Immigrants: We Get the Job Done
June 28, 2017 3:34 PM   Subscribe

 
Immigraniada
posted by mbo at 4:24 PM on June 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Oh wow, that's a powerful music-video/political statement.

✊🏽
posted by Fizz at 4:24 PM on June 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Fantastic. For me, far and away the best track from the Mixtape, and well transcends its source material while building on and furthering one of its essential themes. The video is an excellent extension of the music.
posted by LooseFilter at 4:27 PM on June 28, 2017 [16 favorites]


This was so freaking good. It caused me to finally buy the mixtape.
posted by greermahoney at 4:45 PM on June 28, 2017


This track is the one I am still obsessed with, all these months later. Not only is the hook a world-class earworm, but Sno Tha Product is so commanding and playful and charismatic that I became (and remain) a fangirl.
posted by minervous at 5:40 PM on June 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


Fuckin-A.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:44 PM on June 28, 2017




Snow Tha Product is so great. And so is this video.
posted by rtha at 7:33 PM on June 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


How can I make this the final exam in every class I teach from now on?
posted by allthinky at 7:49 PM on June 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


I have to give a little love to K'naan on this. I was first introduced to him by his fantastic reinterpretation of Bob Dylan's With God On Our Side from the Chimes of Freedom compilation. He's been singing and writing about the immigrant experience for years and his voice is both sweet and powerful.
posted by irisclara at 8:06 PM on June 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


I've been listening to Snow Tha Product all day because of this video, and I greatly recommend that life choice.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:21 PM on June 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


I would pay lots to hear Snow Tha Product do Guns and Ships.
posted by Gorgik at 8:22 PM on June 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Several years back, K'naan and J Period made a tribute album to Fela Kuti, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan and it's phenomenal.
posted by gnutron at 8:39 PM on June 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


Another vote for "this song turned me on to Snow tha Product."

She's been on regular rotation on spotify for me ever since the mixtape dropped. All her songs are so fun and "swaggerful" and confident. I'm turned off by "pussy, drugs, & money" songs generally. Not out of any sense of prudishness or anything, but mostly because by 2017 I don't really find that original or compelling. Or, didn't, I guess.

Hey I'm only here for a minute
Bet you want a girl that keep it hella independent
Know you gotta like a girl that this appealing
If you caught up in the moment
Then I'll get you in your feelings

. . . .
Babe show me what you like
Ay I put money I can match it for ya
I'm in this bitch and I don't wife it
Looking like a brick and all them zippers on the jacket on ya
He got a thang for a latin chick
He wanna hear a little spanish
I told em it ain't shit to practice it.

. . . .
He trying to catch me in my feelings
But he don't know that I'm the plug though
Shout out to my bitches
That can get it independent.


I mean, come on.

Also, this video is amazing, but the mixtape is hit-or-miss. Most of the straight covers are mediocre, despite their star power, but the new version of "My Shot" is also pretty great.
posted by absalom at 8:54 PM on June 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Another shout out to K'naan, raising the profile of young refugees in Canada, and of course especially the cause of child soldiers, for years. Loved this!!
posted by chapps at 10:59 PM on June 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Holy fuck. Yes, this is the best track in the mixtape, and for those of you who don't speak Spanish, you'll want to look at the translated lyrics which imho are some of the best of the whole piece. But that video is like a punch in the gut - I know it's cheating because my family are immigrants but I totally cried.
posted by corb at 12:07 AM on June 29, 2017 [6 favorites]


The problem with the sentiment in the song and the imagery of the video is that it actually confirms the right-wing working class anti-immigrant rhetoric:

"Immigrants: We Get the Job Done"
.... yes you do, because you work for less, and under illegal conditions.

