August 17, 2005
Jobs Americans Won’t Do? Not Where I Live!
By Linda Thom
[Recently by Linda
Thom:
Passel’s Pattern]
Five years ago, after living in California for 30 years,
my husband and I
moved to the “other” Washington. Whidbey
Island in the Puget Sound is quite a contrast with
Southern California. And the
weather is not the only difference.
Here, on this large island, Americans do jobs
immigrants won’t do.
For example, I took my auto to the carwash last week. In
the five years I have lived on Whidbey Island, I have
never taken my car to get it washed but it was parked in
the
Vancouver, B.C., airport lot for three weeks and a
seagull visited…I really didn’t want to deal with it.
Usually, I don’t wash my car as I live on a dirt road in
a place where it rains a lot and the car is a late-model
Oldsmobile that my husband says could pass for a CIA
staff car. Judging from the looks of local cars and the
lack of carwash businesses, most other residents of
Whidbey don’t wash their cars either.
I
think there is only one auto-washing facility within 30
miles of my house and that’s where I went.
Two clean-cut, young, American men, Andrew and Jay,
hosed off the car and helped get it on track for the
machine and then they dried it when it emerged. There
was a can for tips at the exit.
Contrast this with Santa Barbara, California, where
there are probably ten to fifteen car washes and the
owners are always getting busted for hiring illegal
aliens. The workers speak Spanish and they
swarm around the car and they
all put out their hands for tips at the end.
Americans do the work on Whidbey Island and other
examples abound.
Earlier this summer, the
Whidbey News-Times
ran an article that reported that
strawberry season was coming and teenage pickers would
be showing up for work as school was over. The reporter
listed the advantages of teenagers getting jobs in the
summer. It teaches them the value of hard work, it gives
them job skills like showing up on time and it gives
them pocket money.
Later in the summer,
pick-your-own fields of blueberries, blackberries,
raspberries, loganberries appeared. Imagine that…picking
your own berries. My three-year-old grandson loved it.
He had to be reminded to breathe as he was eating
raspberries as fast as he could pick them.
In contrast, Santa Barbara County is one of the leading
producers of
strawberries in the country and the Farm Bureau
reports that
most of the workers are
illegal aliens.
In Santa Barbara County, I don’t recall ever seeing
American teenagers picking
strawberries or anything else for that matter.
How about
teenagers mowing grass? Nope, I didn’t see that
either.
I
take my car to Jiffy Lube for servicing. The workers are
young, white Americans. The men who painted my house
were
Americans and the painting contractor is a
blonde woman named Beth.
The trash collectors are Americans but they don’t come
down the one-lane, dirt road where I live so my husband
and I
haul our own trash and
recycle items to the collection center which is
staffed by women.
These workers are all American.
On Whidbey Island, Americans serve and clean the
restaurants—including the Mexican and Chinese
establishments. In Mexican restaurants in California,
the servers speak Spanish. In Santa Barbara, a large
Chinese restaurant was shut down several years ago and
the
Chinese owner jailed for
knowingly hiring illegal aliens.
When my family lived in Santa Barbara, we had a
high-maintenance yard and always had a gardener, a
U.S. citizen who came from Guatemala. When we moved
to Whidbey, we bought a house with fir trees and some
grass over the drain field. The
deer, rabbits and my husband cut the grass.
The neighbors
cut their own grass also and John, a 65-year-old
neighbor, has a yard on the garden-tour circuit and he
takes care of it by himself.
I
did hire a young man to mulch and dig holes for plants.
He had blonde hair and blue eyes and a Dutch last name.
He worked very hard but required lots of supervision as
he wasn’t the brightest light on the Island. He said he
had been
unemployed for a long time and he thanked me
profusely for the two days of work I gave him.
And I know there are other areas in the country where
Americans do their own work.
Until four years ago, my parents lived in
suburban Maryland. They paid teenage boys in the
neighborhood to
mow their grass after the doctor told my mother to
stop mowing it herself because of osteoporosis. The
next-door neighbor used his blower to clear the
snow in the winter.
Americans can and will do their
hard work when there is no one else to do it.
Moreover, mass immigration has many negative impacts on
American workers. Most know about the depressed wages
caused by an
excess supply of labor. But consider a few other
consequences of over immigration.
