Unless you are machine-gutting overfed chickens or stooped over in the Arizona sun picking genetically modified tasteless tomatoes or working the night shift at the Happy Times Asian massage parlor then chances are your job is not being threatened by the scary brown invading hoards.
Sorry, you’ll need to direct your hate somewhere else before you head to your next MAGA rally. That flood of “not their best people,” rapists and murderers are not racing here to take your job.
Besides, if someone with little or no education, non-English speaker with no money can come in and “steal” your job away from you, what kind of job do you have exactly? Who are you working for? You really need to reevaluate your life choices.
Just saying.
If your long term job prospect is being threatened at all, it is being threatened by technology and not by some family desperate to escape a hellhole of a life in country overrun by gangs, despots, and drug cartels.
So desperate by the way, that they are willing to travel thousands of miles and literally risk the lives of everyone in their family just to get away to a place they thought would be safe.
Oh, and by the way, you should have seen that jobs change-a-comin’ if you had been able to get your mind off scary brown skinned neighbor who just might or might not be a member of MS13.
Technology has always been taking jobs, but in the past it was a few jobs here and there.
That gas station attendant was slowly replaced by the self serve gas pump beginning around 1967. That bank teller was slowly replaced by the ATM staring circa 1971. That Blockbuster was replaced by a Redbox Vending machine and then by Netflix.
Did you miss those? You weren’t paying attention. That neighbor has a weird tattoo afterall…
Now the change is faster, and since your brain isn’t evolving as quickly as the technology, you are having a hard time keeping up and you are afraid. And because you are afraid, you need to lash out and blame someone unlike yourself. That is what being in a tribe is all about after all.
So instead of blaming the very white billionaire Walton family for replacing 10 human checkout clerks with ten lines of self serve checkout lanes at your local Sam’s Club, you blame the Mexicans. Or the Guatemalans. Or the Hondurans. Heck who cares, they all are brown and they all look alike from a distance.
Quick build a wall to repel the advancing hoards.
Instead of blaming the faceless McDonald’s corporation for replacing workers with electronic ordering kiosks because they were so cheap they didn’t want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for their human workers, you blamed the El Salvadorans escaping gang violence because hey, they are brown and it is easier to blame the brown people than the very white Ronald McDonald and his very white Board of Directors.
Besides, those McDonald’s clown folks are in your tribe.
If your plan is to constantly blame the “others” for your job losses, your poor educational choices or your bad luck, you better start finding new groups to add to your list. If you are thinking of getting any kind of job that requires repetition, you might reconsider.
Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are going to be taking over jobs at an alarming pace in the very near future.
Want to drive a truck? Driverless trucks are already being tested and will be deployed within five years.
Robots are making burgers pizzas and lattes.
AI can read mammograms with greater precision than humans, and robotic accountants wont be tempted to dip into the funds that the clients never knew about.
And hey, that robot wont need health insurance or a retirement plan contribution either. So screw you.
According to Gartner, close to 2 million repetitive type jobs will be lost to robots and AI in the US by the mid 2020’s. Who will you blame then? Poor El Salvadorians carrying latte making robots in their backpacks as they cross the Rio Grande? Refugee children from Guatemala coding AI as they cross the Arizona desert or the corporate owners who decided that robots are more cost efficient than humans?
The brown invaders aren’t taking your jobs America. The robots are. And no wall, no matter how tall, is going to stop them.
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Author: Tim Holt is an educator and writer, with over 33 years experience in education and opines on education-related topics here and on his own award-winning blog: HoltThink. He values your feedback.
Feel free to leave a comment. Read his previous columns here.
