11 ms·

I was 15 (~2004) years old working at Burger King when I had my first glimpse of a broken immigration system. I came to work one day and we were very understaf

I was 15 (~2004) years old working at Burger King when I had my first glimpse of a broken immigration system. I came to work one day and we were very understaffed. I asked my manager what was going on. She heard a rumor that immigration enforcement was coming to our store and they, our co-workers, were never coming back. People I was friends with, just gone forever. I wish we could have a functioning immigration policy so hard working people wanting a better life can come here and live without fear.

badpun 4y ago
I suspect the system works as intented. American economy and people profit off of illegal immigrants' cheap labor, but at the same time the legal system does not recognize them, so that they can be squeezed even more with no recourse. That's how the country was built in the past and that is what it is still doing - and it's working extremely well. I don't believe it will ever be changed. Oh, and H1-B is the same principle, but for coders and such. It has to be made nicer, because coders have better options worldwide - but it's only made as nice as absolutely necessary to keep the cheap people coming in.
- rayiner 4y ago
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Sorry the who?
    - rayiner 4y ago
      Globalists. Adjective form of people who think globalism—free movement of labor and capital across borders—is a good thing: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-united-nations-20160920-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-united-nations-20... See also socialism :: socialist and capitalism :: capitalist.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Ok and so have you ever noticed that quite often when people refer to "the globalists" they have a different group in mind?
        xyzzyz 4y ago
        What are you even talking about?
        tptacek 4y ago
        They're referring to the fact that "globalist" is code for "Jewish" among antisemites. Rayiner isn't being antisemitic, and is talking about the word in its original meaning.
        xyzzyz 4y ago
        That's not only extremely silly, it's in fact a pernicious kafkatrap. What if all globalists actually happened to be Jewish? There would have been no way to criticize them for their globalist ideas -- if you did that, you'd immediately be criticized as anti-semite, despite explicitly specifying the set of ideas you don't like and separating them from Jewishness of their proponents, never mentioning it. How lucky we are that there are plenty of non-Jewish globalists, allowing us to criticize globalism.
        tptacek 4y ago
        It's not extremely silly. It's absolutely a code word among antisemites. And, once again: Rayiner isn't using the word that way, so there's no need to deploy ESR-speak against me. Please take it somewhere else. You asked what the subtext of the word is, and I provided it.
        rayiner 4y ago
        I’ve encountered Bush/Obama types who believe in free movement of labor and capital trying to redefine it as a reference to Jewish people to avoid discussion of the merits of their ideas, if that’s what you mean. Sorry, but globalism is an important phenomenon for discussion, just as capitalism and socialism and communism were in the 20th century. We’re not going to make the obvious label to describe proponents of that ideology taboo based on some completely contrived dog whistle. (Not only contrived but non-sensical given that Israel has very traditional and non-globalist views of what it means to be a nation.)
- realce 4y ago
  > so that they can be squeezed even more with no recourse IMO it's about labor pressure on actual US citizens. You know that some illegal immigrant could be hired to take a low-wage position over you, therefore you don't have actual labor bloc leverage from withholding your labor from those positions. Prevents unions, prevents wage raises, prevents strikes, prevents all progress in those classes of work. They use these folks against US workers all the time.
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    Interesting that illegal immigration - something that has been a major concern since the 90s - became a major flashpoint after the courts chipped away significantly at labor rights and peak (illegal) immigration was over for 2 decades.
    - nradov 4y ago
      The number of illegal aliens present in the country appears to have peaked in 2007. So somewhat later than 2 decades. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/13/key-facts-about-the-changing-u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/13/key-facts-a...
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Both are correct. That's why the executive is sabotaging immigration control right now, it's like telling the world come to America. 10x more Cubans, Haitians, Brazillians crossing the border cararraja why? To stop that inflation! No unions, no inflation, no dignity in the workplace, up that unemployment in real life (but not on paper, turn those 9's into 6's).
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      > 10x more Cubans, Haitians, Brazillians crossing the border Do you have a source for this?
      - 4y ago
- bashmelek 4y ago
  I also worry about all kinds of other exploitation that could result from the immigrants’ legal situation.
- TwoFerMaggie 4y ago
