Those bastards can’t speak American, and they’re taking all those jobs away that I’d never even consider doing!

Jobs is just a thing people talked about but was never the actual issue. The issue has always been fear of change. Depending on the list you look at right now, Peso Pluma is between the #1 and #12 artist right now in music. There are areas of the country where knowing Spanish has become a near necessity to own a business.

Depending on how racist they are, it might be some #WhiteGenocide nonsense, or it might be that they have some honestly kind of legitimate concerns about changing culture, or they just don't like seeing all the brown people around. It seems to vary a lot from person to person.

I'm not saying they're right and I'm certainly not endorsing that way of thinking. I just think it's important to understand the real reasons they're all freaking out. It was never really jobs and always plain xenophobia.

That's not an excuse to allow the wanton exploitation of migrant labor that does, whether you want to admit it or not, undercut US labor on the margins. Not to mention the tolerance of labor violations against undocumented workers undoubtedly trickles up to legal labor and harms a lot more workers than just the migrants.

Illegal border crossings are a serious problem and the proper solution is not to hand wave away conservative concerns about it. All that does is maintain the status quo wherein migrant laborers are kept in legal limbo, facilitating their continued exploitation. That's bourgeois shit and if I wanted to get a little conspiratorial about it, I'd suggest that maybe that's the whole point of the "Americans don't want to do those jobs" rhetoric.

The proper solution is to legalize the migrants, get them documented, and protect them with US minimum wage and labor laws.

Or there's one dude with a merry-go-round, making the number seem higher.

I’m just gonna leave it as a quote from the article. If the wording is messed up, it’s their problem. Good point, though!

So?

It's a huge problem in the towns and cities immediately on the other side of the border and that's the primary concern here. Imagine where you live and 671 unhoused and unfed human beings walked into your town every. single. day. No local municipality in the world has the resources to deal with that. It has to be the federal government.

That's not to suggest that building walls in the wilderness is an effective intervention. But it is an unfortunately popular one. It must be coupled with federal programs to receive, house, and find work for the people arriving at areas not blocked by a wall.

But the people living in those border towns don't deserve to be burdened with a problem created by federal government policies. The feds need to fix the problem.