I actually work in a meatpacking plant in my hometown for $15/hr. I was laid off from a good paying job and took what I could find to pay my mortgage. I work with many immigrants, mostly from Guatemala, and find them to be lovely people. They own homes, play soccer at the park, and raise their families here with dignity. We didn’t have a single Hispanic student in my high school 20 years ago. Minority enrollment is now approximately 10%. We have around 3,000 immigrants in a town of 12,000. Most issues seem to stem from a language barrier and the need for translators and ESL teachers.
When I see a family celebrating a confirmation or wedding, fixing up a house or playing at the park on a Sunday afternoon, it restores my faith in America. This is what is good about our country.
But I sometimes think about what would happen to my own paycheck if we didn’t have this influx of labor. Would I have to work 9-10 hour days 6-7 days a week to pay the bills? ICE raided the meatpacking plant in 2018 and arrested 150 workers. I was living in another state and remember being appalled. But from a purely economic standpoint and from the perspective of a working class person, that ICE raid did what our union couldn’t do. It raised wages at least 3-5 dollars an hour.
One interesting incentive my employer offers is a referral program for new employees. If you refer someone to work at the plant, you both get $100/week for an entire year. You can refer as many people as you’d like. HR told me when I was hired that a few people get an extra $800/week through referrals. Perhaps that explains some of the luxury cars in the employee parking lot…
Immigration is a complicated issue. A lot of Trump voters from local churches stepped up when the raid happened and looked after children while their parents were in custody. I encounter Trump voters laughing and joking with immigrants every day while also sharing memes about Haitians eating cats. I also know democrats in town who have never had a single interaction with an immigrant in our community.
My own thoughts on immigration are constantly evolving. Thanks for sharing this piece!
"But from a purely economic standpoint and from the perspective of a working class person, that ICE raid did what our union couldn’t do. It raised wages at least 3-5 dollars an hour."
Just like any econ 101 textbook would predict. The level of mental gymnastics people will go through to pretend supply and demand doesn't apply to labor is absolutely unbelievable.
Right, except you're forgetting the demand part of the equation. Those people who are the supply of labor also create demand for goods and services that is pretty much equal to the earnings of their labor since their probably not making enough to invest in Bitcoin or the stock market. That goods and services demand in turn creates demand for people to fill those jobs. This isn't mental gymnastics - it's a realistic description of the world we actually live in.
India has the biggest population in the world and yet they aren’t producing enough jobs which is why their people are trying to escape India. So what happened to the “demand” side mister?
If you are saying that this immigration is going to increase GDP then you will get no argument from me. It is the relative market power of business owners vs laborers, and as a result the distribution of that GDP, that will change. Why do you think that there is universal support for mass immigration among business owners all across the political spectrum?
To me the issue seems simple. We need the workers, and the need in things like care for the elderly will overwhelm our system for everyone but the very rich unless things change. Business owners in AZ shot down recent proposed state legislation requiring every business to use E-Verify. E-Verify is apparently not too difficult to work around in any case. We also need Payroll tax revenue to support SS and Medicare. So let employers hire who and how they want, but charge the employees (not employers) who don't provide full documentation Payroll taxes that are ca. 20-35% of wages. The US government can directly control what amounts to a tax on immigrant labor, the revenues being only paid to fully legal immigrants through SS and Medicare.
What you’re suggesting is a ponzi scheme. Social security is still going bankrupt despite all the immigrants we have taken in who will also try to cash on social security when they retire. It’s a death spiral.
The ignorant idea that it is a Ponzi scheme can only be expressed by someone who has zero understanding of what a Ponzi scheme is and zero understanding of retirement funding. All retirement is paid for by the current production of those currently in the workforce. When I own stocks in companies that fail to produce I lose retirement savings. Because I can't accurately predict which investments will continue to have productive workers in the future I have to save more (and spend less) than in a collective system of retirement savings like Social Security. The ballpark minimum number for all of my grad school and post-doc friends to retire today is $2.5 million in net worth with at least $1 million in retirement accounts (they can all do the math). Unfortunately many people at 50 or 60 or 70 don't have $2.5 million saved as required by our mostly individual privatization of retirement support.
This is completely correct. The supposed surplus(which is pretty controversial and Borjas discusses a lot) that illegal immigrants add to the tax coffers is 100% predicated on them not withdrawing benefits later on. If they get path to citizenship or whatever other process to get health and end of life entitlements, they quickly become huge net takers.
They are not “cashing in” unless they get a Social Security number and pay into the system because they get a job. And if we get rid of the “donut hole” and not cap SS tax for highest earners, the system will not go bankrupt.
It’s definitely mental gymnastics because those third world immigrants are still destroying the wages of the jobs Americans were doing, while creating demand for things by their own immigrant people. A Mexican buys from a Mexican. He ain’t creating a job for a local American.
"and find them to be lovely people. They own homes, play soccer at the park, and raise their families here with dignity."
No, they are short, ugly, unintelligent and will NEVER amount to more than low-skilled labor. Their children will likely be worse as they take on the worst traits of hip-hop America and learn how easy it is to game the system. There is nothing good about low-skilled immigrants. Nothing.
Really don’t want to hear you complain about grocery prices then. Who do you think picks your vegetables? Slaughters the chickens you eat at Raising Canes?
The first hurdle is convincing the people in these communities that it is in their interests. I spend a lot of time in rural areas of very blue states like Vermont and New York and they are all very much Trump anti-immigrant folks. They seem to blame immigration that they see on their TV’s but the smart kids leave (often women) and the ones who stay behind often get involved with substance problems and that is where their crime comes from.
It’s not necessarily in their best interests. That’s the problem. In some cases there are genuine conflict of interest. Springfield is struggling to provide services and housing to new residents, and has been seeking federal aid. That doesn’t in any way justify racism and discrimination or cat hoaxes, but it is important to understand that existing residents may have useful insights into their own best interests that might include things like housing affordability and property taxes.
What I stated is the truth. The difficulties and opportunities are discussed in detail in this NYT article “How an Ohio Town Landed in the Middle of the Immigration Debate”
“But the speed and volume of arrivals have put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals. The community health clinic saw a 13-fold increase in Haitian patients between 2021 and 2023, from 115 to 1,500, overwhelming its staff and budget.”
“At the Rocking Horse Community Health Center, a federally subsidized clinic that does not turn away anyone, a surge in Haitians has caused a consultation that normally took 15 minutes to take as long as 45 minutes because of the language barrier.
“We lost productivity. We had a huge burnout of staff,” said Yamini Teegala, the chief executive officer.
Six Haitian Creole speakers were hired and trained to assist newcomers. But expenditures on translation services jumped to an estimated $436,000 this year from $43,000 in 2020, she said.
“This is not sustainable,” Dr. Teegala said, adding that her priority was not to save money but to ensure quality care.
On Aug. 14, the first day of school, the Springfield City School District’s registration department was crammed with immigrant families waiting to enroll children, so many that some had to queue up in the hallway.
Nearly 350 new students registered for elementary and middle school the first week of classes, most of them children of immigrants.”
“But she expressed concern about the 2025-26 academic year. “It’s going to get very tight,” she said.
“Springfield, like many towns, is also struggling with a dearth of affordable housing for low-income families, and the Haitian influx has not helped.”
And so on. Read the article. It’s very good.
That doesn’t mean immigration is bad. It means it has expenses and issues at the local level that have to be factored in and understood.
If the people who live in communities affected by increased immigration stopped electing Republican President and congressional representatives who have relentlessly sought to dramatically reduce, if not eliminate entirely, federal funding for health care, education, affordable housing, and support services from new immigrants, these "conflicts" could rather easily be defused.
Of course, this ain't gonna happen: Republicans win elections by exploiting xenophobia and racism, not by solving problems that help nurture and sustain xenophobia and racism.
It's little wonder that the Springfield clinic -- and many others like it across the country -- are struggling. For Republicans, this is a feature, not a bug.
Yes. We need the immigrants who are happy to work in a meatpacking plant for $14/hour, who also have no health care or educational needs. Where are such unicorns to be found?
“But the speed and volume of arrivals have put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals." This is the crux of the problem. SPEED and VOLUME. How can a community of 60,000 people with limited resources absorb 20,000 newcomers? Non-English speaking immigrants from a very different culture exacerbates the problems. Residents have a right to voice their concerns. Who is listening? And ultimately, who is responsible for the mass influx into the country?
HIPAA is another reason healthcare is inefficient and expensive, and why doctors and pharmacists can’t be reached except by phone or fax, no email or texting. Privacy was important when the law was enacted because insurers could drop you for preexisting conditions, which is no longer allowed.
ChatGPT or another human or AI based translation service doesn’t know who who are, and what would they do with the contents of your discussion with the doctor? Do you also worry that the nurse might be listening in, or the doctor herself might sell the info about you to some Russian hackers?
For less than half what the clinic paid in translation services, they could have hired one of the Haitians as a full time translator, with everyone fleeing Haiti for Springfield there are probably some bilingual healthcare workers in the group.
The residents in these communities are capable of determining "what is in their interests" - they are, after all, the people living there and dealing with the influx of "newcomers." Do you welcome others telling (or convincing) you what is or is not in your interest? Perhaps the "Trump anti-immigrant folks" understand the many benefits of small-town rural life and simply want to maintain their way of life. If asked, I'm guessing that most small-town residents support legal immigration and immigrants who can contribute to the local economy and community. A huge flood of unskilled workers who cannot speak English immediately strains local resources, long before they can be expected to make positive contributions to the community.
If it's in their interests, then why do the towns receiving large numbers of immigrants need so much federal assistance? Can't we find immigrants who can land on their feet and not have to spend months or years on public aid?
It seems like a short term vs long term issue - a bunch of families with children move into an area, and suddenly you need to hire more teachers and possibly even build more school buildings, etc., even if in the longer term the new residents open businesses and start paying enough in taxes to cover the cost of municipal services to a larger population.
So because the supply of jobs as engineers,or neurosurgeons,or tax accountants,or specialist doctors,all of which these migrants are qualified to do having studied in their country of origin and holding diplomas,degrees and such like,because these jobs just don't exist in Smallsville in the middle of Kansas they open an eatery instead. They love their native cuisine and they know their new neighbours (who are too stupid,fat and lazy to cook their own meals) will love it too. Maybe a food writer does a piece about them in a national or even international magazine and by the second generation being a food provider is this families raison d'etre. This is how it happens. In the UK our new political administration is making noises about clearing "fast food junk food " shops from our High Sts to protect children from toxic food. It's always "to protect children. Either they have NOT joined up the dots or they are being deliberately racist. It's not going to happen though,local councils need the business taxes these folks pay.
In cities like NYC, the issue has been the ones who arrive who are unable to work for legal reasons. THEN you do have an assistance problem, because you are not allowing them to work and earn for themselves. (Bloomberg had a nice editorial about this problem.)
i spent quite a bit of time in binghamton, new york over the years. living there and seeing it die out, grocery stores and restaurants closing, a downtown that looks move vibrant in 80 year old pictures than it does now, decaying mansions, wide cracking up streets and all the rest leads to this persistent feeling of background depression and hopelessness that is very hard to shake and worse that spending time in objectively poorer places, or even places going through acute economic distress (a small town in new mexico, athens greece during the euro crisis). if something came along that pushed the town back from that depressing state of affairs, i would not want to go back.
You’re describing hundreds of Texas towns. The dead main streets. The exceptions offer gifts or Mexican food or coffee for those passing through, for those coming to the courthouse if a county seat, or for people in the surrounding rural area. We have plenty of immigrants. It is rare in many or even most places to hear English in a grocery store (or a TJMaxx!).
But immigrants want to live in the big cities. Much like the homeless. There are no homeless people in towns of 2000 people.
I’m baffled by the mysterious step 2 to step 3: revitalized towns with non/service jobs.
Well, the reality is that the smartest individuals in any population will statistically always be men. And flooding communities with low-IQ, violent-minded immigrants, pushed by NGOs and government welfare programs, tears apart the social fabric and erodes the existing culture. But I wouldn’t expect you to figure that out on your own.
Agree that immigration is a solution, but it misses another part of the problem.
We somehow need to restablish both the literal and perceived dignity of hard work and labor if we're going to create a sustainable domestic labor pool for what Mike Rowe calls "dirty work."
That's not easy to do. I had friends turn down lucrative longshoremen jobs just because they couldn't see themselves working in the port (instead of making less money working in corporate sales). Not an uncommon phenomenon.
"Dignity of work" is kinda BS. We shouldn't look down on people with "dirty jobs," but you aren't going to convince people that spending the rest of your life wrist-deep in chicken guts is a good life.
Well, maybe if the dignity wasn’t just rhetoric, and instead included actual good pay and benefits. Generations before us got paid a lot better regardless of their “skill” or education.
$50 trillion in normal economic gains were redistributed from the bottom 90% of workers to the top 10% since the mid 1970s. A lot of dignity got stripped away with it.
You're just not going to get good pay from a job like that, at least not without causing all sorts of problems. Even if you do, its a shitty job that causes all sorts of health problems.
You shouldn't look down on someone for having this sort of job, but you also shouldn't pretend it's a good job that people who have other options would do.
But more and more jobs in America are slipping into the class of jobs that don't pay enough for the demands expected, especially when compared with the cost increases of things like housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education.
