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Socdem moment 
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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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Your anger is justified for tis' not simply idpol. It's the collaborator role and mentality that this lady plays, that has seeped now into immigrant life-or-death matters.
Upvote, cause in principle you make the right argument and I think Jasmine is tone deaf to use cotton picking as an example.
But let's be honest. Americans don't want to perform low paid heavy manual labour.
They aren't going to be manufacturing garments in factories or picking peaches from the fields any time soon.
So I have to credit her for making a good argument, even if she chose the wrong example.
I mean ostensibly you're right, Americans absolutely cannot and will not do low paid heavy manual labour. I think the point is that it's not ridiculous to expect somebody supposedly on "the Left" to make the leap that maybe nobody should be doing low paid heavy manual labour. This is just classic socdem labour aristocracy spoils of empire type shit, that it's fine slave labour happens, just not here.
Well yes, I 100% agree.
It is in fact possible to have well paid agricultural labour. My own family has done it. It's still hard labour, but it doesn't have to be low paid.
But at the risk of sounding like a neoliberal, I don't think it is wrong that middle class Americans, who are rich by Latin-American standards, have the opportunity to get their kids an education so that they can become UX designers, lawyers and doctors.
The same happened in my family, and we don't have anyone doing farm labour in my generation.
And I therefore also don't think it is morally wrong that poor Latin-Americans try and earn better wages so that they, too, can provide their kids the same opportunities.
Just stop the exploitation. Give them an honest wage and let them enjoy the fruits of their labour.
We're arguing the same thing I think. Hard work should be compensated with appropriate wages and living conditions, manual labourer or office worker or whoever. Ideally nobody should work, but until we build that work this is the one we've got. Labour is always morally "wrong" under capitalism because it is definitionally exploitative.
This may not be glamorous work, but this is all essential labor. We need food to survive. We need clothes to survive (in most climates 🤔), and even in some solarpunk utopia, we would need factories to build things like looms, tractors, harvesters, and whatever other machinery is necessary to automate this labor. With the pressing climate crisis, we also have a genuine cause to transition to more local and direct supply chains for a lot of purposes. We have the choice either to find a way to make this labor rewarding, or to consign it to some underclass.
Under capitalism, we choose the latter, and then we have liberal politicians like this justifying immigration not as a right to seek greener pastures, but in terms of a cost/benefit analysis for the economy. While the economic bean-counting does make more sense in practical and economic terms than an arbitrary reign of terror against the workers who keep the food flowing to our grocery stores, there is nothing liberatory about it. It is still a regime which cultivates a "reserve army of labor" which it uses the threat of deportation against to suppress the wages and rights of all workers, with the fig leaf that coffee or bananas might cost a little bit less. They are not upset by the violence of border militarism or the trade war. They are only upset that it is being used in an arbitrary, capricious, and self-defeating manner, which is why they are out here scoring cheap rhetorical points while advocating nothing more than a return to the status quo ante. They have no interest in pulling on the thread of why these jobs, which are essential for us to survive, are so alienating in the fist place.