Treat Essential Workers Better
By Roy Beck
Most of the people celebrated as “essential workers” during the pandemic were part of the working classes whose interests had been ignored and devalued for decades by the makers of immigration policies — policies that had steadily depressed their wages and their labor participation rates. And, of course, many of them were immigrants themselves who now found their climb up the economic ladder depressed by each annual legal arrival of a million more permanent competitors, not counting the unauthorized foreign workers.