Is this xenophobia?
Video – Jan Brewer: Most illegal immigrants are ‘drug mules’ CNN (Hat tip Glenn)
Bias and Bigotry in Academia Patrick Buchanan
Losing White America Patrick Buchanan
Long-Term Economic Pain for American Families Bob Herbert, NYTimes (this is why latent xenophobia has come to the surface in my view)
Xenophobia is the uncontrollable fear of foreigners. It comes from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), meaning “stranger,” “foreigner” and φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear.” Xenophobia can manifest itself in many ways involving the relations and perceptions of an ingroup towards an outgroup, including a fear of losing identity, suspicion of its activities, aggression, and desire to eliminate its presence to secure a presumed purity.
I would argue that latent xenophobia always comes to the surface during periods of economic insecurity. This is natural. So I certainly see the links above as manifestations of xenophobia. The question is whether policy remedies used to allay economic insecurities are appropriate. For example, Pat Buchanan makes a number of valid arguments in the article on academia. What should be done, then from a policy perspective?
My take: there is always going to be some measure of ‘xenophobia overreach’ in tough times. How much is the question. Discussing these divisive issues without a reptilian response is difficult but necessary to avoid particularly nasty cases of xenophobia overreach. I disagree with the ethos underlying Buchanan’s take on losing white America. But perception is reality and he does seem to be expressing views many voters have. What about addressing these concerns constructively instead of dismissing them out of hand?
Other Links
Baseler Ausschuss: Deutschland stimmt neuer Bankenregulierung nicht zu FAZ
Researchers link undersea oil plumes to BP spill LA Times
Watchdog questions Belgium’s finances FT (Hat tip Richard Smith)
Is Google Watching You? New Plugin Will Let You Know Mashable
The PBoC can’t easily raise interest rate Michael Pettis, Credit Writedowns
Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign Mashable
Anchoring Effect You Are Not So Smart (must read piece on irrational expectations)
The Real Sin of Michael Steele Patrick Buchanan (Buchanan is not NC’s usual fare but his foreign policy views are also important)
Elizabeth Warren and Her Discontents HuffPo
"Government as Deux Ex Machina"? Mark Thoma
How Preschool Changes the Brain Jonah Lehrer
Guest Blog: Of two minds: Listener brain patterns mirror those of the speaker Scientific American
Consumer demand ‘fuels faster Russian economic growth’ BBC News
Chinese Banks At Risk, Part 1 Patrick Chovanec (also see Richard’s recent post on this)
For Edwards, the Japanese lesson still holds… FT Alphaville
Bell council cuts salaries 90%; some will forgo pay LA Times
Niall Ferguson Debates Himself Matthew Yglesias
Fiscal policy: When does fiscal stimulus work? Ryan Avent
Too Cash-Strapped for a Boom: How Italy’s Permanent Crisis Saved It From the Downturn Der Spiegel
Thoughts on Academic Tenure Arnold Kling
Antidote du Jour: Great Hornbill (hat tip MarcoPolo)
PS. – if you love birds, listen to the call of the Great Hornbill. Amazing stuff.
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Comments are closed.
Re: “Elizabeth warren and her discontents”
I stopped reading Megan McArdle a long time ago. She’s the Glenn Beck of economic bloggers.
McArdle is a procuress for Finance. That’s a female pimp.
Re: Xenophobia
In an interview with CNN’s John King, it comes through loud and clear just how thoroughly divorced Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is from any this-world reality.
She says “I really believe that our law enforcement officers are so well trained, they understand what America is all about, and that it’s illegal and that it’s not going to happen.”
But as was pointed out in a link Ed posted yesterday, law enforcement errors already are happening, and not just to illegal immigrants, but to American citizens.
Brewer then goes on to dig her hole deeper when she asserts: “And people that are feeling that they’re being racially discriminated against can, you know, pursue a legal relief through the courts.”
Do what?
According to Johann Ace Francis, the U.S. citizen who was deported (see above link), it takes money to “pursue a legal relief through the courts,” something not everyone in America, including Francis, has.
Furthermore, as Francis goes on to explain, being declared an “illegal alien” must be something similar to being declared a “terrorist.” Once declared an “illegal alien,” one is swept away and not allowed any communication with attorneys or family. As Francis so aptly inquired, “how can your family come help you when you’re actually detained and remanded somewhere that no one knows where you’re at?”
Re: Xenophobia
I like how this is something new to some people.
I lived in Chicago from birth until my low 30’s; through the 60’s and 70’s. Then entire Republican Party “renaissance” was based on “those people” (Xenophobia aka tribalism). Fear works. The white people destroyed the country voting for racists hoping they’d help them eventually “get even with those people” and to “right the injustices of civil-rights”. The moron liberals did everything in their power to make sure the racial issues were burning as brightly as possible (busing comes to mind) ensuring the divide was as wide a possible.
The Republican Party used to be simply the Party of Management, with the Democratic Party having the role of the Labor Party. When the Republicans became the Party of “getting even with those people” it was able to focus its energies on turning the country into a corporate Kleptocracy (fascism) with the dumbass whites happily voting for the destructing of all peasants social structures (unions & cities come to mind) in the lame hope that they’d eventfully show “those people” their “correct place”.
The civil rights movement destroyed more than just the Democratic Party (as Johnson suspected it would); it ended-up destroying the entire country.
Americans are f****g dumbasses (sorry, this topic pisses me off more than any single topic in the US.)
You know, NOTaREALmerican, with an attitude like that, I’d like to see your papers, please.
But seriously, if this is what you think of our country, is it possible you would be more content elsewhere? France, perhaps.
NOTaREALmerican,
This is such an fascinating subject, and I’m happy Ed has given us license to discuss something that, more often than not, is deemed to be taboo.
The immigration debate is a little bit more complex than the white-black debate. In the immigration debate, on top of the typical in-group/out-group determinants such as skin color, culture (language, religion, ethnicity, etc.) and class (education, wealth, income, etc.), you also have nationalism. So in the immigration debate, one hears citizenship invoked quite frequently, as well as the standard fallbacks of skin color, culture and class.
The debate also breaks down along rational (or what masquerades as rational, as is the case with Jan Brewer) and irrational lines. Here I define “rational” to mean that which has a proximate material consequence. For instance, in “Bias and Bigotry in Academia” Buchanan points out that working-class whites have been all but banned from America’s elite universities. Thus this group has been deprived of something very material, and Buchanan’s argument is, in my opinion, an appeal to rationality. Likewise, if you’re an American-born high-school dropout seeking work, you’re likely to be pitted against immigrants who are taking entry-level jobs at lower wages than you’d accept. Your stake is material, and therefore you have a rational argument to make against immigration.
Issues like preserving group identity and group purity, and especially if group identity rests on immutable characteristics such as skin color or birthright, fall into the irrational category. Thus racial profiling, because it is motivated purely on skin color, falls into the irrational category. And while there might be some ultimate material payoff for racial profiling, there is no proximate material payoff. The law enforcement officers who engage in this activity do it out of pure meanness.
That said, I’d like to take this opportunity to throw out this quote by Hannah Arendt that I believe raises some very rational considerations. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but have lacked courage. So again thanks Ed for giving me the opportunity:
It has turned out that in the eastern and northern parts of the country integration of the Negroes into the higher-income groups encounters no very serious or insuperable difficulties. Today everywhere it is really a fait accompli. Dwellings with relatively high rentals can be integrated if the black tenants belong to the same upper level as the white or yellow (especially the Chinese, who are everywhere especially favored as neighbors). Since the number of successful black businessmen is very small, this really applies to the academic and liberal professions—-doctors, lawyers, professors, actors, writers, and so on.
The same integration in the middle and lower levels of the middle class, and especially among the workers who in respect to income belong to the upper level of the lower middle class, leads to catastrophe, and this indeed not only because the lower middle class happens to be particularly “reactionary,” but because these classes believe, not without reason, that all these reforms relating to the Negro problem are being carried out at their expense. This can best be illustrated by the example of the schools. Public schools in America, including high schools, are free. The better these schools are, the greater are the chances for children without means to get into the colleges and universities, that is, to improve their social position. In the big cities this public school system, under the weight of a very numerous, almost exclusively black Lumpenproletariat, has with very few exceptions broken down; these institutions, in which children are kept for twelve years without even learning to read and write, can hardly be described as schools. Now if a section of the city becomes black as a result of the policy of integration, then the streets run to seed, the schools are neglected, the children run wild—-in short, the neighborhood very quickly becomes a slum. The principal sufferers, aside from the blacks themselves, are the Italians, the Irish, the Poles, and other ethnic groups who are not poor but are not rich enough either to be able simply to move away or to send their children to the very expensive private schools.
This, however, is perfectly possible for the upper classes, though often at the cost of considerable sacrifice. People are perfectly right in saying that soon in New York only the very poor and the very rich will be able to live. Almost all the white residents who can do so send their children either to private schools, which are often very good, or to the principally Catholic denominational schools. Negroes belonging to the upper levels can also do this. The working class cannot, nor can the lower middle class. What makes these people especially bitter is that the middle-class liberals have put through laws whose consequences they do not feel. They demand integration of the public schools, elimination of neighborhood schools (black children, who in large measure are simply left to neglect, are transported in buses out of the slums into schools in predominantly white neighborhoods), forced integration of neighborhoods—-and send their own children to private schools and move to the suburbs, something that only those at a certain income level can afford.
