Old Vet on The Passion of Immigration
(Dan here…this is a post from 2007 by Old Vet, a regular at Angry Bear during this time period. Pre Trump. Peter Dorman reminded me of Old Vet, and Mike Kimel dared me to put this Old Vet post up. Here it is.)
Old Vet on The Passion of Immigration
This post is by OldVet…
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When you make a man into a monkey
That monkey’s gonna monkey around”
Call me a Monkey’s Uncle. Out of pure frustration with the name calling debate on immigration, I can’t help wanting to tweak some tails.
My daughter LittleVet is French/American and lives in Paris . She has a living great-grandfather named Franz who is German and a former Luftwaffe pilot in WWII who learned a bit of English as a POW working in Louisiana cane fields. She has a grandfather on the other side named Mohammed who lives in Algeria . One great grandmother on my side emigrated from Bremen after the turn of the century in 1905, and other relatives emigrated as indentured servants from debtor’s prisons in Paris . The wheel turns for LittleVet. I’ve lived as a guest in eight foreign territories outside the US . Moving around the world is something I understand in my bones. This year I was told by my more liberal brother that I was becoming a “populist demagogue” and by my conservative brother that I was a “liberal social engineer.” My sister told me I was “some sort of Libertarian capitalist.” Who, me? What is going on here?
Yesterday my neighbor Joe complained about lawsuits brought against our sheriff in Tennessee, who routinely picks up illegal immigrants found during arrests and turns them over to ICE. Joe lost his job after 32 years last year when his factory shut down and moved to Mexico and his firm invested in a new plant in Russia rather than here at home. He’s got a high school education. I heard a young couple with a child – one white, one black, and one mixed – worrying about how to find jobs while we ate in a “meat-and-three” diner this week. I heard virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric on “talk radio” as I drove into town one day, from a Rush Limbaugh wanna-be. Joe and I were discussing the qualities of fire wood when Joe’s best friend from the plant pulled up – he was black. They both talked about a mini-wave of Mexican crimes with Joe’s nephew, who is a cop, and they were worried about it. What about my many Cuban immigrant friends and former co-workers in Miami? One Cuban asked me what the churches were offering sanctuary to Mexicans for, from poverty? He said the best cure for poverty was hard work, and if people wanted to be citizens, they should follow the same rules as everybody else. A Mexican perfectly legal immigrant whose son used to help us plant trees, and whose daughter was valedictorian of her university graduating class, said the same thing last year. The medical, educational, and policing costs are treated as the only costs of mass immigration, rather than the job losses and job downgrades and the loss of technological innovation in service industries.
I read blogs that call any anti-immigration writer “racist, xenophobe, and nativist.” Virtually every economist of note whose works I read, and most intellectually interesting writers on politics, line up firmly in the camp of wide open immigration. Labor unions, leaders of corporate America, both Democrats and Republicans, want open borders. Church leaders talk about “sanctuary” for cities and churches to hide illegal immigrants on the run. Virtually every leading politician wants some version of amnesty for those in the US without papers. Technological innovation in low-tech service industries in the US is as close to Zero as you can get, and cheap labor is used as a substitute for capital investment in education or equipment. Cities are flooding with more poor people looking for jobs. Religious leaders want more credulous minds and donors filling their pews in church, and labor unions want a flood of fresh laborers to swell their ranks. Business elites from Bill Gates to Jack Welch to the WalMart Waltons want cheaper labor and higher profits. College professors in safe tenured jobs declare their willingness to save the world’s poor rather than America ’s poor. Ayn Rand sycophants shrug at complaints – let them starve. Everybody wants to do something about the warming planet and melting ice caps, but nobody wants to talk about a population explosion that has caused it. Less educated and less wealthy Americans compete with an unending stream of immigrant and outsourcing labor competition, while our elites nimbly move their capital around the world and acquire ever-more-sophisticated skills in short supply
My opinion is that there is a complete, non-political split between the educated elites in America, and the rest. I can beam instructions to my broker via satellite from rural Tennessee and make money to supplement my small pension. My neighbor is 60 and looking for a job that will cover health care costs, in competition with increasing numbers of young Americans and immigrants. It’s ironic – his job moved to Mexico, and he now competes with Mexicans in America for jobs. Joe told me he thought nobody game a damn, and I told him about 70% of Americans did, but they were not in charge. Where here does the anger come from?
It’s from a sense of betrayal. In a very crowded country, more immigrants are waived across the border like in a NASCAR finish. A historical sense of being “one country” has broken down, and those who were willing to be workers and led by the elites of American society are rebelling. The 70% majority of Americans have no one to turn to for help, or at least that is the feeling. As “rdan” points out no measure taken so far come close to helping those who are losing out. America is very good, in the final analysis, at spreading the costs of a society but very poor at spreading the benefits. How do we get that dynamic spirit of immigrants with a sparkle in their eye, and at the same time lift the spirits and the fortunes of ordinary Americans? Just saying it’s happening is delusional. Either trust will be restored by the elites, who control the power and the money in this country, or it won’t.