The idea that most people have so many "other options" is increasingly less true. There needs to be a bottom threshold on wages, where necessary jobs pay people enough to actually thrive in America. Not just hang on by their fingernails while private equity continues to eek away at wage growth on one side of the equation, and jack up prices to make record profits on the other side. The math of the situation is becoming untenable.
So, what are we going to do about it as a country? Just give in and accept that the end result if we continue down this path is basically some version of company stores or direct serfdom? Or perhaps, defend the idea via policy changes, that working people should make enough off the fruits of their labor (especially working for companies making billions a year *in profit*) to afford a decent living.
The original intent of the minimum wage was to be a *thriving wage* you could raise a family on, not just what you would need to not starve to death if everything else in life went fine & you suffered no extra hardships.
Why shouldn't you get good pay for doing a job well done, even if it's as a janitor? Instead of fair pay raises we got decades of billions of dollars in STOCK BUYBACKS by corporations. Stock buybacks do basically nothing except siphon value out of a company for the benefit of the people who already own 85%+ of everything in this country already.
yeah, I'm in the top 10% so not looking to rock the boat, but I do think there can be honest policy conversations about how to address working class challenges and the problems of some of these declining areas.
We have made the pie bigger but not redistributed it to impacted people & locations, so now they are advocating for their interests in ways that will make the pie smaller. Tough choices ahead.
I also think we might suffer from a problem of perspective in this country, where many people like you and I who are in the top 10% don't feel that well off, but we're still way better off than that person working 40 hours a week for $35,000 a year or less.
And that can make people mistakenly think that when we're talking about "taxing the rich" we might be talking about them, when what we're actually talking about is people making $400,000+ a year, and especially people making MILLIONS+ a year.
Like what is the *practical benefit* to society to have 3 people making more money every year than the bottom HALF of working Americans? Particularly when they are also going to be allowed to use schemes to pay a lower tax rate percentage than those same working people.
If that money was in the system to pay people to work at your rural grocery store, or pick up your trash, etc... those people would still have disposable income to use on other services & stores that make communities more vibrant. When the money just gets siphoned out of the community entirely, there's nothing left to sustain economic activity on the granular level.
If you explained this scenario to any third grader, they would surely think you were joking.
There's a decent argument for helping people who can't earn enough, but by mucking with wages isn't the way to do it, as it makes the market less efficient. Just tax people and redistribute money to people who need it though either an EITC or UBI.
Why shouldn’t you get good pay for a job well done, even as a janitor? You may be arguing for merit based compensation, where a janitor who cleans well gets more pay than one who just smears dirty around with a filthy mop, but I think you instead mean every job should come with high pay and benefits. That latter case won’t work, since compensation is just a price signal like any other and if a company or city needs people to clean buildings, then they will offer the job to whoever can do it at the lowest pay that person is willing to accept.
If you force the employer to pay above that clearing price, the city or company needs more money to do that (from higher taxes or goods prices) and the lowest skilled (perhaps in language) will not end up with a job since the higher pay will attract more applicants.
"but I think you instead mean every job should come with high pay and benefits."
Good attempt at a strawman there. How about we simply start with giving everyone in the bottom 90% of workers the extra $1144 a month that was taken from them over the last 45 years, plus maybe some interest?
And it really says something to me that you think someone making a decent wage is going to incentivize people to fuck off and be lazy, when the social science really seems to be leaning strongly towards the revelation that decent pay *increases* job performance in most people, at least up until the point where they are no longer financially insecure. But giving financial rewards past a certain point actually clouds people's judgement and ability to creatively problem solve. So in effect, the current wage structure in America largely both fails to pay people enough to release them from the systemic stress & cognitive overhead of living on the verge financially, AND pours excessive compensation into the buckets of people who then underperform or make bad decisions, because the stress of maintaining the metrics attached to that big wage, narrows their ability to see the bigger picture/long term implications of complicated decisions. If you can jump overboard with your golden parachute in the next three years, why do you care if the company has taken on a debt load that will probably force it into bankruptcy in 5 to 10 years?
My most ardently evangelical/bleeding heart liberal friend loves her 99 cent/lb. chicken. I could share with her the story of the Central American woman whose SSN the poultry producer “discovered” was fraudulent some 15 years after she had begun working there, coincidentally the day after she led a protest seeking - merely - better gloves so workers wouldn’t get so many staph infections … but my friend would think - because Econ blogs like this one have disseminated the idea - that better practices were Marxist somehow, were about the environment, somehow, which is “against people” and people are all that matter to her, being Christian- ultimately which is to say, leads her to conflate anti-materialism in the old sense with being “anti-people”. That’s the problem with constant human rights talk - eventually 99cent/lb. chicken becomes a human right.
The absolute number of Americans under the age of 18 has been declining for almost 20 years, and this trend shows no sign of reversing. The Total Fertility Rate is 1.5-1.6; 2.1 is what maintains a stable population long-term. A smaller cohort of young people aging into adulthood means an even smaller cohort of kids from them, etc. Even if more native-born Americans go into "dirty work" - good luck with that, blaming and shaming doesn't work - there won't be enough of them.
All about the TFRs. I don't know why people don't realize the competition for the remainder of this century (and beyond) is going to center on a country's ability to outcompete other countries for immigrants to bolster their failing domestic populations. Countries who get a leg up on easing assimilation (of the natives to the newcomers, NOT the other way around) will be successful and live to see another century. Others will not.
If I’m reading you right… since when is it the duty of the folks living in a small town to “assimilate” to a bunch of new arrivals who can’t speak English?
I understand the argument that nations which assimilate immigrants at a faster pace have a competitive advantage. But the duty is for the immigrant to assimilate into the host society, not the other way around.
When a town of 10,000 locals gets an influx of 3,000 immigrants in the span of two years, you haven’t really assimilated anyone—you’ve just imported a new town with its own distinct language and culture into the old one. The locals have a right to fume about such an intense demographic change.
Ah and there you have what no one really wants to tackle. Assimilation. What does it look like? How do we foster it? Yes, as Noah mentions, influxes have happened before and will undoubtedly happen again, but can we not get better at preparing and facilitating the transition? It seems we have learned nothing.
You could ask a Detroiter who saw the city go from 90% white (very few social problems) to 90% black (very few social problems). It's the part in the middle that's, um, problemmatic.
It’s not Teddy. Although President Teddy seemed interesting. I was reading some of your other posts to see if you get other things wrong.
Detroit very few social problems. Wow. Do you live there? That sounds insane to me. You could live there I know houses in the City are inexpensive. You could live close to the stadiums and walk to Lions and Tigers games. Godspeed Richard.
I'm not talking about you or me living there today and attempting to walk to Comerica Park or Ford Field. I'm talking about the typical Detroit resident of today doing so. They in the present have as little to fear as you or I would have in the past. Similarly, most Detroiters are employed, going to school, growing families (in their fashion), and getting on with the business of life. So, what's changed really?
Most of the immigrants in Springfield are working in manufacturing, not meat processing.
Until comparatively recently, meat processing was a well paid union job. That has largely been lost with the lack of enforcement of anti trust against major meat processors. Historically people were paid well enough to be willing to do it.
There are probably unionized well-payed butchers at quaint shops that will gladly sell you meat at double the price of meat from the meat packing cartel that you hate, so you’re absolutely free to buy it instead.
Are the meat-packers practicing slavery, since you imply the pay is too low for anyone to willingly do the job?
The discussion is about meat processing, not butchers. There is a local food movement to smaller independent slaughterhouses, which in general are more humane and are able to serve local farmers. Large consolidated slaughterhouses generally only process meat from major corporations.
The meat from smaller local facilities is available locally to me at a competitive price. It is not double in price, what a silly idea.
The meat industry has become extremely consolidated in the US, which has put significant pressure on independent farmers and the wages of meat processing workers. The article you are commenting on talked about the difficulty of finding willing workers, which is generally a sign that wages are too low.
What does a butcher do if not meat processing? They don’t just slice ham or dole out ground beef, a butcher takes a dead animal and safely separates out the edible portions, I.e. meat processing. The lower skilled counterparts at meat packers do a single part of that job repeatedly at an assembly line.
Mass migration makes it economically impossible for many to have kids, as wages are slashed and any sense of community and belonging is ripped apart. The foundation people rely on to raise families is being systematically undermined
The fact that fertility rates are decreasing around the world, and especially in places like China, South Korea, and Japan, should indicate that this poster is approaching this topic with a certain agenda in mind.
What’s your hypothesis on that? I live in Asia and know why. I wonder if you do? Does it have to be an agenda? Here’s a hint, low fertility is complex and multivariate. Why has Korea and Japan resisted importing the next generation?
This! If I try to steelman the Trumper argument, look where Noah writes: "Americans — especially younger Americans — started to move away from these towns... Young people with even a modicum of talent, ambition, and wanderlust packed up and moved to New York City, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, etc."
If you accept that, all the immigration logic falls into place. But people in those towns want to fight this premise, and it's worth pondering whether any smart policies could help them. Because lacking smart policies, they are willing to try dumb policies.
For the past 40 years, it’s been increasingly difficult to stay in smaller cities and towns even if you very much want to. Reduced enforcement of monopoly laws resulted in the absorption of thousands of smaller businesses and those white collar jobs moving to larger cities. Globalization resulted in a very significant movement of factories out of the country, eliminating many blue collar jobs and the entire ecosystem of businesses that supported those workers in their communities.
What we saw with the pandemic and increase in remote work is that many people, given a choice, actually don’t prefer larger metro areas.
People in those towns want to fight that premise because it's bullshit and asinine to suggest that "everyone with a modicum of talent or ambition packed up and left."
I know it's hard to believe, but there are still people in this world who value family and community more than money. That are capable of "making it big" but that choose to earn less money and live in a certain community because it's what they believe is best for their families.
And I say that as someone who did leave my hometown, not to go work in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, but to run an NGO in a developing country. All 4 of my siblings have college degrees, all are doing quite well for their families, all have travelled extensively (domestically and internationally) and most importantly all are happy where they're at.
Now that my wife and I have started a family, we plan to move back to my hometown, because we value family and want our children to grow up near their grandparents and cousins. Our biggest fear is not being able to find a job (I'm getting job offers already). Our biggest fear is not being able to find a house, as most houses sell within a couple days of being listed.
But yeah, everyone with a modicum of talent leaves....
For reference: my hometown is 1300 people.
I can count on one hand the number of non-white classmates I had in HS, although that's certainly not true anymore as there has been a healthy amount of immigrants move in.
I mean, how would you ever do that besides government coercion to force people to work specific jobs? Government policy is usually pretty terrible at creating cultural change, and even when it succeeds, it isn’t pretty - that was the Cultural Revolution in China after all.
Let me throw out ideas, knowing they are probably bad. But just to get the ball rolling:
- Large subsidies to small municipal governments
- some kind of "rural opportunity zone" program that incentivizes more businesses to move a bit further from the big cities.
- massive top tax rates, so there's really no point in earning very high salaries.
- massive income transfers to low incomes, because at some point the low cost of living in rural areas does become appealing
I mean listen, if told someone they could be a school janitor in a small town, have a fine house & car, support their family, and have the summers off to go fishing down at the lake - that's not a bad deal! There are still plenty of Americans who would take that deal.
I mean, I kind of thought remote work might get more people back to the countryside. I'm from the rural midwest, and it crossed my mind that maybe I could go back, get a cheap house, and telecommute... Enough people do that and it helps the local business, stems the out-migration of young people. Maybe?
Young people aren't going to move somewhere devoid of amenities and entertainment, and educated professionals with kids aren't going to move to a place with terrible schools, no matter how cheap.
To add - not sure what Gen you are (I'm 32) but when I was growing up we got a lot of this messaging from school that going to college was the definition of success. And everyone was given that same message, even if you weren't actually a good fit for college. I think this one-size-fits-all messaging was pretty detrimental because it made it so kids that would have been successful in labor had a negative perception of it.
I also grew up in a longshoremen town, San Pedro (Port of Los Angeles). Whole family is ILWU.
None of my friends growing up wanted to work at the Port. They had a completely unjustifiable aversion to "labor." And they weren't college-bound either. Hard to explain where that antipathy comes, especially when it goes against basic economic interest, but it definitely exists.
You're right but it's hard. One part of "the dignity of hard work" is that hard physical labor (without some sort of scarce "skill" incorporated) is worth a lot less in the market than it used to be. Part of this is the ongoing automation of labor. (Consider the containerization of shipping.) (Contemplate that in elementary physics, when they taught us the basics of how steam engines operate, the mechanical energy output is called "work".) (OTOH, women are no longer as disadvantaged in the job market.) Part is that several hundred million Chinese are now competing to do the hard physical labor that is done is manufacturing plants. Another part is purely cultural, there's more status in "white-collar" work; for a few decades skilled building trades were having a hard time attracting people even though they were paying quite well. But that part seems to be reversing; people have discovered that getting a college degree isn't worth the work/time/money unless the college is good and you've got interest/a head for it. In the long run, Americans generally come around to valuing jobs largely on how well they pay. And it seems that we're coming back to that. For instance, a lot of low-grade colleges are going out of business and the building trades are reported getting more recruits.
"We somehow need to restablish both the literal and perceived dignity of hard work and labor"
Hard work is it's own dignity. There are millions of unemployed Americans who don't work because THEY DON'T HAVE TO. The social welfare system makes life easy-peasy. What we need to have is a massive cut-off of welfare for able bodied people. They will suddenly be looking for jobs. The problem is that naive middle class white people can't understand how happy many people, of all races, are to simply DO NOTHING all day and live of the massive influx of subsidies.