  This is sadly how a lot of economies function. Something is dangled in front of you (life in the big cities, citizenship in developed countries, etc.), and in order to get that you must agree to be exploited, to different extents. This way inhabitants of said economies get to enjoy the fruit of such cheap labor. Sometimes the facade of a convenient modern life is built entirely upon an underclass who are intentionally kept in that situation just so they can continue to be exploited. This is of course neither healthy nor sustainable. Of course incentives and promises of upward mobility after some hard work are nice, but one must question themselves: if the local economy will simply cease to function when there are not as many people willing to be exploited, is this model still ethical?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
refurb 4y ago
Presumably your coworkers weren't legally working in the US? Why would them leaving be viewed as a "broken" immigration system? I'd say it's broken if we don't enforce immigration laws, not if we enforce them. It would be trivial to set up a system to validate the right to work in the US. In fact one already exists - E-Verify. But many groups have resisted the national roll out and penalties if businesses don't comply (similar to how we have sanctuary cities). The funny part is that in all the other countries I've lived in, this issue never comes up. Sure, there are illegal immigrants, etc, but nobody questions when they are sent home or when businesses are fined for violating immigration law. I'm not sure why it's such a contentious issue in the US.
- fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
  Saw this for the first time as a teenager working in the service industry too. My restaurant was a little mom-and-pop run by a couple who would knowingly violate employment law by hiring undocumented workers for back-of-house roles, and would use the threat of contacting immigration enforcement to coerce them to do further unlawful things when it suited their interest. Often it was in service of unlawful activities like improper waste disposal and dumping. I have no idea how much they were paid, if it was regularly, or if they benefitted from mandated labor concessions like lunches and breaks. So odd that we so often label people on one side of this transaction as “illegal” but have no popular words to describe the other.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    When wealthy people say they want an unregulated free market - this is what they mean.
- ilammy 4y ago
  It's "broken" in the sense that other parts of the society depend on non-enforcement. Start enforcing it more often and the house of cards starts crumbling.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
duxup 4y ago
When the local Chipotle opened down the street from my office lines were out the door at lunchtime. And yet if you got in line ... it just kept moving, never stopped. Behind the counter were 4 people (including the cashier) making the burritos. They were fast, communicated efficiently, and very accurate with orders. Immigration enforcement put some pressure on Chiplotle and they were all gone one day. Replaced by 7 locals behind the counter who didn't listen to each other, were insanely slow and all around bad at their job. It was hard to go in there and order and watch them just kinda ... be there, but not do much right. Fast food might not be the best measure, but man those folks worked efficiently and accurately.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Have you ever encountered the customer service in Europe? (Especially outside Germany, Sweden, etc.) It's awful and everyone is rude. It's because they don't have to worry about being replaced by illegal immigrants.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    I don't see the leap in logic from "I experienced bad service in areas of Europe" to "downward wage pressure alleviation results in a better experience." Can you expound how they are related, and if you have some insight, where this has been researched?
  - BongoMcCat 4y ago
    No, it is because we don't use the tipping system. And it's not awful, and people are not rude, just not "fake-friendly" as americans.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      And in my experience, the "fake friendly" is largely confined to chain restaurants in the US. I haven't encountered it much at Michelin-starred establishments, for example.
  - seanw444 4y ago
tomrod 4y ago
I had a similar experience as a kid at Dairy Queen. At the time, I adhered to the common cultural milieu in my little Bible belt town and had a load of cognitive dissonance when they took my friends away, never to be seen again -- the spirit of this was totally violated: "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." It was an eye opening experience for me. I take as a fundamental human right that people and capital should be able to travel without sovereign restraint. You should be able to vote with your feet. I get the pro-isolationist arguments regarding wages, of course, but restricting immigration because your wages are at risk is a zero-sum game where one side the winner violates a human right. The EU gets this and allows people to travel to work between countries. The US gets this and allows people to travel to work between states. Why does a line on the ground invoke magical worldviews and forced tribalism supporting sovereignty?
jjtheblunt 4y ago
hard working people wanting a better life regularly come here and live without fear, by filling out paperwork, don't they?

