Not to seem like I'm picking on you, there, Felix, but $40 divided by six, for the crew and the driver, is $6.67. And whatever they're making, the grape harvest is about six weeks long, which is very generously 360 hours of work. I'm not sure what business you're going to open on a couple grand.

And FWIW, most undocumented migrant farm workers don't actually go back to Mexico. The cost of the crossing is enormous, way beyond what they make in a year, and the risks are very real. When you see the big caravans of workers with Mexican license plates, those are the documented folks.

That's part of the reason the various proposed reforms- like John McCain's back when he was something other than a creature of the radical party line- always fail. Someone proposes that the process should include everyone who's been here for, say, four years, and it turns out that that's the vast majority of undocumented immigrants. And of course we can't let four million or so Mexicans be absorbed into our 309million-strong population. Why, that would be...er... less than a percentage and a half of the total population. I mean, damn those dirty wetbacks, that's... um... statistically insignificant. So what if the effect on our economy would be positive and the effect on the labor market would be to raise farm worker's wages back to an actual living wage by giving all the workers legal standing and the basic right to negotiate, thus letting a fair market set their wages, we've got to keep those...

Meh. I can't even do it in jest. Rant failure.

This is another one of those things that's kind of a double-edged argument for me. On the one hand, the idiot right screams "amnesty! amnesty!" when that's not even on the table. No one's proposed it, not the President or Nancy Pelosi or whoever else they're on about this week. Reform =/= amnesty. So it's a completely baseless accusation.

On the other hand, I dearly wish someone would propose amnesty. General and total. Even with the damage the Bush era did to our economy, we'd never notice the population increase in any negative way. For fuck's sake, they're already here working. Let them have the same protections from abuse and access to life as the rest of us.

That was interesting. Thank-you.

Happy to help, Marine.

Born on Camp Pendleton Marine base, raised on a farm in Appalachia, moved to California in the service, lived in the Bay area, Washington state, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, couple places in Japan, and finally San Diego.

According to the USDA, the average farm worker wage in California is $6.17/hour, slightly higher than the national average. Because harvest workers only work an average of about 1000 hours a year, they earn well below the poverty limit in even the poorest states.

Here's a nice article for those interested in this lucrative and exciting career: http://careers.stateuniversity.com/pages/10/Farm-Laborer.html

Man, the new uniforms still look weird to me. And I agree about that girl. I adore girls who are smarter than me (all together now: "That really doesn't narrow the field much.")

Wow, was that a long sentence. There seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of wine I've had over an evening and my ability to make my thoughts coherent. Maybe I can find the perfect ratio and write Molly Bloom's Soliloquy

What's going to be amusing to our jaded, cynical old hearts is twenty years from now when the US tanks use railguns and a potential enemy has a significant enough nuclear program to have depleted uranium rounds, and we start whining about how they're firing poisonous radiation at us and how that violates the Geneva Convention.

I could see a True Story tag , for those who'd want to use it, but a section seems problematic to me. I suspect that a big chunk of the stories here are "Well, some of it's true, but..." type stories. I know mine are, they fall into four broad categories:

1)Entirely true- Not many, and the thing is that I'd probably never cop to it on any particular story.
2)Entirely made up- The more time goes on, the more of my stories fall straight into this category.
3)The sex is mostly real, but the situation is made up- A lot, a lot of my stories are stuff that happened within our circle of sex-positive friends back when we were in college, but I've made up a scenario where they happened with strangers because it's that much hotter and that much more fun to write.
4)The inverse of the above- The situation is/was real, but in real life nobody actually fucked. Good few here, too.

And the can of worms thing is very real, too. One of the reasons I quit posting on another story site *coughLitcough* is that stories in any of several categories get inundated with hate. This place seems free of that in my (admittedly limited) experience, but I suspect that would change real quick if an incest story was marked as real. Or a gay story, or any MMF, etc.

To that statement it's not that the US doesn't want people coming into the country it's just do it legally is what the fight is really about.

Go to HaileSelassie's link. Read that hot mess. Then tell me: if you lived in Mexico, especially one of the areas of Mexico that is presently an open drug war, would you wait years for a chance that might not even come? Or would you get your family to the "land of the free" by any means necessary?

Thank god my ancestors emigrated illegally during the Potato Famine. We were the original wetbacks. And thank god we're correctly colored to subsequently blend into society. WASPs were heavily prejudiced against the Irish when we arrived, but after a couple generations we lost the accent and blended right in. If we were brown? Hmm...

Undocumented workers do pay taxes, in fact Social Security estimates that they're worth $6 to $7 billion- that's billion, with a b- to the system that they'll never claim. They don't file for returns, but that very much does not mean that they don't pay. And contrary to what Faux News likes to scream, they're ineligible for welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc, 90% of the men are employed, and they aren't criminals any more than the rest of the population. They're just people looking for a better life, who have enough guts to risk the border crossing to get it and enough work ethic to earn it once they're here.

$9 to $11 is very optimistic for a wage estimate. They make the minimum wherever they are when they're working for an employer who's filing payroll as required, and they make a lot less than minimum for a criminal employer.

I never understand how people talk themselves into this hate. We're blaming people for wanting to come to the US? I thought we all felt that this is the best country on earth and everyone should idolize it?

There are, at any given time, somewhere between 4 and 7 million undocumented immigrants in this country. It is a far, far smaller percentage of the population than the Irish mass immigration represented in the middle of the 19th century, and less than a lot of other European migrations at their peak. And unlike the Irish, who were unskilled, broke, and desperate, the majority of Latin immigrants are coming here directly to a job. They contribute to society, contribute to the economy, and are generally the salt of the earth.

And to affirm something that was mentioned up-thread, no amnesty is being discussed. Reform is being discussed. The 1986 reform was not amnesty either.

I was chilling in my room at the barracks, all caught up on my classwork and passing the evening with a book, when Nicolas and Jon called. The call was more than welcome, I'd been thinking about them a lot since our weekend together. And not just because of the sex. Seemed they'd been thinking about me, as well. The call was to invite me along on a ski trip with their friends, and they...

Added 25 Jul 2010 | Category Gay Male | Votes 21 | Avg Score 5 | Views 11,844 | 6 Comments

"Hey, you alright?" said a voice from behind me. I recognized it as belonging to Nic, the younger and more obviously gay of the partners who owned the little seaside B&B on whose back patio I was presently sulking. "Yeah, I'm okay," I said. "Or I will be." "Don't kid a kidder, boyo," he said in a gently amused tone, coming around to sit by me on the padded, loveseat-sized bench. I glanced...

Added 06 Jun 2010 | Category Gay Male | Votes 8 | Avg Score 4.88 | Views 12,616 | 5 Comments

I was sitting with my back to the door when Commander Rainey came in. My feet were up on the windowsill, the weekend’s watch roster on my lap. I’d like to say I was working on it, but really I was kind of staring into space. She tapped twice on the open door. “Come in,” I said without turning, thinking it was one of my girls. “I’m already in,” she answered. I turned to see her halfway to...

Added 06 Jun 2010 | Category Straight Sex | Votes 8 | Avg Score 5 | Views 3,872 | 5 Comments