Virtual Mirage Supplemental
Bullet Points:
** Happy Birthday WSF!
** Bondi vs Bongino – Will he return to work? The great and near great who went to Epstein’s Island to be videotaped having sexual relationships with young children who were subsequently murdered object to having their names out there. Do any of the videotapes still exist? Mr. & Mrs. Tom Hanks proactively renounced their US Citizenship and became Greek Citizens (no extradition treaty for sex crimes from Greece). Perhaps the rest of Congress and the judiciary should do the same.
** (Scripps) A person, believed to be an illegal alien, in northern Arizona has died from a case of bubonic plague, local health officials said. The individual, who was not identified, was treated at Flagstaff Medical Center Emergency Department and died there the same day despite life-saving attempts, according to a statement from Northern Arizona Healthcare. The plague is historically associated with the Middle Ages in Europe, where it was rampant and led to one of the deadliest outbreaks in the continent’s history. It’s sometimes referred to as “The Black Death.”
** John Brennan comparing accountability to Nazi Germany is peak irony—a tired tactic from a bureaucrat caught in his own web. The man who peddled a baseless narrative to undermine an elected president now feigns outrage at the prospect of scrutiny. If probing potential abuses of power is ‘authoritarian,’ what do we call weaponizing intelligence to manipulate an election?
** What will all of the serial killers do for work now that Planned Parenthood is closing?
** Save some for the rest of us? Yeah.
Cultures
Illegal Workers and Higher Wages for Americans Don’t Mix
(Sharyl Attkisson)
The presence of a large, vulnerable labor pool suppresses wages across the board, making it harder for Americans and other legal workers to earn a living wage.
It’s like demanding a clean river while dumping sludge upstream.
This is the kind of mental gymnastics some people perform when they champion both illegal immigration (or lax enforcement) and higher minimum wages. These competing positions, often held by the same people, clash in ways that undermine their stated goals of fairness and compassion.
Let’s dig into why this combo is like trying to mix oil and water—and what the economy might look like if we stopped relying on undocumented labor to keep prices artificially low.
At first glance, supporting open borders (or at least turning a blind eye to illegal immigration) and pushing for higher wages may seem like a double dose of kindness.
“Let people in, give them a chance at a better life, and make sure everyone earns a living wage”—sounds like a progressive dream.
But here’s the rub: flooding the labor market with millions of undocumented workers directly undermines the push for higher wages. It’s basic supply and demand.
When you have an abundant supply of workers willing to take low-paying jobs—often under the table, with no labor protections—wages stagnate or plummet. Employers, especially in industries such as hospitality, agriculture, construction, and domestic work, have little incentive to pay more when they can hire undocumented workers for less. Take the example of a hotel in a bustling city. The cleaning staff, many of whom may be in the US illegally, are paid minimum wage or sometimes less, even way less, in cash, with no benefits or job security. Why? Because they’re vulnerable. They can’t complain to authorities or labor boards without risking deportation. Some employers know this and exploit it, keeping wages low not just for undocumented workers but, as a result, for everyone in those industries.
American workers, who might demand higher pay or better conditions, are priced out.
Meanwhile, the same folks who cheer for open borders also rally for an increased $15 minimum wage or universal basic income, ignoring how their first stance kneecaps the second.
The “Kindness” Facade
The argument for lax border enforcement often hinges on compassion: “These are human beings seeking a better life.” Fair enough. Many of them are. But what happens after they cross the border? Too often, they’re funneled into grueling, low-wage jobs with no protections.
The hotel maid, the nanny, the farmworker working in scorching heat—these can be challenging, backbreaking jobs. However, for the illegal worker, the pay is often abysmally low, often below the legal minimum. This isn’t kindness; it’s exploitation dressed up as charity. By allowing millions of undocumented workers to fill these roles, we’re not just exploiting them—we’re also devaluing the labor of American workers. If employers can hire someone desperate enough to work for $5 an hour, why would they pay $15 to a citizen who can demand better?