To this another factor is added, which is present in other countries as well. Marx may have said that the proletarian has no country; it is well known that the proletarians have never shared this point of view. The lower social classes are especially susceptible to nationalism, chauvinism, and imperialistic policies. One serous split in the civil-rights movement into “black” and “white” came as a result of the war question: the white students coming from good middle-class homes at once joined the opposition, in contrast to Negroes, whose leaders were very slow in making up their minds to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam. This was true even of Martin Luther King. The fact that the army gives the lower social classes certain opportunities for education and vocational training naturally plays a role here.
–Hannah Arendt, Crises of th NOTaREALmerican,
This is such an fascinating subject, and I’m happy Ed has given us license to discuss something that, more often than not, is deemed to be taboo.
The immigration debate is a little bit more complex than the white-black debate. In the immigration debate, on top of the typical in-group/out-group determinants such as skin color, culture (language, religion, ethnicity, etc.) and class (education, wealth, income, etc.), you also have nationalism. So in the immigration debate, one hears citizenship invoked quite frequently, as well as skin color, culture and class.
The debate also breaks down along rational (or what masquerades as rational, as is the case with Jan Brewer) and irrational lines. Here I define “rational” to mean that which has a proximate material consequence. For instance, in “Bias and Bigotry in Academia” Buchanan points out that working-class whites have been all but banned from America’s elite universities. Thus this group has been deprived of something very material, and Buchanan’s argument is, in my opinion, an appeal to rationality. Likewise, if you’re an American-born high-school dropout seeking work, you’re likely to be pitted against immigrants who are taking entry-level jobs at lower wages than you’d accept. Your stake is material, and therefore you have a rational argument to make against immigration.
Issues like preserving group identity and group purity, and especially if group identity rests on immutable characteristics such as skin color or birthright, fall into the irrational category. Thus racial profiling, because it is motivated purely on skin color, falls into the irrational category. And while there might be some ultimate material payoff for racial profiling, there is no proximate material payoff. The law enforcement officers who engage in this activity do it out of pure meanness.
That said, I’d like to take this opportunity to throw out this quote by Hannah Arendt that I believe raises some very rational considerations. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but have lacked courage. So again thanks Ed for giving me the opportunity:
It has turned out that in the eastern and northern parts of the country integration of the Negroes into the higher-income groups encounters no very serious or insuperable difficulties. Today everywhere it is really a fait accompli. Dwellings with relatively high rentals can be integrated if the black tenants belong to the same upper level as the white or yellow (especially the Chinese, who are everywhere especially favored as neighbors). Since the number of successful black businessmen is very small, this really applies to the academic and liberal professions—-doctors, lawyers, professors, actors, writers, and so on.
The same integration in the middle and lower levels of the middle class, and especially among the workers who in respect to income belong to the upper level of the lower middle class, leads to catastrophe, and this indeed not only because the lower middle class happens to be particularly “reactionary,” but because these classes believe, not without reason, that all these reforms relating to the Negro problem are being carried out at their expense. This can best be illustrated by the example of the schools. Public schools in America, including high schools, are free. The better these schools are, the greater are the chances for children without means to get into the colleges and universities, that is, to improve their social position. In the big cities this public school system, under the weight of a very numerous, almost exclusively black Lumpenproletariat, has with very few exceptions broken down; these institutions, in which children are kept for twelve years without even learning to read and write, can hardly be described as schools. Now if a section of the city becomes black as a result of the policy of integration, then the streets run to seed, the schools are neglected, the children run wild—-in short, the neighborhood very quickly becomes a slum. The principal sufferers, aside from the blacks themselves, are the Italians, the Irish, the Poles, and other ethnic groups who are not poor but are not rich enough either to be able simply to move away or to send their children to the very expensive private schools.
This, however, is perfectly possible for the upper classes, though often at the cost of considerable sacrifice. People are perfectly right in saying that soon in New York only the very poor and the very rich will be able to live. Almost all the white residents who can do so send their children either to private schools, which are often very good, or to the principally Catholic denominational schools. Negroes belonging to the upper levels can also do this. The working class cannot, nor can the lower middle class. What makes these people especially bitter is that the middle-class liberals have put through laws whose consequences they do not feel. They demand integration of the public schools, elimination of neighborhood schools (black children, who in large measure are simply left to neglect, are transported in buses out of the slums into schools in predominantly white neighborhoods), forced integration of neighborhoods—-and send their own children to private schools and move to the suburbs, something that only those at a certain income level can afford.
To this another factor is added, which is present in other countries as well. Marx may have said that the proletarian has no country; it is well known that the proletarians have never shared this point of view. The lower social classes are especially susceptible to nationalism, chauvinism, and imperialistic policies. One serous split in the civil-rights movement into “black” and “white” came as a result of the war question: the white students coming from good middle-class homes at once joined the opposition, in contrast to Negroes, whose leaders were very slow in making up their minds to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam. This was true even of Martin Luther King. The fact that the army gives the lower social classes certain opportunities for education and vocational training naturally plays a role here.
–Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic
Shoo!
I don’t know what happened there, but I especially like the part about “Crises of the NOTaREALmerican.”
This could have been written by any of the parents of the kids I grew up with (assuming they could think that clearly – which most of them couldn’t). What date was this written?
Re: The lower social classes are especially susceptible to nationalism, chauvinism, and imperialistic policies.
The peasant class is very susceptible to manipulation. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t have 7000+ years of history of peasants slaughtering each other for the amusement and benefit of the nobility.
Re: The immigration debate is a little bit more complex than the white-black debate.
I agree that the “immigration” issue isn’t directly related to the black/white issue BUT it is generally related. The Republican political “infrastructure” – which already existed to talk openly about “those people” (and their failings) – has basically been applied to “the beaners”. And – again – liberal intellectuals are using the problem to increase the divide by using their “victimization infrastructure”. Race works for “both” Parties as they have perpetual anger to generate. (Personally, I have no problem with completely regulating immigration. A country that can’t control its own immigration is pretty pathetic – but, then, that’s why we can’t).
Re: integration of the Negroes into the higher-income groups encounters no very serious or insuperable difficulties.
This is true. My first suspicion that “those people” were actually normal humans was when I accidently moved to an integrated neighborhood in Tallahassee Florida. I discovered (to my horror) that “one of those people” lived two blocks away AND nobody seemed to mind. (How odd, I thought). Ironies of ironies the guy turned out to be a rabid Chicago Bears fan.
—-
It’s sad, that after 40+ years of this racial crap, the Blue and Red Team of the Republicrat Party holds power by manipulating this issue. It’s going to destroy the country.
I think you hit on something here that’s important. Two thoughts:
1. Americans live in fairly segregated ethnic enclaves – often because of mutual self-selection. A lot of people don’t ever find out that “Ironies of ironies the guy turned out to be a rabid Chicago Bears fan” because their experiences are limited.
2. This is the breeding ground for xenophobia, of course. If you don’t have a relationship with someone, their otherness is going to be larger than if you did.
None of this is going to go away because xenophobia is natural. In a diverse nation like America it means we are always going to run into these kinds of conflicts. I think having a more well-thought out immigration policy might decrease the tensions.
One point no one has addressed and is how Western Europe is coping. There are the Poles in Ireland and Britain, the Turks in Germany, Muslims in France and so on. How do those tensions compare to what America is experiencing?
Arendt wrote that in 1970.
Re: How do those tensions compare to what America is experiencing?
I lived in London for 9 months in the early 90’s. The Indian immigrants were “those people”.
Germany has many Turkish immigrants who are “those people”.
The Italians have the Ethiopians who are “those people”. And then there’s “those damn Gypsies”!
The French have the Moroccans who are not only “those people” but Muslim trrrrssss to boot!
Then, of course, I know a Swiss Guy that has a Swedish Wife, so the Swiss have his Swedish Wife too; and she thinks – even after 20 years – she’s still one of “those people”. (She’s just not Swiss enough).
Most people live in a semi-psychotic fantasy-land, and the smart amoral scumbags know it and take advantage of it every chance they get.
In the UK we have many ethnic minorities, so it’s kind of hard to give more than a skim quickly.
Just from the postwar immigration: blacks from the Caribbean, Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis; since the Wall came down, a whole bunch of new ones, notably Poles as you mention, basically EUers from the East exercising their right to labour mobility in the EU; but also Lithuanian migrant workers, for instance . Plus refugees and asylum-seekers from all over and the rather vague “illegal” immigrants, half or milion or so of them (1% of the population). Cumulatively there’s been a lot of fudging of residence qualifications over the years, in response to, let’s call it “electoral pressure”. All have had indifferent-to-hostile receptions from the state and from our citizens, and have integrated, or not, to varying extents. Biggest single identifiable group is religious not ethnic – “Moslems” at around 4Mn I think now.
Hang it, Wikipedia ref: http://tinyurl.com/2ec79sa.
You see what I mean – very complex history that I am just driving by.
The incidence of minor riots over the years correlates well with economic downturns, or hot weather.
And yes, immigration is a much-discussed issue in the UK again, now.
“I would argue that latent xenophobia always comes to the surface during periods of economic insecurity”
No, Pat Buchanan has consistently held his position on immigration for decades.
He is also one of the few American patriots who for DECADES has been decrying and criticizing the NAFTA and WTO agreements which are destroying the USA for anyone but the elite (mostly Ivy people like you Yves).
