What the whole everloving, pluperfect fuck, Politico?
I……..you know what? I can’t even write a whole five paragraph essay about this thought experiment sharted out by Eric Posner et. al. on immigration. You really need to click through and revel in the horror of it all yourself.
It starts out reasonably (for that side of the aisle) enough:
We need a new immigration system that offers liberal admission policies but targets its benefits to native workers rather than corporations.
Economic research provides little doubt that immigration benefits our economy. Highly educated immigrants offer their skills, entrepreneurial drive and much-needed expertise for our most important industries. Low-skilled migrants are willing to do back-breaking but vitally important labor that most Americans refuse. Both types bring their purchasing power, which increases the demand for American services and American-made goods, and their cultural heritage, which enriches ours.
Okay, yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here (especially the word native), but sure. Corporations suck, yada yada yada, you all know the drill here.
But then it goes from fairly centrist reasonableness to whatthefuckville, West Virginia tout suite and I've highlighted in bold the parts that had me close to vomiting. From my mouth.
This system should be wiped away and replaced with a system of citizenship sponsorship for immigrants that we call a Visas Between Individuals Program. Under this new system, all citizens would have the right to sponsor a migrant for economic purposes.
Here’s how the program would work: Imagine a woman named Mary Turner, who lives in Wheeling, West Virginia. She was recently laid off from a chicken-processing plant and makes ends meet by walking and taking care of her neighbors’ pets. Mary could expand her little business by hiring some workers, but no one in the area would accept a wage she can afford. Mary goes online—to a new kind of international gig economy website, a Fiverr for immigrants—and applies to sponsor a migrant. She enters information about what she needs: someone with rudimentary English skills, no criminal record and an affection for animals. She offers a room in her basement, meals and $5 an hour. (Sponsors under this program would be exempt from paying minimum wage.) The website offers Mary some matches—people living in foreign countries who would like to spend some time in the United States and earn some money. After some back and forth, Mary interviews a woman named Sofia who lives in Paraguay.
Oh, it gets worse, but we’ve got fair use rules here and you really have to click through and read the whole fucking thing. The writers then justify this trash by saying “well it’s not much different than the au pair industry.” Well, perhaps not, but there’s not a month that goes by where I don’t hear some rich asshole gets fined for abusing their au pairs, and at least once a year we hear about some other rich asshole who enslaved their au pair.
Not to mention that what the fuck, this is almost literally slavery. I mean, damnit, some dude just wrote about the slave his family owned, a story that still is one of the worst things I’ve read in ages. Until today.
I mean it rolls up the worst this decade has to offer: exploitation, the gig economy. Rolled up into a glib little package. Here’s what really will happen because it’s already happening. Someone will “sponsor” young women (and men) to come here and work in “massage parlors.” We know what goes on there.
Or someone will “sponsor” people to work in their fields. Note that the proposed program exempts them from minimum wage laws. This also already happens now.
What exactly will change, then?
oh, and there’s this:
Wealthy families could sponsor migrants, too, but there are fewer of them, and they would likely find a $6,000 boost in income not worth the trouble—
And there’s this:
Other Americans would sponsor migrants for low-skilled agricultural work, or to work in factories that move back on shore to take advantage of newly available cheap labor, or to work in their own businesses. A great free market using migrant labor would flourish, creating new jobs for working class natives as supervisors and agents
(Remember, they’re exempt from minimum wage. What the fuck?)
The level of wrong here is...I don't even know how to quantify it without getting even more explicit with my expletives. Posner, you dumb motherfucker. What the fuck?