Anti-immigration Conservatives Reap What Their Greed Has Sown


Is a gallon of gas worth 45 minutes of this?

Though they constantly say they loathe illegal immigration, the GOP has happily turned the other way while their corporate buddies exploit illegals for profit. But, with an election on the horizon the situation has snowballed into something ugly, and they're being forced to do something not-eactly-hawkish about it. Could the neocons have avoided this mess?

I think so. I think the GOP's habitual refusal to address the federally mandated minimum wage, along with the greed that drove their constituents to nurture illegal immigration, has brought the right wing to this.

In 1981 I got my first job. It was the summer between 10th and 11th grades, I'd just moved to a new town, and wanted to buy a car. And so, on most days of the week I slung hush puppies and North Atlantic Cod for the newly opened Captain D's on Atlantic Blvd in Jacksonville, FL. For 35 hours a week I earned $3.35 an hour - the federally mandated minimum wage of the time.

It wasn't a bad deal. At 16, I had a whopping 80-something bucks a week (post-taxes). I was a kid living at home; the money was all mine! Even with the ridiculous gas prices of the late 70s and early 80s, eighty bucks could keep a teenager pretty happy for a week.

Consider - in 1981, $3.35 bought:

• more than three gallons of gas ($1.10 average per gallon)
• twenty-two stamps (15 cents each)
• seven loaves of bread (45 cents avg)
• an hour and forty-five minutes at $3.35/hr could buy most record albums (at six dollars apiece)
• three hours of work could get you into any concert
• the average new car, at $7,600, cost (pre-tax) 2,267 hours, or 57 forty-hour weeks of minimum-wage work.

Now, as you all know, the federal minimum wage hasn't changed in ten years. Obviously, this means today's minimum wage-earner cannot buy nearly as much as I could in 1981.

For instance, in 2007 $5.15 buys:

• one and a half gallons of gas
• twelve stamps
• two loaves of bread
• 3.5 hours will buy most new albums (avg $18)
• five hours, at least, for a concert's nosebleed seats ($25 for the shitty seats)
• the average new car is $27,700 bucks; you're looking at 5,379 hours of pre-tax work, or about 135 forty-hour weeks of minimum-wage work.

So it's pretty fucking clear why many of today's teenagers aren't exactly beating down Captain D's doors (and the clueless wonder why today's youth isn't "motivated").

How does the federally-mandated minimum wage affect the current dilemma the GOP is facing on immigration reform?

Rapture-ublicans controlled Congress from 1995 until 2007, and for the past ten years remained stubbornly stagnant on the issue of increasing the minimum wage. Greed, you understand, is considered a virtue among these assholes.

Nevertheless, as time passed inflation happened, and there came a time when $5.15 an hour was insufficient. At the same time, corporations needing unskilled, low-wage labor were losing employees.

The solution? Either (1) raise wages - thereby attracting more unskilled American teenagers/young adults, or (2) find another group of people willing to work for $5.15 an hour.

Most corporations happily chose curtain two. They figured out they could get immigrant workers to bust their humps for the federally-mandated minimum wage. Teenagers and pre-college/trade school adults were no longer needed as the foundation of America's unskilled work force. Better yet, once the fat cats figured out many of their newly found immigrant workers weren't in the USA legally, the corporate-immigrant understanding became "you work for less than $5.15 an hour/we won't turn you in."

So much for conservative values, eh?

Anyway, for over a decade no one said "boo" as Minute Maid, Del Monte, and Mott's boosted their profits on the backs of illegal immigrants willing to work for next to nothing. Immigrants flocked here, illegally. Corporations' profits skyrocketed. Congressional (R)s looked the other way.

And now we are where we are. The GOP's long-standing refusal to keep the minimum wage at a competitive level snowballed into a monster they cannot now escape. With a (D)-run congress in town, a general election on the horizon, and their own rabid-right-wing a.m. radio mouthpieces fueling their base's passion, the GOP is being forced to face a gigantic problem of their own making.




Suck it up, crybabies. You've got no one but yourselves to blame.

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