Sunday, December 7, 2008

reflection #3

I wanted to bring up the movie we watched that brought up the issue of illegal aliens in the United States.  People that want all illegal aliens found, kicked out of the country and want a "fence" put on our borders don't know how much our economy depends on these people.  This film showed us what would happen if all of the "Mexicans" all of a sudden just vanished and were gone.  All of the the small jobs that a lot of people don't think of and a lot of major jobs and domino effects would occur that would hurt the economy greatly.  Mechanics, friends, husbands and also people like border patrol policemen would all be gone and/or lose their jobs.  I think that this video was a very important bit of information to show people the consequences that would follow what would happen if we were to get rid of all the illegal aliens in the United States.  The jobs done by these illegal aliens allow our food to be purchased at the low prices they are sold at and allow large farming companies to hire cheaper labor to sell their products at a lower price.  

1 comment:

Kyle Valentine said...

Some aspects of this movie (and I guess really our study of latino farm workers) bothered me. We keep bringing up the fact that we depend on cheap latino labor to keep the cost of our groceries down. I guess this is naive of me, but I think they should have a minimum wage- documented or not. An industry shouldn't be dependent on the fear and hardship of others. I suppose in the global scheme this view is unrealistic. If we enforced some kind of minimum wage even for undocumented people then we would have to import our groceries from a country without minimum wage and the US's import/export ratio would get even worse.