printThe open-border fetishist often has a job lobbying, broadcasting or litigating, and feels nothing for Americans who don’t have work, unless they are migrants. This prototypical character will dismiss the following figures from Patrick J. Buchanan’s column, “Is This Our America Anymore?”, with a correlation-is-not-causation quip:
Buried in the Oct. 30 Washington Post was a bland headline: “Report Points to Faster Recovery in Jobs for Immigrants.” [by Shankar Vedantam]
The story, however, contained social dynamite that explains the rage of Americans who are smeared as nativists and xenophobes for demanding a timeout on immigration.
In the April-May-June quarter, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs. And native-born Americans lost 1.2 million. [VDARE.com note: See Pew Confirms VDARE.COM On American Worker Displacement, By Edwin S. Rubenstein]
From July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs. Native-born Hispanics lost 133,000. Black and white U.S. construction workers lost 511,000 jobs.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, from Jan. 1, 2000, to Jan. 1, 2010, 13.1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, entered the United States, a decade in which America lost 1 million jobs.
From 2008 and 2009, the figures are startling. In 24 months, 2.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrived, as U.S. citizens were losing 8.6 million jobs.
Query: Why are we importing a million-plus workers a year when 17 million Americans can’t find work? Whose country is this? .”
I confess, however, to developing reservations about the American work force. These misgivings, some of which were voiced in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” are based on my limited, but fairly consistent, contact with what I’ve dubbed “The North American Personality.” Personally, I’m ready to outsource. Later.
UPDATE (Dec. 19): Here are the OECD’s ratings of “Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science.” The US scores statistically significantly below the OECD average on the mathematics scale. That’s all you need to know. The top scoring countries across the board are Shanghai-China, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong-China, and Singapore.
Just last week, international financier Jim Rogers told Judge Andrew Napolitano of “Freedom Watch” that he moved to Singapore because, among other reasons, the people have a wicked work ethic and they save their money. He likened the Asians of today to Americans in the 1950s. The Americans I’ve had to interact with professionally (irrespective of political persuasion) hold highly inflated opinions of their meager abilities, are slack, full of attitude, lazy, and quite rude.
Something I could not figure out: They complain about not having money, but refuse the odd job offered to them (from these quarters) as if it were beneath them.
As an engineer in the computer industry for 30 years now, I also have reservations about the American work force. Even in this tight job market, my team has had a hellish time finding anyone competent to fill an open position. Lots of users of the technology, damn few able to create it.
When hard times hit and it’s time to start laying people off, who are the folks a business is going to cut? The guy/gal who works their butts off and show up every day or the ones you can’t count on to show up and when they do they spend every moment they can on their facebook? As a result, a large part of the nearly 10% unemployed that we now have are the dregs of the workforce. Yes I realize I’m speaking in generalities here and there are good people who out there who have lost their jobs by no fault of their own but my practical experience at my job bear my theory out. Over the past year or so we’ve had times when we were looking to hire and you just can’t imagine the “fresh out of the pen”, “stoned looking”, obviously lazy folks we’ve had inquire about the openings. On a related note, the local news did a story the other night about this woman who has been unemployed for over 3 years. She was an administrative assistant and was telling the reporter “a very good one.” I’m thinking, obviously not if they cut you loose and no one else will hire you after 3 YEARS.
Dan
At Friday’s breakfast, our resident Liberal made mention of the latest “Bigot’s e-mail over the cost of illegal immigration” naturally lumping it in with legal immigration of the past- Irish, German, Polish. When, I ignored the racist comment by admitting that we Irish have our faults and we did have some negative influence on the country too; but, that the immigration problem is manifold. Like under our welfare system, many American workers can make better than minimum wage by not working, therefore creating a job for an illegal or that the US Hispanics are becoming aware that the illegal immigrants are displacing them in the workforce and beginning to speak up, he decided to move to a new subject. Since Liberal minds, like Conservatives, are set in concrete, I’m aware that no opinions were changed; but, we were able to move to better subjects over breakfast.
[You share your home with a left-liberal? Must be a close relative, or else eviction would have been an option.—IM]
Not hardly, Friday breakfast is a civic breakfast, made up of church members and other Christians in the community. Not a prayer breakfast either. Most of the time, it consists of football, basketball, and television show conversations, politics and religion are no-nos most of the time due to conflicting opinions on both. Since I am the oddball loner on all five subjects, I normally don’t participate. I just enjoy the company of others one day a week to keep from being a recluse. The remaining six days a week are spent with my wife, a fellow Libertarian. Six out of seven, ain’t bad.
[Good, good. You had me worried. You are still more social than I am.—IM]