Why Import Workers Now?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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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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1 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 8 December 2009:
A great piece by Mr. Buchanan. The left’s refusal to do anything about immigration, despite the fact that labor economists like George Borjas have documented immigration’s corrosive effect on American wages, only demonstrates that the new neoliberal left cares more about globalization and diversity than it does about the employment prospects of Americans. (Unfortunately, some of the unions are in on it too. A union rep. once told me that they can get more dues from 150 Mexican immigrants making $5 an hour than they can from 20 Americans making $30 an hour.)
2 Comment by Steve Berg on 8 December 2009:
The late Irwin Feerst tried to get the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to come to its senses and look out for the jobs and welfare of American engineers. He ran for president of that organization, and lost. I joined just so that I could vote for him. They would rather be cosmopolitan than patriotic. And the result of that has been a steady erosion of jobs for Americans. It is going to be extremely difficult to reignite the domestic economy. And if it stays in the doldrums, that is going to severely cut the amount of Asian exports sold here, causing severe repercussions in their industries. All is not lost, however, as the Free Market, that self correcting perpetual motion machine, will take care of all of these problems automatically. Harumpf!
3 Comment by Jon I on 8 December 2009:
Good article Mr. Buchanan. I would also like to thank Mr. Roberts for saying some of the unions, and not “the unions” are encouraging our traitorous immigration policy. Being the son of a union steamfitter, I become very agitated around “conservatives” who make a pastime out of denigrating working people and labeling all union members by their worst examples, such as the UAW and the SEIU.
Personally, I think there will eventually be a split in the AFL-CIO ranks. Of the work friends that my father has had over the years, not one of them fits the mold as a multicultural globalist, and that goes for the younger tradesmen also.
4 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 8 December 2009:
Jon,
I agree with what you say. The “conservative” criticism and caricatures of union members are about as politically astute as the GOP’s unwavering support of free trade.
All the union members I know are about as anti-globalist as one can be, but they complain about the union leadership becoming more globalist and soft on immigration. If only the unions would come out in full force against immigration…they could be a formidable ally.
5 Comment by John Seiler on 8 December 2009:
Better actions to take:
1. End the Fed, which produced the inflationary Boom/Bust that caused the Bush Depression. The Boom in housing was built by illegals coming up here to construct all those $1 million homes now worth $200,000.
2. End the Bush wars. Stiglitz now calculates Bush’s Iraq War alone has cost us $7 trillion. That’s $7,000,000,000,000.00. The Afghan War, when it’s over, could cost as much. Do we need any other explanation of why we’re mired in the Bush Depression? Bush “paid” for the war with inflation (see No. 1, above), borrowing, and lies.
3. End all government aid to immigrants, including schools. Their kids would be better off anyway not being brainwashed by the NEA.
4. Slash all taxes 25%, like Reagan did. And don’t put an end date on the tax cuts, like Bush did with his cuts. Which means in 2010 we’ll have the Bush Tax Increases. (Did Dumbya do *anything* right?)
6 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 9 December 2009:
It was the beloved Republican party that in the 1860s pioneered the importation of cheap foreign labour to keep down the wages of American workers. It is still doing the same thing
7 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 9 December 2009:
As the professor well knows, Honest Abe’s Republicans also imported foreign workers to fight Republican wars to subjugate the South.
8 Comment by Tom Piatak on 9 December 2009:
I do not see the relevance of the position of the Republican Party in the 1860s to the immigration issue today. Calvin Coolidge and the GOP were responsible for ending mass immigration in the 1920s, a process that was resumed by LBJ and the Democrats in 1965. Today, the leaders of both parties defend the status quo, but most of the opposition that does exist is among Republicans. The point of Buchanan’s column is that it makes zero sense to be importing foreign workers when so many Americans are unemployed, a point that is both important and incontestable.
9 Comment by Robert on 9 December 2009:
“I do not see the relevance of the position of the Republican Party in the 1860s to the immigration issue today.”
Tom,
The relevance is that it is hard to rub the spots off a Leopard. The historical position and purpose of the the republican party hasn’t changed alot except having become more adept at disguising itself under sheep’s skin instead of its historical preference of shepherd’s skin . Sure, there are a few republicans giving lip service to immigration but only after a revolt from the masses they pretend to serve abut could no longer smooze on the issue. Why on earth a man of your caliber would put any hope whatsoever in a gang of thieves posing as leaders of the republican party is beyond belief.
