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It’s the Immigration, Stupid
Many Americans get very mad when they see protesters waving Mexican flags in American streets. It calls to mind the people who have been flooding into their communities, their emergency rooms, their public parks and their schools for a generation – people with broken or non-existent English who are showing up in increasing numbers mowing lawns, installing carpets or flooring, working in liquor stores or bagel bakeries or garages or a myriad of other businesses or else who are standing out huddled together by the street at 6 AM waiting to be picked up by someone for day labor.
The flying Mexican flag reminds Americans that these people are breaking the law and living in a lawless underground which shuns the police. They are people who – either through poverty or because of a deficiency in character and upbringing – possess no concept of “respect for the law;” people for whom the law is merely a punishment entity that needs to be factored into their personal cost-benefit, risk-reward analysis. They are people whose fundamental amorality with regard to society’s explicit and implicit rules allows them to obtain welfare handouts wherever possible, to apply for child tax credits for children outside the country, to use emergency rooms rather than pay for medical services, to drive without a license and drive away recklessly from accidents and to gather at and often trash public parks and spaces.
These are people who, for whatever reason, have chosen an illegal life course and who, in order to maintain it, are forced into a cascade of other illegalities. That someone living illegally in a foreign country would be unburdened by an abstract respect for the law of that country is not surprising. The disposition you would expect from them is contempt. It is not hard to believe that such people would be prone to disrespect more serious laws involving property and personal safety.
Those Americans who get angry at seeing the Mexican flag on their televisions are quite different from the people who are flying it. They are brought up with an idea that the rules have a basic logic and that they are there for the common benefit. Some may break the laws, many may cheat on the rules, but the vast majority possess an instinct that the law is supposed to be followed irrespective of how it inconveniences me right now or how likely I am to be punished for disobeying it. They wear their seatbelts and they don’t run away from their bills. They wait their place in line instinctively.
The perceptions of these angry Americans toward the flag-wavers and their brethren is predicated on the skin color and accents or languages of the newcomers. They are better able to notice the influx of illegal aliens because many of the illegal aliens are Latino and speak Spanish. The angry Americans, however, get angrier still if you suggest that the source of their disapproval of illegal aliens is racism. The case is quite the reverse. The source of Americans’ growing contempt for Hispanics – and there is no point claiming that it doesn’t exist – is the knowledge that the people they see invading their country and taking their jobs happen to be predominantly (though not exclusively) Hispanic and the majority are in fact from Mexico.
Should the elite from the GOP and their Chamber of Commerce wing and the Democratic Party and the Masters of the Universe get their way and succeed in passing their vile amnesty, you can trust that the subsequent celebratory explosion will be marked by seas of green, white, and red Mexican flags. You can also trust that no single law will more piercingly rip the social fabric and fatally deepen the racism that already exists. There are Americans who will never accept the invaders and who will never forgive their enablers.
It is probably true that the Americans who are enraged by protesters waving the Mexican flag would not list solving illegal immigration – in comparison to providing jobs and building the economy or protecting them from the threat of terrorism – as their highest priority. While, in the words of Senator Jeff Sessions, they have been “begging and pleading their government to enforce the law” for a generation, still, they have grown accustomed to the dishwashers, the hotel staff, and the gardeners and they cannot afford to go around in a state of rage – at least until the flags come out.
It also makes sense to suppose that those Americans who are most enraged by the Mexican flags come preferentially from the lower rungs of society. Not only are poorer people more immediately impacted by illegal aliens (no illegal alien has threatened, so far, to take my nanophysics theory job), but there is something subtler and more spiritual about their anger. It is this:
If you are poor, it can be a struggle to respect the rules. It can be a struggle to obey them. Hell, just getting by may be a struggle. Perhaps you haven’t seen a pay raise in a decade. Perhaps you are working longer hours in harder jobs than you used to. Or you are facing a pile of medical bills or are postponing your retirement. Or if you are younger you might be having trouble putting decent clothes on your kids without thinking about where or whether they will ever go to college. It is more than a suspicion to you that life in the lower echelons of American society is not easy and for what seems like the longest while it’s been getting harder.
And yet with all the bills and the hardship and the sweat, you are able to find that vital, holy something that causes you, when you’re not totally exhausted, to sit your kids down and tell them about the importance of obeying the rules. God bless you.
That vital something you have found has a name. It is called civilization.
I’m telling you people: literally millions of Americans who are not distinguished by their dedication to political discourse are rushing to support a rather loutish and highly imperfect presidential candidate (who will go unnamed) who started his campaign by exhibiting a profound sympathy for those who have suffered the most — practically and morally — from watching the rules get trampled. And trampled.