It’s funny that supply and demand (in this case excess labor) never seems to enter into the US economic picture. That’s because the elites profit mightily from holding down salaries. Of course a Harvard or Yale grad is tied into a social network that protects them for life. It’s a safety net most Americans do not have.
There is no reason we should continue to allow into the USA each year 1 million new immigrants + hundreds of thousands on temp visas in these times of famine. Unfortunately the Ivy league control the NYTs, the US government and just about every other news organization. They continue to push increases in immigration as a solution to most of our economic problems ( I could post some links, but just read any column by Thomas Friedman of the NYTs).
I also find it startling that Obama, who claims illegal aliens ‘take the jobs Americans won’t do’ actually believes that if he legalizes 30 million of them, that they will continue to ‘do the jobs Americans won’t do.’ No, they’ll run down to Walmart to compete with Grandma for that air-conditioned Walmart greeter job.
These elites attempt to make us believe that excess supply makes its own demand. And yes, it’s us (the lower 90%) vs the top 10%.
I am still surprised that many people consider controlling (illegal) immigration a race issue. Fundamentally, it’s all about money and quality of life. The middle class pays for the needed infrastructure and has to endure the crowding, and the rich benefit from the cheap labor. That’s pretty much it. I am sure it is also partly a race issue, but then on any issue you can find people whose position is motivated by race if you look hard enough.
Re: Fundamentally, it’s all about money and quality of life.
Yes, it should be about money and quality of life. BUT, if either political Party talked about money and quality of life the peasants would realize what was going on. Better to confuse them with meanness (the Red Team) or guilt (the Blue Team) and keep the real issue hidden.
If the peasants ever woke up an asked the simple question of: “Hey, were DID all our jobs go?” there might be some explainin’ ta do.
Why are you posting anything linked to Pat Buchanan and Peggy Noonan?
These people are less than honest shills for the elite, and are no different than Karl Rove, Broder, and Sean Hannity. Both of them were press agents for prior presidential administrations (Nixon & Reagan) who got picked up by media syndicates to write political commentary.
Some would call them propagandistas. As for myself, I would find them neither informative nor accurate in too many of their “opinions” to be worthy of a steady read.
I agree. I know Yves told us to be nice, but really I can’t wait till she gets back and imposes some judgement on the selection of links of the day.
We are all eager for her to re-appear. But, your sentiments about Buchanan sound more like the sentiments of someone who doesn’t want to move outside of his intellectual comfort zone.
Napster, I say the same thing to you regarding Noonan. Just because the person is linked doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. It should mean it’s an important piece that has a view you should hear. Looking to sanitize the links to omit these kinds of people is motivated by the desire to live in an intellectual gated community in my view.
Yes, I know I should be open-minded but I lived through the 80s…and haven’t forgotten them.
Anonymizer, I understand where you’re coming from. Thanks for that.
xenophobia and racism is opposition to illegal immigration.
So according to this logic if you support illegal immigration then you are non racist,progressive and a multiculturalist.
The selective violation of the laws of the USA by illegal aliens is subversion of the US Constitution and its laws.
Leveraging the benefits the USA has through employment ,welfare etc by illegal immigrants is a targeting of the benefits bestowed on US citizens and lawful residents by the legal embodiment of National identity,the US Constitution and the Federal government.
Therefore the targeting of this US national identity is in fact a form of racism.Unfortunately the dominant voices have this fact turned upside down.
Let me put it another way.Would you support drunk drivers being given an amnesty from conviction because they are foreign?
The point I make is that no one has the authority to select which laws must be ignored and not enforced based on where they come from.
Indeed when the laws against illegal immigration are not enforced then fear of those foreigners is a justifiable fear
Unfortunately, it’s more beneficial for the Blue Team to keep the victimization guilt-pot boiling than it is to address the unsolvable “jobs issue”. Just as it’s more beneficial for the Red Team to keep reminding its own dumbasses that “those people” are taking the jobs rather than bring up the issue of “where did the good jobs go”.
Different clowns, same circus. And the dumbasses still can’t figure it out after 40+ years.
In a town with an ordinance against oral sex, would you be in favor of pardons to those that broke the ordinance?
The issue with your argument is that while you think the law makes sense, most people that get close to the immigration system know that it utterly broken, and by being broken, it makes the moral standing of someone that willingly break it far better than it’d be for someone that goes against most other laws.
There are many laws I have to obey that I consider stupid, unjust, counterproductive, and downright destructive. I’m disturbed by people who think they can wink at lawlessness where the law displeases them, and still believe that everybody else will go on as law-abiding citizens, even in all those myriad areas where this or that law happens to displease all those other people. If you want to live in stable, reasonably non-corrupt, law-abiding country (and that’s a major reason why people want to migrate here, even if they don’t consciously recognize that’s a large part of the reason why it’s a decent place to live), then you have to be prepared to obey the law, and expect and demand that everybody else does, too.
It’ll hold up if small numbers of people (or, say, one or two major metropolitan areas) think they’re just so special they don’t have to obey the law, or if a few pooh-bahs are seen to be corrupt. Past a certain critical mass of people who think they’re just so special, it all breaks down.
Sure, frivolous examples like getting away with breaking anti-oral sex laws, or minor speeding infractions (a favorite analogy of people defending illegal immigration), or negligible numbers of illegal aliens, aren’t going to erode respect for the law, because they *are* trivial and don’t affect people one way or the other. That’s why they’re pretty pointless as analogies.
Bump it up to things like “having sex in public” or “drunk driving”, or “illegal aliens by the millions”, and people start to care when the law isn’t enforced, and the seeds for civic cynicism, distrust, and contempt for the law will be planted if the lack of enforcement continues. That you or I might think that breaking immigration law is no big deal, on the level of going 10mph over the limit, isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is that large enough numbers of citizens do think it is a big deal, do think they are negatively impacted by it, and if you think the kind of anger this problem is provoking (along with the concomitant crony-capitalist free-for-all at the public trough) isn’t eroding respect for the law, and taking a toll on the general American mode of what I’ll call “civic loyalty”, you’re not paying attention. Making large swathes of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens come to feel that they are being played for chumps is deeply stupid behavior in a governing class.
As for our “broken immigration system”, yeah, it’s broken – though I doubt we’d agree on how. That’s the problem: since there is a huge range of opinion on what exactly an optimal immigration policy is – from “open the borders” to “reduce it to a trickle” – anybody who doesn’t get what they want is going to think it’s “broken”. And yes, I have plenty of legal immigrant friends whose lives INS (or DHS, or whatever they call themselves now) bureaucrats have made a living hell, but “I want in and they won’t let me in”, or “they won’t let my mother in”, or “they won’t let in people I want to employ”, or “you stupid Americans cannot possibly survive without my utter fabulous presence, let me in”, are not, ipso facto, indicative of a broken immigration system.
(I’m only half-joking about that last one. You’d be amazed at how many times I’ve heard variants.)
The forces of xenophobia want to distract the middle class from the culprits of our current economic situation. immigrants are however not the reason nor the driving force behind the pressures in the current labor market.
Studies are conclusively indicating that this pressure is coming from older workers competing with lower level employment positions.
There has actually been an increase in the numbers of immigrants who are returning abroad, which is also indicative of the job pressure.
Teen employment is also under stress, however we cannot conclude that this is due to the competition with immigrants because the data is not consistent with this assumption.
What we call a teenager assumes teenagers are completely separate from immigrants, when the case may be a teenager could be an immigrant or not depending on the status of the parents. Some immigrant teenagers may also not be enrolled in high school, or may be living in the United States alone without their parents. However, although these overlaps are real and should not be discounted, I have no idea has to how small or large this effect is. If I had to guess I’d say between 10 and 20 percent, but that is just pure speculation.
Nevertheless, a teenager who is trying to earn leisure income because they are living with parents who pay all the remaining living expenses is not the same thing as someone who needs the job to pay their living expenses. Teens who live at home, or are college-bound, have other options and will not be homeless and starving if they don’t get a job.
So when the pressure in the labor market becomes influenced by a lot of older workers losing their jobs, the number of teen employment is probably going to decrease dramatically. The pressures on the immigrant population would also cause an increase in the number of immigrants returning back out of country, but not as much because their options are unlike live-at-home teenagers.
Blaming the immigrants is a classic reaction by the scurrilous elite. The rise of the “Know Nothing” Tea Party movement has a lot to do with promoting a distraction from the issues of the day which benefit the elite. In the case of “Know Nothing” movement in the early 1850’s, the distraction was meant to lose focus on the corruption of government by financial elites and the Slave-istocracy. It was at this time that the Party System of Whiggery and Democrat could no longer contain the stress on the Middling White Classes. The “Know-Nothing” movement was a first attempt by the elite to promote and forge a new paradigm to capture and control the pressure. When it broke down, the issue of “free-labor” and slavery could not be contained and from this vestibule arose the Republican Party.
I think we are now in another moment of crisis. The current party system is straining very hard to contain the pressures on the middling classes once again.
And once again Xenophobia is the first attempt by the elite to contain the masses.
napster said: “Blaming the immigrants is a classic reaction by the scurrilous elite.”
There is certainly much truth in your statement.
Your comment echoes this statement by Tom Morello:
People have a right to be upset. People are very fearful. Politicians on the right are preying on people—-good, honest, working-class people’s fears—-and using race to divide us. The real criminals are those who are outsourcing the jobs overseas—- the corporate criminals, the banks that put us in the economic malaise that we’re in to begin with—-and the ones who are going to be suffering are the ones who are going to be racially profiled in Arizona while the banks and politicians are going to laugh all the way to the Tea Party. What SB 1070 does, it makes an entire race of people suspects first and people second. That’s why it’s wrong. That’s why it’s racist. And that’s why we’re going to stop it.
