recognize.

And of course mission creep occurs. The system expanded to the hopeless and chaotic no fly lists (there are several, very poorly cross-referenced, with neither proper review nor appeal for anyone added—apparently the TSA can’t be trusted to do its job without them). Then the next step was the equally hapless Read ID system, which still doesn’t work. Americans, still singing about being “brave” and “free” can expect a future with many more police and transit workers demanding their papers. After all, Customs and Border Protection does have police power 100 miles inland from any coastal or land border, and that gives its officers jurisdiction over much of the American population. And "controlling immigration" is such a good excuse, such as for boarding buses and demanding IDs, which they did until Greyhound finally stopped that. Step by step, as laid out in the Milton Mayer book, freedoms are whittled away and, except for those profiting off of it, few even notice.

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Is there a Republican alive who cares about human beings more than money and trashing immigrants and Democrats?

I think not.

Ronald Reagan is the Republicans hero .

What does that tell us? It tells us who they are and what they do .

These people can only hate

Just look at their other front runners.

Trump, De Santis , Marg T Greene, Tucker Carlson.

All liars, deceivers , and charlatans .

They’ve been exposed as what and who they are.

And so it continues.

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“All U.S. extremist mass killings in 2022 linked to far right, report says“

https://www.axios.com/2023/02/23/mass-killings-extremism-adl-report-2022

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Check out this visualization of how the "GOP enables wage slavery of undocumented workers" which uses data from Thom's excellent article and other sources. https://thedemlabs.org/2023/02/23/gop-enables-wage-slavery-of-undocumented-workers/

It includes a map of recent examples of undocumented workers being exploited in meat packing plants, WalMart and Trump properties. https://wakelet.com/wake/8ePMj070raQ1LgEcK0fST

And a Follow The Money map to show how the GOP gets money from corporations who benefit from cheap undocumented labor. https://embed.kumu.io/445d75042877a53c163a5b2d57c7b157#gop-con-job/corporate-slavery

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founding

My position will probably stoke some angst among progressives, But truthfully I am torn over the immigration issue. While I do believe that this country should be a place of refuge for the oppressed,

I don’t believe it should have open borders, which is the classic libertarian point of view, (cheap labor)

We do need people, so hungry, that they will work at menial jobs, whether as nannies and gardeners to fruit picking and sanitation.

But if they weren’t available via migrants, then our corporations would have to pay more to it’s laborers to entice Americans into the job, but that would raise the price of services and products and then people would be screaming about inflation. A conundrum.

That concerns me though is the culture war, started by the right, specifically the Christian right.

I would say that 99.999% of people crowding our southern border are Catholic and Evangelicals. Evangelicals have made surprising inroads among Mexicans, maybe even Central Americans.

These people are conservative, ultra conservative, patriarchal, and while begging to get into the land of milk and honey, once in forget from whence they came and resort to their ultra right conservative values.

Then there are the Venezuelans. These people are not destitute economic job seekers (and by the way picking cucumbers is a job).

They are political refugees, the 21st century version of the Cubanos, those upper middle class and wealthy Cubans who had exploited the working class Cubans, until the Castro revolution, then fled to Miami where they now constitute the ultra right wing power base of DeSantis and the Republican party.

In fact we can thank them, as well as SCOTUS for Dubya’s election.

Take a look at the Venezuelans, well dressed, well fed, clean, even carrying soccer balls, dolls and toys, teens dressed in the latest hip hop fashion.

As regards immigrants. I take issue with the label asylum seekers, here and in Europe, very few are seeking asylum, most are just job seekers. The women and kids from Central America are asylum seekers, but the young males, especially those flooding into Europe are job seekers.

And as they flood in to seek employment, they bring with them an alien culture that will not adapt or assimilate. We in America don’t have much of a problem, but Europe does.

As impolitic as it is to say this, the culture of Afghanistan, the mid east, north Africa does not overlay with, much less integrate into European culture, eventually it overwhelms and then absorbs European culture, and Europe ceases to be tolerant, inclusive, eqalitarian, and democratic and becomes theocratic, intolerant, homophobic, misogynistic like Turkey.

