"Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people — we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy — the restaurant business as we know it — in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.” But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position — or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do."
by KULR_Mooning
4 Comments
Thank you for posting this. I’ve been meaning to look it up and do so.
That’s pretty crazy he never had a white kid in the pit
> No one understands and appreciates the
> American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The
> Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I’ve worked with over the years make
> most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks…
>
> …The very backbone of the industry, whether you like it or
> not, is inexpensive Mexican, Dominican, Salvadorian and Ecuadorian labor-most of whom could
> cook you under the table without breaking a sweat
The way the current system is set up effectively creates an exploitable underclass whose conditions range from undesirable work to pseudo-slavery. These people have no state recourse because of their undocumented status, limited access to community resources because of language and attitudinal issues (particularly xenophobia from natural-born US-Americans), and exist in a particularly precarious situation, basically at the whim of their employers, where thier wholes lives can be uprooted at a moment’s notice by secret police.
The solution, of course, is not mass deportations. Those disrupt communities, advance authoritarianism, and brutalize documented and non-documented people alike. Natural-born and documented US-Americans will be left with a deeply broken economic system, devoid of the workers who made it function at all. Undocumented US-Americans will, at best, see their lives thrown into upheaval and at worst be disappeared outright.
The solution is a mass citizenship path for all currently resident undocumented people and a streamlining of the immigration system with much wider acceptance of refugees. This decreases their exploitability, meaning that all workers’ rights and pay potential are strengthened because these workers can now seek legal recourse. It allows them to more formally enter a community, strengthening local social bonds.
Most importantly, though, they’re not going to stop coming and its not their fault. The climate crisis is making the Equatorial regions less habitable by the year. There will only be more climate refugees and the states of the Global North will have a choice to make: accept or shoot. And I would much rather the former than the latter because I am not a fan of murder. That’s why a more open path to citizenship or documented non-citizen residence, particularly for refugees, is also necessary