The New Centrist’s Questions
January 13, 2009 Economics, Immigration
WEVS1, of The New Centrist, writes,
Have you been to any demonstrations over the past say, fifteen years? The far left–anarchists, communists, etc.–are definitely not in alliance with corporate elites. They are against NAFTA just like the paleocons. They even use similar (anti-capitalist) rhetoric. Extremists on the left and right both rail against what they call globalism (hard right) or globalization (hard left). Jenny’s comments exemplify this.
WEVS1, I don’t think Jenny meant the kids or the protesters. I think she meant those to the left of the mainstream Democratic party, such as Move On.
The arguments she makes and the rhetoric she uses are almost identical to those used against Jews, Italians, Catholics, Russians and others who were part of “new immigration” wave in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These arguments were rehashed from the critiques made of the “early immigrants” (Dutch, Germans and Irish) who arrived in the eighteenth century. Seriously, check out Hourwich’s “Immigration and Labor”. It was written almost a hundred years ago and it is eye-opening to see how little the arguments have changed.
Some of the arguments haven’t changed, but some have. When the arguments are identical to yesteryear’s, and towards all immigration groups, I am inclined to agree with you. However, there are many differences between legal and illegal immigrants, and various immigrant groups do perform differently, and others behave differently because overly generous policies allow them to behave differently, and perhaps draw a different type of immigrant. So there are present problems that are new, and not like 120 years ago.
The idea that immigrants of the past did not flock to communities dominated by their countrymen and countrywomen, that they did not create media in their own languages (newspapers, books, etc.), is simply not supported by the evidence. Take a look at the images of early American cities with storefront signs in Yiddish, Polish, Italian, Russian, etc. (not English) take a look at the names of the newspapers that were popular in immigrant communities, take a look at the languages they were published in.
Correct, I have no issue with immigrant groups who do this. I do have issues with immigrants being eligible for government benefits that working class American do not have. Additionally, I think we both can find some important differences between Islamicist and nationalist (see La Raza) immigrants who seek something different than assimilating into the American landscape in critical ways.
This process of assimilation has been going on for a long, long, time. Critics of immigration said Jews would not assimilate. They said we were not interested in becoming American, we were only interested in making a “quick profit” and that increasing numbers of us were not even religious, instead informed and guided by foreign ideologies like Marxism, anarchism and communism. Sound familiar?
But we couldn’t just cross the border back then, though, could we? And that trip across the pond was hardly a pleasant one. Most immigrants then came to become American.
“We are NOT a wealthy country any more, yet foreign entities and countries keep telling us that we are wealthy and must keep paying.”
U.S. Gross Domestic Product is about fourteen and a half trillion dollars. That’s $14,500 billion. This places the U.S. among the wealthiest countries of the world.
And was of our debt compared to our savings? Our expenditures compared to our budget? That is how you measure wealth. Debits versus credits.
13 comments
DK, the US has still got one of the highest HDIs of all nations.
http://berclo.net/page99/99en-idh.html
Froylein, your stats are out o date. The UN ranks the US 15th for 2006, the latest year that figures are available. It’s possibly gone lower now. The “anything goes, welcome everyone, work visas for all” approach has contributed to massive unemployment in many formerly well-paying work sectors and crippling social services expenditures for localities with high populations of low-income workers (including immigrants- let’s be honest here, they’re not, for the most part, economically self-sufficient). As much as we all want to support everyone’s right to a job and a good living, the current system is a failure.
Holy crap, a post devoted to me at The Kvetcher! Thanks, DK! I’ll make sure to respond to all of this at greater length at my blog. First I wanted to reply to this comment:
“But we couldn’t just cross the border back then, though, could we? And that trip across the pond was hardly a pleasant one. Most immigrants then came to become American.”
Yes, they could. The borders (Canada and Mexico) were much more porous back then. It was actually much easier (politically) to immigrate to the U.S. in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than today.
