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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Neither surprising, nor new.

This has been going on for years in a number of countries (Spain, Italy, etc...) just so the goods can be marked "Made in *". The TV image of the careful old craftsman hand-sweing your luggage is a falsehood. It's sweatshops all over again.

It's even happening in the United States. Louis Vuitton does its repairs with immigrant labor in southern California so it can say the work was done in America. (The whole thing is tremendously complicated because of California laws about handbags and leather goods, but that's off topic.)

There are compounds in some states that are essentially isolated towns surrounding a factory where Chinese laborers put things together so they can be marked "Made in USA." The laborers eat, sleep, work, and live without ever going outside the compound. It's like the horror stories we see about China, but on U.S. soil.

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I think Japan, for the most part, has been able to avoid having to resort to low paid immigrant labor for their craftsmanship-centred goods.

Sure, some mass produced items in Japan do use cheap foreign labor but it has not yet bled into their legendary craftsmanship industries.

What's wrong with immigrant labor (apart from them taking "our" jobs)?

it is implied that they are payed at a sweatshop price in sweatshop conditions

ahhh.... now it makes sense. I always thought the issue was just the inferior quality of the designer bags.

So it's implied that in Southern California they are breaking minimum wage laws?

Also, exploitation only applies if the workers 1) have no better option and 2) their options are artificially constrained by the party offering their only option. Anything else is simply failing to understand their situation.

Segregation is technically illegal, but if you look at a census map for 8 Mile Rd in Michigan, it’s all white people to the north and black people to the south. In other words, please don’t assume that injustices can’t somehow still occur within systems that, by the letter of the law, have done away with injustice. I don’t know how to epxlain to you that immigrants assembling consumerist garbage in the US probably aren’t doing it because they weighed other options and thought it was the best one... And if you think they can “just leave”, ask yourself why so many of them haven’t.

“Segregation is technically illegal, but if you look at a census map for 8 Mile Rd in Michigan, it’s all white people to the north and black people to the south”

Is theRe a historic reason for this, or example of schellings segregation model?

http://ncase.me/polygons/

Simply because they are abiding by minimum wage laws and making less than you are per hour does not mean they are exploited. Simply because Detroit is segregated in practice (as a result of factors beyond the control of most of the individuals) does not mean these workers are exploited. The fact that the dinosaurs went extinct even though they too, like us, deserve a chance to exist does not mean these workers were exploited.

They are often exploited, trafficked, abused, and paid less than anyone else.

Again, see "sweatshops."

Nothing is wrong with immigrant labor.

It's the abuse of immigrant labor that's wrong.

Did you even read the article? There are pleanty of negative impacts caused by this specific method of cheap immigrant labor.

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