badpun 4y ago

I suspect the system works as intented. American economy and people profit off of illegal immigrants' cheap labor, but at the same time the legal system does not recognize them, so that they can be squeezed even more with no recourse. That's how the country was built in the past and that is what it is still doing - and it's working extremely well. I don't believe it will ever be changed. Oh, and H1-B is the same principle, but for coders and such. It has to be made nicer, because coders have better options worldwide - but it's only made as nice as absolutely necessary to keep the cheap people coming in.

rayiner 4y ago
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Sorry the who?
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Globalists. Adjective form of people who think globalism—free movement of labor and capital across borders—is a good thing: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-united-nations-20160920-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-united-nations-20... See also socialism :: socialist and capitalism :: capitalist.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Ok and so have you ever noticed that quite often when people refer to "the globalists" they have a different group in mind?
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        What are you even talking about?
        tptacek 4y ago
        They're referring to the fact that "globalist" is code for "Jewish" among antisemites. Rayiner isn't being antisemitic, and is talking about the word in its original meaning.
        xyzzyz 4y ago
        That's not only extremely silly, it's in fact a pernicious kafkatrap. What if all globalists actually happened to be Jewish? There would have been no way to criticize them for their globalist ideas -- if you did that, you'd immediately be criticized as anti-semite, despite explicitly specifying the set of ideas you don't like and separating them from Jewishness of their proponents, never mentioning it. How lucky we are that there are plenty of non-Jewish globalists, allowing us to criticize globalism.
        tptacek 4y ago
        It's not extremely silly. It's absolutely a code word among antisemites. And, once again: Rayiner isn't using the word that way, so there's no need to deploy ESR-speak against me. Please take it somewhere else. You asked what the subtext of the word is, and I provided it.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        I’ve encountered Bush/Obama types who believe in free movement of labor and capital trying to redefine it as a reference to Jewish people to avoid discussion of the merits of their ideas, if that’s what you mean. Sorry, but globalism is an important phenomenon for discussion, just as capitalism and socialism and communism were in the 20th century. We’re not going to make the obvious label to describe proponents of that ideology taboo based on some completely contrived dog whistle. (Not only contrived but non-sensical given that Israel has very traditional and non-globalist views of what it means to be a nation.)
realce 4y ago
> so that they can be squeezed even more with no recourse IMO it's about labor pressure on actual US citizens. You know that some illegal immigrant could be hired to take a low-wage position over you, therefore you don't have actual labor bloc leverage from withholding your labor from those positions. Prevents unions, prevents wage raises, prevents strikes, prevents all progress in those classes of work. They use these folks against US workers all the time.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Interesting that illegal immigration - something that has been a major concern since the 90s - became a major flashpoint after the courts chipped away significantly at labor rights and peak (illegal) immigration was over for 2 decades.
  - nradov 4y ago
    The number of illegal aliens present in the country appears to have peaked in 2007. So somewhat later than 2 decades. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/13/key-facts-about-the-changing-u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/13/key-facts-a...
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Both are correct. That's why the executive is sabotaging immigration control right now, it's like telling the world come to America. 10x more Cubans, Haitians, Brazillians crossing the border cararraja why? To stop that inflation! No unions, no inflation, no dignity in the workplace, up that unemployment in real life (but not on paper, turn those 9's into 6's).
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    > 10x more Cubans, Haitians, Brazillians crossing the border Do you have a source for this?
    - 4y ago
bashmelek 4y ago
I also worry about all kinds of other exploitation that could result from the immigrants’ legal situation.
TwoFerMaggie 4y ago
This is sadly how a lot of economies function. Something is dangled in front of you (life in the big cities, citizenship in developed countries, etc.), and in order to get that you must agree to be exploited, to different extents. This way inhabitants of said economies get to enjoy the fruit of such cheap labor. Sometimes the facade of a convenient modern life is built entirely upon an underclass who are intentionally kept in that situation just so they can continue to be exploited. This is of course neither healthy nor sustainable. Of course incentives and promises of upward mobility after some hard work are nice, but one must question themselves: if the local economy will simply cease to function when there are not as many people willing to be exploited, is this model still ethical?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

