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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, NPR aired an interview the other day with undocumented migrant workers (in the US) living very close together when traveling (sleeping sitting up together in a van) and having very limited access to water for bathing and hygiene when lodging at farms where they were working picking produce; it's likely this causes grave loss of life in the migrant community, and decimates produce farms economically this season.

Edit: This is not intended as a political comment, only an observation of a component of the pandemic macro.

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/816644358/covid-19-threatens-...

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Undocumented migrants have for all effect become the modern day equivalent of slavery without the associated compasion.

Many happy to lambast such people and yet, be first to complain if their avocados go up in price or out of stock.

Hopefully, some level of amnisty and clean slate is driven here as currently without that, will only shoot themselves in the foot on many levels.

After all, many live day by day, kinda hard to carry on if that is removed from them and more so, kinda hard to isolate if they have no other choice.

That is sadly one area that politics needs to agree upon and deal with, otherwise the impact will be wide upon many fronts.

That has been an issue from the beginning and has a long history of success, failure, etc. See Cesar Chavez etc.

The endgame is for those jobs to be automated also.

> Hopefully, some level of amnisty and clean slate is driven

In the absence of the actual border and viable border enforcement a proper border would enable, that will only make the problem 10x worse, as a significant chunk of Mexico will try to go North in hopes of another "amnesty" in the future.

The total number of immigrants to the US has dropped dramatically as living conditions in Mexico have improved over time. This keeps getting repeated but does not agree with evidence.

> total number of [illegal aliens] to the US has dropped

Given that the US government was prevented from _counting_ them in the 2020 census, I doubt this very much. As an immigrant myself, I also took the liberty of replacing "immigrants" with "illegal aliens" in the quote above, to be more precise.

>Undocumented migrants have for all effect become the modern day equivalent of slavery without the associated compasion.

Except for the fact that it's a choice - they aren't kidnapped and sold, they are choosing to work in (to us) shitty conditions because the conditions in their home countries are even worse. If you want to talk compassion - have some compassion for what they are running from.

I'm actually a little stunned at your disregard for the realities of slavery, both modern day and historic.

I’m stunned you believe they have a choice. Choice is one of the greatest fallacies of modern economics, responsible for extreme harm.

I suspect that the groups of people that lament undocumented workers and those that enjoy avocado toast don’t overlap much. The former are conservatives, the latter are generally young, city dwelling liberals.

This may not apply here but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Exploitation doesn't have to be active but can emerge from perverse incentives, ignorance, and malicious opportunism. I imagine a large faction of people espousing more liberal viewpoints are at worst willfully disingenious or at best optimizing for the emotional/time investment of supporting ethical behaviour.

My opinion, not taken as fact: young, city-dwelling liberals have been some of the most corrupt in this regard. This includes idly participating in second-hand exploitation, but also actively reinforcing exploitative practices because they align with a personal economic incentive.

I've had exactly the opposite experience. These city-dwelling liberals are quite conscientious about what they buy, supply chains, and their impact on the world.

It's definitely a spectrum that transcends anecdotes. I'm colored by people saying one thing and doing another, but I always keep an open mind because of this; looking for proof of action rather than intent. In that case, I think I was wrong in referring to a group of people under a constructed label as if they were the same person and judging them with my own presupposition.

I'm guessing they have little contact with other groups, so they're probably fine until the virus gets in there, and then it goes very bad very quickly.

Disclaimer: I don't have any relevant expertise, and comment on forums because I'm bored in virus lockdown...

> Disclaimer: I don't have any relevant expertise, and comment on forums because I'm bored in virus lockdown...

Lol. This should be a Surgeon General warning required to be attached to every online comment. To wit:

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: The overwhelming majority of users making online comments likely do not have any relevant expertise and comment on forums because they derive personal satisfaction from commenting on forums.

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