Back to this shit.

Answer the fucking question or don't bother posting

Who picks the produce you eat? Where are they from? How much do they get paid? Are they unionized? Do they have benefits?

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War is god

Great so fresh fruit and vegetables. Anything else?

To anyone who's interested: I was looking for something else and stumbled across this. I haven't listened to it yet but I'm going to. I have no idea "whose side" it will come down on, but it being an NPR thing I think I have a good idea.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/632/our-town-part-one

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War is god

"...so fresh fruit and vegetables." Not a flame, but that's obtuse. Literally every mouth in this country has to eat, so an across-the-board increase in food prices driven by an increase in labor costs would hit practically every family in the country.

Housecleaning is probably another. Remember when a couple politicians got called out for employing illegal immigrants as housekeepers? Screw hiring Molly Maid or any of those corporate outfits... People want to keep their costs low so they're going to want to hire independent cleaners who are, as I understand it, predominantly undocumented/illegal.

Only half jokingly, I suppose people's lawn care would get more expensive because I'll bet you lunch that the guys on the crews I see in my neighborhood are neither paid minimum wage nor are they protected by Worker's Comp (which is insanely expensive and is legally required of employers in California).

Question: What do you mean by "dependent?" Could those industries and services continue without the immigrants we're discussing? Sure, but that's not the point. The point is the increase in costs associated with reserving those positions for citizens, right?

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War is god

Whatever. You do so in the complete absence of scientific data or a plausible explanation backing up that belief. See how "denying manmade climate change" plays out over the next few decades. I just ask that you please remember your denial and re-evaluate it moving forward.

not really but think what you wanna think... the left is doing a lot more in the absence of scientific data.. for example "genders"

Non sequitur much? The topic was climate change/immigration/with a little economics thrown in. Why stop at gender, let's fully derail it, and talk about creationism (riffing on absence of scientific data)! Again, remember how denialism continues to play out over the next decades.

Which is backed up by science, as gender is a social construct invented in 1955. In 1954, gender only referred to grammar.

Sex is determined by 5 factors including hormones. A human with external reproductive organs, but low testosterone and high estrogen? A human with internal reproductive organs, but high testosterone?

Not only fresh fruit and veggies, but as I understand it most food would go up. Meat, dairy, etc.

Construction. Home maintenance. Labour for your new roof just doubled, and the wait to get it done tripled. Good luck with that.

Services like childcare, house cleaning, food at restaurants, etc.

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Long Chile was a silly place.

Dairy would not and most grains wouldn't. Meat processing may since manually intensive and raids keep catching illegal immigrants.

Why do you assume my roof costs will go up? Do you exclusively hire illegal immigrants?

At restaurants on the margins

You seem to think this less than 5% of the population has some sort of outsized influence on the economy and interaction in my life.

According to Google, dairy industry is heavily dependant on illegal labour.

Why do I assume roof costs will go up? Because construction industry is rife with illegal labour and always has been, not to mention a heavy cash economy. It pisses me off to no end, but it's just reality.

A contractor friend of mine bought several properties in Arizona for cheap after the housing crash. He said it is almost laughable how cheap labour is there compared to here, purely because of the cheap illegal labour. According to him, you almost have to utilize illegal labour to stay competitive.

You personally may not feel a significant impact but a shit load of Americans will. Considering how strong the blow back was when gas, which is already incredibly inexpensive in most of the US, goes up with any significance, I can only imagine what the response will be when there is upward pressure on prices for aforementioned goods.

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Long Chile was a silly place.

I almost forgot about this. I read the article. I'm not going to defend everything listed there, but most of it struck me as opposing Communism in Central America. Given Communism's track record in third world countries all over the world it seems just as reasonable to claim that we saved lives and stemmed the flow of immigrants by our actions.

So supporting right wing dictators who exploit and “disappear” their citizens without any due process is ok as long as you label those struggling, poor opponents “Communists?” Seems a little too convenient to be honest. Saved lives?!

