Good News: American Media Waking Up To Immigration!
Here at VDARE.com, we`ve been battling immigration
propaganda since the
waning weeks of the last millennium. At times over
the last half a decade, it has seemed as if the
struggle naught availeth, but this summer the tide
of opinion is clearly flowing in the right direction.
We`ve long had the
public on our side, but the
media elite have blocked free
discussion of immigration. The ice, though, is
finally starting to crack.
For example, Republican pollster Matthew Dowd`s recent
New York Times op-ed [The
Mexican Evolution August 1 2005] claiming that
the illegal immigration problem would fix itself within
a mere 20 years because the world was going to run out
of Mexicans was a
resounding flop in the punditry marketplace.
Ironically, its sophistries were so absurd that it seems
to have
finally alerted mainstream media editors that
America faces a
demographic time bomb.
Thus, the press was primed when the liberal but honest
Pew Hispanic Center released the results of its
recent surveys of Mexicans and of Hispanics in
America.
The media response was gratifying. For example, the
Chicago Tribune splashed it as their lead story
on the front page on August 17th:
Poll: Over 40% in Mexico would live in U.S.
Pew study also finds many Hispanics born here support curbs
By Vincent J. Schodolski
"LOS ANGELES—More than
40 percent of Mexicans in a new survey would opt to
immigrate [sic] to the United States and more than 20 percent
of them would enter this country illegally given the
opportunity, a study released Tuesday disclosed."
There are about 106 million people in Mexico, so you can
do the math. (Of course,
doing the math would put you
far ahead of 90% of the pundits.)
The Mexican government recently calculated that
20.64 million Mexicans now live in the United
States. So, opening the borders, as the
Wall Street Journal has
long advocated, would more than triple that
population.
Pew also asked Mexicans if they would be inclined to go
to work legally in the U.S. in a
temporary worker program, and 53% of the 2400
surveyed said "Yes." That translates to 56
million people (assuming they bring their
underage dependents, which the Bush plan would
allow).
Unfortunately, Pew didn`t ask how many would stay on
illegally in America after their time ran out. But
if 21% of all Mexicans are inclined to try to sneak into
the U.S. that would seem to suggest a minimum number who
would try to stay on illegally after their allotted
years were up: about 22 million.
So, a temporary worker program wouldn`t eliminate
illegal aliens, as its supporters like
Tamar Jacoby claim, even in their fraudulent and
wholly nominal sense of documenting-the-undocumented.
The mainstream media also seem stunned by the separate
Pew survey of American-resident Hispanics, which
documented once again what we`ve been saying for years:
that favoring easier immigration is not the royal road
to the heart of American-born Hispanics (i.e., Hispanics
who vote).
The
Tribune also reported:
"Another poll showed
sharp differences of opinion between Hispanic residents
of the U.S. who were born elsewhere and Hispanics born
in the United States. The former group was inclined to
view immigrants favorably and to support the issuance of
driver`s licenses to people in the country illegally.
The latter group was supportive of immigrants, but by a
far smaller margin. This group also opposed issuing
licenses to undocumented residents… `Just because
someone is Hispanic does not mean you are in favor of
immigrants,` [Roberto Suro of the Pew Hispanic Center]
said."
As we`ve long explained, white politicians get a
distorted picture of what Latino voters actually want
because the
Hispanics they deal with on a daily basis—the
campaign consultants,
ethnic activists,
Hispanic media mouthpieces, and fellow
politicians—all yearn to get more warm brown bodies into
the United States. The more Latinos who show up here,
the more
money and power the
Hispanic identity politics elite get.
But if you`re an American-born guy fixing cars for a
living in
East LA, the arrival of another million would-be car
mechanics from south of the border just hurts your wages
and overwhelms your kids` public schools. (The same
probably applies to long established and naturalized
immigrants.)
Maybe next, the press can relearn the
Law of Supply and Demand.