The presence of a large, vulnerable labor pool suppresses wages across the board, making it harder for Americans to earn a living wage. Also, turning a blind eye to some businesses that exploit illegal laborers has the effect of punishing competitors who follow the law, providing the former an unfair and unlawful advantage. This makes it more difficult for honest businesses to compete and encourages them also to break the law and exploit the illegal labor force.
So, when someone says, “Raise the minimum wage!” while also shrugging off border enforcement, they’re essentially saying, “Pay American workers more, but feel free to pay illegal workers less.” It’s a contradiction that hurts both the exploited immigrant and the American worker.
What If There Were No Illegal Workers?
Now, let’s play out the thought experiment: what happens if there were no illegal workers? You’ve long heard politicians on both sides of the aisle, and others insist it’s just not possible for the American economy to function without them. Would the economy collapse? Would your morning coffee cost $20? Not quite. Many analysts agree the nation wouldn’t implode—it would adjust, as markets always do.
Without a steady supply of cheap, exploitable labor, some employers would face a choice: pay more to attract legal workers (and cut profits or increase prices), automate, or close.
In industries like agriculture, we’d likely see a mix. For example, in the absence of illegal farmworkers, growers might invest in mechanized harvesting equipment (already happening in places like California’s wine country). Some might offer competitive wages to attract American workers or legal immigrants.
In 2011, when Georgia cracked down on undocumented labor, some farmers struggled to find workers, but they adapted—some raised wages, others shifted to less labor-intensive crops.
In the hospitality industry, we might pay more for a hotel room if the cleaning staff were paid legal wages. Some restaurants might charge an extra buck for your burger if kitchen workers aren’t being paid under the table. Construction costs could rise, making new homes pricier. A 2018 study from the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that a significant reduction in low-skilled immigrant labor could lead to wage increases of 2-4% for native-born workers in those sectors.
So, some prices might creep up, but so would the purchasing power for working-class Americans who would be earning more. Higher wages could draw more Americans back into these industries. Currently, many people avoid jobs because they don’t believe the pay justifies the effort. If employers had to compete for legal workers, they’d have to offer better wages and conditions.
This isn’t speculation—it’s already happened in tight labor markets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when unemployment was low and labor was scarce, fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s raised wages and offered signing bonuses to attract workers.
The Selfishness of the Status Quo
Maintaining the status quo—lax enforcement of illegal workers and low wages—benefits consumers and employers at the expense of both legal and illegal workers.
We get cheap produce, nannies, and budget hotel stays because an illegal labor force is propping up the system with their sweat and vulnerability.
A society that truly values fairness would prioritize a system where all workers are legal and paid what the market says their labor is worth. That means enforcing immigration laws to reduce the oversupply of vulnerable workers, cracking down on employers who exploit undocumented labor, and letting the market set wages.
More importantly, this shift would be kinder to all. Illegal immigrants wouldn’t be trapped in exploitative jobs, afraid to speak up. More American workers would have a fairer shot at decent wages. And consumers? We’d adjust to slightly higher prices, just as we’ve adjusted to inflation, supply chain hiccups, and every other economic shift.
The idea that we need millions of undocumented workers to keep the economy humming is peddled by those who profit from cheap labor.
The bottom line is we can’t have it both ways. Those who claim to want higher wages can’t logically support a system that floods the labor market with vulnerable workers, thereby suppressing pay for everyone.
Waking up in Arizona…We do things you only dream of.
DRJIM prepares for Surgery on EdB
A home surgical suite allows DRJIM to “practice” medicine without a lot of costly overhead.
Larry Correia wrote:
So the news is freaking out because ICE raided a “farm” and used tear gas on the peaceful farm laborers. Democrats start screaming how Trump was going to deport MS-13, not peaceful “strawberry” pickers
Oh wait. Turns out was a giant weed growing operation.