I never cease to be amazed at how erudite and articulate some of these rock musicians are.
Racial warfare is what keeps the plutocrats wealthy and powerful, and class warfare is what causes them to lose their wealth and power.
So our plutocrats are employing higher-ups in the NAACP like King Salim Khalfani as well as Astro-Turfers from the tea-party movement like Sarah Palin to create friction and hate between black plebs and white plebs. Because if they were to make peace with one another and unite as a single force, this would enable the plebs, both black and white alike, to harness a larger portion of wealth and power from our plutocrats. And if this were to happen, outfits like the NAACP and its white counterpart, the tea-party movement, would have a harder time receiving funding from our elite class of plutocrats, thus greatly reducing their chances of becoming very rich plutocrats themselves.
In the original post: “What about addressing these concerns constructively instead of dismissing them out of hand?”
At this point in American history, we’ve addressed racist concerns constructively for decades upon decades. Being black still gives you a great chance at impoverishment. Being Hispanic means you can get detained for no reason at all. I’m done with reasoning with the racist.
We have to wait for the oldest generation to die off. Until then, there will be serious systemic racism. My generation (Millennials) are ready for an end to this crap.
Re: My generation (Millennials) are ready for an end to this crap.
I can vaguely see this in people less than 30. Altho I no longer live in a northeastern large city.
I suspect my generation won’t die fast enough to allow you guys to fix things however.
Cocomaan, you’re probably right. It sounds fatalistic but that’s the optimistic approach on some level because your generation sees these things a lot differently. Same thing is happening in other countries too. Look at the Germans for example. Their Wold Cup team is an example of a more diverse country than just 15-20 years ago.
Of course, the REAL issue has a lot more to do with class. What I think people should be worried about is economic stagnation in the face of large increases in per capita GDP and a widening distribution of wealth. The Herbert article pointed to the insecurity that lays behind this. Naked Capitalism has been about exposing this, an issue that the politics of prejudice obscures.
“We have to wait for the oldest generation to die off. Until then, there will be serious systemic racism. My generation (Millennials) are ready for an end to this crap.”
You can speak authoritatively for your entire generation? I’m impressed, but please provide non-anecdotal evidence that the level of discrimination is so much less amongst your generation than amongst the “oldest generation” (most of whom are retired and so have little influence on hiring and little concern about job issues).
Napster,
you state….”Blaming the immigrants is a classic reaction …”
No one is blaming immigrants.The problem is with illegal immigrants and they are to blame for the problems they cause.
Why are non racists and progressives unable to distinguish between what is legal and illegal?
Why is it wrong ,as you infer,to blame illegal immigrants for breaking US law.?
Why is it racist to demand the laws enacted by Congress and the President be enforced?
Re: Why are non racists and progressives unable to distinguish between what is legal and illegal?
Because logic doesn’t apply. It’s all based on emotions and the psychology of teams.
Why are the same Red Team racist mean morons so enthusiastic about demonizing “those people”. Why are the same Blue Team guilt-ridden morons so enthusiastic about making excuses for breaking the law.
It’s simple, because both teams know it’s the key to getting reelected. Different clowns, same circus for the last 40+ years.
sean,
Businesses employing illegal immigrants are breaking the law, too. Thorough policing of and a severe penalty on businesses for these infractions would end the problem so effectively that it is clear that current policing is not meant to solve the issue. If it’s such an important issue to control, why aren’t we advocating seizing businesses and business owners assets and sending the owners to jail?
Is Edward Harrison picking the links? Too bad. I read him religiously. As one commenter mentioned, Pat Buchanan has been stirring the pot for years, since he was Nixon’s speechwriter and helped craft the “Southern Strategy” raising the spectre of hulking black men despoiling fragile white women. I question the results of his study. There are also many evangelical colleges (Oral Roberts comes to mind) which discriminate against the “dark peoples” yet receive tax relief.
Immensely powerful people fund Republican and Tea Party interests (Richard Scaife and David Koch). Ditto for the Democratic Party. The Republican (Tea Party) strategy which has worked politically everywhere for millennia is to pit the have-nots against the have-nots. All of us, progressive, right, whatever, who aren’t in that top 1% are suffering.
Buchanan’s vision of northeastern “elite” universities descriminating in favor of ill-prepared blacks and Hispanics against white Catholics and evangelicals makes me laugh. I’m sure he’s passing around a copy of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to prove that the Jews are manipulating the World Order to gorge on Christian blood. After all, wasn’t Wall Street rewarded for bringing down the economy? And aren’t most Wall Street hustlers Jews?
Speaking as a newly poor, progressive Jewish female from NYC, any so-called facts can be bent to fit an ideology. I wrote four congressmen before the TARP vote (which occurred on Bush’s watch) to plead with them NOT to vote for it.
Xenophobia is used to pit one against the other. The idea is to keep the bottom 99% at each other’s throats while their pockets are being picked clean.
The ancient strategy of divide and conquor. Works every time.
Links about irrationality and Tversky/Kahneman.
Posts linking to commentary about China and financial crises by Pettis.
DownSouth making multiple comments.
People going crazy over Pat Buchanan and accusations of xenophobia.
It’s a good day to be alive.
Seriously…thanks to everyone pitching in while Yves is out. I’ve really enjoyed the links and the posts.
“Xenophobia is the uncontrollable fear of foreigners.”
This definition of Xenophobia on Wikipedia has drawn a lot of discussion on the Wikipedia website. And so it should, since it only muddies the water.
According to my dictionary xenophobia is “a fear of strangers or foreigners or of anything foreign or strange”.
Simple and to the point without the moral or psychological judgement.
The fear of strangers is controllable just as any other fear is controllable. If the intent is to describe some instinctual response then they should just say so.
In addition the fear of strangers could be a perfectly reasonable response depending on the circumstances.
Today the word xenophobia is used to vilify anyone who argues for a real solution to illegal immigration.
In the late 1980’s the illegal immigration was a 3 million person problem instead of todays 12 to 15 million person problem. Today the same failed solutions are being trotted out again. This reeks of intellectual dishonesty and even those without PHDs understand that!
Using contrived definitions is also intellectually dishonest.
For the record, I think illegal immigrants should be prosecuted because they are committing a felony. I also think that American needs immigrants and immigration reform. Nothing I described at the outset indicates how I feel about the subject one way or the other. However, what I think is beside the point here.
It is interesting that your comments make a blanket condemnation of the use of the term xenophobia – as if to say I “used [it] to vilify anyone who argues for a real solution to illegal immigration” or that I am using contrived definitions to be “intellectually dishonest.” I sense you are making assumptions that you should not be making about what I am asking or what my questions mean.
In fact, I actually said “Discussing these divisive issues without a reptilian response is difficult but necessary to avoid particularly nasty cases of xenophobia overreach. I disagree with the ethos underlying Buchanan’s take on losing white America. But perception is reality and he does seem to be expressing views many voters have. What about addressing these concerns constructively instead of dismissing them out of hand?”
You have taken the opposite tack i.e. given a reptilian response that doesn’t really answer any of the questions regarding policy remedies. One question, again as stated, is: “What about addressing these concerns constructively instead of dismissing them out of hand?”
The fact is xenophobia is rife within the immigrant and minority communities right now as well as within the communities Buchanan is defending. Economic downturns polarize and cause people to circle the wagons. How can we constructively deal with these questions?
If “perception is reality”, then propaganda is king. Long live Goebbels!
The problem with comparing everything to Nazi Germany is that the U.S. has gone so far beyond it in sophistication. Goebells is only half the propagandist that Cass Sunstein is.
HA! And modern marketing married to politics is about as insidious as you can get. Both are applied psychology. The average people don’t stand a chance against the smartest amoral scumbags in these professions.
Cassandra, perception IS an individual’s reality. For example:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=closing-the-gap
“People see desirable objects as physically closer than less desirable ones, according to a study in the January issue of Psychological Science. When psychologists Emily Balcetis of New York University and David Dunning of Cornell University asked people to estimate how far away a bottle of water was, those who were thirsty guessed it was closer than nonthirsty people did.”
Were the bottles physically closer for the thirsty people? In a way, yes.
The reason propaganda works is that perception and reality are very much inter-connected.
Sir, my objection was to your choice of the definition of xenophobia.
My point was that the word itself has recently been abused. Wikipedia’s definition adds insult to injury.
I apologize if I left some other impression.
Edward Harrison says: “For the record, I think illegal immigrants should be prosecuted because they are committing a felony.”
AFAIK being in the country illegally is only a civil violation.
Re: Using contrived definitions is also intellectually dishonest.
Yes it is dishonest. But the political framework is now completely sociopathic (exists on dishonesty). The government exists only by continuing the lie to the peasants. Neither the team of the Republicrat Party can address the issues that the country is facing BECAUSE it would require honesty. The nobility that own the sociopaths in the politic system know that if the truth comes out (we’re bankrupt – and it wasn’t “those people” fault) the patriotic REAL Mericans will go batshit crazy.
Countries fail when mythologies fail. Keep the mythology of greatness alive and EVERYTHING else is fine.
“Latent Xenophobia”
I wonder if we could post some articles or thoughts written by border-town residents.
