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.
