Illegal Immigrants

As much as I dislike the demigods who rant and rave in the media, I believe I agree with those who want to crack down on illegal immigrants. I'm not against immigration or even the wave of Latin Americans who want to come to the US. I simply believe that it should be done legally.

I worked for a company in Michigan that had a labor force that was about 85% immigrants. The work, slaughtering and processing beef, was hard, dirty and dangerous. The people who worked the kill floor, fab and rendering earned every penny they made. In an area that had suffered losses of the good union jobs from the closing of a GM plant and the continuing disappearance of jobs in paper mills and auto-related industries, it was hard to get Americans to work in that place. They would continually moan and groan about job losses and the area's unemployment rates, but you rarely found anyone lining up at Murco for a job. It seems that they would rather cry about the loss of the great jobs that weren't coming back than get a job they didn't like. The fruit industry in western Michigan seemed to have gone heavily to immigrant labor. You could drive down the Red Arrow Highway and go quite a while without seeing a sign that wasn't in Spanish.

Immigrants are in the US, doing the work that we just don't want to do. They are here doing it gladly because it's better than where they came from. I have no problem with that, other than those folks crying about no jobs when, albeit hard ones, there are jobs available. I do have a real beef with the flood of illegal immigrants doing those jobs and the seeming lack of interest by our bureaucrats and elected leaders in stemming the tide. It's time we found folks who look after our interests, like we pay them to do. If not, Murco is always hiring and they can find productive work there with Juan and Juanita, if they can keep up with Juan and Juanita, who work damned hard.