Thurston Howell III went off on Gilligan now and then. In one episode the fictional tycoon got so mad he referred to the sailor as “probably not even a Republican.” That was when many pre-literate boomers got their first inkling of well-heeled northeasterners as stereotypical stalwarts of the GOP. Howell belonged to all the right clubs, knew the right people and graduated Harvard. A remake of Gilligan’s Island that fit in with modern times would switch Howell to the blue party and amp his rage up to eleven.
No such thing as a “labor shortage” is possible in any country with physically fit citizens.
Hubert Humphrey, FDR, LBJ, Billy Bob Clinton and Barack Obama all had ancestors that were speaking English generations before Nikki Haley’s, Marco Rubio’s, Ted Cruz’s or even some of Donald Trump’s. There are still “country-club Republicans” but very few attend Episcopalian services these days. Irish and Italian Catholics along with a growing contingent of Jews have been bucking back against Thomas Nast’s defining ass since the 70’s. Plenty of them play golf and tennis in places that exclude the rabble too. (READ MORE from Tim Harnett: The Media Control of ‘Context’)
This kind of demographic shift might be expected to alter perspectives on newcomers to American shores. Vintage Cabots, Lodges, and Winthrops whined about an invasion of Bohunks, Micks, and Jews with a 30-year-old tawny in one hand and a Cuban in the other. The xenophobic zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle society circles over a century ago can be touchy when the border comes up. None of Ron DeSantis’s DNA was in the Western hemisphere until decades after the Civil War. The likes of his great-grandparents were exactly who took the brunt of the scorn when Astor’s, Morgan’s, and Whitney’s held soirees.
Would anyone today say that the late 19th century immigration wave was anything but good for the economy? A-1 of the Wednesday, February 28 Washington Post features the headline: “The economy is roaring, and immigration is a key reason.” The Weekend (March 2–3) Review section of the Wall Street Journal front pages, “Border Crackdowns Won’t Solve the Immigration Crisis.” Whatever ideological clashes exist between the two papers, their assessments of migrant impact on the economy are practically identical.
The word “economy” is like the words “quantitative easing.” What is good for some might not be for others. People trading T-Bills and blue chips on Wall Street tend to stay in the chips as new dollars arbitrarily materialize and reach circulation. Financial players are waiting on the shore as the Fed pours more into the artificial lake of currency. People living below the dam may remain parched. The new money will be worth less, but anyone in a position to amass enough of it still becomes richer.
A guy getting a paycheck from Walmart usually ends up working longer hours for his Big Macs and six-packs as this kind of thing goes on. It’s not diluted greenbacks that flow his way. It’s the nonstop stream of competitors for jobs and housing coming from 2000 miles SSW of Manhattan that never thins.
The economy of 1900 worked a little differently than it does in the 21st century. Assistance for immigrants without means was mostly local or private back then. Tammany Hall was waiting for launches from Ellis Island. Putting up new arrivals and placing them in municipal jobs was an electoral investment. There are pols all over the country, and in Washington D.C., taking pages from Boss Tweed.
Whatever economic or humane opinion anyone has about immigrants, their material presence in new geographic environs is the fact that must be confronted. Physical reality, apparently contrary to some economic views, has its impact on both people who don’t have financial portfolios and those who do. (READ MORE: Opposing Illegal Immigration Is Not About Race)
Raw resources can lay dormant and unexploited. What never remains unexploited, unused or unsqueezed for all its juice is the working class. The most enlightened lovers of the downtrodden will always find a way to save them in their sweatshops. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, keeps his peons in gears that guarantee maximum torque.
When a million people pour into a new country they are in need of beds, shelter, food and plumbing. That, in itself, is an economic stimulus. Business will rise to fill the gap, but the increased demand will be felt most keenly wherever need is most dire already. In an economy like ours, we’d hardly notice a million over the course of five years. A rate of one and a half to two million per year requires more drastic adjustment. Does it take a London School of Economics doctorate to figure out whose lives are being disrupted?
Whenever more effort is required to maintain a minimum of societal status self improvement moves further from reach. If rent takes five more hours of toil each week, time for college is harder to find. More competitors in line for affordable housing won’t help. Multiply this by every other necessary commodity marketed to low-income consumers.
A March 2, NYT/Sienna poll found that 65 percent of registered voters think the United States is headed in the wrong direction. New York mayor Eric Adams is desperate to send foreign immigrants to his town in different directions. A New York Times, “New York Today,” newsletter is titled: “The Sputtering Effort to Persuade Migrants to Leave New York.” The subhead continues, “A $25 million program aims to relocate migrants in other counties. But many don’t want to make the move.” It’s a policy that was not mentioned in either the WP or WSJ’s description of immigrant impact on the economy.
Revelations like these explain why the president is purging the word “Bidenomics” from his public statements.
We keep hearing from the citified enlightenment that flyover country is a massive parasite on the largesse of urbanity. People a few hundred miles from an ocean or the Great Lakes aren’t pulling their weight. Red states suck tax revenue from the blue. Is there any question as to how relative “value” is computed? Who would you miss first, a Silicon Valley engineer inventing a new way to make your laptop go haywire, or a baler of hay in Nebraska making sure steak gets plated Friday night? Experts, who can always find funds for their studies, cloud up every direction we look in. Can one of them ever provide us comprehensive details on the number of consumers of steaks, vehicles, plush accommodations, top shelf liquor, and other luxuries who produce “value” that no one else values?
It seems that the burden on people dwelling in 3,000 square feet across from Central Park comes from the low skilled, low tech division of the work force. Nevertheless, we are told, if millions a year don’t keep coming the whole economy will falter. The notion that financial woes and shortages are related to the non-productive over consuming in cities isn’t getting any traction in media.
A trucker, logging 100,000 miles a year keeping NYC larders stocked, is supposedly less essential than a professor teaching students what a detestable nation this is. An economic audit of the U.S. is sorely overdue. How many of those who hate hillbillies worse than Margaret Drysdale ever did are worth a thing to the U.S. economy? The claim we need millions more campesinos to do menial jobs has become a dogma of economic religion. Most of the ones sermonizing the line are only fit for menial tasks themselves. (READ MORE: America’s Immigration Implosion)
If you don’t believe the management class of this country teems with bumbling dead weight watch any Hill hearing. It’s an endless procession of “highly educated” suits telling the world that the dog ate their homework. They can be dead serious though, about more immigrants being necessary to keep peasants with pitchforks down.
There is more than one major paradox in secular humanism. How is the developing world ever going to develop if its most promising denizens must all escape to Europe or the U.S. to get half a chance? It’s hard to figure out how many demands for endless, unlimited immigration differ from justifications for slavery. Nobody is really too busy to mow their own lawn. They simply don’t want to. My father cut his own grass at 92. Is there somehow more justice in a world where a guy with Incan or Aztec ancestors runs pipe and puts up the drywall instead of a Scot or a Pole? Would it be bigoted to think that diners were better in the 70s when the cooks had names like Tom, Dick, and Harry?
No such thing as a “labor shortage” is possible in any country with physically fit citizens. It is, with no exceptions, always a matter of somebody else picking your cotton. Thurston Howell will never run out of reasons to berate Gilligan who, by now, probably is a Republican.
