American Tune

First off, I LOVE PAUL SIMON!!! He wrote this in 1973.

I'm not too adept with written words. The rest of my family are all eloquent and poetic and succinct. But me, not so much. Therefore, I must sometimes rely on the talented to help me express my own feelings. I've never just re-posted a whole article from another blogger before, but I feel Suebob has captured the topic and my own feelings about Illegal Immigration and Legal Corporate Emigration so well that I'm just going to copy and paste here for you. Please run down to the bottom of the page here, and click on Suebob, under Other Blog Likey, to give her plenty of comment love. She is a wonderful unemployed writer.

28 April 2010

By the time I get to Arizona
Illegal immigration is a huge problem.Immigrants come here and take low-wage jobs. They are willing to worker harder and for less, under worse conditions and without legal protections. If you are a U.S. citizen and want a job picking crops, washing cars, slaughtering animals or doing non-union construction work, you might be out of luck. Unless you speak Spanish, you probably wouldn't fit in with the rest of your work crew.

Immigrants take advantage of our social services and educational system. Like most other people, they also have a tendency to want to reproduce, and their kids who are born here are citizens just by virtue of their birth on American soil.

Illegal immigration is a huge benefit as well.

Who becomes an immigrant? People who have the brains and initiative to take a look around and say "I want something better." The lazy, the feeble and those lacking imagination sit where they are, stuck in a terrible situation.Illegal immigrants pay into our system through inescapable taxes and Social Security dollars paid to fake numbers that are stolen from somewhere else.

They make our culture richer, more interesting. They bring traditions, values and, most importantly to me, cuisines.

Their children are raised with stories of how bad their parents had it back in the old country and are encouraged to work hard and to make the most of what they have.

In addition to illegal immigration, we also have the problem of legal emigration. Not by people, by corporations. They offshore themselves while conducting most of their business here, taking advantage of what they need from our country while eliminating their tax obligation.

They also avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, depriving their US employees of the half of their retirement benefits the employer normally pays. Their employees also can't collect unemployment benefits.

According to the General Accounting Office (via Crooks and Liars):
"GAO, searching publicly available data filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, determined that 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded corporations and 63 of the 100 largest federal contractors maintain subsidiaries in countries generally considered havens for avoiding taxes. Dorgan and Levin said they requested the updated report from one several years ago because they are focused on combating offshore tax abuses, which they estimated cause $100 billion in lost U.S. tax revenue each year."

Then they send every job possible overseas to lower-paid labor who have lower expectations from their employers.

We get poorly made, cheap products that break almost as soon as we take them out of the box or unravel as soon as we throw them in the wash. We get to talk to outsourced operators on the phone - in varying levels of American English competency - giving us generally unhelpful help when we call practically any customer service center.

I know it's not an either/or, but I'd rather have illegal immigration with all of its benefits, than legal corporate emigration, which doesn't seem to have any for me.
Posted by SUEB0B at 3:23 PM