Last night we went to get ice cream on North Temple in the middle of all the construction and my kids commented on the local project that will take years to finish and Michelle said, if they know a big earthquake is coming why are they building on to the light rail line for tracks and we talked about that and how we have to plan for the future and how we can't be worried about possible disasters but we should prepare for them nonetheless.  We also spoke about if a disaster did strike how it would provide jobs for people and how some good could come out of a very tragic incident.

 

Then my wife made a wise observation. A large majority of the population especially the white people don't have construction and labor skills but rather computer, management and other skills and when a large disaster strikes the people that will be in the middle of the rescue effort and the majority of the re-building effort will be minorities specifically Hispanics and a large majority of them will be undocumented Hispanics.

 

Will we expect them to help out of the goodness of their hearts and then be deported anyway? Have they not already been helping the economy by filling the needed job positions and paying property taxes, sales tax, gas tax, food tax etc.....? It will be interesting to see what happens when this occurs. I hope that such events are not wide spread but only isolated occurrences. When the oil spill occurred a large group of CERT certified undocumented people showed up within an hour of being activated. Are they an important part of our community?  Can we afford to get rid of 12-20 million people that make up a concentrated part of the labor backbone of our communities?

 

Georgia and Oklahoma, Alabama other states recently passed a law against undocumented people and thousands left the State only to leave over one billion dollars in crops rotting in the fields and the Governor tried to get the Prisoners to harvest the crops but they would not work near as hard or the same hours as the undocumented people that had been doing the work. They also tried to get US Citizens to fill those positions and show up early in the morning but they could not fill the positions.  The estimate is they will loose over 1 Billion in crops this year without the needed labor force to bring them in. What is the solution? The unemployed people of Georgia won't do this work. Can't we get some of the 15 million unemployed people to go to Georgia to help? Doesn't look like it. If I sound like I have empathy toward these undocumented people it may be for a couple of reasons. One reason is that US Citizens take advantage of these people to do the work so the projects cost less money so we are taking advantage of these people and now that we want to get rid of them we are finding out that it will cause wide spread problems with the economy and that really is our fault to begin with since we put up a large HELP WANTED sign and small stay out side just under that. Another reason is that they have their families firmly rooted in the US and many of their kids don't even speak the languages of their native lands so we would be separating millions of families so I do have empathy in these areas.

What is the solution?