I keep hearing people say we need illegal immigrants to do the jobs we don’t want to do. This to me is just wrong. Having people do all the jobs we don’t want to do, and, paying them sub standard wages is not necessarily the right thing. If you look at the bus stops in LA around 5pm there are long lines of illegal immigrants going home from their domestic type jobs. Cleaning, childcare, yardwork, handyman. Kind of reminds me of pictures of the old south. In essence we are taking advantage of people fleeing their country and with nowhere else to go.
I feel instead we as a country should protest those countries that are not taking care of their citizens and help change things so families are not torn apart. Guatemala, for example, is beautiful, however, a long history of US companies owning and controlling a lot of the land, hurt their economy. United Fruit company has less power, however, they and other companies own a lot of the land still. Perhaps we create a trade policy where we will only buy produce from family farms. Or, threaten to not do business with Guatemala until they have social reforms. Currently we are importing about 5 billion in goods from Guatemala. And, we export about 9 billion.
I hope Trump takes into account basic human rights into all these planned tariffs. I don’t think our country needs to be richer, nor should we should be taking advantage of the illegal immigrants. We need to start fixing the problems at the root level. As a super power, its within our powers to at least try.