@admitsWrongIfProven I certainly agree that forcing anyone to do menial work without pay is fascist or some epithet just as bad or worse. Enslavement is never good policy, in an ethical (or any other) sense.

But pay (and work conditions) are continuous, so it takes judgment to distinguish between "wage slavery" (what if we pay them 1¢ per hour?) and something maybe reasonable. 1/

@admitsWrongIfProven I don't think having some kind of public works corps ppl could volunteer for as part of a path to legal immigration is necessarily fascist or a bad idea. (To be less coy, I think it could be a very good idea.) But the ethical quality of a proposal like that depends on the actual quality of the conditions ppl would volunteer into: are the pay + conditions sufficiently decent that we can understand this as people reasonable "paying dues" rather than horrifyingly enslaved? /fin