But the unionized longshoremen need those jobs! Instead the port containers should be unloaded by teams of muscular workers, and dry goods with shovels, or better yet spoons.
This is a good and well reasoned article. But I think it's worth looking closely at what the message is culturally to the people who have chosen to stay in their declining small towns.
To me it sounds like the message is this: The way of life you're trying to protect is over. You need to accept that, and your three options are: 1. Move to the City. 2. Stay in your town as it delapidates and is overrun by 'drug people'. 3. Stay in your town and accept the cultural change as it is overrun by foreigners who don't speak your language. Option 3 is the least bad option. You won't like it at first, but eventually you will come to accept it.
That may be an honest assessment, but I think that is a hard sell politically. What's an even harder sell is the leftist position that "if you don't like option 3 it's because you're a racist and a bad person, besides the way of life you're trying to protect is based in white supremacy and colonialism so we should celebrate and accelerate its decline". That may not be the stated position of mainstream democrats, but it's associated (I think not entirely unfairly) with the democratic coalition.
Trump on the other hand is saying: "Your way of life is under threat, but I understand that it is important and valuable and I will fight to protect it" (ok he actually says a lot of batshit things about eating pets, but I think this is his underlying appeal).
Trump's promises may be impossible to fulfill. His message may be delusional, or a cynical grift (or both). But I think that without an alternative message which acknowledges that something culturally valuable is being lost (even if change may be necessary and long term positive) it will be impossible to win people over from the Trumpist camp.
What is stopping the young people who stay in these dying towns from opening the shops and restaurants to revitalize it before the immigrants come in and do it? And what’s so bad if immigrants speak their old language as they open businesses, I’m sure they can still operate the cash register.
One of my best friends comes from an arguably dying small city of around 30k. He and I are both scientists.
His sisters are back there still, all younger than him (he and I are mid-20s). 2/4 of them have a kid, one of whom has a trailer trash name. The youngest one is smart and trying to follow her older brother out.
That’s what the locals that stay into adulthood are doing: drinking, fighting and fucking.
Because 'the young people ' are the potential market to sell to - if they knew how to shop and cook.frugaly or even not frugally there would be no one to sell your ethnic Turkey Twizzlers,Fish Balls,and Chicken Gungies TO. As no one is offering you employment as a nuclear research assistant,a job you are educated and qualified to do,your other survival option is to open an eatery of some kind. It can be based on your national ethnic cuisine but tweaked to appeal to Western tastes and if you can establish a "story" that journalists can pick up on you can "sell the story along with the food".
We watched Trump and Vance accuse Haitians of being savages, demonizing them and calling them pet eaters. This stems ONLY from a place of racism. Period.
Stories like this one are entering the disinformation space and being amplified for the purpose of getting people to be suspicious of non whites and immigrants.
Trump's racism in his blathering lies about immigration is so blatant. The racism of that man has no boundaries. Deranged and dangerous!
"Haitians eating pets" is Trump's new caravan BS story.
How about wearing this "Keep the immigrants, deport the racists" tee in front of racists and bigots? 👇
No, it's their shitty genetics. The Bell Curve and all that, get over it.
You aren't going to "save" small rural towns with no economic base. That's fine. People move on to opportunity. If anything keeping immigration low so they don't drive up the cost of real estate and taxes in the cities makes this easier.
Importing a bunch of net tax recipient immigrants (yes, they are fiscal drains even if they have some shitty mcjob) doesn't solve this. It just means the surplus from the economically dynamic regions has to be divided amongst more people, which means less for each.
Look, a family of four basically has a floor of consumption around 80-90k (far higher in expensive cities). Around 50k-60k in direct welfare (medicaid, rent assistance, etc) and say 30k+ if you've got two kids in the public schools. Some immigrant $15 an hour or whatever isn't going to come close to paying for all that (full time that's $30k a year and a few grand in taxes paid).
What's going on in Springfield isn't hard to figure out. Most of those government expenditures happen at the state and federal level. Medicaid, etc. Each of these welfare cases thus become a government cash infusion into the locality, and if you own the scarce resources they are bidding up then you are making bank (just look for instance at who owns the apartment buildings, its often the "kind hearted" elected officials that want to remind us to be more humane). The local employers are happy to get people whose existence will be heavily subsidized by the state as well, and the local K-12 schools that are being paid for with state/federal taxes are happy to get the extra cash.
This is just the rural equivalent of the urban ghetto (itself subsidized by the suburban economic core).
Of course if you made the people of Springfield, OH pay for all this, they would resent it. And indeed those who don't benefit much and those services that have to be paid for with local funds are indeed sticking points. But what's going on here is little more than a Ponzi scheme grift, the surplus from the economically vital regions isn't infinite mana from heaven. You can't make a country rich by importing tons of low IQ low productivity burdens, even if you give them jobs digging ditches and then filling them.
With the people in these towns you can at least say that they are "our people" and that they and their ancestors played some role in building modern America. You might even be willing to fork over some of your economic surplus to help them decline gracefully, and give their kids opportunities to move on (and the parents can move to be with their kids when they make it somewhere else). But the Haitians are never going to make it (bad genetics, that's why the country they came from is so shitty in the first place). They are just going to be new generation of dying welfare towns living on Eds and Meds subsidies from an ever more burdened economic core.
I can't take the "people in poor countries have low genetic IQ and therefore will be stuck in poverty for generations if they immigrate" arguments seriously. How well do you think the typical South Korean would have done on an IQ test in 1920?
It’s interesting that Richard Hania was written off as a bigot when he talked negatively about the IQ of blacks but now that he’s disparaging the IQ of Trump voters he’s being welcomed back into polite society. Polite society loves to hate Trump voters.
I wish we could stop talking about IQ -I’d happily never hear about it again, I remember my first cringing awareness of Mensa - but your math checks out to me. I don’t understand how people can be in cloud cuckoo land about this, or why they like to be.
This is certainly true. Nearly identical people can form societies with very different characteristics. e.g. China vs Taiwan, West vs East Germany, North vs South Korea. In an alternate universe Haiti might have been very successful.
But we don't live in that universe. Immigrants from Haiti are going to bring all of that cultural baggage with them. I might be more favorable towards immigration from failed countries like this if we had an actual plan to address this. But that would require the political establishment to actually be honest about it rather than burying their heads in the sand and screaming "racism" any time it is brought up.
You seem to gloss over some aspects of this complex issue that shouldn’t be. If the importation of over 300K Haitians Venezuelans and other from the region was such a wonderful idea, why was it done via airlifts largely in the dead of night? If it truly was an effort to rebuild the local economy, why were local governments largely left out of the process? Usually when there are supposedly great programs initiated, you run the risk of injury getting between a news camera and a Congressman or Senator. Have I missed all of that? Your depiction of these migrations as being powered solely by word of mouth is not very credible, as it still comes down to having funds to make those moves. Your larger point that immigration can be a beneficial way to mitigate our declining birth is lost in the current chaos - ask NYC how well their program is working.. If we were serious, we would nationally devise a process to attain bipartisan legislation to manage LEGAL immigration and to deliberately and thoughtfully create programs for smooth transitions of the immigrants into their new country. The fact that we are not doing this strongly suggests that rebuilding rural economies is a secondary objective. It seems more to be a vehicle for cheap lies about Republican racists.
The quality of the “American system” for low income, unskilled residents- whether citizens or refugees is very poor. This was not the case during the last immigration boom 100+ years ago. A decent proportion of the Haitians who came over from the 70-80s onward were middle class and many of the poorer ones did well as they were religious, family-oriented and hard-working (like many Asian immigrants).
Too many of their children, though, have been rescued from the disease that is the Haitian system only to succumb to the American disease. I’ve spent a lot of time in Newark, NJ over the years. There are pockets of Haitians (and now francophone Africans from CAR and elsewhere) and also Brazilians (due to a long-existing Portuguese community). The Brazilians are doing well. The Haitians are having their lunch eaten by the African arrivals - much fewer in number but seem to be the ones working rather than the kids of Haitian immigrants.
The second and third generations seem to lose their work ethic and ambition- they become Americanized. This is fine if their kids get educated and can become corporate drones, which requires little work ethic or ambition, but there are fewer lower level jobs these days that allow someone to waste time, surf the web and check social media for 4 hours out of an eight hour day, and attend useless meetings/calls for two hours of that day. Even at McDonalds, work means work.
Yes, dat shows third generation immigrants start having stats like long-time Americans, so this is reason to hate on specific immigrants?
Yes some immigrants out perform for longer than 3 generations, the rest just revert to American averages, so we are to allow in the immigrants who exceed Americans for 4 generations??
I get the people see some immigrant types and culture as better...and know that it just doesn't matter in broad immigration policy and future prosperity of our country. Allowing in immigrants of all types and education, and having a growing population is America's super power. And as long as we are a rich and thriving country, a chunk of Americans, with 3 or 10 generations in the country are going to be spoiled, not anything special or squander their opportunities as Americans...so be it.
'The qualities of individual people are not reflected in the quality of their government."
I like my rephrasing here:
We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all People, everywhere, anytime, are created Equal. Endowned by their own understanding individually, of their own conception of their creater, with the unalienable rights of life, Liberty,, Pursuit of happiness.
HaIti was nice enough in the past to be a major tourist destination. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/travel/in-haiti-tourism-economy-caribbean.html It was of course occupied by Haitians at the time. Current socioeconomic situations say little about the nature of the people who live there, and even less about the people who choose to leave.
Might want to repeat the last sentence to our host.;). A lot of tourist economies tend to be based on resorts in the Caribbean. They're gorgeous, and the people friendly; but you're advised to not stray too far from them.
Assuming those warnings are valid now, it apparently was not true of Haiti at the time in question. Because the article I linked has links to old articles recommending hotels and night spots in downtown Port-au-Prince.
There's the matter of the "Haiti Independence Debt.
"The Haitian independence debt involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding an indemnity of 150 million francs in five annual payments of 30 million to be paid by Haiti in claims over property – including Haitian slaves – that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition... The New York Times approximated that in total 112 million francs was paid in indemnity, which when adjusted for the inflation rate would be $560 million in 2022, but considering that if had been invested in the Haitian economy instead, it could be valued at $115 billion."
$560 million invested 200 years ago is most likely worth $0. Those calculations don't work over long time periods because investments fall to 0 over a long enough horizon. e.g. $1 invested 500 years ago at a 7% rate of return is $492 trillion.
You are confusing the people who could not put up with living in that lawless, frightening country with those who can. Nations and countries are composed of different individuals. No way can you identify people who wanted to leave that dangerous country with those who presumably benefit from the gang culture in power in Haiti
Just a question but do the 50% of Haitians that practice VooDoo as their sole religion suddenly give it upe whan they hit the border? Before it became politically correct to memory hole the FACT of VooDoo animal scarifice it was common knowledge.
Surprisingly, when people migrate to a dramatically different culture, they often do change their religious practices. As a boy, I remember hearing of the Hmong people who were resettled into Iowa where I lived. Their traditional religious practices were "animist" but they enrolled their children in Baptist Sunday schools (as well as making sure they learned English).
But remember, most people aren't deeply committed to one singular religion. Haitians practice a mix of Catholicism, west African religions, and Haitian innovations, and likely they will start to pick up American tendencies as soon as they can speak a bit of English. This sort of assimilation is particularly common when the people have no intention of going back to where they came from. (Also, it's likely that the Haitians that dare to leave and can afford to are likely to be the better-educated, more-affluent, more-Frenchified Haitians.)
And of course, this whole scare is rather a joke. We all eat mass-slaughtered chickens. But there's no law against buying and eating a dog or cat, either. Americans are repulsed by the concept, but it's by no means outside of our proclaimed moral system. And how many Americans remember that Hindus (a considerable number of them American now) are repulsed by us eating cattle?
Not recently but circa 2010 there was a spare of news stories about eastern European refugees living in makeshift huts in the woods along the river at Peterborough England catching and eating fish from the river and swans from the local lake. Roast swan,a dish for a king. There was a big outcry at the time. Not at the desperation of the migrants,it's a big centre for agricultural work,but because we Brits are animal lovers!
Yes and no. You should listen to the videos of city council meetings in Springfield, people black and white, making their detailed complaints about the situation in their town. They didn’t mind the first group TPS sent to work in the factory. They mind thousands and thousands more coming who aren’t working and have no place to work. That’s more than they can handle.
You all call racist, but that’s not the complaint. Nobody minds immigrants looking for work and a better way of life. Everybody gets the essential economics of the situation in small towns across America. When immigrants coming to join us in middle America, that’s fine. Little by little, becoming part of the community. That’s fine. TPS sending a third again the population of the community over a few years and apparently not preventing the worst of them from coming in the flood. That’s overwhelming and painful.
Why are those folks in Springfield complaining about the federal government’s role in this? How are these thousands of apparently desperately poor people funding their journey to Ohio, or wherever? The American taxpayer is funding this. Or not funding it because it’s becoming part of our national debt.
You know why my neighbors in my small city are going to vote for Trump? Because they are so sick of the judgments of urbanites who despise them. No sympathy, certainly no listening or you’d know what the actual complaints are out here instead of picking up media soundbites and beating us with them. This essay is fine as far as it goes but you ignore the rest of the situation at our peril.
My family in Iowa votes for Republicans decade after decade with the hope that things will get better in their rural communities. It hasn't worked.