Thus rather than showing the "necessity" of immigrant labour, the video and lyrics actually, from the point of view of the low paid worker, confirms that you will come over, steal my job by undercutting my wage demands, and my demands for decent working conditions.
posted by mary8nne at 1:02 AM on June 29, 2017


The same is true of those proposed food-service immigrant labour walkout/strikes that were proposed in the wake of Trump. By pointing out the prevalence of immigrant labour, they actually prove the right-wing point that immigrant labour is in fact displacing local workers -- that they are "stealing jobs".
posted by mary8nne at 1:05 AM on June 29, 2017


Mary8nne, your point is missing the other half of the right-wing accusation - that immigrants are "Lazy". Which this disproves.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:34 AM on June 29, 2017 [8 favorites]


Thus rather than showing the "necessity" of immigrant labour, the video and lyrics actually, from the point of view of the low paid worker, confirms that you will come over, steal my job by undercutting my wage demands, and my demands for decent working conditions.
That just seems like succumbing to standard divide and conquer tactics -- that it's you or me: one job, one dollar, one prize that we're hustling for.
I'll outwork you, it hurts you
You claim I’m stealing jobs though
Peter Piper claimed he picked them, he just underpaid Pablo
But there ain't a paper trail when you living in the shadows
We're America's ghost writers, the credit's only borrowed
Establish a legal, accessible path to work authorization. Enforce protections of all labor, and let that bring up the floor on working conditions. Let people come out of the shadows and live in solidarity with their domestic peers. Stop letting your pocket get picked by a corporation who then tells you that it's the foreigner who stole from you.
posted by bl1nk at 5:21 AM on June 29, 2017 [5 favorites]


Hey EmpressCallipygo, perhaps its my eurocentric position, in the UK for instance the right-wingers are mostly arguing about unemployment and wage deflation (due to eastern Europeans). (as well as NHS medical stuff.) Is the "lazy immigrant" actually still a rhetorical figure in US politics? Its never mentioned over here.


and, bl1nk, - I don't think it can be reduced to a divide and conquer rhetoric.
There are real reasons why even legal immigrants from poorer countries will generally work for less money than locals accustomed to expect a higher standard of living. The left generally seems to claim that wages are not actually lowered by immigration, and yet... low paid labour is, in fact, mostly performed by immigrants. These two things are difficult to reconcile.

If you admit that wages are in fact lowered by increased immigration, then all this stuff about pathways to work authorization does look like it will just make things worse. I don't think any of the right-wingers asking for Jobs would complain if instead of legalizing the workers, you just started policing more thoroughly companies employing them illegally.
posted by mary8nne at 5:50 AM on June 29, 2017


That moment when you realize the narrative around immigrants in the US is so fucked up you can't even begin to explain it because it sounds so insane.
posted by corb at 6:18 AM on June 29, 2017 [7 favorites]


That moment when you realize the narrative around immigrants in the US is so fucked up you can't even begin to explain it because it sounds so insane.

Schroedinger's immigrant!

Huh, I hadn't realized it before, but the narrative around immigrant labour in the UK is pretty much tap-dancing on the noble savage line -- that those Polish builders are just so good and so hardworking, it's not a mystery why people go with them instead of British builders! And also why they should not be permitted to stay.

(This should not be confused with the Good Immigrant archetype, which currently does not exist in the UK, as far as I can remember. It's long enough ago that I, myself, failed at immigration, so more current cultural pulses welcome.)

Frankly, I don't care what the right thinks about immigration. I mean, I do, but only as something to push back against. If you keep dodging and changing up to try and appease an idea based on exclusion, racism and hatred, it doesn't work. It never has. You can never throw enough ideals under the bus; the queer community has been trying to learn this for decades. A legal path to immigration and higher wages is a good thing, and that's what I'm going to keep fighting for. I don't give a shit if someone hates it. They'll hate less rigorous stuff too, because it implies that a member of an out-group might also be a human being who deserves to come out of the shadows. My activism is not a campaign commercial.
posted by kalimac at 7:07 AM on June 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


Mary8anne, you don't seem to have a strong graps on US issues and this song--and vid (what with the American flag sweatshop and all)--are pretty clear about situating the US as the site of this particular struggle. For example, Most Trump voters were not working class. Democrats have the support of low wage earners, most of whom are POC in the US, and for the umpteenth time, 3 million more Americans of all income levels picked the Democrat overall.
posted by TwoStride at 7:37 AM on June 29, 2017 [5 favorites]


*Riz's (outstanding) section aside, which does take the song to a more international scope.
posted by TwoStride at 7:39 AM on June 29, 2017


Increases in automation and other forms of productivity as delivered by advances in technology have more of an impact on lowering wages than immigration. People are just more willing to blame immigrants because they're the faceless stranger, whereas those same people may be delighted with the way Spotify and Pandora makes it easier to listen to new music. Nevermind the fact that being a radio DJ is no longer a viable job.

