Too Good To Sweat

It's a bit belated perhaps, but I haven't posted about the immigration issue so here's my short and admittedly simplistic take. In the past, I've the following jobs: waiter/busboy, mover, and assembly line worker in a food processing plant. In each job, I worked with illegals and/or naturalized citizens. When I hear that "immigrants do the jobs Americans won't do" I find it offensive and outrageous. For years, every prospective white-collar employer with whom I interviewed was more interested in talking about the food processing plant job than anything else on my resume---and with good reason. The "undesirable" jobs I had taught me the meaning of discipline and hard work at an important age, and those potential employers knew it. Given the choice between a job applicant who's busted his hump and one who's wandered the mall with a cell phone, i-pod, and Daddy's credit cards in his pocket because he's too good to sweat, I'll take the former every time. Unfortunately, we've created legions of the latter during the past few years.

In Saudi Arabia, millions of people refuse to work because they consider themselves too good for the jobs that are available. And so for their country to function every day, Saudis depend on foreigners who now make up 25% of the entire population. Here, under the guise of "compassion," some would instill the same sense of entitlement and sacrifice our nation's work ethic to the God of corporate profits. I'm not sure which system is worse, but a generation from now the results will probably be the same.