Your neighbors will vote for Trump to spite the Democrats. How will voting for a guy (and party) with only a "concept" of a healthcare program, just to name one policy issue, improve their lot?
I don't despise people who vote against their interests, I wonder what the hell they're thinking.
For your neighbors, are those judgments from urbanites delivered in-person right to their faces? Or did they gain that impression by digesting their own set of media soundbites?
This is a real question, I'm not trying to be snarky. It seems to me that so many cultural complaints these days come down to "the elites think ____ about people of my class/geography" or alternately "the racist country folk think ____ about people of my skin color". In both instances I'd argue that this impression is brokered by a third party (i.e. the media, a political candidate, etc) who provides the supposed evidence of the opposite group's contempt or hate or whatever -- in order to drive outrage or clicks or votes. Not to say that racism/classism don't exist, but these stereotypes are painted with quite a broad brush.
Just as an example, and again I'm not attempting to pick on you unfairly at all, but you wrote "you all call racist" at the start of your second paragraph. Do you really think that *all* city-dwelling liberals (or whomever you intended that comment towards) think that it's racist for citizens of Springfield to express concerns about migrants' impact on the community at a city council meeting? As a city-dwelling liberal myself I would estimate that maybe just 10% of the people I know who also fit that description, would call the situation you described "racist". You seem to be assuming that as a group we have no sympathy, or empathy, or willingness to listen on these issues, and I don't think that's accurate. Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart do not speak for my demographic.
As much as small town people don't want to be caricatured, urban liberals don't want to be caricatured either. Day after day I see comments online about how my "tribe" is far left, woke, obsessed with race, smug, hates and fears rural people, believes in communism, supports endless wars, et cetera. This DOES describe some people I know, but they are by far the most "out there" of my groups of friends, and they generally drive the rest of us crazy.
It's frustrating to feel lumped together with extremist douchebags just because we're both left of center. Isn't this just like conservatives being told that they're on the same team as white supremacists?
This is so tricky, because even though the residents have legitimate complaints and aren't racist, the focus on the situation by Trump and Vance is meant to evoke racial fears, which seems important not to overlook. Maybe Dems need to find a way to clarify this.
First, they (Dems) would have to understand human nature. If only they (Dems) could figure out how to convince the masses not yet on the lifeboat that capsizing it is in no one's interest. Those who understand human nature (non-Dems) would simply grab an oar and start smashing the heads of those trying to board.
In regard to "How are these thousands of apparently desperately poor people funding their journey to Ohio, or wherever?" it seems to me that the most likely answer is "Once a Haitian in Springfield gets work, he starts scrimping and saving so he can pay for his relatives to get to the US and to Springfield to crash with him." As far as I know, TPS gets people visas and work permits and such but it doesn't choose where they go, that's left up to individual liberty and the Great Free Market.
I mean, here in Boston, housing is very tight but there are Haitians, including families with kids, who get here by one means or another and live on the streets because they have no other choice. But your long-term prospects living on the street in Boston are probably better than owning a house in Port-Au-Prince these days. There are charities that ensure you won't starve and you can get at least emergency medical care on the taxpayer's dime...
As for grumbling about the attitudes of urbanites, that's fully justified. One aspect that's very visible here in Boston is that housing is segregated by income, so if you've got a good paying "professional" job, you live in a suburb where poor people, much less refugees from Haiti, are largely priced out. So you don't experience the cultural frictions and you don't have to fret that your schools will have to spend too much money on bilingual education. But also, the baseline population is larger (metro Boston is something like 5 million people), so even adding 100,000 Haitians doesn't make an enormous difference.
Fantastic post! My definition of love is "That which uplifts", and immigrants and locals working together to revitalize their small towns is a beautiful example of this.
There's actually a musical sort of about this, "Come From Away", the true story about the thousands of plane passengers who ended up in a tiny Newfoundland town after 9/11 grounded all air traffic for several days. While there was that familiar initial distrust and skepticism, people from both the town and the planes worked together to make the best of the situation and it was beautiful and I cried a lot.
Your position on mass immigration would have much to recommend it if only it was consistent with reality! I have a pretty good sized farming operation and often need additional workers to hand pick our crops. I had heard from an older friend about how great an experience he had in hiring Hmong immigrants for his greenhouse operation in Colorado so I found there was a large Hmong immigrant community in our nearby community and my wife and I approached the pastor on he local Hmong christion church who invited us to attend one Sunday. We wnet and got up in front of the congregation and told them about the jobs we had available for picking during the summer. Now good pickers on our place make $300 to $500 a day for an 8 hour day. Paid breaks and good, sanitary, safe conditions so a pretty darn good job if one is unskilled!
I told them all how the deal worked, distance and how we could help arrange transportation and the first thing out of the PASTOR'S WIFE'S mouth was " Could we pay cash so they could keep their welfare benefits"! I was astounded and when I explained we had to pay and deduct employment taxes and insurance interest died. We never got ONE Hmong immigrant.
I might agree with you on your thesis of reinvigorateing rural areas with selected immigrants if we could cut ALL cash benefits and houseing support but while we used to be a place where opportunity brought in workers the left has screwed up our federal programs to such an extent that even many immigrants now choose federal and state dole over working! Fix that and I could agree with your idea but without it we are just bringing in millions of additional freeloaders and bankrupting the system.
Most Hmong came as refugees, who are eligible for welfare as soon as they get here. Refugees also get other benefits. I've known folks who came as refugees and got cars and housing assistance. A few years later they were taking vacations back to the country they'd "escaped" from.
Legal refugees are eligible for SSI, TANF, SNAP and Medicaid only for 12 months after their entry. It’s strange that these Hmong are still eligible, since the last Hmong refugees the US accepted was way back in 2009, most Hmong in Thailand are now repatriated to Laos.
Asylum seekers on parole are only eligible for emergency medical aid. Other immigrants, such as on family or marriage visas need a cosponsor who is liable for repayment of any welfare those immigrants receive.
I agree that it is bad that the refugees only wanted to work under the table. Immigrants shouldn’t be getting welfare at all, but should be allowed and encouraged to work legally and on the books paying taxes like everyone else.
My experience with the Hmong was in about 2016 or so. I can't say what benefits they were getting all I know is it must have been substantial for them to turn down the work we offered. They had a nice little church of a couple of hundred souls and I guess one of the shockers for me was that the Pastors wife was encouraging fraud among the congregation!
Our society, it seems to me, is not any longer encouraging self reliance nor the melting pot. Misplaced compassion is damaging a whole generation of immigrants. Not all, of course, but many!
I'd like to hear the details. OTOH, that's not a lot of money, really. It's also possible that the money is for children born here, who are citizens. Dunno exactly what the welfare programs are in Ohio, though. A quick Google suggests that if a family has two citizen children, they might be able to get $500 in food stamps alone. Though cynically I'd note that food stamps come out of the general federal budget, most of which is paid for by affluent people in the infamous blue coastal metros. It's likely that it's a significant flow of money moving into Springfield.
They are employed thru a temp agency who brought them to Springfield. The temp agency is owned by the same person who owns 50-60 properties in which cots are rented out to 20-25 immigrants per property at $250/cot. There is exploitation and possibly human trafficking involved. It is reported that the FBI is investigating fir human trafficking.
Nothing sadder than a dying town. Immigrants flock to their own. Little Italy. Little Senegal. Etc. As opposed to mass dumping, place like Connecticut mass imported Italians to work in their new factories. And a by product is New Haven pizza. Bring them on.
Heh, Little Italy back in the late 1800s was generally considered to be a den of thieves. Remember that Italians were essentially banned in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. All we remember now is a romanticized version.
Great point about immigration in the past (before welfare benefits) being based on job opportunities and local networks- often the latter being more important than the former (or rather, there are often better jobs elsewhere than the spot the immigrant chose out of comfort).
Refugees are a different situation because they are sometimes “dumped” somewhere (Minnesota for Somalis) and that somewhere becomes a comfortable cultural nexus regardless of the quality of job opportunities relative to other places. I can’t speak to the Haitians of Springfield because I don’t know what proportion were placed there vs what proportion came later once there was critical mass.
However, once there is a government safety net, particularly for families with children, mobility decreases and economic decision-making becomes less important. Why do poor native-born families and single mothers choose to live in cities which are more expensive, more dangerous and have poorer schools than cheaper rural or suburban or small town areas that would offer better lives for their children? There are plenty of places where
a housing voucher would cover the rent, groceries are cheaper and more plentiful and schools are safe and decent relative to the nightmare cities/neighborhoods these people live in now.
Speaking of cities, you need to get out more if you think all young people have a preference to live and work in big cities like NY or Chicago. The vast majority don’t and do not. Amongst the wealthy kids whose parents work (but rarely live) in those cities, kids who went to elite schools and seek employment in high paying/high status industries - they do gravitate to those centers of industry (not always in big cities), but the majority of them leave for the suburbs later and these elites are a very small slice of the populace.
America is a service economy. The vast majority of jobs created in the past two years have been in government, healthcare, leisure and hospitality and social services. Manufacturing employment has been flat for two years.. Tech and finance laid off people post covid but are hiring again (though young people in finance in NY are a fraction of their past populations). Amongst our milieu, working in tech or finance or consulting and living for a time in a big city is common. However, our milieu is not common.
The arrival of cheap immigrant labor can keep businesses alive that should have moved elsewhere, but it also retards capital investment.
Look at the wine industry or meat processing. The tech exists to automate lots of the work. Wine growing countries like Australia (and even much of Europe ) have automated much of the work in the vineyards (millions of immigrants can’t walk over the border into Australia each year). The California high end wine industry is backwards. They are only starting to make capital investments in the past five years that were common elsewhere 20+ years ago, and US manufacturing companies have almost no market share in the equipment the vineyards are buying (see also manufacturing robotics generally). Faced with labor shortages in recent years the vineyards first reacted by training the wives of their vineyard workers to prune and harvest and only then turned to the tech common in other countries.
Why invest in robotics or automation when one can hire immigrants for low wages or just manufacture in China or Bangladesh? It is sad that making capital investments or working with schools and government to train young people already here don’t seem to be the top choices. We’d rather borrow money to import.
Let’s not pretend that cheap illiterates are some kind of miracle solution. My Italian immigrant grandfather came to Paterson, NJ with his family around 1900 because there was a huge Italian immigrant population there. The silk mills there imported weavers from Naples, Italy in the latter 1800s to keep the mills going (my relatives weren’t weavers, just campesinos). Within a few decades, though, the industry there collapsed because competitors used automated processes. Cheap labor is often a stopgap rather than a real solution.
Lewiston, ME (like many smallish former mill towns in New England, is a dump. Its heyday (like many mill towns) was before electricity when water power ruled (Paterson, NJ was also a mill town). It is not coming back. Same for most of the former grain elevator towns in the Midwest. Farming is large scale and automated and Cargill doesn’t need an elevator in every little town. These mill and farming towns popped into existence due to key geographic location and the needs of the industry taking advantage of that geography at that time. Few people “need” to be in the middle of nowhere Maine or Kansas.
Importing people to populate a town only invented based upon geography and tech from 150 or 200 years ago is insanity. And we’ve seen what happens when government benefits allow people to stay in a town that has no jobs - Bridgeport, CT and lots of other mid-sized former mill towns in the North as well as the South (Winston-Salem, NC, say) managed to retain population even as industry left. It seems having a critical mass of people and maintaining population isn’t a panacea. People living in some of these places would have been better off moving their families out.
I am pro-immigration but it needs to be selective (including a proportion of low wage workers on time-limited trial visas) and controlled and drawing from around the world. No American should have to speak Spanish or Creole to get a job at a factory or McDonalds. Immigration should only exist alongside internship, apprenticeship, training and work-study opportunities for citizens (not just in manufacturing but also, say, in tech project/program management. Our schools seem to believe that everyone is going to college, the union backers of Dems don’t like the idea of student labor or private tradesmen/women and our profitable tech companies would rather outsource rudimentary program management to second tier Indian graduates than training our own second tier graduates.
The issue of temporary foreign workers holding back capital investments has quite rightly become prominent in the Canadian version of this debate (not about changing the composition of small towns, more about suppressing wages and pushing housing and healthcare to the breaking point).
What you're saying is these towns need anchor businesses that employ low skilled labor. The towns that find the anchor businesses and have a source of labor will win.
Of course, the kids of the immigrants will mostly want to leave.
I was born, raised and now live in a small mid western town. This essay repeats several common misapprehensions about the issues we face. While it is true that young people move away, a lack of housing is a much more significant cause of this. We have about 18,000 actively employed in the county but a survey of local employers shows that they need another 2,000. A large share of these open jobs pay well in excess of $20.00 an hour. They don't stay because they don't want to move back in with Mom and dad. Our housing is in such short supply that vacancy rates are below 1%. However developers will not come here when there are no subdivisions to exploit and the costs of creating a new one exceed $40.000 per lot. There is substantial money available at the state and Federal level but the bias toward larger cities shown by both developers a government officials leads to 90% of the funding to go to urban projects. I am also put off by the focus on meatpacking plants. They represent a tiny portion of the opportunity. The factory has changed. 40 years ago low skilled positions probably did constitute 70% of the need. Today that percentage has shrunk. significantly. This is very important when considering the future of education. Finally I would add the the comment about respect for work is correct. Speaking about the meat packing jobs in the article's manner is not constructive.
Housing issues are always associated with urban areas in the public discourse, it hadn't occurred to me that they could also be severe in smaller towns. Thank you for pointing that out.
