From Real Time with Bill Maher, aired 4/7/06...New Rule: Don't blame illegal immigrants for driving down wages. Blame Congress. Republicans in Congress have to stop saying that the problem with Mexicans coming over the border is they keep wages down. You know what keeps wages down? The fact that Congress hasn't raised the minimum wage since 1997. 1997, when my dealer still had a beeper! Car dealer, car dealer, what did I say?
Yes, news flash: Congress controls what the minimum wage is. Who did you think it was, the valet parking team at Tony Roma's? And upping the minimum wage would affect wages. It has to. The word "wage" is right in it. Even George Bush could understand that. Maybe not. The point is, the elephant in the room is that no one can live on minimum wage, and that we are making a whole swath of our society - tens of millions of people - live like animals. So that the luckier segment can live with indulgences their parents never dreamed of.
Do you know that most upper-middle-class people nowadays never clean their own toilet or do their own laundry...until they go to rehab.
AFFLECK: Sometimes not even then.
MAHER: Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is actually lower than it was in 1968, the year George Bush graduated from Yale. And that is unforgivable! And the wage thing is bad, too.
People like to tell themselves that these immigrants do the jobs Americans won't do. Not true. Americans will pick fruit in the hot sun. But not at $5.15 an hour. Trust me. If some of these jobs paid real wages, your wife would be having sex with a Jewish gardener.
Americans want the contributions of the poor and the immigrant without having to actually see or be among them. Which is why I suggest, instead of building a wall on the border, we build a Wal-Mart. It would be 1,950 miles long, or the size of a normal Wal-Mart. And there would still be just the one register open. But it would solve this problem.
Because if we built this Wal-Mart exactly on the border, the Americans could come through the front door and shop, and the Mexicans could come through the back door and work. And then go home the same way at night, unless they got locked in. It is Wal-Mart.
In summation, I am not saying that raising the minimum wage is going to solve the illegal immigration problem. That can only be solved by arming Lou Dobbs. But five bucks an hour in an America where the luckier ones spend that on a coffee, is a cruel joke. And if you don't believe me, do what I do. Listen to the voices of those poor souls who are making this paltry sum. Of course, I have to. They're my staff.
Bill+Maher Immigration minimum+wage Wal-mart
1 Comments:
And how precisely do illegal immigrants get the benefit of an enhanced minimum wage?
Posted by Jake Jacobsen