Editor:
Dear Mr. Kopp,
If you are going to decide to go down the route of “immigrants are taking the jobs of Americans,” then you need explain why that is the case.
American corporations are deciding they would rather pay low wages with no benefits to immigrants and manipulate the H-1B visas to hire vulnerable non-union immigrant workers at a lower cost than they would have to pay if they hired Americans.
Immigrants are taking American jobs, that is true, but it’s not because of immigrants or the terrible job of the federal government doing anything about immigration. It’s because large hedge funds, large corporations, and uber-wealthy landowners want to pay the lowest wages so they enable immigrants and abuse the H-1B visa program.
Please stop blaming the victims for the problems created by greed. Corporations and uber-wealthy landowners can pay reasonable wages. Our taxes can also create a retirement system and health care system that doesn’t require corporations and uber-wealthy landowners to separately pay for retirement and health care for workers. It doesn’t have to be this way. Unlike other global first world nations, we just choose to ignore reality and not realize the actual problem is a lack of understanding of the problem.
Use the tax system to create a state retirement system and health care system. Make corporations and uber-wealthy landowners pay a living wage.
By the way, the phrase “living wage” was used by Republican Theodore Roosevelt back in the day. It’s not a new nor partisan idea.
Gino Napoli
Categories: letter to the editor
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
100% correct. Every time Congress tries to reform the immigration system, Lobbyists for Construction, Agriculture, and Hospitality, etc. descend on Washington to bribe our Congressional members to not pass anything that would make immigrants legal. They need them to stay scared, confused, and submissive because of their chaotic legal status so they can be exploited. But on the other side of the coin, are Americans prepared to pay a lot more for everything if there is a short, fair, legal, and simple path to Citizenship or legal work status?
LikeLike
Well they are gonna pay a lot more one way or the other, especially now that tariffs are the current President’s fetish. And then when the man abolishes the federal tax system, we will return back before World War one when the federal government was funded by excise taxes and tariffs alone, which was unreliable and unstable, causing much economic instability because the federal government had no control of the economic system or the currency. Even the wealthy realized there was a need for the Fed banking system AND an income tax. That’s why both happened. It didn’t save us from greed, but the system became more stable.
Regardless of the false equivalence worrying about whether Americans “are prepared” to do what you think is the other side of some coin.. we will have to relearn history again.
LikeLike