My brother is a city councilor in the small town I grew up in. He reports facts about like what you mention. OTOH, $20/hour comes to about $40k/year, and the cost of building a single-family house is around $200k these days. (The tight labor market has driven up the cost of construction workers, among other things.) A family that makes $40k/year can't really afford that, though a couple that makes $80k/year could. In the case of his town, what keeps housing from being built in town is that there are a lot of outlying burgs of circa 100 people that are within commuting distance. That housing is slowly decaying because people don't prefer it, but for the time being, poor-ish people find it cheaper to live there, which puts an upper limit on what a developer can get for a new house.
One thing to check is whether there are local regulations that limit the construction of apartments. I'd also check what "there are no subdivisions to exploit" really means, e.g. platting a new subdivision is relatively simple.
Haitians did not spontaneously migrate to Springfield. Springfield city launched a Welcome Springfield initiative to attract immigrants, which has become controversial with residents. That is an important fact to understand.
(I'm a different Lisa ) I wonder if this was incentivized behind the scenes by proposed Amtrak routes that Sen Brown has talked about. There was an email that went out in Dec 2023 wherein he provided a map of proposed routes and existing routes. Springfield is on a proposed route. I will also say it looks like East Palestine, where the toxic train accident happened in the opposite corner of Ohio, also is located at the nexus of a current and proposed route.
In Australia, the state governments have the right to sponsor visa for permanent migration just like businesses. They use issue a 5 year visas to work in a regional area after which you can apply for permanent residency. Although "regional" in the Australian migration context is any place other than Melbourne and Sydney.
The problem, though, is technological progress over the long sweep of history has strongly favored centralization, and everything educated people believe is based upon that bedrock truth. However, we have a sharp increase in technological progress in communications technology that favors the opponents of centralization. These people may not have any sort of winning strategy for how to build a competitive civilization, but they now have the tools to fight a real war against centralizers.
Immigration is the poster child for centralization. It represents the idea that all people are pretty much the same, that people rightfully ought to get up and go where things are better, and that the people who are already there ought to accept newcomers as long as they meet the requirements set by CENTRAL NATIONAL AUTHORITY.
Does it matter that a community such as the ones you are describing really need these immigrants to reverse their decline?
Well, of course it matters to me. And it matters to the kinds of Republicans I know who run things in town. As I gather it matters to the people who run things in Springfield. But to the disaffected, that's not how it looks.
In their eyes, globalization caused the problem. Furthermore, unfettered freedom of movement played a huge role -- inevitably, this destabilizes small communities. (Read Patrick Deneen if you think I am putting words into their mouths.) Now, they are supposed to solve a problem of others' making by agreeing to wholesale alteration of their local culture by welcoming blocks of foreigners into their midst.
Their leaders and their poll answers might SAY that the number one issue is economic, but that is not candid talking. What this ilk really means is that the centralization crowd (they experience it as a conspiracy) promised economic benefits and this turned out to be a lie.
Which (in their minds) justifies any lying that they and their preferred leaders might do in response. Which is where our communications technology has turned out to be such a weapon. And it is what J.D. Vance means when he claims entitlement to repeat rumors, true or not, to gain attention for his constituents' concerns.
(Truly, it gets worse. The likes of Peter Thiel fully intend to use this crowd to overthrow the existing order and install a radical government of the techno-elite. Which means that this movement is unlikely to fade in the near future.)
I bring all this up, Noah, because I think it has become all too common to misread the nature of the opposition in today's media environment.
Our main opponents are not good faith opponents interested in facts, reasoning, or the good of the nation. It's not enough to prove that anti-immigrant policy would be bad for such communities (these people don't care) or that their sentiments are xenophobic. The question is how to fight back against the power of digital memes, where it is very difficult to counteract rumor, distortion, and outright lies that appeal to peoples' darker sides.
I actually work in a meatpacking plant in my hometown for $15/hr. I was laid off from a good paying job and took what I could find to pay my mortgage. I work with many immigrants, mostly from Guatemala, and find them to be lovely people. They own homes, play soccer at the park, and raise their families here with dignity. We didn’t have a single Hispanic student in my high school 20 years ago. Minority enrollment is now approximately 10%. We have around 3,000 immigrants in a town of 12,000. Most issues seem to stem from a language barrier and the need for translators and ESL teachers.
When I see a family celebrating a confirmation or wedding, fixing up a house or playing at the park on a Sunday afternoon, it restores my faith in America. This is what is good about our country.
But I sometimes think about what would happen to my own paycheck if we didn’t have this influx of labor. Would I have to work 9-10 hour days 6-7 days a week to pay the bills? ICE raided the meatpacking plant in 2018 and arrested 150 workers. I was living in another state and remember being appalled. But from a purely economic standpoint and from the perspective of a working class person, that ICE raid did what our union couldn’t do. It raised wages at least 3-5 dollars an hour.
One interesting incentive my employer offers is a referral program for new employees. If you refer someone to work at the plant, you both get $100/week for an entire year. You can refer as many people as you’d like. HR told me when I was hired that a few people get an extra $800/week through referrals. Perhaps that explains some of the luxury cars in the employee parking lot…
Immigration is a complicated issue. A lot of Trump voters from local churches stepped up when the raid happened and looked after children while their parents were in custody. I encounter Trump voters laughing and joking with immigrants every day while also sharing memes about Haitians eating cats. I also know democrats in town who have never had a single interaction with an immigrant in our community.
My own thoughts on immigration are constantly evolving. Thanks for sharing this piece!
"But from a purely economic standpoint and from the perspective of a working class person, that ICE raid did what our union couldn’t do. It raised wages at least 3-5 dollars an hour."
Just like any econ 101 textbook would predict. The level of mental gymnastics people will go through to pretend supply and demand doesn't apply to labor is absolutely unbelievable.
Right, except you're forgetting the demand part of the equation. Those people who are the supply of labor also create demand for goods and services that is pretty much equal to the earnings of their labor since their probably not making enough to invest in Bitcoin or the stock market. That goods and services demand in turn creates demand for people to fill those jobs. This isn't mental gymnastics - it's a realistic description of the world we actually live in.
India has the biggest population in the world and yet they aren’t producing enough jobs which is why their people are trying to escape India. So what happened to the “demand” side mister?
If you are saying that this immigration is going to increase GDP then you will get no argument from me. It is the relative market power of business owners vs laborers, and as a result the distribution of that GDP, that will change. Why do you think that there is universal support for mass immigration among business owners all across the political spectrum?
To me the issue seems simple. We need the workers, and the need in things like care for the elderly will overwhelm our system for everyone but the very rich unless things change. Business owners in AZ shot down recent proposed state legislation requiring every business to use E-Verify. E-Verify is apparently not too difficult to work around in any case. We also need Payroll tax revenue to support SS and Medicare. So let employers hire who and how they want, but charge the employees (not employers) who don't provide full documentation Payroll taxes that are ca. 20-35% of wages. The US government can directly control what amounts to a tax on immigrant labor, the revenues being only paid to fully legal immigrants through SS and Medicare.
What you’re suggesting is a ponzi scheme. Social security is still going bankrupt despite all the immigrants we have taken in who will also try to cash on social security when they retire. It’s a death spiral.
The ignorant idea that it is a Ponzi scheme can only be expressed by someone who has zero understanding of what a Ponzi scheme is and zero understanding of retirement funding. All retirement is paid for by the current production of those currently in the workforce. When I own stocks in companies that fail to produce I lose retirement savings. Because I can't accurately predict which investments will continue to have productive workers in the future I have to save more (and spend less) than in a collective system of retirement savings like Social Security. The ballpark minimum number for all of my grad school and post-doc friends to retire today is $2.5 million in net worth with at least $1 million in retirement accounts (they can all do the math). Unfortunately many people at 50 or 60 or 70 don't have $2.5 million saved as required by our mostly individual privatization of retirement support.
This is completely correct. The supposed surplus(which is pretty controversial and Borjas discusses a lot) that illegal immigrants add to the tax coffers is 100% predicated on them not withdrawing benefits later on. If they get path to citizenship or whatever other process to get health and end of life entitlements, they quickly become huge net takers.
They are not “cashing in” unless they get a Social Security number and pay into the system because they get a job. And if we get rid of the “donut hole” and not cap SS tax for highest earners, the system will not go bankrupt.
It’s definitely mental gymnastics because those third world immigrants are still destroying the wages of the jobs Americans were doing, while creating demand for things by their own immigrant people. A Mexican buys from a Mexican. He ain’t creating a job for a local American.
"and find them to be lovely people. They own homes, play soccer at the park, and raise their families here with dignity."
No, they are short, ugly, unintelligent and will NEVER amount to more than low-skilled labor. Their children will likely be worse as they take on the worst traits of hip-hop America and learn how easy it is to game the system. There is nothing good about low-skilled immigrants. Nothing.
Not a particularly kind comment from you.
You seem nice… /s
Do I? I must be doing something wrong then.
Really don’t want to hear you complain about grocery prices then. Who do you think picks your vegetables? Slaughters the chickens you eat at Raising Canes?
Lol. You understand nothing.
@Britt Thank you for sharing this comment. Good perspective, thank you.
The first hurdle is convincing the people in these communities that it is in their interests. I spend a lot of time in rural areas of very blue states like Vermont and New York and they are all very much Trump anti-immigrant folks. They seem to blame immigration that they see on their TV’s but the smart kids leave (often women) and the ones who stay behind often get involved with substance problems and that is where their crime comes from.
It’s not necessarily in their best interests. That’s the problem. In some cases there are genuine conflict of interest. Springfield is struggling to provide services and housing to new residents, and has been seeking federal aid. That doesn’t in any way justify racism and discrimination or cat hoaxes, but it is important to understand that existing residents may have useful insights into their own best interests that might include things like housing affordability and property taxes.
I think we also need to be objective and look at the truth.
What I stated is the truth. The difficulties and opportunities are discussed in detail in this NYT article “How an Ohio Town Landed in the Middle of the Immigration Debate”
“But the speed and volume of arrivals have put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals. The community health clinic saw a 13-fold increase in Haitian patients between 2021 and 2023, from 115 to 1,500, overwhelming its staff and budget.”
“At the Rocking Horse Community Health Center, a federally subsidized clinic that does not turn away anyone, a surge in Haitians has caused a consultation that normally took 15 minutes to take as long as 45 minutes because of the language barrier.
“We lost productivity. We had a huge burnout of staff,” said Yamini Teegala, the chief executive officer.
Six Haitian Creole speakers were hired and trained to assist newcomers. But expenditures on translation services jumped to an estimated $436,000 this year from $43,000 in 2020, she said.
“This is not sustainable,” Dr. Teegala said, adding that her priority was not to save money but to ensure quality care.
On Aug. 14, the first day of school, the Springfield City School District’s registration department was crammed with immigrant families waiting to enroll children, so many that some had to queue up in the hallway.
Nearly 350 new students registered for elementary and middle school the first week of classes, most of them children of immigrants.”
“But she expressed concern about the 2025-26 academic year. “It’s going to get very tight,” she said.
“Springfield, like many towns, is also struggling with a dearth of affordable housing for low-income families, and the Haitian influx has not helped.”
And so on. Read the article. It’s very good.
That doesn’t mean immigration is bad. It means it has expenses and issues at the local level that have to be factored in and understood.
If the people who live in communities affected by increased immigration stopped electing Republican President and congressional representatives who have relentlessly sought to dramatically reduce, if not eliminate entirely, federal funding for health care, education, affordable housing, and support services from new immigrants, these "conflicts" could rather easily be defused.
Of course, this ain't gonna happen: Republicans win elections by exploiting xenophobia and racism, not by solving problems that help nurture and sustain xenophobia and racism.
As noted in the above quote, the clinic in question IS federally funded.
And as recent study suggests, federal funding for such clinics has declined by roughly 30% over the last decade.
https://www.nachc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Overlooked-Decline-Community-Health-Center-Funding_2023_Full-report.pdf
It's little wonder that the Springfield clinic -- and many others like it across the country -- are struggling. For Republicans, this is a feature, not a bug.
Immigrants who need "health care, education, affordable housing, and support services" are not the kind of immigrants we need.
Yes. We need the immigrants who are happy to work in a meatpacking plant for $14/hour, who also have no health care or educational needs. Where are such unicorns to be found?
Someone has to do the low skill jobs.
“But the speed and volume of arrivals have put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals." This is the crux of the problem. SPEED and VOLUME. How can a community of 60,000 people with limited resources absorb 20,000 newcomers? Non-English speaking immigrants from a very different culture exacerbates the problems. Residents have a right to voice their concerns. Who is listening? And ultimately, who is responsible for the mass influx into the country?
1. There are far less than 20K new (legal) Haitians in Springfield: https://jabberwocking.com/how-many-haitian-immigrants-really-live-in-springfield-maybe-2000/
2. The residents and businesses in Springfield weren't the ones who raised any concerns. It was outside race-baiters who engaged in false narratives. In fact, local Springfield Republicans are livid at Trump and Vance causing their area problems, they don't want them to visit and are trying to debunk Trump/Vance lies: https://www.google.com/amp/s/english.elpais.com/usa/elections/2024-09-20/springfield-doesnt-want-to-be-in-the-news-trump-promises-to-visit-while-its-republican-mayor-hopes-he-wont.html%3foutputType=amp
Half a million dollars for translation services, that could be done for $20 a month with a ChatGPT subscription, seems like bad management.
