No entiende 'Elnacho'

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2011/feb/14/immigation-laws-illegal-florida-arizona/?comments_id=953765

Elnuestros weighs in on the latest installment of the Naples Daily News’ immigration series and gets called more names than you can believe, including “anchor baby” and “Elnacho.”

Read the utterances of a high class crowd commenting at the link above, then come back for the background.

Wal-Mart paid giant fines for hiring illegal immigrants to fluff and buff their stores at night. The company hired coyotes, I mean labor contractors, who in turn put the illegals to work with their brooms and mops and nobody was the wiser. Nobody hates Wal-Mart for doing it, or getting caught. It was just a bottom-line business decision, the kind that trumps ideology or principle any day (or night) of the week.

Same thing goes for Florida’s agriculture industry. All those shiny plastic green tomatoes would rot in the fields if it weren’t for an unlimited supply of third-world labor to come and pack them off to the gas chambers for “ripening.” Same with strawberries, citrus, you name it.

The sugar growers around Lake Okeechobee went even further, back before mechanized harvesting was introduced. They got special immigration permission to bring Jamaicans in to cut the cane because not even Mexicans would do THAT work. When the crop was in, the Jamaicans were sent home. Everybody was happy, except the Caribbean cane growers who couldn’t make money because the US government subsidized the price of domestic sugar and imposed tariffs on imports.

Pick another industry. Say hospitality, with its demand for the kind of workers (not American, of course) who are satisfied to live 10 to a room on a busboy’s pay. How about landscaping, or roofing? Don’t you love seeing those good ol’ boys driving around in their humongous Dodge Ram In-Your-Face-Attitude Pickem-up Trucks, making sure their “workers” are doing what they’re being paid, cash under the table, to do?

How about meat-packing. Green Bay used to be a capital for that. Chicago, too. You know the Robert Frost poem, right? Now the packing plants are scattered around the Midwest, manned by immigrants who, once again, can afford to work there because they don’t have those distinctly American Middle Class biases against the living conditions they tolerate in order to afford such jobs. Vicious little circle, right. And the Immigrant Haters accuse them of “stealing” jobs Americans would love to have.
I got news for you, all you chicos and chicas out there. Americans never wanted those jobs for the wages being paid. That’s why the immigrants were trucked in to begin with.

Now, of course, we don’t blame the big industries who need all that wage-busting labor. Now that the Middle Class is on the ropes and job security is as tenuous as the pipe dream of retirement and Mr. and Mrs. Average American are realizing that globalization means importing Third World living conditions to their neighborhood, too, they need someone to blame.

That’s where the immigrant comes in. Just like that rascally black man served to keep Southern crackers distracted from the reality of the lousy pay and conditions those unrepentant Sons of the Confederacy offered in the New South, the Mexican and Guatemalan today give them a scapegoat they can understand without knowing diddly about the impact of NAFTA on Central American agriculture or the role of Congress is making outsourcing the new American Tradition.