Why Import Workers Now?
At last week's Job Summit, there was talk of a second stimulus package, of tax credits for small businesses that hire new workers, of an Infrastructure Bank to select national priority pubic works projects like the Hoover Dam and TVA of yesteryear.
But no one, it seems, advanced the one obvious idea that would have the most immediate and dramatic impact—a moratorium on all immigration into the United States.
Unemployment is at 10 percent, near the postwar high of 1983. Fifteen million Americans are out of work. Ten million more have given up looking or are working fewer hours than they would like.
We have been losing jobs every month for two years.
Why, then, are we still bringing immigrants into the United States at a rate of 125,000 a month to take jobs from fellow Americans and compete with our unemployed for the jobs that open up?
In the last year, 1.5 million new immigrants have come to take up residence and been issued work permits. Probably twice as many jobs have been taken by these folks as the 650,000 the Obamaites claim were saved or created by their $787 billion stimulus package. How do Democrats justify this?
How can they justify bringing in another 1.5 immigrants in 2010 and another 1.5 million in 2011, when 25 million Americans they are supposed to represent are unemployed or underemployed?
If Obama voters feel disillusioned do they not have valid reason?
As for illegal aliens, it is estimated that 8 million still hold jobs in the United States. Endlessly we are told that these hardworking folks are just doing jobs that Americans refuse to do.
But Middle American News has taken a look at the Census Bureau data. In almost all the occupations to which unskilled and semi-skilled illegal aliens gravitate, native-born Americans hold most of the jobs.
U.S. citizens account for well over half of all housekeepers, maids, taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the U.S., almost two-thirds of all the butchers, meat processors and ground maintenance and construction workers, and three-fourths of all porters, bellhops and janitors.
We are told that many if not most of these are "dead-end jobs" Americans do not want or will not take. Yet, how can that be true when American citizens are already doing most of these jobs?
As related here in October, USA Today found that, invariably, when U.S. authorities raid a plant site where hundreds of illegals are working, and send them packing, hundreds of Americans show up and apply for the jobs. Is this not as it should be, if we are looking out for our own people first? And isn't that what a family does, or should do?
Why, then, is the Obama administration cutting back on jobsite raids and inspections? Why is the administration talking of moving in 2010 to legalize the status of the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the United States?
Is putting illegal aliens on the path to citizenship a higher priority for this Obama crowd than opening up jobs for American workers?
Are the K Street lobbyists whose corporate bosses cannot get enough low-wage labor that powerful? Are the Hispanic lobbies like La Raza and MALDEF, with their charges of "nativist" and "xenophobe," so intimidating the Democratic Party cannot stand up to them?
Two weeks ago, the Washington Post, focusing on unemployment among young African-American males, wrote, "Joblessness for 16- to 24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions—34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population."
More than one-third of all young black males are unemployed.
Which raises a question. Where is the Black Caucus?
Here are folks who favor preferential treatment for their black constituents over white Americans—i.e., affirmative action. But they go mute when it comes to immigrants coming and taking jobs and illegal aliens holding down 8 million of those jobs that could be going to the unemployed in their own community.
Nor is it only working-class Americans who are being shouldered aside by the annual flood tide of immigrants.
As Jerry Woodruff, editor of Middle American News, writes: "Immigrants are taking good, high-paying jobs from highly skilled Americans. The Census Bureau found that 34 percent of all software engineers . . . are immigrants. Yet, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers reports that 48,000 U.S. software engineers are unemployed."
If Obama wants to take executive action to assist Americans out looking for work, he could take two strong and effective steps.
First, call on Congress to vote a moratorium on immigration until the unemployment rate falls below 6 percent. Second, instruct Homeland Security and the Justice Department to renew the raids and enforce the law against employers who are taking jobs from Americans by illegally hiring undocumented aliens.
If Obama did that, suddenly folks would sit up and say, as they did after Ronald Reagan busted the air controllers, "This man is serious."
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Entries(RSS)
I dont understand why you would think I or anyone else have gotten their 'nickers in a knot', Mr Jacobi. This discussion has been quite interesting to me so far.
Your basic point is understood, in that slavery brought in an intrusive population which would not have been here otherwise. My idea was to look a little deeper, to see why so many people tend to make associations with historical slavery when discussing just about any important topic, which is another valid point, but perhaps better discussed elsewhere since this thread has moved on.
50. It is true that most slaves came in European ships. However, it was a major economic activity for New Englanders and the foundation of a number of great fortunes. Even after the international slave trade was made illegal for Americans in 1808, Yankees continued to engage in trading slaves to Cuba and Brazil right up the 1860s. (Americans are hardly aware that only 5 per cent of all slave importations came to North America---most went to the Carribean and South America. Only in the U.S. South was the black population so well cared for that it grew by natural increase.)
@26, 41, 48:
Thanks for the reading suggestions. Robert, I'm enjoying Servile State, thanks to your link.
Dr. Wilson @27, 35:
If I understand you correctly, then, I have no "quarrel" with Jim Crow, either, since that would never have existed without the war and reconstruction.
I bring this up because, as I acknowledged to you in a previous post, while there was a calm before the storm, during which the first blacks to enter my neighborhood were largely peaceable, everything changed after the notorious string of confrontations in the South, in particular in Birmingham, 1963. Where once I could walk to school and not be confronted by anything worse than the occasional baleful stare, this now became a gauntlet, and has remained so unto this day. Here's the incident that is seared in my memory.
