The reality is: what’s under discussion is large-scale inflows of unskilled workers. What could go wrong?

Sorry for the long post title — and the somewhat rambly post below, but I wanted to get a few thoughts down.

Remember when the peso crashed?  Wikipedia tells me this happened in 1994.  In the wake of this economic crisis in Mexico, I distinctly remember reading newspaper articles (because this was pre-internet) about professionals in Mexico who humbled themselves to work unskilled jobs in the United States.

Around that time, too, there were articles about Poles and other Eastern Europeans who had left their home country and overstayed their visas here following the upheaval of the post-Cold War transition from communism to democratic/capitalistic governments.  Highly educated, their education was going to waste because they weren’t legally authorized to work in the United States, so ended up doing day-labor construction or working as maids/housecleaners.

In such a case, legalizing the illegal workers could be deemed to be a big “win” because their skills could finally be put to use.  But this doesn’t seem to be the case any longer.  It seems to me that lots of illegal Eastern Europeans have returned home, where their economies have rebounded and, even if not, they now have the opportunity to work elsewhere in Europe (e.g., Germany, the U.K.).  A couple years ago, a realtor-friend of mine told me, as explanation for why so many condos from a certain complex were on the market at such low prices, that this was an area that had been popular with Eastern Europeans who packed up and left.

Now, we really seem to be talking exclusively about unskilled workers, Obama’s infamous (just ask twitter) reference to the bed-makers and bedpan-emptiers.

And it’s not just Obama — many Republicans have this notion of creating a guest-worker program, and they seem to have in mind the Middle Eastern oil states when thinking of this, where they certainly do import massive numbers of workers (up to 90% of the workforce), with the requirement that you stay only as long as you have a job, have no eligibility for any form of welfare for you or your dependents, and leave before you come anywhere close to retirement age.

But we’re not the UAE, rich enough to support our own citizens through government largesse, whether or not they’re capable of holding down a comfortable middle-class job, or capable of dictating to employers that they hire local citizens for a minimal percent of their workforce, and that these workers can sit around all day, in the same way as the proverbial boss’s son who doesn’t do squat.

Consider the poster child of “jobs Americans won’t do”:  farm labor of the most manual sort, harvesting produce.  Do Americans not do this job because they don’t a sufficient work ethic, or are by dint of upbringing unable to tolerate the working conditions?  That’s only part of it.  Consider not just the working but the living conditions of these workers, and tell me that it’s just fine for human beings to live in squalor for the sake of cheap lettuce.

In the year 2014, we are incessantly told that a quality education is vital for our children to succeed.  Worry about our children’s success keeps us up at night.  But we know that there are no guarantees in life, that our children could end up at a minimum wage job, either because of a poor job market or because, as happens sometimes, all our parenting effort just doesn’t have the outcome we’d like.

And that “we” is the upper-middle-class “we” — and ignores the large number of Americans who, like it or not, are not and may never be qualified for anything other than an unskilled job, maybe even one that doesn’t ask too much in terms of physical effort or conscientiousness or initiative.

It may be that over time, we may reach a point where more unskilled jobs open up, and where labor shortages have ill effects in terms of too-high wage growth or inability to hire at all.  But that’s not where we are in the year 2014.

What we’re looking at here is an objective of creating a new Servant Class, of enabling Americans once again to have a low-cost maid or nanny or landscaper, as was the norm in the pre-Civil Rights South, or in the 1900s in the North, when every household had their Irish servants.

Is that moral?  Is that right?  Perhaps the prospective servants would be just fine with trading their Third World life for this, but is it right for Americans to dream of a subservient workforce?   And does it make any sense to foreclose, for the struggling American working class and poor “underclass”, potential avenues of employment and independence, just so that those who have “made it” aleady get their cheap workforce?