He has suggested that the only solution to the illegal immigration problem is for those who have come here illegally to return home. However much that may end up being a blue-smoke “touchback” – and we owe it to ourselves to make it more and to make it real – it is nevertheless, morally, the only answer.
Those people who get most angry at the Mexican flag wavers guard a wisdom that is little more than a rumor to you or me. If, in your efforts to crush the vulgarian, you manage to crush them as well, you will leave us with an empty space on the inside.
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Published in Immigration
Yes.
More than that. You ever work in a company that started using illegal or foreign labor? It starts with a few, which is not problem but soon you have more illegals than legals or foreigners then citizens. Then the illegals let you know you are not welcome and might get the crap kicked out of you. Working a low wage labor intensive job is one thing. Working one where your coworkers are actively pushing you out and letting you know that you might not make it to your car or the bus at the end of the day is another. It is not worth the danger. Especially when you know that these folk break the law every day and that law enforcement could care less about the situation. Especially when you live in an area that has declared “sanctuary” for the illegals.
Plenty of good arguments for abolishing minimum wage, but in a world where supply of labor is essentially unlimited (due to illegal immigration), I don’t think abolishing the minimum wage is necessarily helpful. After all, if you’ve ever hired migrant labor from your local 7/11 or Home Depot, you’d know they don’t work for less than $10/hour.
The Hispanics I know obey the law, are not cheap labor, and they run circles around the local population as far as actually showing up for work, working all day in all kinds of weather conditions, are not glued to their cell phones or needing to taking smoking breaks every twenty minutes. They are respectful and don’t sit at home collecting from the state. The jobs they do are available to everyone – the construction force here are paid decently.
During certain ethnic and religious holidays, I see Italian flags, Irish flags, even rainbow flags on Gay Pride day. Is it not Americans that hire foreign workers? It may be different where you are – and I understand your message. In Florida, where tourism is a main industry, like Trump said, you cannot find American workers to work for a season.
I’ll also add that our restaurants, fast food joints and cafes are loaded with Russian and Asian kids here on work visas as well. You say there is no reason why Americans can’t take low wage, manual labor jobs – so why don’t they?
Very good article!! People pouring over our southern border are not running from any threat to their lives or their freedom. This is not a matter of their survival. Mexico is a neighboring democracy, with two sea coasts, oil, beautiful climate. They just want to make more money, at best, and to collect benefits paid for by US taxpayers, at worst. Why are these considered such noble goals by the Left?
If Mexicans are so industrious, hardworking, great family people, and all the other paeans lavished on them by the Left–then WTF is wrong with Mexico?
Michael,
Trump got caught using this meme himself. Americans don’t want to wait tables at Mar a Lago for 6 months earning 4 times what they’d earn the other 6 months up north. Not to mention living in Florida for the winter.
Are you kidding??!!
Regards,
Jim
Immigration purity is what motivates the trump support. While Illegal immigration is not a net good for this country, there are a couple of more important issues this election cycle – for which their is no purity test:
1) 19 trillion dollars of debt
2) who knows how much unfunded entitlement debt
3) healthcare inflation
4) a coherent Middle East policy
How can illegal immigration be more important than the above?
Btw – I used to wear an Indian flag on my jacket, it is a symbol of pride….of course I also cry during replays of the miracle on ice too
At least a third of Trump’s support comes from people who think that illegals deserve legal status. Amnesty fears don’t explain Trump.
The reason it is the first issue is that if we don’t solve our national sovereignty we will not have a nation left to reform those important issues you raise.
Trump supports touch-back amnesty, so of course amnesty fears don’t explain Trump support.
The illegal immigrants I’ve known throughout the years were 17-30 year old males who were shipping money home to their native countries. If they had a typical minimum wage job, it was year round and in the evenings. It was basically the job that covered their fixed living expenses like rent, food, etc., which was kept to a minimum by sharing one apt among multiple workers. It also provides an income stream during the winter months where less work is available.
When the weather gets warmer, they take on additional work in the mornings . This summer seasonal work is where they make the lion’s share of what they send home because they make $12-$15 an hour, can put in 80 hours a week, and pay no taxes.
There is no shortage of this kind of work for people of any nationality who want it. The reality is, however, that most young Americans consider the summer months an extended vacation from their arduous semesters as women’s studies and interpretive dance majors. They live at home with no meaningful expenses and leech off their parent’s health insurance, cell phone bills, etc.
