[rule_follower]

>dey turk ur jerbs

This sniffling condescension toward those in our society who have and continue to lose out to corporate interests who have sold out the American worker is vile. When employment and income prospects of citizens are reduced and dimmed at all levels, be it farm workers or IT gods, because corporations are importing foreigners to replace them (whether directly or indirectly) and the government is either complicit in or utterly passive toward the situation, it is entirely reasonable to be angry and feel betrayed. Early labor organizers would have long ago (hell, as recently as the mid-90s) risen up in arms over this. That organized labor utters not a peep tells us very clearly that such movements are dead.

[dang]

Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? It's not what this site is for and we ban accounts that are here only to do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[romwell]

The sniffling condescension is towards the sentiment, not the people or the general idea of protecting the job market.

Unionizing and making sure visa workers don't get paid less and exploited? Hell yes. Making the process of obtaining visa and immigrating here a living hell for the people that, by all logic, deserve to be and are needed here? "dey turk ur jerbs".

Also, "imported workers" should not be conflated with "people who don't hold a US green card". The latter category includes people who gave 5-7 years to this country while getting a PhD here, for example.

[zaptheimpaler]

Its not the immigrants you should be mad at, its the corporate interests. Like this article shows, the immigrants have an advantage over citizens precisely because companies get away with paying them less.

The US government has been bought & sold to the highest bidder for a long time now, in many, many areas - repealing net neutrality, healthcare no one can afford, skyrocketing CEO salaries while companies claim raising minimum-wage would bankrupt them, the list just goes on and on. Pharmaceutical companies hide results/push bad drugs and get a slap on the wrist. Google/Apple/Facebook got caught colluding in wage-fixing to keep salaries low and got a slap on the wrist.

Prisons are run for-profit and the few companies that control how prisoners send messages/make calls to the outside charge rates like $20 for a 20-minute call. A money order to send money outside costs $11.95. The prison facilities sometimes share in the revenue made by these companies, which gives them further incentive to gouge prisoners. No doubt the prisons kickback some money to police officers who get them more arrests too.

Like at what point is the government going to fucking step in and protect the people over the companies?

As long as that keeps happening the middle-class will continue to get f*ed. But immigrants are just a convenient scapegoat to blame, and screwing them will not really solve the problem. When you sell crucial nation-level functions to companies, set up a stock market that incentivizes revenue above all else, and the government is asleep at the wheel to correct the worst tendencies of revenue-maximizing, this is what happens.