If the immigrant isn't around to pick the fruit or cook the food, the business owner will only hire a local for more moeny until a machine arrives that does it for cheaper than the local. But, sure, keep blaming the foreigner and stop them from earning a living and starting a business and hiring more people and creating more jobs.

And when the foreigner complains that their treatment is unfair, tell them that they're sending the wrong message by speaking up, and that this is why poor people hate them.

(that is literally what you're doing right now)
posted by bl1nk at 7:42 AM on June 29, 2017 [6 favorites]


Is the "lazy immigrant" actually still a rhetorical figure in US politics? Its never mentioned over here.

Lazy, and violent criminals to boot, yes, sometimes. The precise cocktail of slurs and stereotypes vary for different ethnicities of immigrants and by US region, and are often full of impossible contradictions. And yet, people believe it. My relatives believe it. They have guns and ammo at the ready in case of dangerous foreigners. They think brown people are shady and they get paranoid when they hear non-English conversations. But they condescendingly admire how hard the contractors work and believe that they all live 14 men to a shack and send all the money home to their families. They also believe that these same people are having large families here which are swarming the hospitals for free health care.

The left generally seems to claim that wages are not actually lowered by immigration, and yet... low paid labour is, in fact, mostly performed by immigrants.

That cause-and-effect argument is somewhat complicated by the fact that the other segment of the population performing most of the low-paid labor in the United States is African-Americans. Also, at the other end of the pay spectrum, high-paid labor is also often performed by immigrants: see the tech and medical industry.

> I don't think any of the right-wingers asking for Jobs would complain if instead of legalizing the workers, you just started policing more thoroughly companies employing them illegally.

The poor, working-class, and even middle-class right-wingers would often agree in principle that companies should be policed for employing illegal immigrants, but they still blame the immigrants more. They victim-blame. How are the companies supposed to resist this cheap pool of labor?

The wealthier right-wingers in the business community absolutely do complain about policing employers. Oh, they make acquiescing noises at first, but before you know it, it's IMPOSSIBLE for them to keep up with people who are lying about their immigrant status and it's NOT FAIR for the company to be held responsible as law breakers.

And psssst, you don't really want your food to cost more, right? Or for the company to move its headquarters out of your city. And they can't find people to take these jobs anyway. And the show must go on. And they can't possibly just pay people more because the company would make less profit and because the workers don't really deserve it (after devaluing the people doing this labor, they are loathe to pay a new worker twice as much.)
posted by desuetude at 7:52 AM on June 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


A couple of links, since I have time to begin researching this:

Does Immigration Harm Working Americans? This actually doesn't 100% support my argument, but it's pretty interesting background reading on how all of the elements of immigrant labor work together in the US.

The Labour Market Effects of Immigration Again, a deep dive into the effects of immigration, this time on the UK workforce. The general answer is: neither of us are right. It's complex.

But then I guess, its no surprise that queer community does tend to have an aspirational bourgeois bias.

Well, no. You're right. The queer community has issues with classism and sexism and racism and like sixty other -ism's. My initial point remains, though, which is that you cannot appeal enough to a group that demands equal rights only for some. There will always be more people to throw under the bus in exchange for a scrap of recognition and privilege. Solidarity, the bulwark of the working class, is now an aspirational bourgeois bias?

I respect the concerns of local low wage earners, because I am one. Which is why I support a $15 minimum wage. As someone making a pretty low wage myself, I do not believe in turning against the most vulnerable members of my community. My links above show that such a thing may or may not affect wages, but I know that it will lead to an increase in general human suffering, which is unacceptable. I'm pretty sure that's the point of Labour and the Democratic party and, as stated before, they do retain their working-class base.