Yes, the trip was longer and more dangerous by ship than air. But, comparatively speaking, it was far less expensive.
Then, as today, *some* came to be American. But many came to to America to earn a bit of money so they could go back home and get a piece of land, start a small business, etc. They did not think they would be here forever.
Check out the Hourwich text, DK. This is an old American story and not unique to any one group of people (ethnic, religious, national).
I think some of the critiques being made are important, relevant and accurate. But, as someone who studies the history of immigration and immigrants, Jenny’s arguments were straight out of the early 1900s, if not early 1800s.
The bottom line (as stated earlier) is in free, open, capitalist economies, immigration flows rise and fall in relation to labor demand. As labor demand rises, immigration will increase. As labor demand falls, immigration will decrease. The increase in labor demand (or decrease) is caused by broader business cycles (boom/bust). Stated very simply: in a growing economy, labor demand will increase which will cause immigration to increase.
Government can (and does) restrict immigration flows for various reasons. But is this good for the American economy? If you are someone who believes in free markets, it definitely is not good for the economy or the American people. But if you think security concerns occasionally trump the demands of the free market, I would have to agree.
I also agree we spend way too much relative to what we save. Nevertheless, the U.S. is still one of the wealthiest countries in the world and American citizens have among the highest standards of living.
This is sort of tangential, but I briefly addressed open borders here:
Do You Want to be a Citizen of the World?
http://newcentrist.wordpress.c.....the-world/
WEVS1 = The New Centrist = TNC
Judi, how many unemployed US Americans you know would wash up dishes for $3/hour? BTW, the HDI ranking not only depends on the GDP but also literacy rates, life expectancy and particularly female access to to school education. Let’s blame the haredim. They fit the description. Food stamp-wise as well.
Considering the legal minimum wage is much higher than $3/hr, the answer is, no one should wash dishes for $3/hr. But some would argue that employers cannot afford to pay more than that– well, I would argue back that in an economy where a record number of people are unemployed or under-employed, who’s got the disposable income to go out to eat, anyway? Employers, through greed, have created a cycle where they have eaten their feed corn. The insatiable quest to squeeze every last droplet of profit out of businesses has come back to bite us in the butt. The auto industry wants a bail-out. Why? So they can produce cars to sell to overseas buyers. Because US residents sure as hell aren’t buying.
And I wasn’t just talking about $3/hr dishwashers, btw. The science and tech fields have been gutted to their core by outsourcing, visas and other cost-cutting measures. So the business looks good on paper, stocks are up, but it’s a house of cards because no one is left working there. Counting on innovation? Don’t hold your breath. The pharmas are staying alive by repackaging their old stuff so people will please, please buy it instead of generics. Don’t believe me? I’ve got a state-of-the-art Bayer campus in CT to sell you. Oh, wait- Yale bought it at a fire sale price- only to have it sit vacant because there’s no money to fund the research they dreamed would happen there. So they’re using it to store surplus art from the Yale Art Gallery. I kid you not.
I want to be a citizen of the world, but I can’t afford the membership fee anymore.
The hareidim are the least of the problem.
That’s capitalism to you in its radical, global form. Compete, or you’re done. Just that Obama’s proposed safe-trade area will backfire as the US cannot make itself independent of the global markets anymore and much of the industry that has been left greatly relies on export. (Noteworthily, all safe trade areas in history so far have wounded up as totally broke economies were statistics counted way more than actual output.) There currently is a shift typical of industrialized turning into service societies; high unemployment in classical industries is a matter of a restructuring society and inevitable. Car manufacturers now seek financial aid to cover the expenses of research that should have done themselves years ago; those petrol-gulping monsters are not what people need and care to afford anymore. German car makers have been making similar demands BTW (noteworthily, a high-end German luxury car that sells at $100,000 and up has got a production and marketing cost of less than $1,500). As long as people are ready to pay high prices for exclusivity (e.g. spend thousands or even tens of thousands on one handbag), we’re still way too well off to be compassionate with those that really are in a seriously bad economic shape. I agree, $3/hour is ridiculous, but as far as I can tell from my visits to the US, nobody really cares whether those people behind the kitchen doors get fair pay. If I had a kitchen over there, I’d cook myself, but the majority of my friends seems accustomed to eating out on a regular basis. The haredim are just as much a problem as any community that will generously “ignore” abuse of any welfare system. A friend of mine that works at a bakery in a heimishe neighbourhood told me that people that definitely are wealthy show up with foodstamps totalling up to thousands. She said religiously-wed couples often do not even obtain a civil wedding license (which would explain why girls as young as age 15 get married) to collect more benefits. My friend grew up FFB (Chasidish) and has seen enough dirt in welfare system abuse by haredim to fill DK’s blog for a month.