The funny thing is that the most famous
Hispanic-American of the 20th Century, United Farm
Worker labor leader Cesar Chavez, a man so revered that
his birthday is an
official state holiday in California (like
Martin Luther King`s and
Jesus Christ`s), understood the Law of Supply and
Demand much better than most pundits these days.
And that`s why he
hated illegal immigration.
He called his first strike forty years ago, the year
after the
Bracero guest worker program was ended by LBJ. This
lowered the supply of farm workers in the U.S., making
it easier to win wage increases. The growers would fight
back by sneaking busloads of Mexicans across the border
to use as strikebreakers. In response, Chavez, who was a
third generation American citizen,
volunteered his UFW staffers to the INS as unpaid
border guards, just like the
Minutemen.
As Ruben Navarrette Jr. reported in the Arizona
Republic: (August
31, 1997)
"Cesar Chavez, a labor
leader intent on protecting union membership, was as
effective a surrogate for the INS as ever existed.
Indeed, Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union he
headed routinely reported, to the INS, for deportation,
suspected illegal immigrants who served as
strikebreakers or refused to unionize."
At first, Chavez`s strikes succeeded, driving up the
wages of stoop laborers to decent levels. Then, his
achievements were overwhelmed by the endless waves of
illegal immigrants.
An article by Marc Cooper in the August 12th LA
Weekly called
Sour Grapes| California`s farm workers` endless struggle
40 years later shows vividly the impact of
an unlimited supply of illegal aliens upon California
farm workers. Cooper writes:
"There`s a prevailing
popular assumption that superexploitation of the state`s
farm workers is a closed chapter in some deep, dark
past… But exactly 40 years after Chavez`s UFW exploded
into the national consciousness by leading the great
1965 Delano grape workers` strike and forced America
to recognize the
plight of those who put our food on the table,
nothing could be further from the truth. The golden
years of California farm workers lasted barely a decade
and then sharply began to fade… Wages among California`s
700,000 farm workers, 96 percent of whom are
Mexican or Central American, more than half of whom
are
undocumented, are at best stagnant, and by most
reckonings are in decline.
"With almost all
workers stuck at the minimum wage of $6.75 an hour, it`s
rare to find a farm worker whose annual income breaks
$10,000 a year.`Twenty-five years ago, a worker made 12,
13, 14 cents for a bin of oranges,` says economist Rick
Mines, until recently research director at the
Davis-based California Institute for Rural Studies.
`Today that same bin pays maybe 15 or 16 cents—in spite
of 250 percent inflation.` Virtually no workers have
health insurance or paid vacations. The cyclical nature
of the crops throws most out of work for two or more
months per year."
Why do California growers constantly need to recruit
more illegal aliens from south of the border? They
aren`t putting more land under cultivation. In fact,
more of the Central Valley is paved over each year to
accommodate the booming population.
The answer is twofold. Because wages are so low, there`s
little need to
mechanize farm work in California. And because the
state`s farm work jobs are so poorly paid for the brutal
conditions (three workers died of heat stroke this
summer), nobody makes a career out of it if they can.
So, the growers constantly suck in to this country more
(and ever
less educated) illegal aliens. Cooper notes:
"In a pattern that one
academic calls “ethnic
replacement,” succeeding waves of ever poorer, more
marginal Mexicans, many of them from
indigenous communities where Spanish is a foreign
language, increasingly constitute the field labor force.
The downward-spiraling Mexican economy feverishly churns
those waves to the degree that, at any moment, as many
as 20 percent of California`s agricultural workers have
been in the U.S. for less than a year."
The neocon
open border cheerleaders contend that these
newcomers will "assimilate"
into American culture. Real Soon Now. Yet, these Mixtec-speaking
Indians who
increasingly make up California`s farm workers
haven`t even assimilated into Hispanic culture in
the 484 years since the
Spaniards conquered Mexico.
The good news is that the American media are starting to
wake up. The bad news is that the immigration crisis
just keeps getting worse.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