Medical translation is confidential and presumably covered by HIPAA.
I would not use ChatGPT for medical translation. Too much risk.
HIPAA is another reason healthcare is inefficient and expensive, and why doctors and pharmacists can’t be reached except by phone or fax, no email or texting. Privacy was important when the law was enacted because insurers could drop you for preexisting conditions, which is no longer allowed.
ChatGPT or another human or AI based translation service doesn’t know who who are, and what would they do with the contents of your discussion with the doctor? Do you also worry that the nurse might be listening in, or the doctor herself might sell the info about you to some Russian hackers?
For less than half what the clinic paid in translation services, they could have hired one of the Haitians as a full time translator, with everyone fleeing Haiti for Springfield there are probably some bilingual healthcare workers in the group.
Unlikely that conversational Chat GPT could keep up.
The residents in these communities are capable of determining "what is in their interests" - they are, after all, the people living there and dealing with the influx of "newcomers." Do you welcome others telling (or convincing) you what is or is not in your interest? Perhaps the "Trump anti-immigrant folks" understand the many benefits of small-town rural life and simply want to maintain their way of life. If asked, I'm guessing that most small-town residents support legal immigration and immigrants who can contribute to the local economy and community. A huge flood of unskilled workers who cannot speak English immediately strains local resources, long before they can be expected to make positive contributions to the community.
If it's in their interests, then why do the towns receiving large numbers of immigrants need so much federal assistance? Can't we find immigrants who can land on their feet and not have to spend months or years on public aid?
It seems like a short term vs long term issue - a bunch of families with children move into an area, and suddenly you need to hire more teachers and possibly even build more school buildings, etc., even if in the longer term the new residents open businesses and start paying enough in taxes to cover the cost of municipal services to a larger population.
Taking immigrants who don't need federal aid is better in the short term and, at worst, equal in the long run.
So because the supply of jobs as engineers,or neurosurgeons,or tax accountants,or specialist doctors,all of which these migrants are qualified to do having studied in their country of origin and holding diplomas,degrees and such like,because these jobs just don't exist in Smallsville in the middle of Kansas they open an eatery instead. They love their native cuisine and they know their new neighbours (who are too stupid,fat and lazy to cook their own meals) will love it too. Maybe a food writer does a piece about them in a national or even international magazine and by the second generation being a food provider is this families raison d'etre. This is how it happens. In the UK our new political administration is making noises about clearing "fast food junk food " shops from our High Sts to protect children from toxic food. It's always "to protect children. Either they have NOT joined up the dots or they are being deliberately racist. It's not going to happen though,local councils need the business taxes these folks pay.
In cities like NYC, the issue has been the ones who arrive who are unable to work for legal reasons. THEN you do have an assistance problem, because you are not allowing them to work and earn for themselves. (Bloomberg had a nice editorial about this problem.)
i spent quite a bit of time in binghamton, new york over the years. living there and seeing it die out, grocery stores and restaurants closing, a downtown that looks move vibrant in 80 year old pictures than it does now, decaying mansions, wide cracking up streets and all the rest leads to this persistent feeling of background depression and hopelessness that is very hard to shake and worse that spending time in objectively poorer places, or even places going through acute economic distress (a small town in new mexico, athens greece during the euro crisis). if something came along that pushed the town back from that depressing state of affairs, i would not want to go back.
You’re describing hundreds of Texas towns. The dead main streets. The exceptions offer gifts or Mexican food or coffee for those passing through, for those coming to the courthouse if a county seat, or for people in the surrounding rural area. We have plenty of immigrants. It is rare in many or even most places to hear English in a grocery store (or a TJMaxx!).
But immigrants want to live in the big cities. Much like the homeless. There are no homeless people in towns of 2000 people.
I’m baffled by the mysterious step 2 to step 3: revitalized towns with non/service jobs.
what were the industries that made them vibrant in the past?
Well, the reality is that the smartest individuals in any population will statistically always be men. And flooding communities with low-IQ, violent-minded immigrants, pushed by NGOs and government welfare programs, tears apart the social fabric and erodes the existing culture. But I wouldn’t expect you to figure that out on your own.
Agree that immigration is a solution, but it misses another part of the problem.
We somehow need to restablish both the literal and perceived dignity of hard work and labor if we're going to create a sustainable domestic labor pool for what Mike Rowe calls "dirty work."
That's not easy to do. I had friends turn down lucrative longshoremen jobs just because they couldn't see themselves working in the port (instead of making less money working in corporate sales). Not an uncommon phenomenon.
"Dignity of work" is kinda BS. We shouldn't look down on people with "dirty jobs," but you aren't going to convince people that spending the rest of your life wrist-deep in chicken guts is a good life.
Well, maybe if the dignity wasn’t just rhetoric, and instead included actual good pay and benefits. Generations before us got paid a lot better regardless of their “skill” or education.
$50 trillion in normal economic gains were redistributed from the bottom 90% of workers to the top 10% since the mid 1970s. A lot of dignity got stripped away with it.
You're just not going to get good pay from a job like that, at least not without causing all sorts of problems. Even if you do, its a shitty job that causes all sorts of health problems.
You shouldn't look down on someone for having this sort of job, but you also shouldn't pretend it's a good job that people who have other options would do.
But more and more jobs in America are slipping into the class of jobs that don't pay enough for the demands expected, especially when compared with the cost increases of things like housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education.
The idea that most people have so many "other options" is increasingly less true. There needs to be a bottom threshold on wages, where necessary jobs pay people enough to actually thrive in America. Not just hang on by their fingernails while private equity continues to eek away at wage growth on one side of the equation, and jack up prices to make record profits on the other side. The math of the situation is becoming untenable.
So, what are we going to do about it as a country? Just give in and accept that the end result if we continue down this path is basically some version of company stores or direct serfdom? Or perhaps, defend the idea via policy changes, that working people should make enough off the fruits of their labor (especially working for companies making billions a year *in profit*) to afford a decent living.
The original intent of the minimum wage was to be a *thriving wage* you could raise a family on, not just what you would need to not starve to death if everything else in life went fine & you suffered no extra hardships.
Why shouldn't you get good pay for doing a job well done, even if it's as a janitor? Instead of fair pay raises we got decades of billions of dollars in STOCK BUYBACKS by corporations. Stock buybacks do basically nothing except siphon value out of a company for the benefit of the people who already own 85%+ of everything in this country already.
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
yeah, I'm in the top 10% so not looking to rock the boat, but I do think there can be honest policy conversations about how to address working class challenges and the problems of some of these declining areas.
We have made the pie bigger but not redistributed it to impacted people & locations, so now they are advocating for their interests in ways that will make the pie smaller. Tough choices ahead.
I also think we might suffer from a problem of perspective in this country, where many people like you and I who are in the top 10% don't feel that well off, but we're still way better off than that person working 40 hours a week for $35,000 a year or less.
And that can make people mistakenly think that when we're talking about "taxing the rich" we might be talking about them, when what we're actually talking about is people making $400,000+ a year, and especially people making MILLIONS+ a year.
Like what is the *practical benefit* to society to have 3 people making more money every year than the bottom HALF of working Americans? Particularly when they are also going to be allowed to use schemes to pay a lower tax rate percentage than those same working people.
If that money was in the system to pay people to work at your rural grocery store, or pick up your trash, etc... those people would still have disposable income to use on other services & stores that make communities more vibrant. When the money just gets siphoned out of the community entirely, there's nothing left to sustain economic activity on the granular level.
If you explained this scenario to any third grader, they would surely think you were joking.
There's a decent argument for helping people who can't earn enough, but by mucking with wages isn't the way to do it, as it makes the market less efficient. Just tax people and redistribute money to people who need it though either an EITC or UBI.
All this "dignity of work" stuff is just BS.
Why shouldn’t you get good pay for a job well done, even as a janitor? You may be arguing for merit based compensation, where a janitor who cleans well gets more pay than one who just smears dirty around with a filthy mop, but I think you instead mean every job should come with high pay and benefits. That latter case won’t work, since compensation is just a price signal like any other and if a company or city needs people to clean buildings, then they will offer the job to whoever can do it at the lowest pay that person is willing to accept.
If you force the employer to pay above that clearing price, the city or company needs more money to do that (from higher taxes or goods prices) and the lowest skilled (perhaps in language) will not end up with a job since the higher pay will attract more applicants.
"but I think you instead mean every job should come with high pay and benefits."
Good attempt at a strawman there. How about we simply start with giving everyone in the bottom 90% of workers the extra $1144 a month that was taken from them over the last 45 years, plus maybe some interest?
And it really says something to me that you think someone making a decent wage is going to incentivize people to fuck off and be lazy, when the social science really seems to be leaning strongly towards the revelation that decent pay *increases* job performance in most people, at least up until the point where they are no longer financially insecure. But giving financial rewards past a certain point actually clouds people's judgement and ability to creatively problem solve. So in effect, the current wage structure in America largely both fails to pay people enough to release them from the systemic stress & cognitive overhead of living on the verge financially, AND pours excessive compensation into the buckets of people who then underperform or make bad decisions, because the stress of maintaining the metrics attached to that big wage, narrows their ability to see the bigger picture/long term implications of complicated decisions. If you can jump overboard with your golden parachute in the next three years, why do you care if the company has taken on a debt load that will probably force it into bankruptcy in 5 to 10 years?
My most ardently evangelical/bleeding heart liberal friend loves her 99 cent/lb. chicken. I could share with her the story of the Central American woman whose SSN the poultry producer “discovered” was fraudulent some 15 years after she had begun working there, coincidentally the day after she led a protest seeking - merely - better gloves so workers wouldn’t get so many staph infections … but my friend would think - because Econ blogs like this one have disseminated the idea - that better practices were Marxist somehow, were about the environment, somehow, which is “against people” and people are all that matter to her, being Christian- ultimately which is to say, leads her to conflate anti-materialism in the old sense with being “anti-people”. That’s the problem with constant human rights talk - eventually 99cent/lb. chicken becomes a human right.
The absolute number of Americans under the age of 18 has been declining for almost 20 years, and this trend shows no sign of reversing. The Total Fertility Rate is 1.5-1.6; 2.1 is what maintains a stable population long-term. A smaller cohort of young people aging into adulthood means an even smaller cohort of kids from them, etc. Even if more native-born Americans go into "dirty work" - good luck with that, blaming and shaming doesn't work - there won't be enough of them.
All about the TFRs. I don't know why people don't realize the competition for the remainder of this century (and beyond) is going to center on a country's ability to outcompete other countries for immigrants to bolster their failing domestic populations. Countries who get a leg up on easing assimilation (of the natives to the newcomers, NOT the other way around) will be successful and live to see another century. Others will not.
If I’m reading you right… since when is it the duty of the folks living in a small town to “assimilate” to a bunch of new arrivals who can’t speak English?
I understand the argument that nations which assimilate immigrants at a faster pace have a competitive advantage. But the duty is for the immigrant to assimilate into the host society, not the other way around.
When a town of 10,000 locals gets an influx of 3,000 immigrants in the span of two years, you haven’t really assimilated anyone—you’ve just imported a new town with its own distinct language and culture into the old one. The locals have a right to fume about such an intense demographic change.
Ah and there you have what no one really wants to tackle. Assimilation. What does it look like? How do we foster it? Yes, as Noah mentions, influxes have happened before and will undoubtedly happen again, but can we not get better at preparing and facilitating the transition? It seems we have learned nothing.
You could ask a Detroiter who saw the city go from 90% white (very few social problems) to 90% black (very few social problems). It's the part in the middle that's, um, problemmatic.
It’s not Teddy. Although President Teddy seemed interesting. I was reading some of your other posts to see if you get other things wrong.
Detroit very few social problems. Wow. Do you live there? That sounds insane to me. You could live there I know houses in the City are inexpensive. You could live close to the stadiums and walk to Lions and Tigers games. Godspeed Richard.
You're missing the point, Edward.
I'm not talking about you or me living there today and attempting to walk to Comerica Park or Ford Field. I'm talking about the typical Detroit resident of today doing so. They in the present have as little to fear as you or I would have in the past. Similarly, most Detroiters are employed, going to school, growing families (in their fashion), and getting on with the business of life. So, what's changed really?
Most of the immigrants in Springfield are working in manufacturing, not meat processing.
Until comparatively recently, meat processing was a well paid union job. That has largely been lost with the lack of enforcement of anti trust against major meat processors. Historically people were paid well enough to be willing to do it.
I mean, unless we look all the way back to Upton Sinclair's era...
There are probably unionized well-payed butchers at quaint shops that will gladly sell you meat at double the price of meat from the meat packing cartel that you hate, so you’re absolutely free to buy it instead.
Are the meat-packers practicing slavery, since you imply the pay is too low for anyone to willingly do the job?
The discussion is about meat processing, not butchers. There is a local food movement to smaller independent slaughterhouses, which in general are more humane and are able to serve local farmers. Large consolidated slaughterhouses generally only process meat from major corporations.
The meat from smaller local facilities is available locally to me at a competitive price. It is not double in price, what a silly idea.
The meat industry has become extremely consolidated in the US, which has put significant pressure on independent farmers and the wages of meat processing workers. The article you are commenting on talked about the difficulty of finding willing workers, which is generally a sign that wages are too low.
What does a butcher do if not meat processing? They don’t just slice ham or dole out ground beef, a butcher takes a dead animal and safely separates out the edible portions, I.e. meat processing. The lower skilled counterparts at meat packers do a single part of that job repeatedly at an assembly line.