This has pretty clearly turned into a series of personal back-and-forths as well as getting away from the main topic of the post, so I will be stepping away from the thread for awhile. Others are doing a much better job than I can, of addressing mary8nne's points.
posted by kalimac at 7:52 AM on June 29, 2017


My two thoughts:
1. Great song but holy shit Snow tha Product, you guys. Not that it hasn't been said above, but wow.
2. This is a hip-hop song, a third of the lines in Spanish, based on a hip-hop heavy Broadway musical. Why would anyone judge it on its ability to convince right wing bigots? "Who do you follow on Twitter?" "Oh the usual, Fox News, Hannity, Breitbart, K'naan."
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 11:52 AM on June 29, 2017 [17 favorites]


This is a song and video by immigrants, for immigrants. If native-born low wage workers take issue with immigrants undercutting them, it's not on us immigrants, who after all are in no position of power here, it's on the corporations and business owners underpaying workers. We can take pride in our work and in our importance to our nations and our economies, while still expressing anger that, as the song says, Peter Piper keeps underpaying Pablo. We can express pride and anger that we bring you so much, and receive exploitation and vilification in return.

Solidarity is the answer, not this "stealing our jobs" bullshit, and I'm honestly pretty annoyed that this thread even became about that. This is a song and a video about the immigrant point of view and the immigrant experience. It's a celebration and an airing of anger too.

And p.s., even when wages rise, even when there's a genuine shortage and farm owners are desperate for workers, even when they offer attractive benefits, guess what: US-born workers still do not want to do these jobs that immigrants and undocumented workers are doing now.
Silverado, the farm labor contracting company in Napa, has never had a white, American-born person take an entry-level gig, even after the company increased hourly wages to $4 above the minimum. And Silverado is far from unique.

U.S. workers filled just 2% of a sample of farm labor vacancies advertised in 1996, according to a report published by the Labor Department’s office of inspector general. “I don’t think anybody would dispute that that’s roughly the way it is now” as well, says Philip Martin, an economist at UC Davis and one of the country’s leading experts on agriculture.

Indeed, Chalmers R. Carr III, the president of Titan Farms, a South Carolina peach giant, told lawmakers at a 2013 hearing that he advertised 2,000 job openings from 2010 through 2012. Carr said he was paying $9.39, $2 more than the state’s minimum wage at the time.

He hired 483 U.S. applicants, slightly less than a quarter of what he needed; 109 didn’t show up on the first day. Another 321 of them quit, “the vast majority in the first two days,” Carr testified. Only 31 lasted for the entire peach season.
US-born workers will not do this work. So hey, immigrants: we get the job done. By the time wages are high enough to attract US-born workers, farm owners would find it more cost-effective to use machinery and automation instead.
posted by yasaman at 12:26 PM on June 29, 2017 [13 favorites]


Not 2 hours ago, I was at a conference paper at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music where this track was analyzed in some detail. Coincidence! So glad to be able to see the music video, now.
posted by LMGM at 12:38 PM on June 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


(P.S.: also: child of immigrants here and I have lots of FEELINGS about this track/video.)
posted by LMGM at 12:45 PM on June 29, 2017 [4 favorites]


[yasaman]:If native-born low wage workers take issue with immigrants undercutting them, it's not on us immigrants, who after all are in no position of power here, it's on the corporations and business owners underpaying workers.

Economics may be the "dismal science" but in some sense there is a logic of demand operative on wage prices and companies will price wages as low as possible.

There is an irony in your statement that immigrants "are in no position of power here" given that it is the very erosion of local bargaining power that their wage undercutting is producing.

The problem with these studies you cite is that all they really prove is that $2 or $4 above min is not enough for a local worker to take up fruit picking. The real question is at what price would it actually be enticing?
posted by mary8nne at 1:35 PM on June 29, 2017


If farmers upped the average wage to, say, $25 an hour, people born here might think twice. But that’s a pipe dream, many argue.

“Well before we got to $25, there would be machines out in the fields, doing pruning or harvesting, or we would lose crops,” Martin says.
and
Even when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers lost interest, fast.