refurb 4y ago

Presumably your coworkers weren't legally working in the US? Why would them leaving be viewed as a "broken" immigration system? I'd say it's broken if we don't enforce immigration laws, not if we enforce them. It would be trivial to set up a system to validate the right to work in the US. In fact one already exists - E-Verify. But many groups have resisted the national roll out and penalties if businesses don't comply (similar to how we have sanctuary cities). The funny part is that in all the other countries I've lived in, this issue never comes up. Sure, there are illegal immigrants, etc, but nobody questions when they are sent home or when businesses are fined for violating immigration law. I'm not sure why it's such a contentious issue in the US.

fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
Saw this for the first time as a teenager working in the service industry too. My restaurant was a little mom-and-pop run by a couple who would knowingly violate employment law by hiring undocumented workers for back-of-house roles, and would use the threat of contacting immigration enforcement to coerce them to do further unlawful things when it suited their interest. Often it was in service of unlawful activities like improper waste disposal and dumping. I have no idea how much they were paid, if it was regularly, or if they benefitted from mandated labor concessions like lunches and breaks. So odd that we so often label people on one side of this transaction as “illegal” but have no popular words to describe the other.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  When wealthy people say they want an unregulated free market - this is what they mean.
ilammy 4y ago
It's "broken" in the sense that other parts of the society depend on non-enforcement. Start enforcing it more often and the house of cards starts crumbling.
- slothtrop 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

duxup 4y ago

When the local Chipotle opened down the street from my office lines were out the door at lunchtime. And yet if you got in line ... it just kept moving, never stopped. Behind the counter were 4 people (including the cashier) making the burritos. They were fast, communicated efficiently, and very accurate with orders. Immigration enforcement put some pressure on Chiplotle and they were all gone one day. Replaced by 7 locals behind the counter who didn't listen to each other, were insanely slow and all around bad at their job. It was hard to go in there and order and watch them just kinda ... be there, but not do much right. Fast food might not be the best measure, but man those folks worked efficiently and accurately.

rayiner 4y ago
Have you ever encountered the customer service in Europe? (Especially outside Germany, Sweden, etc.) It's awful and everyone is rude. It's because they don't have to worry about being replaced by illegal immigrants.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I don't see the leap in logic from "I experienced bad service in areas of Europe" to "downward wage pressure alleviation results in a better experience." Can you expound how they are related, and if you have some insight, where this has been researched?
- BongoMcCat 4y ago
  No, it is because we don't use the tipping system. And it's not awful, and people are not rude, just not "fake-friendly" as americans.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    And in my experience, the "fake friendly" is largely confined to chain restaurants in the US. I haven't encountered it much at Michelin-starred establishments, for example.
- seanw444 4y ago

tomrod 4y ago

I had a similar experience as a kid at Dairy Queen. At the time, I adhered to the common cultural milieu in my little Bible belt town and had a load of cognitive dissonance when they took my friends away, never to be seen again -- the spirit of this was totally violated: "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." It was an eye opening experience for me. I take as a fundamental human right that people and capital should be able to travel without sovereign restraint. You should be able to vote with your feet. I get the pro-isolationist arguments regarding wages, of course, but restricting immigration because your wages are at risk is a zero-sum game where one side the winner violates a human right. The EU gets this and allows people to travel to work between countries. The US gets this and allows people to travel to work between states. Why does a line on the ground invoke magical worldviews and forced tribalism supporting sovereignty?

jjtheblunt 4y ago

hard working people wanting a better life regularly come here and live without fear, by filling out paperwork, don't they?