10 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 9 December 2009:
8. Tom, sorry I have offended you here and elsewhere. It is important that people break the too-frequent habit of trusting the Republican party, so its history must be constantly held up. I believe I am correct in stating that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a major advocate of immigration. That represents the Republican party far more than you, me, or Pat Buchanan can ever hope to do.
11 Comment by Tom Piatak on 9 December 2009:
Prof. Wilson,
I don’t see any place in this column where Pat is urging anyone to trust the GOP.
12 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 9 December 2009:
Right, the point is that there should be no reason for further immigration with unemployment officially at 10 percent but in actuality between 14-18 percent, depending whether discouraged workers are counted or laborers working part-time when they wish full-time work are inculded. But then the Democrats aren’t supporting further immigration for economic reasons but for electoral reasons. I am reminded of what Bertold Brecht suggested in the 50s that the East German communists should vote themselves a new population because the Germans at the time did not love their communist masters. By encouraging mass immigration, the Democrats are forming a new electorate. Call it the Brecht Approach. As for the Republicans, they seem to be controlled by avaricious lobbyists like Ed Gillespie, who advocates more mass immigration while earning high six figures sitting on his brains in his Alexandria, VA office.
I know Pat Buchanan has sworn off electoral politics, but it seems that with the large void the Republicans have in their political world, Pat might be helpful by running for the Republican nomination in 2012. Sure, Pat would never be nominated but how could he not inform the public of our dire circumstances when his debate opponents are the duplicitous Mitt Romney, the half-schooled Sarah Palin, and the dull as instant oatmeal candidates Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels.
13 Comment by Brock H. on 9 December 2009:
“It is important that people break the too-frequent habit of trusting the Republican party, so its history must be constantly held up.”
And God bless you for doing so, Dr. Wilson. For all of Pat’s boasting about the pre-Depression golden years of the GOP when they put America and its industry-based economy first, via protective tariffs, he engages in doubletalk when championing native citizen workers over immigrants today. Did his precious Lincoln-McKinley GOP not open the doors to waves of immigrants once during the War Against the South and again about three decades later for the ONE AND ONLY purpose of importing cheap labor? Sure, unemployment was probably as low as can be expected, but how much could native WASP citizens have possibly earned doing those jobs next to extremely poor and desperate Irish, German, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants of the 1860s, or Jewish and Southern/Eastern European immigrants of the 1890s-1920s? As always, Pat’s heart is in the right place but the wrong party.
Mr. Piatak, Pat makes his current CAREER out of urging conservatives to trust the GOP, just much more subtly and implicitly than, say, nine years ago. Yes, Silent Cal was a little more conscientious than Lincoln, Grant, and McKinley. Back then it was considered a no-brainer that all immigrant waves must, by definition of the word WAVE, end at some point, otherwise they are called FLOODS. Today it is the mission of our imperial elite rulers to destroy the American people once and for all by replacement via endless immigration. Yes, many Republicans champion closed borders and immigration moratoriums, more so than Democrats, a party beholden to the unabashedly anti-Western Marxist ideology. But how close do you really think those Republicans are to the McCain-Graham party establishment – the one and only body of thinkers and policy-makers who have any say in the matter? They are on the outside of the party, and McCain, Graham and Rove and company are on the inside.
14 Comment by Allen Wilson on 9 December 2009:
In order to understand the mess we’re in today, we must know the history behind it, including the history of the parties in power.
For example, people in Germany must not forget that there is within their political system today a party which used to be none other than the Communist party that ruled East Germany, though it has changed names several times since then.
Likewise, Dr Wilson’s reminders of the real history of the Republican party add much needed perspective to the discussions here, whether those discussion are strictly about the Republican party or not. I see no reason why anyone should object. Likewise with reminders of the real history of the Democrats.
15 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 11 December 2009:
The fact remains, as Mr. Piatak pointed out, that the GOP has the distinction of being the author of the longest lasting, most comprehensive crackdown on immigration in the 20th century. Which would still be in effect but for the Democrats. The restrictions of the 1924 Act lasted 40 years; that’s no attempt to rub spots off of any leopard, that’s the true face of a party that had the best interests of Americans at heart.
The only party I hear Buchanan urging us to trust in is the American people.
16 Comment by Tarkin on 12 December 2009:
“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?”
Because this is the grand design to take this country down and thus into the New Order of the AGes, and prop up Europe in our place. Mr. Buchanan of course knows this well.
