It’s fashionable among certain politicians and their supporters to blame, as a colleague recently wrote, “… Democrats, who bear the responsibility for the invasion of illegals.”
Alas, what short memories we have.
In my much younger years I listened to my father’s generation complain about cheap foreign labor – then mostly Asian – taking American jobs. The Japanese stole our camera technology, they said, and made cheap knockoffs of expensive German cameras. They took waste metals from our empty beer cans and sold it back to us as cheap toys and tools. So we were told
One of my favorite television shows was “Bonanza,” featuring among the characters a man named Hop Sing, the Chinese cook and dishwasher for the protagonist Cartwright family.
The story was set in roughly the time when our train moguls were conscripting Chinese laborers to lay the track for the transcontinental railroad. The National Park Service website even now notes that when the final spike was pounded in joining the east and west tracks, no Chinese laborers were included in the celebration photo.
These days, we are happy to drive Chevy, Chrysler and Lincoln vehicles made in Canada and Fords and Dodges and Jeeps made in Mexico; until recently our prime requirement for a new vehicle purchase was it have an American-company emblem on its grill. No matter many of vehicles were made in factories built where labor was cheaper than that of American trade union workers.
We have, over the years, been happy to eat fruits and vegetables cultivated and harvested by that illegal work force we now are willing to send to El Salvadoran gulags, accusing them without evidence of terrible crimes though the worst transgression most of them have committed is to slip into our nation without government permission to perform our most menial jobs and send money back to their families in their home countries. We are uninterested in any data that shows the crime rate among them is considerably less than that among native-born Americans.
That difference in crime rates makes perfect sense to me. When I was a young pre-teen, I participated in a turkey shoot – shooting with real rifles and paper targets — without Mother’s permission. I did not stay to see how well I did with the borrowed rifle lest Mom would know where I’d been.
A generation later, the daughter of a close friend let slip she and a girlfriend had driven nearly a hundred miles to enjoy the pleasures of shopping in a larger town — when their respective parents thought they were innocently occupied in their nearby Walmart. And now we get a kick out of a television family show in which an episode features the teenage daughter stealing her dad’s vehicle for a similar purpose.
Of course, people who are here illegally are more careful to not get in trouble. And like the parents in that short list of anecdotes, we Americans wink and thank them for safely appearing responsible while we pick them up in the Home Depot parking lot and trust them with our valuable possessions as they work around our homes and jobsites at less cost than any genuine American teenager.
For decades, we have enjoyed the low prices of cheap, non-American labor. Occasionally – though not often enough to incur the wrath of our Captains of Industry, we see in the news “exposés” of exploitation: Latin American beef processors forced to keep working while Covid decimated their ranks, hog producers in Iowa taking similar advantage of cheap labor to create the pork ribs of our summer parties, and egg-factory workers in Maine sequestered in prison-like environs to produce our morning breakfast.
Until recently, we have looked away at the faces of cheap labor. We pretended not to hear the duplicity of politicians decrying “stolen” jobs while their campaigns have been financed by the industries and customers profiting from the cheap, illegal labor.
Times have changed, technology has given us labor that’s even cheaper than illegal migrants and our politicians – enough of them to effect the story, anyway – have found ways to highlight our former laborers as criminals out to rape and murder our daughters.
It’s not a new story, simply one that has been refined for the current audience. When prohibition ended, soon-to-be former American Booze Cops found new opportunities in portraying Mexicans as purveyors of marijuana. Richard Nixon won election in part by calling himself a law-and-order candidate who would go after users and dealers of cocaine who, it was generally accepted, were mostly Southern Blacks.
So don’t blame our current woes on illegal aliens. We all have benefited from the labor we have kept cheap by the denigration of its low cost providers.
Text and Images ©2025 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
Thanks for the coffee, Bill.