[combusean]

I wrote this to an out of work construction worker on Phil Gordon's facebook blaming illegals for the situation in Arizona.

Wages in AZ haven't increased since 1980 because nobody in Arizona who's doing the hiring wants to actually pay more for labor regardless of skin color or national origin. Our policies and the biggest reason anyone is here--is because it's cheap. As you probably know, having everything cheap here makes you essentially disposable. Right to work laws aside, somebody will always find some way to can you and have someone else do it cheaper. It's just how things will be until we can change that. Cheap makes us the backoffice of the real world, perpetually relegating ourselves into an economic afterthought. But we can't even get that. Our economy has only gotten worse since 1980 because we constantly let the finicky, pretend real estate economy make it look like things aren't inherently cheap and broken in Az. Absent better times, we blame illegals for economic woes when our boom days were built on their backs. Blame cheap instead. How is someone who's a citizen going to compete with Day Labor? By educating themselves. I've worked in enough cheap tech sweatshops around Phoenix to know it's probably not that much different from standing on a street corner, but when it comes to that point, hopefully I'll have my degree then. But that's particularly difficult here. Arizona constantly cheapens everybody on education with garbage schools, crappy pay, expensive tuition, and limited options up and down every ladder. And if you read my plan Cliff, you'd see that the costs of immigration would be supported by the immigrants themselves rather than having Washington siphon everything away and give little back, cheapening us. You want things to be better here? Stop thinking cheap.

I really wish illegal immigration weren't the red herring it were here.