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Home-Grown Workers Eager
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| Home-Grown Workers Eager |
| 01.13.04 (9:12 am) [edit] |
[u]Reproduced from Atlanta Journal-Constitution[/u]
Did President Bush ever hear of Booker T. Washington's "Cast Your Bucket" speech?
If so, he has chosen to ignore that great man's advice, as shown by his request to Congress to offer a three-year renewable guest visa for illegal immigrants who have job offers.
In 1895, Washington, the renowned African-American leader, spoke to the Atlanta Exposition, a national gathering of the nation's leading business and political leaders. His subject was the racist practice of refusing to hire African-Americans in favor of importing foreign white workers to fill available jobs.
"To those of you who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth, cast down your bucket where you are," Washington pleaded to a packed audience, many of whom resented that he had been invited to speak to them.
Washington spoke of the lost ship captain who cried out to the master of a nearby ship, "water, water, we die of thirst," only to be told by the master that the vessel was in fresh water and that he should therefore "cast your bucket where you are."
But Washington's plea was ignored, and business leaders callously continued to refuse to hire Americans, particularly African-Americans, in favor of cheap imported labor.
Indeed, Washington's plea has often been ignored. In 1987, when teenage unemployment among African-Americans approached 80 percent, greedy garment employers petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service to import cheap foreign workers on grounds that there was an "unskilled labor shortage." This cruel policy continues to be followed on the specious claim that "Americans won't do the dirty jobs that foreign workers are willing to do."
In fact, any one of the millions of unemployed Americans will tell you that it is not the dirty jobs that they disdain, but the slave wages paid to do those jobs. Nothing is more dirty or dangerous than coal mining or garbage collection, but there is no shortage of people applying for such jobs when a decent wage is paid.
Cut off the flow of illegal immigration, and the wages paid for the dirty jobs would skyrocket.
During the 1970s, for example, office buildings in Los Angeles hired union workers as janitors, paying high wages and substantial benefits. Then greedy businessmen learned that by hiring independent contractors who would hire illegal immigrants, they could cut wages in half and withdraw all benefits. Thousands of Americans were thrown on the heap of the unemployed.
As documentation by author Gary Imhoff revealed, illegal immigration "widens the differences between classes in the U.S.; it keeps down the price of hiring a maid or a gardener for the rich while it makes things worse for the poor."
Some products would cost more if wages rise. But most people would be willing to pay a few extra cents for their toothbrush if it meant a decent living wage for unemployed Americans and refusing to exploit the misery of our desperate neighbors. Higher wages would enable more Americans to buy products from abroad and increase the employment opportunities of workers in those countries.
Message to Bush: Go back and read Booker T. Washington's eloquent plea for justice.
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Robert Hardaway is a law professor at the University of Denver.
Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opini on/0104/12equal.html" title="http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opini on/0104/12equal.html" target="_blank"http://www.ajc.com/opinion/co...
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Views expressed in this article are not neccessarily those of the Proletariat. They are published on this Blog purely to add to the national debate over undocumented workers and amnesty.
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posted by: Esther Hanson (reply)
post date: 01.08.09 (5:28 pm)
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posted by: Lane Norton (reply)
post date: 01.10.09 (6:14 am)
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