I just wanted to leave a quick comment. First, I can’t seem to understand the link to the Pat Buchanan article. Yes, everyone who reads and enjoys this blog probably is intelligent and open minded enough to realize who he is and what his platform is, but by linking his article it gives him legitimacy which I sincerely don’t believe he deserves. His article is pure conjecture based on a very narrow mindset and a serious lack of empirical support. In any case, the man is so far of the reservation that he isn’t worth the wasted breath.
As for the immigration debate, I think the focus is far too much on punishing the illegal aliens and far too little about constructively dealing for the reasons behind their illegal immigration. Clearly employers share a much larger blame and the fines for anyone employing illegal aliens is not nearly high enough to offset the economic gain to have someone working for next to nothing off the books. The debate has to become more constructive and focus on dealing with the immigrants that are already here and giving them a path to naturalization and then cracking down on any business that hire illegals. The US has outdated and honorous immigration policies that only hurt it’s competitiveness in the long term as one only has to look at the current HB1 situation to see that we are clearly not understanding intellectual capital flows to the extent that we should. Let’s be honest, the US has a serious dearth of talented people in the sciences.
Excellent points, all of them.
One thing that receives too little attention is how the economies of the Western states in the US are basically run on illegal immigrant labor. The same powerful economic interests that are destroying your way of life are also behind the lack of enforcement of immigration laws.
The idea that Arizona (or any other western state) would actually get tough on immigrants is a joke. Their economies would collapse if that happened. Most regional businessmen are trying to open up the border even more, not close them off. The whole debate is just to appease the weak-minded consituents of Republican controlled states.
That entire area was conquered and taken from mexico, was it not?
And with time, demographically, it will remains so.
Or become more so.
Solution: make mexico more like the USA.
Or…make the SW USA morelike Mexico.
But that will inexorably happen, anyway, regardless of what the generations now roaming about may think about it.
Wait five, or ten, generations.
The same will occur in Israel, given time.
It is the way of the world…Anglos once conquered Saxons, now they are Anglo-Saxons.
But the time scale takes these changes beyond individual human experience, so people have trouble seeing it.
But historians sometimes see this truth.
And ‘destroying ways of life”?
You make it sound like hat process is something new, or undesirable.
rather, it is the way of the world, and has ever been.
We ourselves, and our families, and nations – and our “way of life” – are ineluctably and unavoidably transitory.
And that is no bad thing, not at all.
What are people clinging to? And why?
People need to embrace change, not fear and/or fight it.
AS Heordotus said, change is the only thing that stays the same.
Or as others have said: this too shall pass.
And that statement remains true in all situations.
You are too funny aet.
I’ve held a long term visa in France and a Japanese green card. In both living situations I had to adjust to foreign customs and learn a new language. I’d never trade those experiences.
I worked side by side with Mexicans building my own house. One opened his wallet one day to show pictures of his hacienda in Chihuahua. Better than my place. Why was he here? A drought had left him unable to farm back home. He brought his daughter along to go to school in the US. She’d get a big leg up on the available education in Mexico and become bilingual in the bargain. They’re probably back farming in Mexico now. Smart guy, I thought, looking out for a future for him and his daughter. Taught me some Spanish, too.
“That entire area was conquered and taken from mexico, was it not?”
Mexico? Wasn’t that the country that was run by the descendants of European settlers/conquerors? They lost a big chunk of the territory they claimed to another country run by the descendants of European settlers/conquerors. Of course there was a whopping total of 4000 non-aboriginal Mexicans in the territory they lost, and all of them were given US citizenship. Additionally, Mexico was formed by a revolt of the New Spain colony, but much of the territory lost to the US had been part of the Alta California territory, to which the New Spain colonists had no more legitimate claim than the US.
“But that will inexorably happen, anyway, regardless of what the generations now roaming about may think about it.”
That probably explains why, for example, the Vietnamese see little difference between themselves and the Chinese, and there hasn’t been any hostilities between the countries since 1979.
“Anglos once conquered Saxons, now they are Anglo-Saxons.”
No, the Angles and the Saxons were both Germanic tribes that conquered England at about the same time and in the process obliterated the native Celtic culture.
Thanks for making those points.
Undocumented workers from Mexico will always be an issue because the gulf in per capita income is enormous between the US and Mexico. But,as you say, the issue should be focused on causation and creating an immigration policy framework that reduces the number of illegal immigrants. What would that policy be? Here are two possibilities:
1. Move away from the stress on family reunification as the main source of new permanent residents toward a stress on work and economic reasons. I believe Canada stresses this. Does someone have data?
2. Concentrate on companies hiring illegals more than the immigrants as Obama seems to have done. This would reduce the potential for racial profiling.
Any other thoughts?
And,in regards to Buchanan, his arguments, like Jim Webb’s are the ones you HAVE to confront if you want any traction on this issue. I disagree that he is far off the reservation. His are EXACTLY the kinds of things that those who want to crack down on undocumented workers say. You may not like what he has to say. But, dismissing what he has to say isn’t going to make the situation better.
In fact, it will make matters worse because most people who take a more-immigration friendly approach are in the Democratic Party. People in the Republican party who see things differently are now switching to the crackdown mode. Right now, there are a lot of people WITHIN the Democratic like Webb who are shifting the other way.
As I see it, in the next congress, unless the economy improves, you are going to see more laws like the one in Arizona – a LOT more.
I think you’re missing the point. The point of “crack-down mode” is just to enhance the exploitability of the 7-10 million Mexicans who do all the real work from Texas to California.
“Concentrate on companies hiring illegals more than the immigrants as Obama seems to have done. This would reduce the potential for racial profiling.”
The only practical approach, and one of the few things I can honestly say Obama is doing a good job with.
My grandmother was an illegal alien. She came from Slosk, then part of Russia, now in Belarus. The czar was sending Cossacks to kill the Jewish peasants (an activity known as a “pogrom”) when the natives got restless. Once her mother hid her in a coal barrel because the Cossacks had this habit of raping the females before they slit their throats. One guy went down into their cellar, rooted around in the barrel, pulled her up by her hair, looked at her blackened condition, made a face and dropped her. That saved her life. (Hmmm, is that affirmative action? That she was saved by her blackened condition while others fairer were slain?)
She got out at 17, took a boat over in steerage with the stink and flies and dying passengers (think Titanic but no upper deck), got to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, where she had to pass through inspection before she would be admitted. There was a quota. She was deathly afraid she wouldn’t be let in, so she hunkered down while the gatekeeper was examining another and slipped by him.
Not only didn’t she know English, she couldn’t read or write. She spoke Yiddish. She raised two daughters, both teachers, who themselves raised a doctor, lawyer, CNN journalist, writer and (most villainous) a VP @ Citigroup.
What did the immigrants give the Native Americans? Casinos.
At this particular time in history it is the “elite” who are thoroughly pro-immigration. Just look at the pages of the WSJ, NYT and WaPo as well as most other so-called prestigious publications. Hard to get more elite than that.
Or put another way, claiming that Pat Buchanan represents the elite is one of the most bizarre claims I have ever heard. Pat is hardly and Ivy League elitist, in fact I could think of few people less welcome in elite circles than Pat Buchanan.
The truth is that any effort to put real control on the amount of immigration is a thoroughly middle class phenomenon.
The elite are imposing immigration on the middle and lower classes in order to reduce their wages and to divide the working classes so they cannot effect meaningful political reform in their interest. And it is working quite well.
So, any effort to divide and conquer is coming from the pro-immigration elite, not the immigration reductionists, who are basically just reacting to the huge changes in the rate and type of immigration that took place over the last 30 years.
You are just making a series of cliched statements and misapplying them in various non-thinking ways.
I don’t “fear” foreigners, I just don’t like the impact that many of them have on the society I live in, nor do I like the quantity of them that are currently being introduced into that society.
I don’t like the Iraq war either. Does that mean I have an uncontrollable fear of war?
Argue on the merits, or lack thereof, for immigration.
Don’t make blanket and unsubstantiated statements about the motives of those who do not support the current levels of immigration.
The Keymaker / Recap
So, DNA is a universal biochemical compiler. It doesn’t like to throw anything away, because environmental parameters change and repeat. The parse, stacks, etc. are virtual, and it’s not just linked triples. It shapes to create multidimensional code, locks and keys.
The human brain is a fulcrum, seeking to balance or repeat a group fulcrum. Imbalanced, repetitive fulcrums create the gravity of inertia, which is balanced by the inverter/rectifier. The dc bus assumes the I/R without recognizing it, due to psychological dissonance isolation. The dc bus also assumes, incorrectly, single direction assimilation of brain fulcrums.
As the planetary environment reacts to the potential, reorganization is catalyzed to continue building the symbiotic circuit. When the sub-circuit fails to adapt, the system circuit opens at that point, and the sub-dc bus shorts. Quantum adaptation occurs to jump/close the circuit, or resources are diverted to better balanced circuits.
Monkeys pounding keys randomly. Monkeys pounding code randomly. Monkeys randomly pounding resonant code, with positive & negative feedback loops. The child/leaf “learns” to “balance”.
There is the source of learning, learning, and knowledge. As the derivative, knowledge acts as an enzyme inhibitor. There is no substitute for growing one’s own orange tree, other oranges are a poor substitute, and vitamin C is for the birds. Technology is the new basis of script, but it is inherently flawed.
NEVER DEPEND ON TECHNOLOGY; it’s a temporary tool for building temporary bridges. The market must go through the vortex, but betting on how it chooses to do so is a ponzi parlor game.
