I Am Not Yet Available For Yard Work
Without a steady stream of Emerald articles to serve as fuel, I’m afraid my blogging output is going to revolve around my daily collection of frets and worries. Hence teaching, basketball, and this marvellous piece from (surprise!) Reason on immigration. My own opinion on the issue is entirely predictable. (Optional Practical Training, here we come.) Some choice quotes:
The fashion across the political spectrum, from the tree-huggers at the Sierra Club to Rush Limbaugh’s pugnacious “ditto-heads,” is to hammer away at immigrants. They steal our jobs. They use up our national resources. They dilute our culture. The timid few who demur are almost universally scorned as ivory-tower knuckleheads who mistake poetry for policy. They aren’t out there in the real world. They don’t “focus on the immigration influx in practice, as opposed to libertarian theory,” as National Review acidly puts it.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton seems to be considering a policy feint in this unpleasant direction:
People have to stop employing illegal immigrants. I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.
Reason’s Nick Gillespie responds in fine form:
Yeah, that’s really fucking heartbreaking to see people lined up to work in the morning. God, this used to be a beautiful country, before all these people–many of whom look different than Hillary–started getting up early in the morning and working really hard at shit jobs for a living.
This piece – also by Glenn Garvin, also linked to by Gillespie in the Hit & Run entry above – is also fantastic. Especially notable is the story that opens the piece, which is the best example of “journalism as blunt object” that I’ve seen in a long while. You’ll know the bit I’m talking about. It involves a violin.
This is probably the best thread in which to announce that I am very happy that David Blunkett is resigning. To those of you who don’t know who David Blunkett is, I say: You Lucky Bastards.
Hopefully this will put an end of his curious project to combine the very worst of left and right wing agendas in his quest to remove what few liberties we have left here.
The xenophobia comes from examples of immigration gone wrong. Prime example? French Algerian Muslim populations. Culturally speaking, the women in this situation got the shaft. As second generation immigrants (born to original immigrants) they find themselves part of two cultures: the diaspora community of their heritage and the culture they must work and go to school in.
Head scarves are only the tip of the iceberg. Radical pro-Islam young men respond to French discrmination, and punish the women for blending in to French culture. The women have a choice: live in the projects and poverty that France set aside for the Algerians to maintain a connection with their roots, or abandon their roots and become completely French at the risk of being hunted and killed by the Algerian gangs.
Funny thing: all this started when France colonized parts of North Africa and took Algerian immigrants back to France to fill the shit jobs. They put the families up in workers’ housing, now the projects, and the families fell into the trap of earning money and sending it back home so their relatives could come and join them. What France Did Wrong: they proivded no upward movement for the diaspora. In America, people come here to work, and they can go to school and move up into more detailed and higher paying trades. Their children then, ideally, are American citizens by birth and become productive citizens. In France, once an Algerian immigrant, always an Algerian immigrant, restricted to zoned housing and shit jobs.
Hillary Clinton and her cronies can throw their hands up and cry “We don’t want what’s happening in France to happen here!” in complete ignorance, because really, the host nation is the problem, not the diaspora.
Re: Lazy mexicans
Not nearly as lazy as middle-class suburban kids like us.
The unspeakable truth is that: economically speaking, immigration is usually nothing but good news for the host country. People who come from overseas at working age (=arrive when they’re taxpayers, don’t use school system), work at the jobs no-one else wants, then obligingly leave back to their original countries to retire, thus not requiring a pension.
Given the currently-inverting age pyramid in the US/UK and the impending pensions/etc crisis, I can’t think of any reason not to have as many of those sweet, sweet immigrants around.
Incidentally Olly, I’m guessing you missed the rather pleasing combination of Robert Kilroy-Silk (UKIP party leader) and a bucket of what was euphemistically called “slurry” by the papers earlier this week?
To reiterate something I’ve said before, and have only observed in greater quantity since moving Texas-ward: Lazy Mexicans my ass.
This anti-immigration crap is just xenophobia, those fucking racists.
On economics and immigrants:
My dad is a dentist, and an immigrant (also Republican), and coincidentally finds himself being the provider of dental care to many other immigrants (mostly Mexican) who have settled in the cheap housing surrounding his practice. He often reduces his fees for some of his patients, and even fired his receptionist last year for treating some non-English speaking patients rather poorly.
Business could be better, and that is mostly to be blamed on the local economy, but it certainly could be worse.