March 17, 2002
View From Lodi, CA: Rolling Stone vs. American Workers
By
Joe Guzzardi
Last week, I worked myself up into a good lather
about “Death at the Wall,” the Rolling Stone
paean to illegal immigration written by former
Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Baum.
Now, having just read Part II,
“Hanging Sheetrock in the Promised Land,” I’m
smoldering.
I’ll start with Baum’s total abandonment of
professional journalism. Someone, somewhere taught Baum
that a good reporter asks hard questions and rejects
easy answers. No evidence of that here, though.
Baum wrote an ode to a group of Mexican itinerant
construction workers illegally in the U.S. Spouting the
same tedious theme we’ve heard
a hundred thousand times, Baum claimed these workers
are doing jobs
“Americans won’t do.” Baum never addressed what
impact the
abundant availability of cheap labor might have on
American workers.
The U.S. has nearly 20 million immigrants in the work
force. Their presence creates a complex social problem
that deserves intelligent treatment. For Baum to suggest
that these roving construction workers are just a
happy-go-lucky bunch that work hard by day then drink
beer and go to the cathouse at night is irresponsible.
The presence of illegal workers in the U.S. has
displaced and hurt thousands of Americans.
To draw a parallel, let’s assume that when Baum was
at the Wall Street Journal, he earned $75,000.
Imagine that one day, his boss came in and said, “Dan, a
bit of bad news. Someone in the U.S. illegally is
replacing you. He’ll work for $30,000 without benefits.
And he’ll work twelve or fourteen hours a day, six or
seven days a week. He’ll never complain.”
Then, just to rub salt in Baum’s wounds, the next day
he would read his boss quoted in the Journal, “We
just can’t find Americans willing to be reporters.”
[VDARE.COM NOTE: Actually,
this process is already underway. Go to
zazona.com’s
H-1B database and search for “Dow Jones”, the
WSJ’s parent company. You’ll find that Dow Jones
employs 171 H-1B visa holders, many of them reporters
and writers. See the similar case of
USA Today. Editorials denouncing immigration are
just a matter of time!]
By working for $11 an hour, a third of the going
union rate, and through their willingness to endure
conditions no American would tolerate, Vinquino, Chuy,
Alanzo, Octavio and Mario have
shut American construction workers out of jobs.
The crew has worked up and down the eastern seaboard
in Nashville, Memphis, Dayton and Atlanta. According to
Baum, English isn’t required. All the foremen are
Mexican, too.
After I read the Rolling Stone piece, I
contacted Greg, my friend at the construction workers’
website
Gangbox.
I asked Greg, a 33-year old African American and a
United Brotherhood of Carpenters cardholder, to
comment on the fate of young black men and women who
might pursue those construction jobs if they paid a
decent wage.
“Some enlist in the military,” said Greg. “The vast
majority struggle to get the few legit jobs out there
and make due with whatever they can get. As for the
rest, have you ever wondered why there are 1 million
blacks in prison?”
Continued Greg: “Many black men, denied a legit job,
are driven into low level street drug sales. And since
our war of drugs targets the bottom of the rung, they
end up in jail. The same for those caught in petty
theft.”
“We’ve really been hurt by losing the low level jobs
to the illegal aliens,” concluded Greg.
No matter how you slice it, Vinquino et al.
compete with Americans with high-school diplomas or less
in the job market. And since the illegal aliens are
willing to work for lower wages,
Americans are stuck.
Does Baum miss this obvious point or does he see
things through his cheap-labor loving Wall Street
Journal eyes?
I’ve come away with two conclusions, neither of which
Baum set out to give me.