“The US has outdated and honorous immigration policies that only hurt it’s competitiveness in the long term as one only has to look at the current HB1 situation to see that we are clearly not understanding intellectual capital flows to the extent that we should.”
That’s unsupported bullshit. The H1-b visa is supported by anti-american, pro-business zealots. There is no shortage of scientists and engineers. Close to 1/2 million scientists and engineers have been laid off or displaced in the last ten years.Their jobs are being outsourced to China and India.
Any politician who supports h1-b should be hanged.
About a month ago Yves included this article in links that addresses the issue you speak of.
I thought the comments it spurred were also quite good.
I’ll take Marx. Capital is free to cross borders with the click of a mouse. Labor should be equally internationally mobile and have it’s own rights. Cop to the reality of contemporary political economy.
Yeah, with unemployment running at 10+% and those 12 million (maybe down to 10 million by now) illegals taking our jobs, lets send ’em all back to where they came from and put the real Americans back to work!
With up to an estimated 80% of California, Oregon, and Washington agricultural workers being illegal, this opens up a lot of jobs! How about spending 10 hours a day stooping in the strawberry fields near Irvine! Those ones they pump full of toxic chemicals to ward off pests that ruin the crop. Picking broccoli up in Guadelupe or lettuce near Santa Maria more to your taste? At least up there you have a chance of ducking when the crop dusters fly overhead and spray herbicides. Like picking peaches in Oregon? Or working the bean fields in eastern Washington?
It’s guaranteed work. We always need to eat. And you and your kids get to live right near the fields in our worker housing. And you move with the crops, so your kids will have a chance to experience a lot of different schools. Benefits? Well, you get to work outdoors. That should keep you healthy, since there’s no health insurance plan.
Prefer to work in an air-conditioned environment? There are chicken processing plants and beef slaughter houses that will be begging for workers once those nasty illegals have gone back.
What? You don’t like working with sharp knives? Well, there are restaurants begging for dish-washers and bus boys and all those abandoned taco stands. I know, you could convert one of them into a hamburger stand or sub shop. Own your own business! It’s the American Way! And don’t forget all the yards in Southern California that will be overgrown in a week, after all those illegal gardeners have been deported. Now there’s a business opportunity!
Or, move to New York City, or Los Angeles and become a nanny! You get to play with other people’s children for 10 hours a day, and, if you are lucky, your employer may offer vacation pay and give you a Christmas bonus. Of course, in New York City, where a studio walk-up is a steal at $2000 per month, your take-home pay won’t cover the rent, but you can easily find 3 roommates to share the expenses. This means leaving your own children with your mother back in Goodland, Kansas. But, it gets you off unemployment! And you can visit them on your week of vacation.
All of these are great jobs that “those people” have stolen from us real Americans. What, you want to be able to buy a house in the suburbs and send your kids to a good school and start contributing to a retirement plan? And why do you keep on bringing up health insurance? All that is SOO last century! You should be grateful that you have a job.
See, it’s so simple. Illegal immigration and unemployment solved.
I’m tired of trying to be rational about this whole illegal immigration situation. It’s not susceptible to rational argument because the whole mess is such a pile of hypocritical s**t. We’re eating cheap food and getting our grass cut and our kids cared for at a pittance, because we all, as a society, are exploiting a group of poverty-stricken, largely indigenous peasants who face a choice of living in squalor and desperation in their oppressive regimes, or escaping to work in a situation that is only marginally less oppressive and at least gives them some small hope of escape. Most of them work like dogs, but we are demonizing them because they try to grasp some ray of hope.
We are all complicit in their “crime”. We are their enablers. We cheerfully buy the cheap food they pick and avail ourselves of the cheap services they provide. Are we willing to pay double or triple the price for our January strawberries or our chicken tenders or our steaks? Think about it when your neighbor rails against “those stupid lazy Mexicans that come up here to get welfare.”
That’s a fair and accurate description of the situation.
However, if Americans had those jobs, they’d need minimum wage if not a living wage to induce them to take it. Plus, they’d be covered by workman’s comp and a whole range of labor laws. Food prices can’t go up too much or else most people would go hungry. (Food prices have already gone up a good 200% in the last few years.) Mainly, what would happen is the Ag/Construction conglomerates would take in less profit, and the smaller farmers/firms would need more in subsidies (they already get tons of them).
And, this is exactly why the Mexicans have the best job security of all –as long as they don’t get caught!
“With up to an estimated 80% of California, Oregon, and Washington agricultural workers being illegal, this opens up a lot of jobs!”
That’s what César Chávez wanted to do.
“There are chicken processing plants and beef slaughter houses that will be begging for workers once those nasty illegals have gone back.”
In the not-so-distant past such jobs were frequently unionized and paid a decent middle class wage. Certainly that was true during my childhood and, despite modest circumstances, we had no trouble buying the meat that supported those middle class jobs. In the current economy there are many legal American workers who would love an opportunity like that.
“And don’t forget all the yards in Southern California that will be overgrown in a week, after all those illegal gardeners have been deported.”
Alternatively people can mow their own lawns or, as in the not-so-distant past, teenagers could make money by mowing lawns.
“Are we willing to pay double or triple the price for our January strawberries or our chicken tenders or our steaks?”
Around here strawberries are best in the early and late summer. If you really want them in January, why not import them from Mexico? It’s barely further from the east coast than California.
As for your preposterous claim of “double or triple the price for … chicken tenders or our steaks”, it has no foundation in reality. See my above comment on the affordability of meat before we had enormous numbers of illegal aliens doing the work.
I believe that people who do really shirty, really necessary jobs – like cleaning sewers or standing for hours hacking the guts out of dead chicken or stooping in fields in the blazing sun to pick veggies should be paid a decent wage, have health care, and not be treated like disposable slaves. However, in our current society, this is not the case. And, if it were, it is unrealistic to believe that the cost of our food would not increase. Which might not be a Bad Thing.
It is interesting to note that the USDA has reported that the percent of disposable income spent on food eaten at home in the US has declined from about 20% in 1929 to just over 5% in 2009. Although many factors have led to the decline in the percentage of income spent for food (and a decrease in the amount of calories consumed certainly does not seem to be one of them), I think we can argue that holding down labor costs is one of them.
So, if I have disposable income of $1000 per week and spend 5% of that on food eaten at home, that’s $50. Take that percent back up to 10% ($100) and my food costs have doubled. We won’t even consider going back up to 20%.
“it is unrealistic to believe that the cost of our food would not increase”
Of course it would, but you didn’t merely say it would increase, you said it would double or triple. Judging by history (say the 1960’s or 1970’s) that claim is a wild exaggeration. Numbers matter.
“the USDA has reported that the percent of disposable income spent on food eaten at home in the US has declined from about 20% in 1929 to just over 5% in 2009”
And the USDA also notes that the percentage of the workforce engaged in agriculture has declined from 21.5% in 1930 to 1.9% in 2000. In other words the great decrease in agricultural prices as a percentage of income has come about by increasing the productivity of agricultural labor (output per hour) rather than by reducing the wages.
We’re eating cheap food and getting our grass cut and our kids cared for at a pittance, because we all, as a society, are exploiting a group of poverty-stricken, largely indigenous peasants who face a choice of living in squalor and desperation in their oppressive regimes, or escaping to work in a situation that is only marginally less oppressive and at least gives them some small hope of escape. Most of them work like dogs, but we are demonizing them because they try to grasp some ray of hope.
What do you mean “we”? We cut our own grass and we take of our own kids, and I’m old enough to know, contrary to your wild claims, that produce and meat were regular fare, not unaffordable luxuries, to families of modest income, before the mass migrations of recent decades. (And btw, my children do hard agricultural manual labor in the hot sun to earn money for their educations, as used to be common all over the country.) I think Alex covers the rest of your popular “economic urban legend” claims nicely.
“We” do not demonize immigrants, and are perfectly well aware of the global economic forces (like American Big Ag) that have driven migration. That in no way changes the fact that this mass, rapid migration is causing serious problems for a lot of people in this country.
So get off your high horse. If you think you’re entitled to, and hire, cheap landscapers and nannies then examine your own damned conscience and spare us the cheap moral posturing. I’m really getting tired of being accused of hypocrisy about things I’ve never done by people who do do those things, and who themselves have probably never done a lick of manual labor in their lives or worked their tails off in a minimum wage job.
Go deeper. WHY do people emmigrate? What causes people to leave their family, friends, homes? Talk to those who come north. One young couple risked crossing the Arizona desert with a 2 year-old, because in their words “If we stay here, we starve.”
Interesting that no one mentions that it is our agricultural subsidies (given in the billions to big agri-business, NOT small farms) that allow the U.S. to ship/dump produce in Mexico, Central and South American countries putting their farmers out of business. Unable to farm, they come north looking for work. In Juarez, MX I see crates of US produce at the market sold below cost.
The immigration pull north, in part, begins with our own food subsidy policy in the U.S. Those same subsidies also lower the cost of corn sweeteners, sodas, etc. creating the obesity and diabetes epidemics, raising health care costs. Who benefits? Go deeper.
Wal-Mart stops fresh seafood sales in Florida, denies BP oil spill connection
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/wal-mart-stops-fresh-seafood-sales-in-florida-828782.html
I’m just F’ing shocked that Wally World would miss an opportunity to sell tainted fish’s… gads, what next, they stop selling soda and high-energy shit …. I can’t go on, I’m getting sick ….