IMHO, an historic blunder has been made both by those who lead and those who follow. (a) Leaders, especially political Democratic leadership, risk a complete rupture with its historical supporters in a risky gamble that new immigrants will swell their voter ranks (and, even a more risky bet, that they’ll vote Democratic.) Republican leaders, who cynically collared fundamentalist religious voters successfully since 2000, are more closely in touch with poorer economic classes, and now shout about the immigration flood that they themselves have sponsored so successfully. (b) Those that follow – the 70% of Americans who just put one foot in front of another – have made the blunder of ignoring their educations, their work ethic, and above all their political system. Some 46% of eligible Americans did not vote in 2004, and some 48% couldn’t be bothered in 2000. Yet Americans feel they’ve been turned into organ grinders’ monkeys, and they’re passionate about that betrayal. Disagree?
And the billions being budgeted to build a border wall fix this . . . how?
And the billions being spent in the ME fix this . . . how?
And the bankruptcies of farmers in the midwest fix this . . . how?
Asking for a friend.
Buffet and Textiles
There is a different story here that people fail to grasp. Buffet admits to what caused the closure of his textile mills in a casual way.
We can sit here and argue over Labor wages or we can recognize it is not the wages paid in so much as the costs associated with Labor. This goes into Child Labor laws, OT laws, healthcare, SS, Unemployment, Workmans Comp, etc. Buffet indirectly identifies this when he said Labor costs. The other aspect is the cost of doing business in the US such as OSHA, property tax, pollution laws, etc. Outside of Labor wages, the rest can be identified as Overhead much of which is non existent in Asia as witnessed from my own experience.
When you purchase solar panels from China and they dump the chemical next to a village as Richard Smith points out in his article (China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse)
That is the elimination of Overhead which would be a business responsibility in the US to take care of rather than dump.
When a company moves production to China, we not only lose wages but we also lose the benefits for that one person laid off and the company avoids that Overhead which surpasses the wages of Labor. And the company comes back and sells at mostly the same price.
From today’s WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saving-democracy-from-the-managerial-elite-11578672945?
Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite
To heal our deep social and political divisions, urban professionals must start sharing power with the working class.
In a number of places (most notably crooked timber) I have argued against open borders, even though I am myself a migrant (I’m an Australian living in Europe), I’m the grandchild of Migrants (British immigrants to Australia) and have a sister (younger) who was born in Scotland. It is not because I am not in favour of immigration, but because I am in favour of immigration that I want controlled immigration.
I think in America’s case, the right way to control immigration is to prosecute the employers of illegal immigrants, not to prosecute illegal immigrants.
Of course I disagree. Let immigrantsin this country(and refugees) be admitted in the numbers they were in the early 20th century. Give them a path to citizenship. Do the right thing.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Seemed to work pretty well back then. And we can make it work better. The country needs more people, not less. Interesting that this Old Cracker questions,
“What about my many Cuban immigrant friends and former co-workers in Miami? One Cuban asked me what the churches were offering sanctuary to Mexicans for, from poverty? He said the best cure for poverty was hard work, and if people wanted to be citizens, they should follow the same rules as everybody else.”
The vast majority of Cuban immigrants were political refugees.
Reason,
In AZ Napolitano did just that for awhile. Whole neighborhoods emptied out, upstate many farm areas residency decline big time. So much for the idea they are looking for a handout.
EM:
As I have said in the past, we occupy 5% of the land in the US and pretty much in bad places on the coasts, in earthquake areas, lowlands which flood, etc. There is plenty of room. We need younger people to provide a labor force and keep the median age low. We know for sure the 1 percenters are going to skimp on paying taxes. Someone has to do so.
EM
I’m FOR controlled immigration. Somehow you missed that. But the current system leaves illegal immigrants extremely vulnerable to exploitation. I’m against exploitation.
P.S. I’m also a strong advocate of a universal basic income which is a “national” right for authorised immigrants. It can’t work without a long residency requirement for immigrants (maybe even requiring naturalisation). This is another reason for wanting controlled immigration.
Another reason is an argument from sustainability. Comfortable sustainability requires a capital intensive economy. You cannot accumulate the required capital if the population is growing too fast (it is volume that is the potential issue with uncontrolled immigration). If people flee societies with unsustainable approaches to the economy and bring that culture with them, they may not have time to adapt to sustainable approaches. Assimilation (in both direction) requires time and should limit the acceptable volume. Read the blog fresh economic thinking http://fresheconomicthinking.com/ for another progressive who believes the same thing.
Reason,
I didn’t miss that you were in favor of controlled immigration. The thing is I do not know may people not in favor on controlled immigration.
This RW bs meme about “open borders” is against almost every Dem’s program I know.
However, I am in favor of increasing the amount of legal immigrants allowed in this country, and especially political refugees. Many of whom are fleeing countries that the US f!cked up.