17 Comment by Matt Weber on 13 December 2009:
Actually, it was the southern plantation owners who pioneered the importation of cheap labor. We’re still paying for that one today.
18 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 13 December 2009:
I had never thought of the slave influx in those terms before, but I will now. There were indentured servants and apprentices in the North in our earliest years, but in terms of providing the model for massive use of cheap labor, I don’t see how anything can compete with the slave economy.
I await with great interest the commentary of our Southern friends.
19 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 13 December 2009:
Make that “massive use of foreigners for cheap labor.”
20 Comment by Samuel Bass on 13 December 2009:
Slaves weren’t cheap. And their needs had to be provided for by the slaveowner. The factory owner was under no such obligation to his workers.
21 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 13 December 2009:
@8 Dr Piatak
There were immigration amnesties prior to Clinton. I remember distinctly the crowds at my local bulk mail facility. I can only imagine the scene multiplied across the South, the North too.
22 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 13 December 2009:
@20 Samuel Bass: “Slaves weren’t cheap.”
On the question of the costs of owning slaves I’ll defer to someone who has studied the economy of the Antebellum South, but, since I read the quoted sentence as referring to the purchase price, I’ll say that I think that this cost is the equivalent of a capital outlay, and thus should be averaged over the life of the slave.
The important part of this way of looking at the slaves, though, is that, if valid, it would seem considerably to alter the landscape of the immigration debate.
23 Comment by Allen Wilson on 13 December 2009:
As a Southerner, I have thought of looking into the issue of slavery from this angle before, with a comparison to both Ellis Island era and modern immigration. The problem is that I’m not qualified to speak on it.
Here’s all I can say on it, or at least it’s all I can think of for now: The importation of slavery was done mainly by New Englanders of course, and there were as many slaves in the North as there were in the South at one time, so Southern plantation owners were no more pioneers in this than New England slave traders. We must not make the mistake of thinking of slavery as peculiarly Southern, it just last longer down here and grew bigger over time. Also, I believe that most slaves were born here due to natural increase, not imported, so I’ not sure exactly how much the slave trade resembles wholesale immigration. The social circumstances and impact on society were entirely different as well. There may be valid similarities, but I’m not sure if the two situations are really analogous.
I’ll leave it others who are more qualified to make comparisons.
24 Comment by Allen Wilson on 13 December 2009:
It would also be interesting to compare the economic costs of slavery, in terms of providing for the slaves, with the economic costs of modern immigration in terms of welfare, taxpayer footed medical care, etc.
25 Comment by Allen Wilson on 13 December 2009:
I think what we are looking at here is like a comparison between the provision of free bread to residents of imperial Rome with the modern welfare state. There is a similarity, but the two are so different that it is problematic do draw an analogy.
26 Comment by Jeremiah Whitmoore on 13 December 2009:
For those seeking to learn more about the peculiar institution Eugene Genovese’s books: The World the Slaveholders Made and also Roll, Jordan, Roll, provide a first class look into the economics and society that was built around the peculiar institution.
27 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 14 December 2009:
#17, 18, et al. Here is a private circular passed among Yankee money men during the War to Prevent Southern Independence:
“Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and this I and my friends are in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led on by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war must be used as a means to control the volume of money.”
Almost all of the slaves were imported before there was anything such as the United States of America, so it is hardly an immigration question. Though importations ceased, the slave population proliferated mightily, a sign of good conditions.
It is a pretty well-established conclusion that the antebellum Southern slave population received back a greater proportion of their lifetime production than free labour at the time, and generally lived far better than the poor of Northern and European cities.
Southern tobacco, rice, and cotton, and New England slave trading provided the foundational capital for the American economy. Slavery was not a burden to Northern free labour—rather the contrary. Its products carried much of the Northern economy. The spokesmen for Northern labor understood this—they almost unanimously regarded Southern free trade planters as their allies and Yankee capitralists as their enemies. That is one of the reasons Lincoln had to control New York City with troops.
If “we are still paying for that one today,” I suggest your quarrel is not with the slaves or slaveowners but with the pwople who, for their own evil purposes, got the idea to turn a peaceful, productive peasant population into citizens.
28 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 14 December 2009:
Hey, great idea Dr. Wilson! Let’s re-establish slavery for the working classes so they can “receive back a greater proportion of their lifetime production.” If it was good for black people surely it would be no worse for white workers and peasants (a point made by some 19th century slavery apologists). Laborers are quite productive enough to care for themselves without the ministrations of plantation owners or industrialists if they get a fair cut of what they produce. The 1950s of blessed memory were blessed because the working class of the time made a living wage. You can’t make a living wage when the economy is sent to China and you have to compete with imported serf labor.