It may come as little surprise that elites in take-off countries are now taking over where the complacency of the West has put us into snooze mode. With a different work ethics than the one we’re accustomed to (i.e. placing emphasis on the needs and rights of the worker) as in that only the corporation’s success counts, we must reliven our virtues quickly if we do not want to be outdone.
http://www.filosofia.org/aut/001/razacos.htm
Published in 1925, La Raza Cosmica (The Cosmic Race) is an essay written by late Mexican philosopher, secretary of education, and 1929 presidential candidate, Jose Vasconcelos to express the ideology of a future “fifth race” in the Americas; an agglomeration of all the races in the world with no respect to color or number to erect a new civilization: Universopolis. As he explains in his literary work, armies of people would then go forth around the world professing their knowledge. Vasconcelos continues to say that the people of the Iberian regions of the Americas (that is to say, the parts of the continent colonized by Portugal and Spain) have the territorial, racial, and spiritual factors necessary to initiate the “universal era of humanity”.
Claiming that the Darwinist ideologies are “scientific” theories only created to validate, explain, and justify ethnic superiority and to repress others, Vasconcelos attempts to refute these theories and goes on to recognize his words as being an ideological effort to improve the cultural morale of a “depressed race” by offering his optimistic theory of the future development of a cosmic race.
It has come, often in its shortened version “La Raza”, to refer to the mixed race people of Latin America, i.e., primarily mestizos, mulattos, and zambos or all three combined.
This is a far cry from the Nazi concept of “Das Volk”.
This is a far cry from the Nazi concept of “Das Volk”.
So? It can be a “far cry” from Nazism and still be a problem. How about leaving the Nazi thing alone on this blog? No one wants that stuff here. This isn’t a far-Left site. We don’t constantly compare people to Nazis like the far-Left does.
Drop it.
The success or failure of safe trade will be based on its flavor and implementation. In a pro-business climate, of course it’s doomed to failure. What’s the fun of running a company if you can’t ultimately pound it into the ground, bail and live off the spoils? Exploitation of workers, while cost-effective up to a point, fails in the end because you’ve killed your potential market. But if you managed to get yours while you wrung everyone else dry, Who cares?
What’s led to Detroit’s inability to sell a car? No R & D? Marketing? Well, that takes foresight. But they were so focused on turning out big suburban assault vehicles that there was no time, inclination or need to develop anything new- or necessary for long-term solvency. Ironically, even if they’d kept up with new tech, no one would be able to get financing to buy in at this point. Except maybe the overseas market.
So back to our $3/hr dishwasher. First, despite all evidence to the contrary, NYC is not the entire US. Elsewhere, people are cooking at home, and, increasingly, on older equipment. Because most people financed renovations with equity from their homes, which they’re either fighting to afford, fighting to keep or have already lost.
But I digress. People aren’t eating out much outside of large cities where closet-sized kitchenettes are the standard. Restaurants are failing, and even if the dishwashers were down to 75 cents an hour, customers still aren’t coming through the door. Because lots of people who are still working have taken either pay cuts or reduced hours, and the ones who haven’t are trembling in anticipation of the inevitable day when they will. And then there are those who aren’t working, who are, increasingly, the ones who used to buy those cars, those vacations and those restaurant meals. The vast majority of people, even the lucky ones who’ve still got a few bucks after the market tanked and their property values pulled a free fall aren’t dropping small fortunes on Louis Vuitton handbags anymore. Did you see the recent Times article about the out-of-work 49 year-old tech analyst ? Welcome to reality, Darien, CT. And your wives, too.
