[imagist]

> This is a particular piece of rhetoric I find distasteful. If there are jobs that are structured such that only an illegal immigrant, who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool and its protections, will take, that job should not exist in that form or at that pay rate. Full stop.

Agreed. There was a pretty good article on this in N+1 magazine a few months back that I found insightful enough to copy down:

> Both American and Mexican labor are cheaper for being divided, and there is no obvious reason to believe that more labor laws, like raising the minimum wage, will change the fact if there remains a surplus of undocumented workers to whom these laws technically apply, though in practice they are unenforced. The real wage, calculated as the average rate paid to documented and undocumented workers alike, explains Trump's rise more than his virulent racism does. Racism is a side effect of a regime that keeps labor laws on the books only to look the other way when millions of brown people are subjected to conditions far beneath these standards.

> The wall isn't racist; the border is racist. The wall is an effort to force a broader recognition of the privileges the border grants to professionals, who are the primary beneficiaries of American immigration and trade policy, and to redistribute some of its racist benefits downward. The only solution to this problem is to raise the price of labor power in Mexico, and then everywhere else. But given the limited political horizon of the professional left, for whom a higher minimum wage for American citizens is the best that can be hoped for, perhaps the unemployed people of Indiana can be forgiven for thinking that the wall is more realistic.