And they were using illegal alien child labor.
Including a bunch of unaccompanied juveniles.
And this same “farm” has a class action lawsuit against it because it was treating the illegals like slaves, working them to death, no breaks, no lunch, demanding double what would be a normal harvest, and then not paying them. So, the usual democrat stuff.
Now they are wailing about what are republicans going to do when the cost of “produce” doubles. In the 1800s democrats said the same thing about cotton.
I grew up in a tiny farm town that was mostly Mexican. Unscrupulous employers taking advantage of a near slave class that’s got no legal protections was standard back then, and that hasn’t changed much.
You know who did have some legal recourse? The ones who here legally as temporary farm labor. It was the illegals that scumbags could take advantage of and victimize with impunity.
I grew up where Ceaser Chavez did his thing, and contrary to democrat talking points, that was no civil rights hero. His dudes would beat the living shit out of the illegals they saw as competition, and leave them unconscious in our drainage ditches.
The whole system is a giant mess, perpetuated for generations, and there is no “nice” solution. The performative civil rights weenies are currently going to bat for giant drug growing operations rights to abuse ten year olds.
Truth matters, nothing the MSM and outraged morons blocking a lawful ICE action is fact, it’s a Democrat operation to undermine PDJT, his A-Team, and America. Odd how there were 200 farm workers, and 500 [paid] “protesters” somehow just showed up.
It’s America.
“The argument for lax border enforcement often hinges on compassion…”
Yes it does, yeah. Let’s talk about that. Compassion is fine and good. If you want to help the less fortunate, to give “a hand up, not a handout” (or some other shitheaded slogan to fluff [1] your own ego) good on ya. But you do not have the right to “be compassionate” with OTHER PEOPLE’s stuff. But that is exactly what is happening today. It’s even worse when you are “generous” with other people’s stuff, but hold your OWN stuff out of the pool. If you think the people of, say, Lowell, Massachusetts (a grimy, working-class, former mill town near the MA-NH border) should accept and bear the cost of a wave of Ethiopian migrants [2], but you live in (the wealthy suburbs of) Newton, or Brookline, or in Andover, or G-d forbid Martha’s Vineyard and refuse to take in migrants in YOUR home town, then you’re a hypocrite and an asshole. A Westchester County, NY resident who wants some poor, white-trash hamlet in “upstate” to take in a thousand Congolese former child soldiers, but will call the cops if she even sees a shabby-looking person on the sidewalk outside her $2.9 million Scarsdale home, is a hypocrite.
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An example from my personal life: I know some people who were instrumental in the cities of Lewiston-Auburn, Maine (L-A) becoming 10% Somali in under a decade. I am very close to a family that played a MAJOR on-the-ground role. So they are Muslim diaspora who came to the US from Nigeria (not negroes, the family moved TO Nigeria, for some damn reason). They applied for residency in Maine (for some reason). Their own residency was made possible by “a New York lawyer” [3] who (for some reason) made it his personal mission to settle nonwhite “refugees” in Northern New England. Anyway, this family lived in poverty for years, but worked really hard, and ended up doing very well, with all the children holding graduate STEM degrees and being very successful. They are nice, good, decent people and I like them. I was on the phone with one of them for an hour today going over her research grant proposal, as it happens. But I digress. Anyway, when I found out about the L-A Somali thing I asked Why? The answer was “We felt very fortunate that Maine took us in, and even though we struggled for over a decade, everything worked out well in the end. So we wanted to pay it forward by helping others.”