“We’ve never had one come back after lunch,” he says.
$20+ / hr was not enticing. US-born workers will not do this work. Immigrants aren't stealing these jobs.
posted by yasaman at 2:16 PM on June 29, 2017 [5 favorites]


I have been mulling mary8nne's comment all day. And it hasn't changed my opinion about this video, In fact, if anything, I'm even more convinced that this video is itself the perfect response to the whole right-wing complaint about people coming to this country and "stealing people's jobs".

Because - the people doing the complaining are almost certain to be themselves the children of immigrants, who themselves were the ones who came to this country and took the shit wages that the then-locals wouldn't do. Nearly everyone in this thread is descended from immigrants, and nearly all of those immigrants were shat on when they got here and were under the same risk of deportation - the only difference is one of timing.

But the Irish people in my ancestry were the filthy scum who were stealing people's jobs in the tin mills in Massachusetts in the 1840s, and the Canadians in my ancestry were the filthy immigrants in the 1910s, with the Polish immigrants in my ancestry soon thereafter. They didn't have H1-B visas in 1847 when James Hurley came over from whereever in Ireland he came from and he didn't come to a high-paying tech job. Delia LeBlanc was taking the shit jobs in 1910, and Michael Stygar took them in 1920. And there are other groups before then, all the way back to the time this country was fucking founded.

And alongside that tradition of immigrant labor we have also had the tradition of each generation forgetting that fact and ostracizing the people who've had to come along after us. The shit jobs have always been here, but so have the people who feel like they have the right to complain about other people taking them - without stopping to think that they could have taken that job first. Sure, the shit jobs suck and are illegal, but somehow they never think to turn that complaint against the hiring managers - who were no doubt themselves also the sons of immigrants - and turn it against the people who are trying to get into this nation's entry-level jobs next.

Because in a sense, that's what these jobs are - they are this nation's economy's entry-level openings. The middle manager doesn't stop people from taking jobs in the mailroom under the argument that "I could want to go back to the mailroom someday", they keep their eyes on the mailroom staff and give the promising ones a promotion, and work to make sure that working in the mailroom is fair and safe.

This video is reminding us that this kind of immigrant labor has not only always been with us, it is what has made this country what it IS, and it is high, high, high time we stopped ignoring that.

Immigrants, we get the job done.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:47 PM on June 29, 2017 [8 favorites]


This is corny conscious hip hop that is mostly enjoyed by white liberals because it strokes their already-inflated sense of self-importance.

Bring around something that gets across the anger of the oppressed experience in an innovative, culturally specific way that alienates the oppressor (post-Koninchiwa grime or anything out of Chicago) and everyone runs for the hills.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 5:31 PM on June 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


The idea that immigrant labor reduces all-over wages neglects the influence of the segmented labor market. There's all kinds of shady labor that "native born Americans" don't know about and don't apply for and wouldn't ever get hired for.

Exploitation is rife in such work because the workers will not be backed up if they complain about working conditions or broken promises.

Immigrants benefit cultures they come to work in. Period. This does not mean they always come out ahead -- it's a grim choice they are making.

Because the world is garbage.
posted by allthinky at 6:40 PM on June 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Is the "lazy immigrant" actually still a rhetorical figure in US politics? Its never mentioned over here.

Really? You have never come across the rhetoric of immigrants as scroungers, criminals, benefit fraudsters, living off the welfare state while producing far too many children? Which "over here" are you talking about?

The right in the UK employs exactly the same rhetoric as the right elsewhere. Immigrants -- foreigners -- are both taking all the jobs and thus responsible for unemployment and lazily taking all the benefits and thus responsible for the death of the NHS. Thus, the immigrant who works as a nurse on the NHS is bad, and the immigrant who falls ill and is a patient on the NHS is bad, and if only the pair of them could be deported, the Tories would suddenly believe in a living wage, abandon austerity and economic equality would dawn in Britain.