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LEGISLATURE 2010 » The Post in Tallahassee
Cities, drivers’ attorneys make new strategies for red-light cameras Thursday, July 15 | Comments 36
Red-light camera bill on its way to governor; opponents vow to continue fight in court Thursday, July 15 | Comments 24
AAA asks Crist to veto red-light camera bill, angering supporters Thursday, July 15 | Comments 53
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Democrat Sink’s careful reactions to Arizona law, federal suit and today’s injunction
Republican guv hopefuls Scott, McCollum criticize injunction blocking Arizona immigration law
Meek won’t say if he’d support Dem primary rival Greene in general election for Senate seat
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FALLEN HEROES
More than 200 men and women with ties to Florida have given their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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By DARA KAM
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Updated: 8:57 p.m. Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Posted: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 28, 2010
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DESTIN — Wal-Mart is discontinuing the sale of fresh seafood in its Florida superstores, a Florida agriculture official told a panel looking into the economic impact of BP’s massive oil spill on the state’s economy.
The discount store giant is dropping fresh seafood products because of a decline in demand, Department of Agriculture marketing director Nelson Mongiovi told the state’s Oil Spill Economic Recovery Task Force on Wednesday.
The decision was not related to the oil spill, but because the company did not did not see enough business in fresh seafood, Joaquin Gonzalez, Wal-Mart vice president for Florida told The St. Petersburg Times Tuesday. Wal-Mart, Florida’s third largest grocery chain, still sells frozen seafood, he said.
But Bob Jones, executive director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association, acknowledged that higher prices for Gulf seafood and a drop in demand for the products since the massive oil leak began three months ago could explain Wal-Mart’s decision.
And the chain’s action, for whatever reason, doesn’t bode well for the $1 billion-a-year seafood industry in Florida, which mostly supplied the chain with snapper and grouper.
==> “It does sound bad for us to say that Wal-Mart stopped the fresh seafood even though they didn’t explicitly say Florida seafood,” Jones said. “People are afraid to eat any kind of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico because of the publicity that there’s millions of barrels of oil and thousands of gallons of (detergents) and questions about what’s the water like, because of the perception that the waters and the fish are bad. That’s just the way it is.”
oopps, crappy post there, maybe the worst I’ve ever been involved in…. how the F did that happen??? I’m really sorry; if I could go back and clean my mess up I would, but no, that isn’t an option. Gads!
The illegal industry of Mexican workers and Mexican drugs is promoted by the American government for the profit of the MEXICAN OLIGARCHY.
We welcome the human rights abusers and OLIGARCHS to address the CONGRESS of the UNITED STATES, representatives of the AMERICAN PEOPLE for the purpose of keeping MEXICAN DRUG TRAFFICKING MONEY of AMERICAN and EUROPEAN BANKS flowing here
Investment in American research and development of food harvesting MECHANIZATION is retarded by American corporatist investment in the business of importing Mexican poverty, abusing labor and causing 20 million people to live in fear unprotected by law, and lowering American living standards.
LAKE ARTHUR, N.M. — A handful of farm laborers are busy at work on a warm day in mid-November, helping harvest 140 acres of Cecil Conklin’s red chili crop. But at this southeastern New Mexico farm, the workers aren’t stooped over hand-picking the peppers — they’re driving Conklin’s mechanical chili harvester as it plows through row after row of chili plants, methodically pulling off the peppers.
“The machine harvests about seven acres a day,” said Conklin, one of the first farmers in New Mexico to make the switch to mechanical harvesting more than a decade ago. “That’s about the same acreage that it took 40-50 workers to pick each day before we had the machine.”
Mechanization “was forced on us — we couldn’t find the labor. Now, chili definitely has to be mechanically harvested in order for farmers to make money,” he said.
Increased market pressure from foreign chili imports, declining prices and lack of labor have made it tough for chili farmers to thrive. Using machines to harvest the state’s signature crop is the only way the $400 million chili industry can stay competitive, said Terry Crawford, professor of agriculture business and economics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
“Time is critical. New Mexico has no more than five years to get competitive. People in the industry need to see the light at the end of the tunnel to stick with it and not say, ‘Gee, I’ll start growing something else,”‘ Crawford said. “We have to become more efficient and cut labor costs significantly.”
In New Mexico, more than 80 percent of the red chili crop is mechanically harvested, mainly in the southeastern part of the state. The harvest method also is being used increasingly by red chili growers in west Texas and southeast Arizona.
LeeAnne said: “The illegal industry of Mexican workers and Mexican drugs is promoted by the American government for the profit of the MEXICAN OLIGARCHY.”
Let me correct that:
The illegal industry of Mexican workers and Mexican drugs is promoted by the American government for the profit of the U.S. OLIGARCHY, which works hand-in-glove with the Mexican oligarchy.
DownSouth, that’s what I meant.
You are such a great writer and I appreciate your correction.
My comment included “We welcome the human rights abusers and OLIGARCHS to address the CONGRESS of the UNITED STATES, representatives of the AMERICAN PEOPLE for the purpose of keeping MEXICAN DRUG TRAFFICKING MONEY of AMERICAN and EUROPEAN BANKS flowing …”
But that could be read as sarcastic -at least, not clear. I’m working on my writing.
Thanks. See ya later on down the page. I think wisely, I decided yesterday not to comment on this stuff. The arguments are all over the place. And I don’t have the stamina frankly.
Mechanized chili harvesting takes hold in New Mexico
Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Dec 25, 2007 by Melanie Dabovich Associated Press Bnet
So what’s new? Here’s David Montejano writing about the situation in Texas in the 1920 to 1940 era:
There was no question among Anglo settlers in South Texas that a major asset of the region consisted of its cheap labor pool. Agribusinessmen, their chambers of commerce, and local county newspapers constantly emphasized this great advantage of the area. One land prospectus in the Winter Garden region, for example, pushed the “sell” in a succinct statement: “The cheapest farm labor in the United States is to be had in this section.” Newspapers like the Galveston News and the Corpus Christi Caller likewise invited prospective agribusinessmen and industrialists to invest in South Texas, citing the presence of ample cheap labor. So cheap was Mexican labor, in fact, that the introduction of mechanization on commercial farms was effectively retarded by the higher costs and less profitable returns from machines.
–David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986
Exactly the problem. Going on 200 years, the US has not progressed in this area.
Safely at the end of the thread of a free-for-all
From a commenter on the Carlos Slim article:
* Heartland Patriot wrote:
To all of you liberal elitists who are SO educated…YOU are the ones making Hispanic or Mexican into a race, for the purposes of race baiting over the Arizona and national immigration debates…IF we were to use nationality as more important, then American folks of Hispanic origins would want the MEXICAN CITIZENS to go back to their own country, or HONDURANS to Honduras, etc. YOU are the ones who want your cake and eat it too…Slim is a Mexican (national), though Lebanese descent, BUT all the ILLEGAL ALIENS are HISPANICS and thus the American Hispanics are supposed to have solidarity with them…YOU LIBERALS are nothing more than two-faced, Marx-loving crooks of the lowest sort. I’m proud to be an American, my family never owned any slaves, and I grew up near the border with Hispanic folks who were PROUD to be Americans…not a bunch of pinche mojados.
LeeAnne,
That is absolutely one of the most benighted comments I think I have ever read.
Quoting David Montejano again, speaking of the 1920-1940 era in Texas:
A more significant sign of modernity than physical trappings was the social arrangements of the farm order. These arrangements owed much to the business standards and market practices that the newcomers introduced. The innovations are familiar ones in the story of development. In contrast to the permanent workers, paternalistic service, and complacent patriarchal attitudes of before, the modern society was characterized by wage laborers, impersonal contracts, and a rational market orientation. Workers themselves were assessed in terms of market costs; they were measurable items of production known as the “labor market.” Relations between farmers and laborers, in short, were thoroughly commercialized.
But the most striking aspect about the new social arrangements was its obvious racial character. The modern order framed Mexican-Anglo relations in stark “Jim Crow” segregation. Separate quarters for Mexican and Anglo were to be found in the farm towns. Specific rules defined the proper place of Mexicans and regulated interracial contact. The separation was so complete and seemingly absolute that several observers have described the farm society as “caste-line.” The notion of caste, borrowed from a very different social context, applies poorly to Jim Crow segregation in the United States; it suggests, nonetheless, the degree to which race consciousness and privileges permeated social life in the farm order.
[….]
Such beliefs and sentiments concerning Mexican inferiority antedated the construction of the farm order, but in this modern context they acquired new importance. Texan history and folklore, previous experience with other races, biological and medical theories, Anglo-Saxon nationalism—-all furnished important themes for the farm settlers in their dealings with Mexicans. Whether indigenous or imported in content, the culture of race-thinking made the segregated world a reasonable and natural order.
–David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986
For more on how those of Mexican descent were treated in Texas during Jim Crow, there’s this outstanding PBS video:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/class/player/
DownSouth, ‘benighted’ -I looked it up. From the dark indeed -no pun intended?
The comment expresses the anger of a man who is clearly insulted by the threat to his identity being used for political convenience and exploitation.
He objects to being lumped into one monolithic group of so-called Hispanics when there are dozens of Spanish-speaking nationalities in this country, many of whom stick with their own, prefer their own, and look down on others.
I’ve had some experience with the prejudice between Spanish-speaking groups. They have hierarchies and preferences, and prefer their own in the same intuitive way every other living species does instinctively.