On a summer day in 1963, I was walking along Madison Street, toward a friend's house. This busy shopping street, where my mother once wheeled me in my stroller, and on whose broad sidewalks I took some of my first steps, still retained something of the feeling of the welcoming neighborhood promenade it once was, even though by now it was more than half black. I saw ahead a group of black boys of my age, 14, and with them a young man I recognized as one who was reputed to be a member of the Vice Lords street gang. I could see something brewing in the younger ones' faces, but I felt tolerably safe because of the presence of the gangster, with whom I'd traded banter a few times and who seemed to be of the opinion that I was brave enough to deserve some respect, or amusingly cocky, or at least all right for a honkey; and who, I expected, would want to avoid attention so that his more profitable activities could proceed.
When I drew abreast, they wouldn't let me pass and began demanding money. Placing faith in a friend in high places, I appealed to the Vice Lord (yes, I was, at that moment, of insufficient faith in Our Lord): "Hey, tell them who I am!", I said, but now there was little trace of recognition on his face. He was caught in a dilemma between the two appeals: whether to be seen as soft and a race traitor by denying theirs for vengeance; or, by denying mine, to lose an opportunity to display control of the street. There my fate hung, while the pack worked itself up; and then followed this dialogue, which I am not likely to forget: "The f-ck you doin' here, honkey?" "The f-ck it look like - I live here!" "You need yo dogs, don't you whitey?" "What you gonna do now, honkey? Got no dogs, now!" That was what made up his mind; he walked on, and blows commenced to fall.
As I said, I had no intention of bringing up this subject when I began commenting on this thread; this post, while a digression, is no tactic, diversionary or otherwise. Events of 46 years ago conspired to put me briefly in the crosshairs of history; otherwise the story is banal and telling it here importunes a reader's time. But I feel I must ask: Was there no solution other than Jim Crow to the post-war chaos? Was a violent black reaction to it inevitable, or could ameliorating steps have been taken earlier, to avoid the explosion? Do you see justice, poetic or otherwise, in this affliction being visited on the North?
I've no doubt that my knowledge of what is known as Jim Crow, and of the events of the so-called Civil Rights period, is far from complete. Whatever you care to write in response, now or in future articles, will undoubtedly enhance my understanding of these events which have borne so heavily on my and my family's lives.
Dr. Wilson @27, 35:
If I understand you correctly, then, I have no "quarrel" with Jim Crow, either, since that would never have existed without the war and reconstruction.
I bring this up because, as I acknowledged to you in a previous post, while there was a calm before the storm, during which the first blacks to enter my neighborhood were largely peaceable, everything changed after the notorious string of confrontations in the South, in particular in Birmingham, 1963. Where once I could walk to school and not be confronted by anything worse than the occasional baleful stare, this now became a gauntlet, and has remained so unto this day. Here's the incident that is seared in my memory.
On a summer day in 1963, I was walking along Madison Street, toward a friend's house. This busy shopping street, where my mother once wheeled me in my stroller, and on whose broad sidewalks I took some of my first steps, still retained something of the feeling of the welcoming neighborhood promenade it once was, even though by now it was more than half black. I saw ahead a group of black boys of my age, 14, and with them a young man I recognized as one who was reputed to be a member of the Vice Lords street gang. I could see something brewing in the younger ones' faces, but I felt tolerably safe because of the presence of the gangster, with whom I'd traded banter a few times and who seemed to be of the opinion that I was brave enough to deserve some respect, or amusingly cocky, or at least all right for a honkey; and who, I expected, would want to avoid attention so that his more profitable activities could proceed.
When I drew abreast, they wouldn't let me pass and began demanding money. Placing faith in a friend in high places, I appealed to the Vice Lord (yes, I was, at that moment, of insufficient faith in Our Lord): "Hey, tell them who I am!", I said, but now there was little trace of recognition on his face. He was caught in a dilemma between the two appeals: whether to be seen as soft and a race traitor by denying theirs for vengeance; or, by denying mine, to lose an opportunity to display control of the street. There my fate hung, while the pack worked itself up; and then followed this dialogue, which I am not likely to forget: "The f**k you doin' here, honkey?" "The f**k it look like - I live here!" "You need yo dogs, don't you whitey?" "What you gonna do now, honkey? Got no dogs, now!" That was what made up his mind; he walked on, and blows commenced to fall.
As I said, I had no intention of bringing up this subject when I began commenting on this thread; this post, while a digression, is no tactic, diversionary or otherwise. Events of 46 years ago conspired to put me briefly in the crosshairs of history; otherwise, telling this story here merely importunes a reader's time. But I feel I must ask: Was there no solution other than Jim Crow to the post-war chaos? Was a violent black reaction to it inevitable, or could ameliorating steps have been taken earlier, to avoid the explosion? Do you see justice, poetic or otherwise, in this affliction being visited on the North?
I've no doubt that my knowledge of what is known as Jim Crow, and of the events of the so-called Civil Rights period, is far from complete. Whatever you care to write in response, now or in future articles, will undoubtedly enhance my understanding of these events which have borne so heavily on my and my family's lives.
Mr. J. I can only say that it was the Northern cities, not the South, that bred the monster of today. What happened in the South in the 1950s and 60s was from outside.
Dr. Wilson
Thanks for reading the post. I'll put your answer in the old cogitator and let it percolate awhile.