"Malcom "Mal" Reynolds" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Gordon Shumway wrote:

Do you really expect us to believe that farm laborers, doing
poorly-paid
jobs that Americans WILL NOT DO, are making enough money to pay taxes?

Why not? I pay taxes on what I earn, so should everyone else.

and those illegal aliens do, unless their employer is paying them under
that
table...in which case he should be deported

Good point. But I don't think Gordon gets it, living way out there in space
with Alf on Planet Melmac. It turns out that the "E-verify" system has
driving much of the farm labor "underground." That means the laborers
probably don't even make minimum wage or have any other legal protections
afforded to most other US workers. Yet they still come here to work. It's
abundantly clear from what's happened in California and elsewhere that rich
growers *depend* on low-paid immigrant labor and fight tooth and claw to
preserve their access to it whenever they can. It's typical that
hatred-driven people want to throw out all the laborers that put food on
their table without a single thought as to who will do that work when they
are gone.

Poverty defines the farmworkers' lives. Overall, three-fifths of all
farmworkers are poor, with 75 percent earning less than $10,000 annually.
The average hourly wage of farmworkers was $5.94 in 1998, with purchasing
power declining steadily each year since 1989. What's most startling is that
each income statistic is halved when applied to undocumented workers. --
Charles D. Thompson, Jr. and Melinda F. Wiggins, eds., The Human Cost of
Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2002)

And Gordon expects people paid poverty wages that put food on his table to
have a tax liability and pay "their fair share." He doesn't realize he's
"eating" their fair share. Most earn less than $10,000 per year and
undocumented workers half that. I guess you actually have to know facts to
make informed decisions.

The real irony is that the last vestiges of the American work ethos are
embedded in these workers who come here to work and make a better life for
their families. Hundreds die each year trying to get here, just so they can
do the worst jobs we have for some of the lowest wages paid in the country.

--
Bobby G.