NY Times: Immigration Continues Exploitation Wrought by Slavery

NY Times: Immigration Continues Exploitation Wrought by Slavery

October 2, 2023

Federal immigration policy allows employers to exploit poor people just like slavery enabled employers to exploit African people, according to a pro-amnesty article published on Monday by the New York Times.

“This is nothing new,” states Times writer Marcela Valdes in “Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works.” It continues:

America’s economy has always relied upon a mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit … “These [economic] spaces that were once filled by slaves are now filled by immigrants,” Anita Sinha, a professor of law at American University told me. “They are exploitative by design.”

“In the United States, versions of these economic dynamics have always been in play, but what has changed over the past 100 years is the way that immigration policy has created a permanent class of disenfranchised ‘illegal’ workers,” writes Valdes, who declines to name this type of exploitative economy.

Bizarrely, Valdes justifies this slavery-like economic model because it aids migrants and delivers cheap products and services to Americans. She writes:

The “solutions” [to migration] rarely address the root cause: Unauthorized immigration, for all the obstacles America throws at it, remains a boon for countless U.S. employers and a reasonable bet for migrants who seek a better life.

American consumers benefit from these systems every time they find exceptionally inexpensive ways to get their lawns cut, their bathrooms cleaned, their houses built, their apples picked, their nails painted and their young and old cared for. The prices we pay for these services have been subsidized for generations by transnational migrants.

Valdes’s quasi-endorsement of exploitation labor has a purpose: to help expand the flow of migrants into the United States. That purpose is exposed when she says illegal migrants should be awarded citizenship if they sneak into the United States and work illegally for five years in what she describes as modern slavery.

Her preferred policy would massively expand the scale of damage caused to Americans by what she describes as the modern version of slavery.

Overall, Valdes’s argument for amnesty, headlined relies on the incorrect claim that Americans can do nothing to stop migration.

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