29 Comment by Rob on 14 December 2009:
While I do enjoy twisting the tails of both Dr. Fleming and Dr. Wilson a bit, I feel the need to flesh out a point made by Mr. Van Oosbree. Not that many Southerners in the 19th century wanted to enslave whites (though they did agree that life in the fields was better than life in the factory). Those that even kicked the idea around-Fitzhugh, Hammond and Ruffin come to mind-were in the minority and none of them were by any means a typical figure of the era-Ruffin, while having many virtues, was an ideologue and Hammond was monster.
30 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 14 December 2009:
#28 I was merely making some empirical observations about the 19th century. You can only enslave those who are fit for that condition. Such did not apply to American (and especially Southern) freemen in the 19th century and, let us hope, today. Rob is correct that “enslaving whites” was an eccentricy and only a response to outside attack, unimportant except for those who wanted to seize on it to intensify the hatred of Southerners that they had been fomenting for the previous several decades, and their followers and propagandists down to today. How easy to blame the long vanished class of Southern planters (who provided the most truly liberal and honourable leadership this Union ever had) for all the evils inflicted upon we the people by Yankee capitalists and politicians.
31 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 14 December 2009:
@23 Allen Wilson:
“Also, I believe that most slaves were born here due to natural increase, not imported, so I’ not sure exactly how much the slave trade resembles wholesale immigration.”
Yet today, we tend to blame that part of the accelerating de-Americanization of our country that is due to the “natural increase” among the foreign-born on the people who support the current open door regime. And I suspect, even if the door were slammed shut tomorrow, we’d (I include myself) continue to blame them, for as long as the problems associated with the unassimilated lingered.
32 Comment by Allen Wilson on 14 December 2009:
Mr Jacobi, that is true, but the slaves were indeed assimilated under slavery, which is another reason why the two situations are not analogous. Granted that the slaves had some kind of sub-culture of their own, but even it was Southern. Although some of the immigrant population assimilates today, most will not, because they dont want to and are openly encouraged not to.
In fact, modern multiculturalists sometimes attack planters precisely because they encouraged (they say ‘forced’) slaves to assimilate to the local culture. They call it ‘oppression’ and may even compare it to real cases of cultural oppression existing today, but of course they get it all wrong again. After all, much assimilation happens naturally over time, oppression or not.
The importation and practice of slavery in those days, though not good by any means and frought with so many terrible consequences, was not in any case a weapon of demographic war against the native population as immigration is today.
The situation was different, and the mindsets and motives of those involved, both planter and slave trader, were different and unique to their time and situation. They are not replicated in the modern elitist mindset. If we try to make too many comparisons and dwell on similarities, we may confuse ourselves and fail to understand either slavery then or immigration now.
Certainly it would be unwise to cite the similar effects of the slave trade as a reason to curtail immigration today.
33 Comment by Allen Wilson on 14 December 2009:
Regarding the last sentence above, I meant to say that it would be unwise if we were trying to make a public case against immigration.
34 Comment by Allen Wilson on 14 December 2009:
Also, the motives of those who encouraged the mass immigration of the Ellis Island era were not identical to those who encourage the mass immigration of the current era. I dont think they had the destruction of the native population in mind.
To all: Even though some of the similarities between the effects of slave importation and modern mass immigration are intriguing, I find it odd that some people here have hit on slavery in order to help explain the current mess or to deal out blame for it. This is quite ridiculous. It seems that slavery has sunk into the mindset of certain people to the point that they will find a way to associate any current issue with it. What is at the root of this?
I am not singling out ‘Yankees’ here. Have we all been so thoroughly indoctrinated that we tend to make associations like this without even thinking? This a serious question.
35 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 15 December 2009:
#34. How right you are, Mr. Wilson, The reversion of all discussions to irrelevant references to slavery, so commonplace and exhibited even here, amounts to nothing but a diversionary tactic of our real enemies.
36 Comment by MAP on 15 December 2009:
More relevant to the topic would be the brutal exploitation of ‘coolie’ labor following the imposition of the present system on the nation by Honest Abe and associates. They were very much discriminated against. I would be interested in learning how their treatment and standard of living compared with that of the slave.