So where did the skilled-labor jobs go? Lots are still here, but are filled by imported workers. Who aren’t using their locally-earned incomes to significantly enrich their local economies. Which means that tens of thousands of Americans are on futile long-term job searches, losing their homes, their insurance, their hope for their children’s college educations and futures, not to mention their retirement income- which is a problem that’s going to bite us in the butt big-time in another 30 years or so when we all get old and can’t afford to live anymore.
And business and government are lying, lying, lying when they say that we need to increase the number of work visas because there aren’t enough skilled workers here. And those who disagree with them are labeled anti-immigrant, protectionist; don’t we remember that our own great-grandparents were immigrants? I like immigrants. I believe that everyone has the right to earn a living.
Including me and my family. By the way, this isn’t some baseless rant; welcome to my life.
Sure, the hareidim, as you’ve pointed out, are abusing the welfare system. I’ve seen it first hand, myself. Shame on them. I suspect that as social services $$ start to dry up, they’ll be in for a rude awakening. But that’s a completely different issue.
Well, that’s not what safe trade means; if he goes through with it, US industries will really be screwed as prices for raw materials and semi-finished products the US industry relies on will soar. In addition, they will have a much harder time exporting finished goods thus competing on the global market. In addition, companies will have a harder time hiring foreign specialists, e.g. German graduate engineers are in high demand over there as their training here is the world’s most demanding in that field, which will translate into a decline of innovations. With states like Dubai and Singapore catching up and offering six to seven figure salaries to German degreed engineers from the start, it might be understandable that moving West will become a second choice.
Also, I do not only have friends in NYC. KFC sells mashed potatoes and gravy in paper buckets and a large group of people apparently buys that kind of stuff. If the US compares in any way to Germany re: the correlation between nutrition and educational degrees, it’s mostly the blue collar and unskilled workers that live on such “convenient” and in relation to their nutritional value overpriced diets. Old kitchenware isn’t a problem (my great-grandmother’s cooker ran perfectly for over forty years; we gave it to charity after she passed away, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t functioning anymore), low quality kitchenware is. My parents have been married 37 years, and the same quality cookpots my mother got when they got married are still in perfect use today. If you want to save money, invest in quality.
As for the mortgages, I can see why people are upset, but then again, they’d never have been able to obtain mortgages (and never ever multiple ones) over here without securities. A non-tenured employment is not a sufficient security for banks here. Germans are more conservative when it comes to money matters, so certain expenses like rent / mortgage, health insurance etc. are top priorities. The LV totes often were bought on credit; that system of credit shopping only works to keep the economy going if there’s a constant cycle that may not be interrupted at any point. With the current and inevitable transition in industries and the resulting higher rates of unemployment (countries cannot hire foreigners just like that; even over there they need to give proof that there are no eligible US American applicants for the job) the cycle was interrupted. We’ve been going through that over here as well, but politicians were smart enough to support innovative industries (e.g. environmental technologies) and founding of businesses that work with lots of low- and unskilled workers in those areas most affected by the economic transitions.
However, safe trade areas remain just one thing, a popular slice of utopia to gain blue-collar and unskilled workers’ votes.
I have a question for anyone here who’s got a good grasp of world history: What examples are there historically of countries that had accepted very large numbers of immigrants from different cultures (as the U.S. has been doing since 1965) and did well for a long period – say more than around fifty years. By “did well,” I mean were relatively prosperous and relatively internally harmonious.
Agri,
Check out this url for a quick overview. It’s a page for HS educators, so ignore the stuff at the botom.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curr......01.x.html
*bottom
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