Class Warfare 101

Regarding Dubya’s time-worn fiction that illegal (“undocumented”…whatever) workers perform jobs “that Americans won’t do,” this item from Bloomberg news bludgeons that bit of propaganda pretty thoroughly, particularly this paragraph:

"The idea that somehow you have a need for people to do jobs that Americans won't do is just insane,'' says George Borjas, an economist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has written extensively about immigration and wages. He says that as immigrants flow into an occupation, ``the wage goes down, and you go do something else."

And this story from USA Today notes why nothing will change (particularly this paragraph):

“The Bush administration is committed to a policy of non-enforcement, and that's why the overall effort at enforcement is going to fail," says Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., non-profit research group focused on immigration. "We don't do anything to employers who hire illegals. There's a complete lack of commitment."

Meanwhile, the beat goes on and we are left to fight the battles that keep us merely from sinking instead of actually getting ahead.