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I hit the roof. “You eventually did well because your family are high-IQ, from a subculture that values scholarship and hard work. Your damn family name reflects that, even. Each of you kids are IQ 130 or above. First, and minor point, your success does NOT translate to a bunch of people who are mean IQ something like 70. Those Somalis are on average literally FOUR standard deviations dumber than you. They are NOT going to replicate your success. They simply aren’t capable. Second, and major point, you had NO RIGHT to do that. You thought you were being generous to those poor Somalis, but you were in essence GIVING AWAY OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF without their consent. Did you ask the ordinary Maine guy in L-A if he wanted a bunch of Somalis dumped into his home town?” [Yes, I do speak in complete paragraphs in real life. Sometimes. I am a man of many flaws, but being inarticulate is not one of them.] We argued for a while, with my friend bringing up the usual idiot Liberal examples. And yes, including the “ethnic food restaurants” one. Jesus wept. It’s all so predictable and tiresome.
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Anyway, the shit that my friends pulled regarding Somalis in central Maine is what the “Refugees Welcome” people are doing to the entire nation, to all of the West. Screw those would-be do-gooders. Because their pets are screwing us, screwing the West. In too many cases literally, against the will of their victims. Like Rotherham. Or some sub-Saharan humanoid having a “sexual emergency” in Germany. Good thing there was a 14-yo ethnic German girl at hand to “relieve his emergency”, as if she were a sheet of Kleenex or something, yeah? (I wish I was making up the “sexual emergency” thing. I’m not. Even my sarcasm isn’t capable of that. It’s an actual phrase used in the defense of the humanoid. I don’t know if the defense was another “New York lawyer” but probably not, seeing as it was formerly-Deutsch land.)
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Misplaced compassion will be the death of us all. The perversion of the drive to be helpful, to “repair the world” (Gods, what a shitheaded phrase and arrogant concept) are more harmful to society than plain old greed. At this point, when the “but muh delicious ethnic restaurants!” doesn’t work, some would-be manipulator is going to abuse Leviticus. “But what about The immigrant who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the immigrant as yourself, for you were immigrants in the land of Egypt. What about THAT, huh? Aren’t you a good Christian?” Yeah? Well, first of all, MY people were never in freaking Egypt. Second, even if you personally think your ancestors were immigrants in Egypt thousands of years ago (and no, they did not build the pyramids, FFS), or you identify with the descendants of those immigrants (for some reason), you have no right to inflict hostile, stupid, and fundamentally never-assimilable people onto the rest of us. Get stuffed.
Footnotes
[1] I use “fluff” in the technical (professional) sense. If you don’t know what a “fluffer” is, I suggest you NOT look it up on your work computer.
[2] The Lowell example is not random. I remember years ago the Boston Globe ran a series about Ethiopian immigrants in Lowell and the challenges they faced against “racists”. The locals were complaining about the burden on their (already underfunded) school system. The Globe excoriated them because “they are complaining about a mere TWO Ethiopian families.” It took another paper to reveal that of those two families, one had NINETEEN children, and the other 17 or 18. Adding 36 or 37 children (none of whom spoke English [or probably had an IQ above 90 for that matter]) is a tremendous burden to a poor town that was still reeling from the recent loss of the major employer (Wang Computers collapsed around this time).
[3] No, “New York lawyer” is not code. At least not on my part. That’s how my friends refer to the person; I have no idea about this person’s background. Initially the New York lawyer did his stuff personally. For the L-A thing, he had a team of people in the area, including my friend’s brother, to do the daily stuff. NYL mainly did the strategy and coordination, remotely, at that point. I still don’t know why a “New York lawyer” would be obsessed with importing and settling non-whites into Maine, NH, and Vermont. Why would you not settle those people in say, the Bronx which has a history of all kinds of immigrants, and all sorts of governmental programs to assist in that. Why target ME, NH and VT? It’s a puzzlement.
Happy Birthday WSF!
What if no work or residency permits were needed? Some workers would come from far away, and would compete on a level legal playing field with Americans. They could unionize and sue crooked or dangerous employers. That doesn’t mean they could vote, or their children could vote, or they would be eligible for government benefits until they have an IRS history of paying enough taxes in.
Policy that protects Americans from competition will repeat the Commodore Perry Expedition but with America in Japan’s losing position. No policy setting exists that allows American industry to be both competition and uncompetitive with the rest of the world at the same time.