The swarm of job seekers from the mid east and Africa into Europe is directly responsible for the rise of fascism, of Marine le Pen, of Orban in Hungary, of the neo NAZIs in Sweden and Germany. And the losers are, either way, democracy, speech, women, gays.

The lack of desire to control immigration in Europe and America is leading to authoritarian governments, which do what the immigrants would do, only in a contracted time frame, put a boot on the neck of freedom.

And in the USA the influx of ultra religious conservatives, only adds to the impetus towards a stifling misogynistic, homophobic, patriarchal theocracy as evidenced by SCOTUS and the modern Republican party.

Here is the conundrum, do we save what is left of our freedoms, our civil rights, by effectively restricting the flow of immigrants (which bring with them cultural values and/or practices) that are inimical to ours, and thus save what little freedoms and choice that we have, or do we open the flood gates and let them all in thus accelerating our decline and we are in decline.

As regards culture. I don’t care what beliefs and practices are, so long as they respect secular, egalitarian and democratic values, which is not the case with white Christian nationalists, here or in Europe and Russia

As regards race, the only solution to the race problem is found when there is no such thing as race anymore, and all humanity is one, but then people being what they are are bound to find other people and groups to target like perhaps blue eyes. Let’s not forget Rwanda where the Hutu’s, considered the Tutsi’s to be a different race and could distinguish them by their noses.

Perhaps the “final solution” is the coming Anthropocene extinction., and we are doing it to ourselves, with our breeding, greed, and insatiable appetites, needs and wants, not to mention chauvinism and beliefs.

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About 2018, German Chancellor Merkel realized that the country's birth-rate was sagging to the point of population shrinkage. She introduced policies to accommodate immigration to fill the labor void while other EU countries like Hungary erected anti-immigrant fences at the border. In 2023, we are seeing unemployment in the USA shrinking to almost zero. Despite the tech world laying people off by the 10s of thousands, unemployment claims continue to shrivel. Meanwhile, since 2015, DJT has been warning us to build a wall with Mexico because prostitutes, drug pushers, murderous gang members, were illegally entering and coming to rape and addict our (white of course) children. So the MAGAs freaked out and immigration has become a political 3rd rail. Well, how long will it take for Washington to get woke that we are running out of labor as we Boomers continue to retire by the millions each year? We can either, like Germany, manage immigration, or wait till our GDP starts to drop off for lack of productivity. Oh, did I mention the move to go to a 4-day work-week? How is that going to work?

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During the last 50 years the US population has increased dramatically https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population, and not principally due to an increase in US born couple wanting to have children - the primary contributing factor has been legal and illegal immigration, with the attendant rise in children born to this cohort https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-population-growth-has-nearly-flatlined-new-census-data-shows/ and https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/immigration-statistics.

US population has increased from approximately 191 million to 338 million during 1060- 2022, or 147 million people. By comparison, this means that we have added dozens of mega-urban areas, with their attendant changes in quality of life during the last 50 years https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities. By 2050 the US is facing a projected population of 278 million, or another 40 million.

The over-riding question, of course, has to be whether quality of life in the US has improved in the last 50 years, and whether the same trends are likely to be extending into 2050.

At the heart of this debate are the overloaded, underfunded and, by global standards, no longer up to most other Western standards, US public Schools https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/. The children from an increasing US cohort of low-income, one-parent, African-America and now Latino families have met with more agony in US schools; either because a single parent is unable to help with homework or general childcare or because both parents are too busy working low paying jobs. Into this mixture has been added a rapidly growing population of ELL students, children of both legal and illegal parents https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/el-characteristics/index.html. The mass of children in our US public schools are further being left behind, because fewer and fewer adults are willing to dedicate their lives to 30 years of being public school teachers https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-wants-fix-nation-s-teacher-shortage-educators-say-problem-n1269340.

The canary-in-the-coal-mine is in US K-12 staffing, and may be associated with the lack of men who are willing to help children https://www.menteach.org/mens_stories/the_status_of_male_teachers_in_public_education_today/. This lack of male role models in all our children's lives should be cause for concern, perhaps https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/11/rising-share-of-americans-see-women-raising-children-on-their-own-cohabitation-as-bad-for-society/.

