Yes, the people who barely have clothing, risked human trafficking and perilous sea crossings are after my job, livelihood, or whatever.
Fucking conservatives and their mental gymnastics all to serve capitalism
If you can be replaced by someone who isn’t a citizen, might not speak english, has no home and has no friends or connections, then you’re clearly just absolutely shit at your job, because you’ve got absolutely EVERY advantage over them. It’s crazy that rightwingers are so eager to blame immigrants for taking jobs
Refugees are routinely used as cheap/free labor in order to undermine the local labor movement. They’re easy to exploit, isolate, and ultimately vilify when economic conditions in working class neighborhoods deteriorate.
You don’t have to bend yourself into a mental pretzel to see a large influx of skilled professionals as a threat to your personal welfare, in an economy that rewards administrators who pursue the smallest possible labor costs.
What’s more, these cheap laborers are often held up as a population that needs to be heavily policed. That creates a boom economy for people in law enforcement. The boom in law enforcement creates a patronage network that runs back to the wealthiest plutocrats and their political allies.
This creates a virtuous cycle for capitalists
- migrants drive down wages and drive up civil unrest
- unrest invites a big police force which cements “cop” as a member of the professional working class
- police brutalize the low-cost migrants while landlords gouge them for a healthy profit
- new wave of migrants come in to repeat the cycle and further stratify local wealth.
The end result is functional serfdom.
It’s always “Immigrants are stealing our jobs!”
And never “The company owner hired an immigrant!”
Shows you just how fucked up these people are.
I think people raised under conservatism, like people raised under capitalism in general, have a counterintuitive and antisocial instinct to “punch down”.
Capitalism teaches us wealth and power come from hard work and merit, if people are poor it’s because they don’t work hard and have no merit, and that poor people are fundamentally bad people.
So if they have to choose between blaming poor migrants who are willing to work for low wages - or are forced to work for low wages, because the law doesn’t allow them to work legally or access the legal protections of citizen workers - or blaming rich, powerful business owners who decide to exploit these poor migrants, that instinct overrides logic.