Immigration lawmakers can’t possibly figure out what the “proper” supply is of workers for various trades. However, immigration lawmakers can allow all workers to be legal, and paid what the market says their labor is worth.
Does that mean that if I were an enterprising woman, I could take my female buddies and go to some place like Iran or Saudi Arabia and set up a distillery to provide alcoholic beverages for a land of thirsty Muslims? What you suggest does not imply reciprocal fungibility. It’s a one-way thing.
Women “could” not open a distillery in the Middle East because the local government would stop them. This is fact, and my words in a web forum are not a magic spell which changes that. But it would be great if those women brought along enough drones etc. to drive the rapists away with force of arms. Then I would have zero sympathy for Middle Easterners who would no longer be able to stop other people from enjoying alcohol.
You take my point though. The world is unfair. The US (far from perfect) owes – some degree of protectionism to the taxpayers when the rest of the world does the same. Then you arrive in the medieval world of Islam, which is more of a political system than a religious system, SURPRISINGLY. People who are not familiar with Sharia consider it a religion, but I assure you that the religious component is only there (GOD WILLS IT!) to enforce political power. I took your point and argument, and it would work if the world were that way, but it isn’t.
2,000 years ago there was political turmoil, and the political celebrities of the day wrote an intensely political book to support the creation of the world’s first multinational corporation, the Catholic church. People with different viewpoints got deplatformed, only to have their writings discovered later as the Dead Sea scrolls. I agree the sum total of harm done by Christianity is less than by Islam. But that doesn’t make them different systems in kind, it just means the teams in the great game picked different strategies.
I understand your point to be that, as Bush and Biden said, you can’t fight the government and win because it has tanks and planes and nuclear bombs. But that point was falsified by the gun owners in Connecticut in 2014 who ignored additional gun registration without consequence. Pockets of freedom will appear and expand about 30 seconds after Congress destroys its own logistics by hyperinflating the dollar. The book Snow Crash is fiction of it. Remember in the 1990’s when OSHA declared they would inspect and regulate the home office? People just laughed.
There are ‘two Bibles’ and both were loosely collected. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament collections are different depending on whether you’re reading the Septuagint, Masoretic Texts (current Hebrew Bible), the King James Bible (Protestant Bible) and the Catholic Bible (with apocrypha not accepted by Protestants). Then there is the New Testament, with a lot of arguments among experts as to authorship claims, and the The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. Many repudiate Gnostic writings. I take no position. The Dead Sea Scrolls didn’t de-platform anyone that I’m aware of. If anything, they confirmed validity on some Old Testament/Hebrew Bible texts.
Though there was political influence exercised by Christianity, it’s not a political system in itself the way that Islam is. Conflating the two as both being inherently political doesn’t wash.
I’ll take real good care of Ed!
Hopefully your “home surgical suite” is not quite like the automated one in Prometheus.
WAIT! The home surgical suite in Prometheus worked.
👍
Birthdays
The more you have, the longer you live.
Wisdom from the Rock of Ages.
The little story about the guy in Flagstaff who died of bubonic plague prompted me to go look for statistics on how many cases of plague there are in the US. I ran into an article on Newsweek.com of all places, that quotes the CDC saying that between 1970 and 2020, New Mexico, Arizona were the national center for plague. The western US is far higher in cases than the east, there were five cases east of the Mississippi in those 50 years, and 491 west of the river. Only four of those 491 are east of the Texas panhandle. Since it’s mostly transmitted by rodents and their fleas, it must be the climate is one the rodents prefer.
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https://www.newsweek.com/plague-map-us-cases-since-1970-new-mexico-1878428
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It’s one of those things – I know I’ve seen stories about plague “out west” but I would have thought California would be the plague capital, not New Mexico. Not even close.
Ah yes, compassion. Satan is the Father of Lies.