This is the precise contradictory mechanism of scapegoating everywhere -- it's a less-extreme version of the story about how Jews in the imagination of 1930s Germans could somehow be both the internationalist capitalists who caused WWI and the Bolsheviks who wanted to destroy private property and confiscate everyone's house. The trick is to say that any pain experienced by the majority is definitely nothing to do with anyone who has power in society, anyone who makes rules or decides wages or allocates money, but is undoubtedly about some not very powerful but visibly different-looking group in society who are The Problem. For this to work, you need to say your target group causes all the problems and that inevitably involves you in contradiction. The US story - lazy, criminal, job-stealing, culturally alien, not needing as much as civilised people and yet demanding too much from society - is the same story as the one in the UK, and it's the same story in lots of other places. It's as old as industrial capitalism and modernity.
posted by Aravis76 at 7:29 AM on June 30, 2017 [6 favorites]


The point about the mechanism of scapegoating narratives apart, I am also always astonished to hear "the logic of supply and demand" dragged out by supposed leftists to explain how immigrants suppress wages. What? Does the left now embrace the idea that the invisible hand of the market is all we need to achieve perfect justice and equality (if only foreigners can be kept from distorting its beautiful operations)? That's suddenly a left perspective? Look, even if you deport every last one of us, Thatcher's evisceration of trade union power remains on the statute books -- until that's fixed, wages are not going to reflect the actual needs of workers because the magic of the free market can't overcome the gross inequalities of bargaining power that will persist even in a 100% immigrant-free Britain.
posted by Aravis76 at 7:48 AM on June 30, 2017


Sorry, final comment, I promise: I recently read Paul Foot's book about the 1965 Smethwick election, and it perfectly encapsulates the way racism can undercut the power and unity of the left and has the potential to make everyone worse off. It wasn't the wage-cutting bargains made by immigrants that weakened the working class in Smethwick--they often sought to join unions--but the racist element in the unions themselves, who didn't want them to and wanted to cut separate deals for white workers (native-born workers, as mary8nne puts it) and immigrant/brown workers. It's a good book. I recommend it.
posted by Aravis76 at 8:03 AM on June 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


I guess I don't read The Sun enough, I thought the "scroungers" narrative was mostly about the local lower classes, "chavs". The EU Medical thing is a big deal, but its not associated with a "lazy immigrant", but merely an immigrant using up all the local services.

I guess I was trying to make a few points:
a) in a way it doesn't quite matter if its true that immigrants steal jobs, if a lot of the voting working class think they do. It means you have to take their claims seriously though, and not just write it off as xenophobia.

b) the comments about supply and demand, were to show that these voting working class beliefs are not based on some conspiracy type crack-pot fantasy but are actually supported by the current mainstream economic theory. ie. that they are totally "rational" claims. and in fact the studies cited above actually show that the theories are at least "possibly true" i.e. the UK study above showed that 1% immigration reduced low wage labour prices 0.6%.

Thus my point is that the "Immigrants get the job done" rhetoric actually SUPPORTS the one single rational and vaguely scientific reason cited against increased migration. Hence it is possibly a bad choice of slogan.
posted by mary8nne at 11:54 AM on June 30, 2017


Honestly, and without sarcasm, my only suggestion is that you read The Mail and The Sun more often, say twice a week for six months. I think a steady diet of the highest circulation papers in the country - the tabloid press dwarf the broadsheet press in audience, and the Mail and Sun massively outperform the Mirror - would be useful in clarifying the reasons why a large number of people in the country think immigrants are the problem.

My suggestion is that it is not based on a sober analysis of statistics and is not a belief that can be shaken by any slogan the left or immigrants themselves come up with. "Immigrants: we get the job done" may feed "they're stealing all the jobs!" But "immigrants: we don't work that hard" would feed "they're lazy benefit cheats" and no one is listening to "immigrants: can we join your union?" and "immigrants: we didn't de-industrialise the North in the 80s but we could help fix it?" (These are also less catchy, I admit, but that's not the only reason why they won't bring around the Mail.)

The point of the song and the slogan, as far as I can tell, is not to convert the anti-immigrant right in the US or the UK but to promote a bit of solidarity for those of us who are scared by them in both countries. So I think perhaps you're judging its success by reference to a goal it doesn't have.
posted by Aravis76 at 11:56 PM on June 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


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