The International Writers Magazine: Reality Check

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VIVA LE CHEAP LABOR! • James Campion As Congress nears its eventual vote on illegal immigrants gaining amnesty and/or probation, we must remember what this body of government represents; the whole of the republic, a republic built on the strength of free and cheap labor. Let's face it, kids, without slavery none of your big empires make it out of the garage. Whether we're talking Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Great Britain, you name it, there's slavery involved. Good way of building and maintaining a bottom line. Free labor and war, these are the bedrocks of any decent empire. We have ours, and its history is littered with it.

We're the Big Bad because we got people to do the shit work for free. And when that went kablooey with the razing of the South, we imported others to do the shit work for practically free. Then unions were formed, and that went the way of the Charleston. We ran out of victims, so we let them sneak in and had them work for peanuts. Now some 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in this country predominantly surviving by doing the kind of manual labor card-carrying citizens refuse to do or do for living wages, for next to nothing.

These people are everywhere. And right now as you read this, a preponderance of them are being exploited.
Illegal immigrants = Illegal workers = Illegal employers.
Wowie, do we have a fine mess, Ollie.

Until recently, they were invisible, however. They don't pay tax, but how much tax could they possibly pay? And they don't have benefits, but how many benefits could they earn? They were the big white elephant in the corner, even after 9/11, when Americans were horny to export and expunge and vilify anyone not "on the team". But now its time to "fix it". Fix what, exactly?
What are we really voting on here?

The continued use or abuse of desperate people to do anything - anything - to avoid returning to their native land? Or is this a referendum on finally securing our borders? Perhaps it's some kind of nifty do-over, like after the Civil War, when half the country's "citizens" were criminals. But, hey, what are you going to do after 600,000 people are massacred? Do over!

So, what are we really voting on here?
People? We're not voting on people. Business is the business of this country. People are flotsam. It's the Calvin Coolidge two-step, quite popular in the halls of this government, the very foundation of it, in fact. Not only do rich snobs use illegal immigrants to raise their little crawling trophies, (god forbid we clean junior's ass) companies also hire them for construction, landscaping, and whatever mass employment lends to keeping costs down and production up.

Cost down. Production up.

These are not just tenets of good business, they are tenets of a good economy, a solvent economy that lends and borrows and makes war, trades and deals and makes due. Survival 101. It goes on all over the globe. No one is exempt. Keep the wheels greased and the engines moving. Not everyone can live in the big house. Some people have to push the broom. You gonna push the broom, princess?
It's not about people. Never is. People are table scraps in the grand buffet of profit. Collateral damage. It's about money, bubba. Everything is about money. For instance, if the law means anything, there should be a mass evacuation of these people. Not affordable. Perhaps securing the borders. Too expensive. You wanna build a wall around this country? Whose gonna pay for that? You? Me? These bankrupt, in-debt-to-the-tits federal budget gorgers? Right. Next week.

The other inescapable element of this whole "voting on amnesty" farce is it does not bode well for this nation to be freeing people of other nations while kicking out the impoverished immigrants. Especially since this is a nation of people rank with despot ancestry either kicked out of other countries, on the lamb, yanked from the jungles, escapees of some kind of genocide or refugees from the kind of abject poverty that had the huddle masses traveling countless miles for countless months with nary a piss pot while entire families waited at home for the first post card from Golden Street, USA.

I'm proud to say I am the offspring of that last bunch, yearning to breathe free and get to work in the sweatshop for five-cents an hour. Dragging your garbage around so you won't have to see it. Yeah, I have that coursing through my blood, Jack. It feels good. Makes you want to see somebody else get a break. Right?

As I write this there is a story coming over the wire that the Senate has some kind of descending penalty plan. If you are in the country illegally for five or more years, you get to take a test for a green card. If you are in for more than two or les than five, you have to do laps and forty push-ups or whatever, and if you just busted in, you have to go back. In other words, anyone breaking the law for longer, gets preferential treatment. I would love this if it didn't screw up my plan to renounce my citizenship and then sneak into the country to avoid paying taxes. Damn it!

But don't worry, those who are sent back can apply for citizenship, and when they pass they can be dumped on our streets to try and survive on meager wages while donating forty percent of it to Social Security and Federal and State taxes. Then they'll run back out and sneak back in again.
© James Campion April 10th 2006
James Campion the author of "Deep Tank Jersey", "Fear No Art" and "Trailing Jesus"
realitycheck@jamescampion.com
www.jamescampion.com
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