Butchers take animals that have already been killed and cleaned and cut them up further into saleable pieces.
Meat processing plants, or slaughterhouses, take live animals, kill them, remove the internal organs, and remove the hide or feathers.
Different work and different skill sets.
Mass migration makes it economically impossible for many to have kids, as wages are slashed and any sense of community and belonging is ripped apart. The foundation people rely on to raise families is being systematically undermined
The fact that fertility rates are decreasing around the world, and especially in places like China, South Korea, and Japan, should indicate that this poster is approaching this topic with a certain agenda in mind.
What’s your hypothesis on that? I live in Asia and know why. I wonder if you do? Does it have to be an agenda? Here’s a hint, low fertility is complex and multivariate. Why has Korea and Japan resisted importing the next generation?
More young couples need to do more of that nasty dirty work, and crank out some more babies.
This! If I try to steelman the Trumper argument, look where Noah writes: "Americans — especially younger Americans — started to move away from these towns... Young people with even a modicum of talent, ambition, and wanderlust packed up and moved to New York City, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, etc."
If you accept that, all the immigration logic falls into place. But people in those towns want to fight this premise, and it's worth pondering whether any smart policies could help them. Because lacking smart policies, they are willing to try dumb policies.
For the past 40 years, it’s been increasingly difficult to stay in smaller cities and towns even if you very much want to. Reduced enforcement of monopoly laws resulted in the absorption of thousands of smaller businesses and those white collar jobs moving to larger cities. Globalization resulted in a very significant movement of factories out of the country, eliminating many blue collar jobs and the entire ecosystem of businesses that supported those workers in their communities.
What we saw with the pandemic and increase in remote work is that many people, given a choice, actually don’t prefer larger metro areas.
People in those towns want to fight that premise because it's bullshit and asinine to suggest that "everyone with a modicum of talent or ambition packed up and left."
I know it's hard to believe, but there are still people in this world who value family and community more than money. That are capable of "making it big" but that choose to earn less money and live in a certain community because it's what they believe is best for their families.
And I say that as someone who did leave my hometown, not to go work in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, but to run an NGO in a developing country. All 4 of my siblings have college degrees, all are doing quite well for their families, all have travelled extensively (domestically and internationally) and most importantly all are happy where they're at.
Now that my wife and I have started a family, we plan to move back to my hometown, because we value family and want our children to grow up near their grandparents and cousins. Our biggest fear is not being able to find a job (I'm getting job offers already). Our biggest fear is not being able to find a house, as most houses sell within a couple days of being listed.
But yeah, everyone with a modicum of talent leaves....
For reference: my hometown is 1300 people.
I can count on one hand the number of non-white classmates I had in HS, although that's certainly not true anymore as there has been a healthy amount of immigrants move in.
I mean, how would you ever do that besides government coercion to force people to work specific jobs? Government policy is usually pretty terrible at creating cultural change, and even when it succeeds, it isn’t pretty - that was the Cultural Revolution in China after all.
Let me throw out ideas, knowing they are probably bad. But just to get the ball rolling:
- Large subsidies to small municipal governments
- some kind of "rural opportunity zone" program that incentivizes more businesses to move a bit further from the big cities.
- massive top tax rates, so there's really no point in earning very high salaries.
- massive income transfers to low incomes, because at some point the low cost of living in rural areas does become appealing
I mean listen, if told someone they could be a school janitor in a small town, have a fine house & car, support their family, and have the summers off to go fishing down at the lake - that's not a bad deal! There are still plenty of Americans who would take that deal.
I mean, I kind of thought remote work might get more people back to the countryside. I'm from the rural midwest, and it crossed my mind that maybe I could go back, get a cheap house, and telecommute... Enough people do that and it helps the local business, stems the out-migration of young people. Maybe?
Young people aren't going to move somewhere devoid of amenities and entertainment, and educated professionals with kids aren't going to move to a place with terrible schools, no matter how cheap.
Not if you work for Amazon. Starting 1/1/25 five days in the office every week.
In no way does a union longshoreman work harder than a sales rep.
I grew up in a longshoreman town and people would literally drop out of college (yes, good ones) to come home when their number got called.
I’m not saying you’re fabricating your story, but just runs contrary to my experience.
To add - not sure what Gen you are (I'm 32) but when I was growing up we got a lot of this messaging from school that going to college was the definition of success. And everyone was given that same message, even if you weren't actually a good fit for college. I think this one-size-fits-all messaging was pretty detrimental because it made it so kids that would have been successful in labor had a negative perception of it.
I also grew up in a longshoremen town, San Pedro (Port of Los Angeles). Whole family is ILWU.
None of my friends growing up wanted to work at the Port. They had a completely unjustifiable aversion to "labor." And they weren't college-bound either. Hard to explain where that antipathy comes, especially when it goes against basic economic interest, but it definitely exists.
You're right but it's hard. One part of "the dignity of hard work" is that hard physical labor (without some sort of scarce "skill" incorporated) is worth a lot less in the market than it used to be. Part of this is the ongoing automation of labor. (Consider the containerization of shipping.) (Contemplate that in elementary physics, when they taught us the basics of how steam engines operate, the mechanical energy output is called "work".) (OTOH, women are no longer as disadvantaged in the job market.) Part is that several hundred million Chinese are now competing to do the hard physical labor that is done is manufacturing plants. Another part is purely cultural, there's more status in "white-collar" work; for a few decades skilled building trades were having a hard time attracting people even though they were paying quite well. But that part seems to be reversing; people have discovered that getting a college degree isn't worth the work/time/money unless the college is good and you've got interest/a head for it. In the long run, Americans generally come around to valuing jobs largely on how well they pay. And it seems that we're coming back to that. For instance, a lot of low-grade colleges are going out of business and the building trades are reported getting more recruits.
"We somehow need to restablish both the literal and perceived dignity of hard work and labor"
Hard work is it's own dignity. There are millions of unemployed Americans who don't work because THEY DON'T HAVE TO. The social welfare system makes life easy-peasy. What we need to have is a massive cut-off of welfare for able bodied people. They will suddenly be looking for jobs. The problem is that naive middle class white people can't understand how happy many people, of all races, are to simply DO NOTHING all day and live of the massive influx of subsidies.
But the unionized longshoremen need those jobs! Instead the port containers should be unloaded by teams of muscular workers, and dry goods with shovels, or better yet spoons.
This is a good and well reasoned article. But I think it's worth looking closely at what the message is culturally to the people who have chosen to stay in their declining small towns.
To me it sounds like the message is this: The way of life you're trying to protect is over. You need to accept that, and your three options are: 1. Move to the City. 2. Stay in your town as it delapidates and is overrun by 'drug people'. 3. Stay in your town and accept the cultural change as it is overrun by foreigners who don't speak your language. Option 3 is the least bad option. You won't like it at first, but eventually you will come to accept it.
That may be an honest assessment, but I think that is a hard sell politically. What's an even harder sell is the leftist position that "if you don't like option 3 it's because you're a racist and a bad person, besides the way of life you're trying to protect is based in white supremacy and colonialism so we should celebrate and accelerate its decline". That may not be the stated position of mainstream democrats, but it's associated (I think not entirely unfairly) with the democratic coalition.
Trump on the other hand is saying: "Your way of life is under threat, but I understand that it is important and valuable and I will fight to protect it" (ok he actually says a lot of batshit things about eating pets, but I think this is his underlying appeal).
Trump's promises may be impossible to fulfill. His message may be delusional, or a cynical grift (or both). But I think that without an alternative message which acknowledges that something culturally valuable is being lost (even if change may be necessary and long term positive) it will be impossible to win people over from the Trumpist camp.
What is stopping the young people who stay in these dying towns from opening the shops and restaurants to revitalize it before the immigrants come in and do it? And what’s so bad if immigrants speak their old language as they open businesses, I’m sure they can still operate the cash register.
One of my best friends comes from an arguably dying small city of around 30k. He and I are both scientists.
His sisters are back there still, all younger than him (he and I are mid-20s). 2/4 of them have a kid, one of whom has a trailer trash name. The youngest one is smart and trying to follow her older brother out.
That’s what the locals that stay into adulthood are doing: drinking, fighting and fucking.
Because 'the young people ' are the potential market to sell to - if they knew how to shop and cook.frugaly or even not frugally there would be no one to sell your ethnic Turkey Twizzlers,Fish Balls,and Chicken Gungies TO. As no one is offering you employment as a nuclear research assistant,a job you are educated and qualified to do,your other survival option is to open an eatery of some kind. It can be based on your national ethnic cuisine but tweaked to appeal to Western tastes and if you can establish a "story" that journalists can pick up on you can "sell the story along with the food".
It’s hard to run a start a business in a shrinking market.
$
Great comment!
We watched Trump and Vance accuse Haitians of being savages, demonizing them and calling them pet eaters. This stems ONLY from a place of racism. Period.
Stories like this one are entering the disinformation space and being amplified for the purpose of getting people to be suspicious of non whites and immigrants.
Trump's racism in his blathering lies about immigration is so blatant. The racism of that man has no boundaries. Deranged and dangerous!
"Haitians eating pets" is Trump's new caravan BS story.
How about wearing this "Keep the immigrants, deport the racists" tee in front of racists and bigots? 👇
https://libtees-2.creator-spring.com/listing/keeplb
If Haitians are so wonderful, why hasn't Haiti improved to the level of say, the Dominican Republic?
Gotta understand the fallacy of composition. The qualities of individual Haitians are not reflected in the quality of the Haitian system.
No, it's their shitty genetics. The Bell Curve and all that, get over it.
You aren't going to "save" small rural towns with no economic base. That's fine. People move on to opportunity. If anything keeping immigration low so they don't drive up the cost of real estate and taxes in the cities makes this easier.
Importing a bunch of net tax recipient immigrants (yes, they are fiscal drains even if they have some shitty mcjob) doesn't solve this. It just means the surplus from the economically dynamic regions has to be divided amongst more people, which means less for each.
Look, a family of four basically has a floor of consumption around 80-90k (far higher in expensive cities). Around 50k-60k in direct welfare (medicaid, rent assistance, etc) and say 30k+ if you've got two kids in the public schools. Some immigrant $15 an hour or whatever isn't going to come close to paying for all that (full time that's $30k a year and a few grand in taxes paid).
What's going on in Springfield isn't hard to figure out. Most of those government expenditures happen at the state and federal level. Medicaid, etc. Each of these welfare cases thus become a government cash infusion into the locality, and if you own the scarce resources they are bidding up then you are making bank (just look for instance at who owns the apartment buildings, its often the "kind hearted" elected officials that want to remind us to be more humane). The local employers are happy to get people whose existence will be heavily subsidized by the state as well, and the local K-12 schools that are being paid for with state/federal taxes are happy to get the extra cash.
This is just the rural equivalent of the urban ghetto (itself subsidized by the suburban economic core).
Of course if you made the people of Springfield, OH pay for all this, they would resent it. And indeed those who don't benefit much and those services that have to be paid for with local funds are indeed sticking points. But what's going on here is little more than a Ponzi scheme grift, the surplus from the economically vital regions isn't infinite mana from heaven. You can't make a country rich by importing tons of low IQ low productivity burdens, even if you give them jobs digging ditches and then filling them.
With the people in these towns you can at least say that they are "our people" and that they and their ancestors played some role in building modern America. You might even be willing to fork over some of your economic surplus to help them decline gracefully, and give their kids opportunities to move on (and the parents can move to be with their kids when they make it somewhere else). But the Haitians are never going to make it (bad genetics, that's why the country they came from is so shitty in the first place). They are just going to be new generation of dying welfare towns living on Eds and Meds subsidies from an ever more burdened economic core.
::points at Flynn effect::
I can't take the "people in poor countries have low genetic IQ and therefore will be stuck in poverty for generations if they immigrate" arguments seriously. How well do you think the typical South Korean would have done on an IQ test in 1920?
It’s interesting that Richard Hania was written off as a bigot when he talked negatively about the IQ of blacks but now that he’s disparaging the IQ of Trump voters he’s being welcomed back into polite society. Polite society loves to hate Trump voters.
Flynn Effect is not what you think it is. The people who coined the term knew this. Your grandparents weren't retarded.
I wish we could stop talking about IQ -I’d happily never hear about it again, I remember my first cringing awareness of Mensa - but your math checks out to me. I don’t understand how people can be in cloud cuckoo land about this, or why they like to be.
This is certainly true. Nearly identical people can form societies with very different characteristics. e.g. China vs Taiwan, West vs East Germany, North vs South Korea. In an alternate universe Haiti might have been very successful.
But we don't live in that universe. Immigrants from Haiti are going to bring all of that cultural baggage with them. I might be more favorable towards immigration from failed countries like this if we had an actual plan to address this. But that would require the political establishment to actually be honest about it rather than burying their heads in the sand and screaming "racism" any time it is brought up.
You seem to gloss over some aspects of this complex issue that shouldn’t be. If the importation of over 300K Haitians Venezuelans and other from the region was such a wonderful idea, why was it done via airlifts largely in the dead of night? If it truly was an effort to rebuild the local economy, why were local governments largely left out of the process? Usually when there are supposedly great programs initiated, you run the risk of injury getting between a news camera and a Congressman or Senator. Have I missed all of that? Your depiction of these migrations as being powered solely by word of mouth is not very credible, as it still comes down to having funds to make those moves. Your larger point that immigration can be a beneficial way to mitigate our declining birth is lost in the current chaos - ask NYC how well their program is working.. If we were serious, we would nationally devise a process to attain bipartisan legislation to manage LEGAL immigration and to deliberately and thoughtfully create programs for smooth transitions of the immigrants into their new country. The fact that we are not doing this strongly suggests that rebuilding rural economies is a secondary objective. It seems more to be a vehicle for cheap lies about Republican racists.
