Industrialized nations manufacture an unassimilated ethnic underclass to fill menial jobs
Evidence
Immigration is a minefield in economic life. On the one hand, the manufacturing, agricultural, and service industries want a cheap labor supply. They rely heavily on migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, to perform the dirty and toilsome manual jobs that their own citizens will not do. Using economic justification, industries also argue that they need cheap labor to stay competitive in the global marketplace. They use their political clout to secure their labor needs. On the other hand, migrants are marginalized and denied adequate services and basic human rights. In some countries, they are even stripped of a national identity if their children born in the host country are denied citizenship. Better-off families are not about to groom their own offspring for toilsome menial jobs with paltry wages and lowly social status. So industrialized countries import or, by discriminatory practices, produce a disadvantaged ethnic underclass that remains largely unassimilated and is resented for its intrusion on the prevailing cultural norms, traditions, and practices. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2586
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- STORYSTEM: This is the structural engine for a migrant-worker story: a society that institutionally manufactures resentment against the very workers it quietly depends on. The denial-of-citizenship-to-children detail is a devastating narrative hook.
- XREF: Connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s immigrant-in-America strain and the structural cheap-labor critique; also parallels essays on how elites externalize toil.
- QUESTION: Is there historical evidence that the citizenry’s resentment of migration is intentionally cultivated by industries, or merely a downstream cost they accept?