Well, your position seems a bit convenient to me given the counterfactuals staring us in the face. The Shining Path, FARC, Venezuela, and Cuba in the hemisphere along with Russia, China, Cambodia, and North Korea in the rest of the world are all glaring examples. Haven't you been educated about the willingness of the Russians and the Chinese to participate in other nations' politics? You seem to want to propose make believe situations that, frankly, never existed. C'mon.

So, yes, saved lives. Saved peoples. Saved nations.

I think we should stick to actual history.

Are you implying that shining path, farc, et al didn't exist?

The counterfactuals are actual history. Your characterizations here are make believe.

But we can get onto other aspects of your theory that also make little sense -- like the USA has some natural inclination to support dictatorship outside of fighting communists or other anti-American elements.

Going back to the article that describes our actual behavior as a nation in Central America over the last century, and your reaction to it, you said you wouldn’t defend everything listed. Well, what wouldn’t you defend, specifically?

While I'm working on that, maybe you could explain how an American so easily parrots and distributes such anti-American propaganda without even presenting another side or asking certain obvious questions?

If you think reasonable accounts of our history of poor behavior as a nation in Central America is “anti-American propaganda” then we have little to discuss. Do you just want to read a sanitized version of our history viewed through rose-tinted glasses? It seems so. In which case, this is likely a pointless conversation.

Here’s some more reading...

https://www.nytimes.com/...n-rights-abuses.html

OK. Let's get this straight because this is a more important conversation than anyone's emotional reaction to the facts.

1.) The original question is about the NET effect of the United States' actions in Central and South America -- to determine to what extent we "owe" people in those counties.
2.) You posted an article that outlined exclusively negative consequences of US actions.
3.) I never wrote anything that seems to request "sanitizing". I simply requested that the other side of the ledger be accounted for.
4.) You offered another article that, once again, only outlined negative consequence of US actions.

I don't mind people chronicling actions from the United States that involve coercion or cost lives. That's a good thing. What I mind is when people get the impression that's all there is to this story.
We don't evaluate climate policy based solely on policy costs. We evaluate that policy based on one set of predicted costs versus another set of predicted costs.. And we can look at predicted outcomes.

I listed only some of the worker revolutions that went sideways in third world countries. Maybe you'd like to create a list of the revolutions that ended up being run by the benevolent struggling, poor farmers and we can discuss?

I'm not being emotional. If anyone is, it's you, when you wrote, "maybe you could explain how an American so easily parrots and distributes such anti-American propaganda."

There has certainly been good work done by NGOs in those countries (which goes on even today, despite Trump's efforts to cut off that funding), but if we're talking about the results of the collective action by the US in Central America over the last century, then it is a fact that our history is not good, even if you don't want to examine those facts objectively. And testament to that history can be seen on the ground today with the state of their economies and quality of life.


It's impossible to know how they would be if the US had behaved differently. Either better or worse. But what we did do was largely terrible and very little we should be proud of.


The bottom line is that between our political and military interventions and our contributions to climate change, Central American countries have been adversely affected by our behavior. Does that mean we owe them the right to walk into our country and live here in the US? I'm not arguing that. But we shouldn't be surprised when they turn up.

FYIGM..........through the imperialism of Latin America from the 1600's to present.

Nobody has to take anybody, but I find it very interesting that people think world-wide it's all about boot straps and "hard work" when talking about other countries from a viewpoint of exceptional privilege and exceptional leverage over other parts of the world.

It wasn't something to be cured overnight either. You had a couple hundred years of exporting resources and not developing industry locally due to the trade setups from Spain, Portugal, and the US. Then, you have deflated prices of exports.....still....and are trying to import production equipment or other goods to bolster economies while you're on crutches..........all the while after Spain, Portugal, and the US were the ones that originally broke your legs for silver, gold, tobacco, coffee, cacao, bananas, wood, sugar, etc.......

Not to mention the US disproportionately contributes to climate change (if you believe in it).

So yeah, to me there's a moral imperative even if there isn't something in it for me.