During the 2023-50 period the Baby boomers, and their voting patterns, will disappear, and it will be up to the next generation to decide whether they want to go to work, or not. Whether they want to preserve Social Security and require Medicare-for-All as Senator Sanders has suggested. And whether the males in the next generation are willing to be a part of all our children's lives, as fathers, husbands and public school teachers.

It is Mr. Hartman's job to generate and record problematic issues, and he does a great job; however, he may not always illustrate a fair and full breath of the challenges we all face.

The US would absolutely be better off with E-Verify and a tough, high cost penalty system on employers for hiring undocumented workers. And with that would come a slower, less volatile economy, with fewer needs for larger and larger urban areas. Perhaps wages would rise, again, and perhaps, the US families would return to stabler families where one person could provide sufficient income and insurance to care for children. But, in conclusion, with respect to quality of life, America may have reached a population density size where quality of life can no longer be maintained with a population increase of another 100 million by 2100. We may need to re-examine the Liberal concept of America having room and jobs for all the asylum seekers of the world, and all the environmental refugees of the world, for instance. And we may need to ask ourselves why so many women and men are not wanting to have children https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility-is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html.

Perhaps a compromise on the worker availability through immigration may happen if people and politicians focused solely on establishing a funded and mandated E-Verify system -without any other amendments https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/senators-introduce-legislation-to-mandate-e-verify-for-all-employers. Such a Bill was indeed introduced on 1-23-2023. Perhaps voters should focus on passing this as a bi-partisan effort.

Mr. Hartman's thesis that the GOP and their corporate sponsors have won the workers-supply game by making employers essentially blame-free is historically correct. However, both parties have played the same game, with contributions to both sets of politicians. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been willing to adopt E-Verify to stop the illegal and cheap labor job magnet that has driven immigration to raise the US population almost 200 million since 1966 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965.

Mr. Hartman citations:

But it’s not poor people coming here in search of safety or a better life who are impacting our labor markets (and, frankly, it’s a small impact): it’s the companies that hire them.

And those same companies then fund Republican politicians who pushed under-the-radar social media ads at African Americans and blue-collar whites in 2016 and the last election saying that Democrats wanted Hispanic “illegals” to come in to “replace them” and take their jobs.

America, it turns out, doesn’t have an “illegal immigrant” problem: we have an “illegal employer” problem.

Which is why every single effort by Democrats to engage Republicans on “comprehensive immigration reform” runs into a brick wall: the GOP wants things just as they are.

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I just cross connected this with all my subscribers. Here's what I said:

Thom Hartmann is so good at what he does here, unraveling the convolutions and complexities of immigration. On a higher note, get your heads into the clouds by tuning into Brian Swimme today at 4 pm pacific. We need a new understanding as even extinction is threatening us and he's the best at that.

Scroll down to register now: https://t.c https://dtnetwork.org/product/book-celebration-cosmogenesis-with-brian-swimme/

My Substack post about Brian Swimme and the event: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/what-is-the-one-thing-we-need-most?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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Ya, this is the problem of the ages for everyone and every country now. People are either coming or going.

I used to have to "verify" for a company. The joke was about trying to get through to a human at that agency would make a good party game. So once again, we need to fund the process and not make it impossible to ask questions of a person instead of a computer.

I have mixed emotions on this subject. Too much generalization. If you consider a million border- crossers, you will have a million stories. I see some paying pretty steep fees to the cartels and coyotes. I see the way union construction has been affected. I know the history of what we caused. I know I would seek asylum in some of their cases. My grandfather fled Sweden and became a citizen. But, there are also those who really don't want to become citizens. I have lived in a foreign country and fully accepted that I was just a guest.

We have to stop being ungrateful and cruel to the people that feed us. That is a good place to start. That's a message people can understand even coming from a Democrat. So much work to do on the asylum-seekers and climate-refugees. Work that should be done all over this planet.

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