Dear Editor:
I read with interest the letter written John Thorgrimson that appeared in last week’s paper. Now although Mr. Thorgrimson is stunned by the presence of so many foreign workers in our fast food establishments, he really should not be surprised.
Unfortunately, the obvious truth is that your average Canadian citizen will not take these jobs because where the foreign workers see opportunity your average Canadians see only a dead end and work that mysteriously is beneath them. Now such an assumption is rather ironic but by no means should it be surprising. In the end we have only ourselves to blame for it.
The problem is that we have created a socialist welfare state that rewards the indolent with various government forms of welfare while penalizing the worker by robbing him/her of the fruits of his/her labour. If you come to the government with a child in tow but no job you can manage to get some kind of government payment. If you manage to go through 12 years of free government education but still cannot read or do basic math you can get some form of government money so that you can get the education you should already have. If you want to go around and produce more children than you can possibly care for, you can get some government money so that you can pay someone else to take care of those children. If you can produce a piece of paper that purportedly says that your ancestors would have rights for eternity, you can get some government money.
The basic truth of the matter is there is both a large economic and cultural disincentive for people to want to work that is built into our society. Whereas the societies that these foreign workers come from do not have such elaborate and well entrenched barriers to the individual developing a sense of responsibility.
So Mr. Thorgrimson, instead of either of us being upset by the presence of so many foreign workers in the food courts of our malls we should be happy. We should be happy that we have someone who, while not having been born in this land, is willing to come over here and help us bear the load of the dead weight of our Canadian born unemployed but tax-consuming neighbours.
It should also be pointed out that many of these foreign born workers have a level of education which in some cases is no higher than that of their non-working Canadian born counterparts. However, the sad truth is that in many cases at these jobs we have foreign-born workers who have a much higher level of education than does the average none working or working Canadian, but who is willing to work at a job which does not use or pay for these skills accordingly.
Julian Ross Hudson