Political correctness is just another crime in search of an ideology, a movement against white middle class European-Americans. Buchanan is correct about that.
LeeAnne,
I don’t get the sense that Heartland Patriot is Hispanic. What he says is “I grew up near the border with Hispanic folks.”
And I don’t have a whole lot more use for “liberal elitists” than Heartland Patriot does. I tend to agree with Robert Hughes when he wrote:
Hence, in the universities, what matters is the politics of culture, not the politics of the distribution of wealth and of real events in the social sphere, like poverty, drug addiction and the rise of crime. The academic left is much more interested in race and gender than in class. And it is very much more interested in theorizing about gender and race than actually reporting on them. This enables its savants to feel they are on the cutting edge of social change, without doing legwork outside of academe; the “traditional left” [that’s where I put myself] has been left far behind, stuck with all that unglamorous and twice-told stuff about the workers.
–Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint
So while I believe Heartland Patriot might have a legitimate argument to make, he is so incompetent and ignorant as to make the claim that “liberal elitists…are the ones making Hispanic or Mexican into a race.” That’s a gap in the truth you could drive an 18-wheeler through, which of course I did. The liberal elitists have certainly picked up the race ball and ran with it, but they didn’t create it.
Then there’s the problem of where Heartland Patriot places blame. Are the illegal workers the ones to blame, or the people who employ them? Who is responsible for the implementation of neoliberalism in Mexico that has left so many destitute? Who benefited from neoliberalism? Who has the political power? The truth is that the immigrant workers are little more than pawns caught up in this huge international drama where American oligarchs write the script, and yet Heartland Pariot places all the blame on the migrant workers.
And then of course there’s Heartland Patriot’s parting shot, the one about “pinche mojados.” That translates to “fucking wetbacks.” Words like “wetback,” “greaser” and “spick” carry the same connotation for Hispanics that “nigger” does for blacks. So I have a word for people like Heartland Patriot, which I can use with no compunction whatsoever, and that word is RACIST.
My reading on the run is terrible. You are so right again. Not only did I read it wrong the first time. I started a comment to you about that correction, and now see that even after concentrating on it a third time I read things into it that just are not there.
It amazes me and your patience is remarkable
I know I should be embarrassed … I’m just grateful for your courtesy.
DownSouth, this is for you But maybe I’m crazy
Referring to Americans as RACIST against BROWN people when they object to US government-supported illegal trafficking in Mexican labor and drugs is PROPAGANDA.
It is one of the many ways of propaganda; just like advertising, repetition works. People with ideologies and intellectual pretensions can get careless and slip into repeating propaganda unwittingly to support their arguments.
You are forgiven. If the shoe fits wear it.
Something just doesn’t sit right about Buchanan’s argument regarding bias in academia. If blacks and hispanics are being admitted to elite universities in “numbers approaching their share of the population,” and whites are under represented, then is he suggesting that Asian and Pacific Americans are overrepresented?
Buchanan, conviniently glosses over the fact that there is no underrepresentation of whites, by inventing a category of “white christian and ethnic Catholics.” Are latin american students, most often baptized, first communialized and confirmed, not ethnic catholics? Are “white Christians”, and does this mean practicing Christians the only true white people.
The truth is there is no underrepresentation of white people in elite academia, and in order to invent such a situation Buchanan has gone so far as to invent a sub-category of white people In a manner that is almost comical by how much it hews to the characterizations of Buchanan as sympathizer to the notions of a “master race”; he’s gone so far down the path of intellectual dishonesty in trying to prove his point that he’s pointed out this master race for us: White Christians and ethnic Catholics.
If he’s so worried about the lack of access that white christians have to the quality educations of elite institutions, perhaps he’d do better by pushing for schools like Bob Jones university to improve their academic standards by teach topics such as evolution.
Also a note to other commenters, please don’t further euphamize Buchanan’s statements by replacing “white christian and ethnic catholic” with Blue collar whites. That is not what Pat means at all.
But Buchanan does specifically single out blue-collar whites:
There is yet another form of bigotry prevalent among our academic elite that is a throwback to the snobbery of the WASPs of yesterday. While Ivy League recruiters prefer working-class to middle-class black kids with the same test scores, the reverse is true with white kids.
White kids from poor families who score as well as white kids from wealthy families — think George W. Bush — not only get no break, they seem to be the most undesirable and unwanted of all students.
Though elite schools give points to applicants for extracurricular activities, especially for leadership roles and honors, writes Nieli, if you played a lead role in Future Farmers of America, the 4-H Clubs or junior ROTC, leave it off your resume or you may just be blackballed. “Excelling in these activities is ‘associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds on admissions.’”
Writes Nieli, there seems an unwritten admissions rule at America’s elite schools: “Poor Whites Need Not Apply.”
For admissions officers at our top private and public schools, diversity is “a code word” for particular prejudices.
For these schools are not interested in a diversity that would include “born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lower- and middle-class Catholics, working class ‘white ethnics,’ social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children or older students just starting into college and raising children.”
“Students in these categories,” writes Nieli, “are often very rare at the most competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League.”
“Lower-class whites prove to be all-around losers” at the elite schools. They are rarely accepted. Lower-class Hispanics and blacks are eight to 10 times more likely to get in with the same scores.
I think it’s rather naive to believe that upper-class liberals (of any color) are any less disdainful of blue-collar whites than upper class conservatives are.
You are right, he does identify lower class whites specifically, I should’ve read more carefully.
It is curious to note that his argument recognizes that lower class blacks and hispanics enter elite academia at higher rates than lower class whites. Does this mean that blacks and hispanics get the benefit of racial affirmative action and economic affirmative action, or does it mean that most blacks and hispanics come from lower economic strata and most whites don’t? If Buchanan is arguing that race based affirmative action should be ended in favor of economic based affirmative action, then I agree, but I think Pat will be chagrined to find that the racial make up of incoming classes will probably be similar to today’s.
I think his argument is interesting in that he reveals what he really is. Probably not a racist in the strictest sense of the word, but most definitely a race baiter. He couches the economic inequity he’s discovered in racial terms and rather than clarify the issue he adds an emotional dimension that allows him to invent a villain. Middle class and working class whites are getting railroaded by the current structure, but PB would like you to believe its the elites and the minorities and their big government redistributionist structure. When in all likelyhood the only solution for the middle class is more big government action.
As to your last statement, lets amend: it’s rather naive to believe that upper-class is not disdainful of the lower class (leave race, color, white, out of it).
c said: “If Buchanan is arguing that race based affirmative action should be ended in favor of economic based affirmative action, then I agree…”
Agreed.
c said: “As to your last statement, lets amend: it’s rather naive to believe that upper-class is not disdainful of the lower class (leave race, color, white, out of it).”
Agreed.
c said: “Middle class and working class whites are getting railroaded by the current structure, but PB would like you to believe its the elites and the minorities and their big government redistributionist structure. When in all likelyhood the only solution for the middle class is more big government action.”
Here’s what Martin Luther King had to say on the subject:
American industry organized misery into sweatshops and proclaimed the right of capital to act without restraints and without conscience.
[….]
Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have an education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.
[….]
Negroes, given the vote, will vote liberal and labor because they need the same liberal legislation labor needs.
[….]
I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinction.
This will be the day when we shall bring into full realization the American dream—-a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of human personality—-this is the dream.
–Martin Luther King, Jr., Address before the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the American Federation of Labor, Bal Harbour, Florida, December 11, 1961
You don’t think Buchanan shares the dream?
i don’t
Under the US constitution it is the obligation of the justice system to be clear about the law and to enforce it without prejudice. The government currently in place in the US is CRIMINAL.
Democracy provides a framework for constant adjudication of differences with an obligation to satisfy disputes in the law.
This government as currently constituted has no RIGHT to exist.
Americans no longer have any rights, not since the Bush coup d’etat of 2000.
I agree w/some posters. Pat Buchanan is a dbag, totally worthless as is Peggy Noonan. Nothing to do w/stepping outside of one’s comfort zone, it’s that there’s only so much time in the day and PB has never had anything of value to say.
Ed Harrison states,
….”Undocumented workers from Mexico ”…
This terminology is propoganda,the false presentation of reality.Its practically impossible to live in the US without some documentation.In the case of illegal immigrants this documentation is usually forged or fraudulent.
President Obama has determined that Federal law will not be enforced against illegal immigrants.He therefore supports a prejudice in favour of people who break US law which is based on the fact they are foreigners.
His justice department’s policy is to prosecute and deport only those illegals who commit serious crimes in the US.
So based on your country of origin you get a free pass on all crimes ,illegal entry,document fraud ,non payment of taxes etc until you commit a serious crime.
No one here has adressed this point .What gives the justice department the right to select which laws it will not enforce?.
its time we acknowledged we have an ‘illegal’ government.
Thank you! The problem is not immigration but ILLEGAL immigration!
I am a legal US citizen but I have relatives in South America (not Venezuela). A few of my family who are here fought for years for permission to come, and struggled with the law for permission to stay.
To this day my South American relatives are banned from coming here, even on a 90 day tourist visa. If there were not so many law breakers, my family would have received travel visas years ago! It pains us to no end that those with no respect for the law are rewarded while those who obey the law are punished. Those who try to enforce the law are called “racist”.
What about us 1st/2nd generation immigrants? My “Latino” relatives can’t see my new home because so many other “Latinos” come illegally. Am I “racist” for supporting border enforcement?