37 Comment by Robert on 15 December 2009:
Our civilization has always reposed upon the institution of slavery except for brief periods such as the High Middle ages, and it appears we are headed back in that direction. It is an impossible subject to discuss because the prejudice is that the South instituted the practice, the North eliminated it, and Americans have lived happily ever after continuing to spread the relief world wide. Any fact mentioned to upset this fantasy is an unpatriotic imposter working for the devil and hatred between races and one world humanity. It is like suggesting the benefits of modesty to a nudist colony, or the consolations of humility to Mr. Dawkins.
38 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 15 December 2009:
It is worth reminding ourselves here of Belloc’s THE SERVILE STATE
39 Comment by Robert on 15 December 2009:
Dr. Wilson,
Yes, I was thinking of his definition when I suggested we may be headed back in the direction of the Servile State.
“Where there is compulsion applicable by positive law to men of a certain status, such compulsion enforced in the last resort by the powers at the disposal of the State, there is the institution of Slavery ; and if that institution be sufficiently expanded the whole State may be said to repose upon a servile basis, and is a Servile State.”
40 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 15 December 2009:
Dr. Wilson makes a wise hint of a suggestion in his mentioning Belloc’s THE SERVILE STATE. CHRONICLES and THE SERVILE STATE were two of the most important instruments in my intellectual journey.
41 Comment by Robert on 15 December 2009:
http://www.archive.org/details/servilestate00belluoft
One can read the book online at the above link. It is not a rant against slavery or a holy endorsement of freedom as we think of it. It is simply an analysis of the various conditions and historical circumstances of what it means to be servile or slave, as contrasted to an independent or free citizen. Hint: It is not rhetorical but evidentiary, more interested in the scientific analysis of servility than simply occupying the moral high ground and platitudes of “weren’t we a shameful people.”
42 Comment by MAP on 15 December 2009:
At the risk of drifting too far off topic, Belloc said that the church lands had been basically stolen and given to the new (capitalist) rich. The pheasants that had tended these lands for generations were then made homeless and were forced into the slums of the new factory cities, fodder for the capitalist. I wonder if the great migration off the rural lands here in the South that has occurred in my lifetime was not deliberately orchestrated for the same purpose. The interesting part is that once one is in these new cities one becomes fully and wholly dependent upon someone else for everything, absolutely helpless. It is a system where every necessity of life (and many made to seem necessities) is part of a vast trickle up, where wealth comes to rest in a few hands at the top of the pyramid.
It would appear that now that the vast majority has been herded into the cities and completely dependent on others for everything, the very security that drove the migration is now being withdrawn. The work is vanishing. And people are now trapped, unable to fend for themselves.
What this could all mean is a matter of conjecture. As Belloc noted people will do almost anything for security.
43 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 15 December 2009:
There is too much going on here for me to cover in one post, but let me start by saying it doesn’t seem to me that anybody here, certainly not me, has “hit on slavery in order to explain the current mess or to deal out blame for it.” Not all of it, anyway. In fact, as I said in my post, I don’t recall ever thinking of the slaves or their importation in this way until I read Mr. Weber’s post. But as soon as I heard it, something clicked. In the most commonly used current sense of the word, slaves were not immigrants. But it seems to me that that is an arbitrary, or at least not entirely necessary, exclusion from the dictionary definition of immigrant: “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence”, when that is, after all, what they did. I agree that, as Allen Wilson, says, “If we try to make too many comparisons and dwell on similarities, we may confuse ourselves and fail to understand either slavery then or immigration now.” But they have one glaring and undeniable similarity (speaking of post 1965 immigration) – allowing people into this country who never should have been – and I really don’t care who gets his knickers in a knot, PCers or Southerners (odd coupling, that) because I or anyone else chooses to look a little deeper into this. I, for one, am simply making a good faith effort to understand both slavery and immigration.
44 Comment by MAP on 15 December 2009:
Pheasants should have been peasants. Ha,ha!
45 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 15 December 2009:
Regarding MAP’s post #42, it seems that the European and American elites strongly encouraged the migration from the farm and into the city. Neo-conservative Briton Paul Johnson, in MODERN TIMES, writes supportively of Charles De Gaulle’s effort in the 50s and 60s to push rural Frenchmen into the cities where their labors could be utilized more rationally. Presumably the French had little say in this or were distracted by events in Algeria, the rise of the Common Market, the frenzy caused by Bridget Bardot, and the excitement created by Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit to France with her husband, Jack. Dwight Eisenhower’s Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson had similar ideas for American farmers in the 50s. “Get big or get out”, said Benson, and rural America began to empty ultimately culminating in packing Americans into 10,000 Levittowns full of Colonials, Split-Foyers, Split-Levels, Ramblers, Cape Cods, Ranchers and Garden Apartments with no gardens.