Our migrant workforce is, in part, a symptom of a much greater disease afflicting the young American work ethic.
I find it interesting that people who hate Mexicans….see what I did there? Yeah, you did that too. You should stop.
Yeah, so?
Whitey…
You are speculating. Trump has not elaborated how long people will have to remain in their home countries or what conditions they need to fulfil to come back. Further, the head of his National Security Advisor’s Committee is Jeff Sessions. If Sessions has any say it will not be touch-back amnesty.
A majority of GOP voters this year have supported what Mr. Stopa would call amnesty. An even bigger majority of the general electorate supports “amnesty.” This issue is a loser for Republicans.
I heard a small businessman call Bill Bennett’s show complaining that teenagers that he employs never want to work overtime while Mexicans do. I will also tell you that we have an inner city dialysis unit that employs locals as well as Indians and Phillipinos. The latter two groups are respectful, show up to work on time and never call out sick. The locals are far less reliable. What I can’t understand is with historically low labor participation rates and the drying up of low skilled labor which will get worse with automation, why are these jobs not filling up with native-born Americans? Have we lost our work ethic? Are welfare and disability benefits too generous? I am an immigration restrictionist but as you can tell I have some ambivalence on the whole issue.
We will see, John. We will see.
The solution is simple, but will never happen – “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.
As long as we have a welfare state that maintains people above bare subsistence (meaning you eat the generic catfood because the name brand costs too much) we’ll have this problem.
I’ve got solutions, but I’m a mean-spirited right wing extremist. For starters, anyone receiving cash benefits gets their butt out of bed and reports to a “work center” [can be an empty building for all I care] 8 hours a day 5 days a week instead of sitting home watching TV or whatever. I have to do that to pay taxes to support them, they can too.
It needs to be more unpleasant to “not work” than to work.
My guess is because he hasn’t thought the issue through past the yelling part.
Unfortunately, yes we will. We will see it good and hard.
I’ve actually had conversations with multiple construction company owners about this very thing over the past few weeks. If a young man walked in to just about any construction firm in NY/NJ and told them that they are genuinely interested in learning a trade and willing to accept that the money will come in 2-3 years once they know what they are doing, they’d be hired on the spot. If they worked hard, they’d be making a minimum of $50,000 annually by year 3 if not $75,000-$100,000.
They literally cannot find motivated workers.
American’s are spoiled. Shutting down employment of illegal immigrants will help Hispanic citizens more than it will help working class whites.
Trump is fundamentally just not to be trusted.
I think we’re not so far apart. I agree that able-bodied people on welfare need to start working. And I think we need to manage our immigration system better.
What we’re doing now – paying people to sit idle, then importing millions of low-skilled workers who’ll then have a right to make claims on our welfare and subsidy systems – is just madness!
I am shocked that this issue, this one issue divides the conservative movement, when we have much much bigger problems. Illegal immigration is not responsible for debt, cultural decline, or entitlement spending which will/are wrecking this country.
Yes, and you are convinced Trump is on your side, I’m convinced he is not. Trump is a life-long leftie who makes millions using illegal immigrant labor. Do you think he is going to shoot himself and his fellow billionaires in the foot once he gets in office. No way.
He is an unprincipled person running for the GOP primary. This is marketing gimmick, that’s all it is. If he gets the nomination, he is going to turn so hard to the left in the general, everyone on board that train will get whiplash.
Even if he buildsthewall, he will create some so many loopholes in his amnesty program that we will wind up with millions more people in the US because everyone that was ever here will wind up qualifying and he will say “But I built the wall, and we still have jobs Americans won’t do.”
How about because they don’t need to, because their lives are subsidized by their parents and/or by the taxpayers?
“The poor aren’t lazy, but they’re also not stupid.”
It does not make any sense to conclude that Trump is a committed lefty any more than that he is a committed conservative. Perhaps he has liberal inclinations on social issues like abortion or gay marriage.
A real lefty is someone who wants to increase taxes and spending in order to bring about government determined Utopia. If you think Trump is hiding those kinds of inclinations you give him a lot more credit than he deserves.
If you want to be cynical, it is far more reasonable to think that Trump will just be one big ball of grandiosity as President – that he won’t specifically care what gets done ideologically as long as it has his name on it and it looks like a winner. And then it is just a matter of what the people around him (read Jeff Sessions) push for.
I didn’t say he was a committed leftie, I said he was life-long leftie.
I don’t think he is a committed anything except self-promoter.
I will never accept the idea that foreign workers are superior to U.S. workers. Never.
Americans haven’t changed biologically from the people who won World War II. Same people.