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This stunning article from Alternet touches on a subject that no US news outlet will touch as they are all corporate outlets: the profound and inhumane abuse of immigrants via the H-2B guestworker program. On its surface, the H-2B program has no right to exist at all. Its existence is based on the notion that for some bizarre reason, the employer cannot find any or enough Americans to fill the needed the jobs. Nevertheless, most H-2B workers work in places with double digit unemployment.
The last time I was in Yosemite, where I formerly lived, the place was swarming with H-2B guestworkers. When I lived there in 1977, there was not a single job that went open for lack of a US worker to fill it. Now that corporate criminal Delaware North has taken over concessions from the more fair though still abusive Curry Company, many to most of the positions are filled with H-2B guestworkers, easier to abuse and mistreat.
The list of jobs in need of H-2B guestworkers is utterly amazing. One of them is “welder.” In shipyards all up and down the US Gulf Coast, thousands of welding jobs formerly filled by proud American workers are now filled by hyper-exploited H-2B guestworkers. Apparently, “welder” is one of those jobs that Americans just won’t do.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration quickly passed a directive allowing enforcement-free mass importation of immigrants, legal and illegal, to do cleanup and rebuilding work in New Orleans. That there were countless able-bodied Blacks in New Orleans was overlooked, or maybe it wasn’t. This directive was passed for one reason and one reason only – so that corporations exploiting the rebuilding process would not have to hire New Orleans Blacks, or any Americans for that matter, to do the work. Instead, tens of thousands of post-Katrina jobs that could have gone to the desperate Blacks of New Orleans went to 25,000 illegal alien criminals.
Scarcely a single word was heard in protest of this directive. All Democrats and all US liberals will fall all over themselves to do anything to worship the Illegal Alien and Immigrant God that they prostrate themselves over. Conservatives will not say a peep because immigrants, legal and illegal cheaply replace costly US workers, On both sides of the aisle, on the Left and the Right, the polarized sides of the political chamber fall all over themselves to beat the US worker to a bloody mass of a pulp.
And it is true: If liberals and Democrats could replace the vast majority of US workers with immigrants, legal or illegal, no matter how exploited, they would do it in a heartbeat. And there is not a conservative who would not do the same.
The abuses of the H-1B program among tech workers in the US and especially in Silicon Valley are many and legion. Yet the loudest champions of the program, a knife expertly aimed at the pulsing heart of the US tech worker, are US Democrats, often liberal Democrats. Of course all Republicans support the plan. And Barack Obama loves nothing so much as he loves his H-1B wage slaves and job thieves.
It is interesting that a progressive organization, in this case, the sickening worms of Morris Dees’ SPLC, are actually protesting about abuses of US workers under the H-2B program. It is incredible that anyone on the Left would attack worker abuses of any kind. Yet the truth is sadder than it appears. The SPLC only wrote this report because the workers being abused were their cherished immigrants. The SPLC would never waste a tear on US workers. Like the rest of the US Left, they care only about immigrant job-thieves. There is no room in their heart for the abused American worker. US workers only get the sympathy of the Left if they hail from some foreign shore.
And what is the SPLC’s solution to the abuses of the H-2B program? A responsible position would be to support the reforms of the program outlined a bill killed with the indispensable help of Senate Democrats. But we know that the SPLC goes far beyond this. The SPLC, like the entire US Left, is an Open Borders organization. Their preferred solution would be abolish the H-2B program and open the US borders to hundreds of millions from the around the world who would quickly funnel through through our ungated edges.
And so we have it: when it comes to US workers, we truly have no friends. The Democrats and Republicans are both corporate capitalist parties, and as such will always oppose the workers when the interests of the workers and our elected leaders corporate masters collide. Selling one’s soul is simple, but it always comes with a price. And indeed, the loudest champions of the horrific slave labor abuses of the H-2B programs have been Democrats, including Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, usually typed as a liberal Democrat.
What we need is a pro-working class party in America. A party that will always or nearly always side with working class Americans, and I emphasize Americans. In the conflict between American workers and foreign invaders and job thieves, the position of the working class party should be obvious.