46 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 15 December 2009:
The lippy bit about knickers does not extend to you, Dr. Wilson.
47 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 15 December 2009:
27 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 14 December 2009:
“Almost all of the slaves were imported before there was anything such as the United States of America, so it is hardly an immigration question.”
How does the time of their arrival matter?
This is similar to the argument I use to distinguish immigrants from colonists when people try to tell me we are a nation of/built by immigrants. The colonists, North and South, made themselves into this new people called Americans, and fashioned most of its institutions, or their rough outlines, long before the United states came into being, and long before the immigrants’ contributions began to be felt. So far so good.
But if the colonists get credit for inventing and building what became the United States, even though the bulk of their work was done before their creation took that name, don’t the first slaves get credit for their posterity and its baggage? The colonists became us; the descendents of the first slaves burned Detroit, Harlem, Chicago, Newark, Los Angeles, the Hough, Roxbury, and have terrorized whites wherever they’ve gone since the end of Jim Crow. And this doesn’t even get into their day jobs.
The question I’d really like an answer to is who?, not when? That is: agreed, the New Englanders supplied the ships, crews, and investment capital for the venture (how much is another thing I don’t know). But who was the first to get the idea? Did the Northerners create the trade on spec, or were they responding to a demand? If a demand, can its origin be located and named? I ask your patience if these are questions you’ve answered before, and probably more times than you’d like, but the opportunity to hear from you on this is too good to pass up.
48 Comment by Robert on 15 December 2009:
Gilbert@ 43,
“I, for one, am simply making a good faith effort to understand both slavery and immigration.”
Any accurate history of the founding, development,and flowering of the Grand Old Party in American politics should be helpful in this effort. Or to use neo-conservative terms, slavery is always the key and immigration the pivot. To destroy middle class protections one must first flood the market with cheap labor (i.e.Open the Southern Border) or move the means of production to cheap labor ( i.e. Concoct new “free trade agreements” that allow our national plutocrats a more international harvest) The one road leads to a servile state, while the other leads to a socialist servile state. Southern yeomen were probably the last class, of any wide scale significance in American history, to know freedom on a authentic human scale.( Wendell Berry still writes of these aspirations) Yet, while they were being honorably eulogised (by Southern Agrarians for instance) men without smiles were planning much more diligently.
49 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 15 December 2009:
47. Briefly, it was not slavery that made the people who burned down Detroit, etc. It was those who, twice in American history, destroyed systems that were coping with the question satisfactorily.
I repeat, it was the Republican Party which, at the same time it was destroying the Southern economy and providing massive tariff protection and government subsidies for its capitalists, deliberately kept down what should have been the economic advance of the American workingman by massive importation of cheap labour from China and the more benighted regions of Europe.
50 Comment by James Kabala on 15 December 2009:
I was intrigued by the lengthy quotation (”Slavery is likely to be abolished…”) Dr. Wilson gave above and would like to know more about it. Information on the Internet about it is sparse.
Apparently it is called “the Hazard Circular” and is credited to a Mr. Hazard (no first name given – always a bad sign), an Englishman, not a Yankee, who is said to have written it on behalf of the Bank of England in 1862 and distributed it to various Northeastern bankers. Through Google Books I was able to trace it to various Populist pamphlets of the 1880s and 1890s, but no further. No work, whether Northern or Southern, written specifically on the Civil War prior to the last ten years seems to have any awareness of it.
One more point: While it is true that Yankee slave traders greatly outnumbered Southerners, Americans of any variety did not rank very highly among slave traders. Most slaves brought here came in European-owned ships.
51 Comment by Allen Wilson on 15 December 2009:
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.
52 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 16 December 2009:
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.)
53 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 19 December 2009:
@26, 41, 48:
Thanks for the reading suggestions. Robert, I’m enjoying Servile State, thanks to your link.
54 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 19 December 2009:
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.
55 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 19 December 2009:
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.
56 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 21 December 2009:
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.
57 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 22 December 2009:
Dr. Wilson
Thanks for reading the post. I’ll put your answer in the old cogitator and let it percolate awhile.