The quality of the “American system” for low income, unskilled residents- whether citizens or refugees is very poor. This was not the case during the last immigration boom 100+ years ago. A decent proportion of the Haitians who came over from the 70-80s onward were middle class and many of the poorer ones did well as they were religious, family-oriented and hard-working (like many Asian immigrants).
Too many of their children, though, have been rescued from the disease that is the Haitian system only to succumb to the American disease. I’ve spent a lot of time in Newark, NJ over the years. There are pockets of Haitians (and now francophone Africans from CAR and elsewhere) and also Brazilians (due to a long-existing Portuguese community). The Brazilians are doing well. The Haitians are having their lunch eaten by the African arrivals - much fewer in number but seem to be the ones working rather than the kids of Haitian immigrants.
The second and third generations seem to lose their work ethic and ambition- they become Americanized. This is fine if their kids get educated and can become corporate drones, which requires little work ethic or ambition, but there are fewer lower level jobs these days that allow someone to waste time, surf the web and check social media for 4 hours out of an eight hour day, and attend useless meetings/calls for two hours of that day. Even at McDonalds, work means work.
Yes, dat shows third generation immigrants start having stats like long-time Americans, so this is reason to hate on specific immigrants?
Yes some immigrants out perform for longer than 3 generations, the rest just revert to American averages, so we are to allow in the immigrants who exceed Americans for 4 generations??
I get the people see some immigrant types and culture as better...and know that it just doesn't matter in broad immigration policy and future prosperity of our country. Allowing in immigrants of all types and education, and having a growing population is America's super power. And as long as we are a rich and thriving country, a chunk of Americans, with 3 or 10 generations in the country are going to be spoiled, not anything special or squander their opportunities as Americans...so be it.
They revert to their genetic mean + get used to the welfare state an underclass culture.
Repeating racist talking points do not further an intelligent conversation.
That's a great insight!
'The qualities of individual people are not reflected in the quality of their government."
I like my rephrasing here:
We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all People, everywhere, anytime, are created Equal. Endowned by their own understanding individually, of their own conception of their creater, with the unalienable rights of life, Liberty,, Pursuit of happiness.
Then what explains it?
HaIti was nice enough in the past to be a major tourist destination. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/travel/in-haiti-tourism-economy-caribbean.html It was of course occupied by Haitians at the time. Current socioeconomic situations say little about the nature of the people who live there, and even less about the people who choose to leave.
Might want to repeat the last sentence to our host.;). A lot of tourist economies tend to be based on resorts in the Caribbean. They're gorgeous, and the people friendly; but you're advised to not stray too far from them.
Assuming those warnings are valid now, it apparently was not true of Haiti at the time in question. Because the article I linked has links to old articles recommending hotels and night spots in downtown Port-au-Prince.
There's the matter of the "Haiti Independence Debt.
"The Haitian independence debt involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding an indemnity of 150 million francs in five annual payments of 30 million to be paid by Haiti in claims over property – including Haitian slaves – that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition... The New York Times approximated that in total 112 million francs was paid in indemnity, which when adjusted for the inflation rate would be $560 million in 2022, but considering that if had been invested in the Haitian economy instead, it could be valued at $115 billion."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_independence_debt
$560 million invested 200 years ago is most likely worth $0. Those calculations don't work over long time periods because investments fall to 0 over a long enough horizon. e.g. $1 invested 500 years ago at a 7% rate of return is $492 trillion.
You are confusing the people who could not put up with living in that lawless, frightening country with those who can. Nations and countries are composed of different individuals. No way can you identify people who wanted to leave that dangerous country with those who presumably benefit from the gang culture in power in Haiti
Your broader point is a good one, but it is very unlikely that the vast majority of those who stay "benefit from the gang culture in power in Haiti." The vast majority are almost certainly victims thereof; that is the whole point of establishing a predatory governing structure. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335735050_Introduction_a_symposium_on_the_predatory_state
Just a question but do the 50% of Haitians that practice VooDoo as their sole religion suddenly give it upe whan they hit the border? Before it became politically correct to memory hole the FACT of VooDoo animal scarifice it was common knowledge.
https://slate.com/culture/2013/11/anthony-karen-a-photographers-look-inside-a-haitian-voodoo-ritual-photos.html
Surprisingly, when people migrate to a dramatically different culture, they often do change their religious practices. As a boy, I remember hearing of the Hmong people who were resettled into Iowa where I lived. Their traditional religious practices were "animist" but they enrolled their children in Baptist Sunday schools (as well as making sure they learned English).
But remember, most people aren't deeply committed to one singular religion. Haitians practice a mix of Catholicism, west African religions, and Haitian innovations, and likely they will start to pick up American tendencies as soon as they can speak a bit of English. This sort of assimilation is particularly common when the people have no intention of going back to where they came from. (Also, it's likely that the Haitians that dare to leave and can afford to are likely to be the better-educated, more-affluent, more-Frenchified Haitians.)
And of course, this whole scare is rather a joke. We all eat mass-slaughtered chickens. But there's no law against buying and eating a dog or cat, either. Americans are repulsed by the concept, but it's by no means outside of our proclaimed moral system. And how many Americans remember that Hindus (a considerable number of them American now) are repulsed by us eating cattle?
Cat hoax! Cat HOAX! CAT HOAX!
You can sing that to a rock rhythm!
I think you need to go take a drive to the town to prove your point.
Not recently but circa 2010 there was a spare of news stories about eastern European refugees living in makeshift huts in the woods along the river at Peterborough England catching and eating fish from the river and swans from the local lake. Roast swan,a dish for a king. There was a big outcry at the time. Not at the desperation of the migrants,it's a big centre for agricultural work,but because we Brits are animal lovers!
Haitians ARE savages and it's perfectly understandable by a ten year old, but clearly not by delusional white women.
Yes and no. You should listen to the videos of city council meetings in Springfield, people black and white, making their detailed complaints about the situation in their town. They didn’t mind the first group TPS sent to work in the factory. They mind thousands and thousands more coming who aren’t working and have no place to work. That’s more than they can handle.
You all call racist, but that’s not the complaint. Nobody minds immigrants looking for work and a better way of life. Everybody gets the essential economics of the situation in small towns across America. When immigrants coming to join us in middle America, that’s fine. Little by little, becoming part of the community. That’s fine. TPS sending a third again the population of the community over a few years and apparently not preventing the worst of them from coming in the flood. That’s overwhelming and painful.
Why are those folks in Springfield complaining about the federal government’s role in this? How are these thousands of apparently desperately poor people funding their journey to Ohio, or wherever? The American taxpayer is funding this. Or not funding it because it’s becoming part of our national debt.
You know why my neighbors in my small city are going to vote for Trump? Because they are so sick of the judgments of urbanites who despise them. No sympathy, certainly no listening or you’d know what the actual complaints are out here instead of picking up media soundbites and beating us with them. This essay is fine as far as it goes but you ignore the rest of the situation at our peril.
My family in Iowa votes for Republicans decade after decade with the hope that things will get better in their rural communities. It hasn't worked.
Your neighbors will vote for Trump to spite the Democrats. How will voting for a guy (and party) with only a "concept" of a healthcare program, just to name one policy issue, improve their lot?
I don't despise people who vote against their interests, I wonder what the hell they're thinking.
For your neighbors, are those judgments from urbanites delivered in-person right to their faces? Or did they gain that impression by digesting their own set of media soundbites?
This is a real question, I'm not trying to be snarky. It seems to me that so many cultural complaints these days come down to "the elites think ____ about people of my class/geography" or alternately "the racist country folk think ____ about people of my skin color". In both instances I'd argue that this impression is brokered by a third party (i.e. the media, a political candidate, etc) who provides the supposed evidence of the opposite group's contempt or hate or whatever -- in order to drive outrage or clicks or votes. Not to say that racism/classism don't exist, but these stereotypes are painted with quite a broad brush.
Just as an example, and again I'm not attempting to pick on you unfairly at all, but you wrote "you all call racist" at the start of your second paragraph. Do you really think that *all* city-dwelling liberals (or whomever you intended that comment towards) think that it's racist for citizens of Springfield to express concerns about migrants' impact on the community at a city council meeting? As a city-dwelling liberal myself I would estimate that maybe just 10% of the people I know who also fit that description, would call the situation you described "racist". You seem to be assuming that as a group we have no sympathy, or empathy, or willingness to listen on these issues, and I don't think that's accurate. Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart do not speak for my demographic.
As much as small town people don't want to be caricatured, urban liberals don't want to be caricatured either. Day after day I see comments online about how my "tribe" is far left, woke, obsessed with race, smug, hates and fears rural people, believes in communism, supports endless wars, et cetera. This DOES describe some people I know, but they are by far the most "out there" of my groups of friends, and they generally drive the rest of us crazy.
It's frustrating to feel lumped together with extremist douchebags just because we're both left of center. Isn't this just like conservatives being told that they're on the same team as white supremacists?
Well said!
This is so tricky, because even though the residents have legitimate complaints and aren't racist, the focus on the situation by Trump and Vance is meant to evoke racial fears, which seems important not to overlook. Maybe Dems need to find a way to clarify this.
First, they (Dems) would have to understand human nature. If only they (Dems) could figure out how to convince the masses not yet on the lifeboat that capsizing it is in no one's interest. Those who understand human nature (non-Dems) would simply grab an oar and start smashing the heads of those trying to board.
In regard to "How are these thousands of apparently desperately poor people funding their journey to Ohio, or wherever?" it seems to me that the most likely answer is "Once a Haitian in Springfield gets work, he starts scrimping and saving so he can pay for his relatives to get to the US and to Springfield to crash with him." As far as I know, TPS gets people visas and work permits and such but it doesn't choose where they go, that's left up to individual liberty and the Great Free Market.
I mean, here in Boston, housing is very tight but there are Haitians, including families with kids, who get here by one means or another and live on the streets because they have no other choice. But your long-term prospects living on the street in Boston are probably better than owning a house in Port-Au-Prince these days. There are charities that ensure you won't starve and you can get at least emergency medical care on the taxpayer's dime...
As for grumbling about the attitudes of urbanites, that's fully justified. One aspect that's very visible here in Boston is that housing is segregated by income, so if you've got a good paying "professional" job, you live in a suburb where poor people, much less refugees from Haiti, are largely priced out. So you don't experience the cultural frictions and you don't have to fret that your schools will have to spend too much money on bilingual education. But also, the baseline population is larger (metro Boston is something like 5 million people), so even adding 100,000 Haitians doesn't make an enormous difference.
Fantastic post! My definition of love is "That which uplifts", and immigrants and locals working together to revitalize their small towns is a beautiful example of this.
There's actually a musical sort of about this, "Come From Away", the true story about the thousands of plane passengers who ended up in a tiny Newfoundland town after 9/11 grounded all air traffic for several days. While there was that familiar initial distrust and skepticism, people from both the town and the planes worked together to make the best of the situation and it was beautiful and I cried a lot.
Your position on mass immigration would have much to recommend it if only it was consistent with reality! I have a pretty good sized farming operation and often need additional workers to hand pick our crops. I had heard from an older friend about how great an experience he had in hiring Hmong immigrants for his greenhouse operation in Colorado so I found there was a large Hmong immigrant community in our nearby community and my wife and I approached the pastor on he local Hmong christion church who invited us to attend one Sunday. We wnet and got up in front of the congregation and told them about the jobs we had available for picking during the summer. Now good pickers on our place make $300 to $500 a day for an 8 hour day. Paid breaks and good, sanitary, safe conditions so a pretty darn good job if one is unskilled!
I told them all how the deal worked, distance and how we could help arrange transportation and the first thing out of the PASTOR'S WIFE'S mouth was " Could we pay cash so they could keep their welfare benefits"! I was astounded and when I explained we had to pay and deduct employment taxes and insurance interest died. We never got ONE Hmong immigrant.
I might agree with you on your thesis of reinvigorateing rural areas with selected immigrants if we could cut ALL cash benefits and houseing support but while we used to be a place where opportunity brought in workers the left has screwed up our federal programs to such an extent that even many immigrants now choose federal and state dole over working! Fix that and I could agree with your idea but without it we are just bringing in millions of additional freeloaders and bankrupting the system.
What welfare benefits were the immigrants getting? Even legal Immigrants aren’t eligible for welfare.
Most Hmong came as refugees, who are eligible for welfare as soon as they get here. Refugees also get other benefits. I've known folks who came as refugees and got cars and housing assistance. A few years later they were taking vacations back to the country they'd "escaped" from.
Legal refugees are eligible for SSI, TANF, SNAP and Medicaid only for 12 months after their entry. It’s strange that these Hmong are still eligible, since the last Hmong refugees the US accepted was way back in 2009, most Hmong in Thailand are now repatriated to Laos.
Asylum seekers on parole are only eligible for emergency medical aid. Other immigrants, such as on family or marriage visas need a cosponsor who is liable for repayment of any welfare those immigrants receive.
I agree that it is bad that the refugees only wanted to work under the table. Immigrants shouldn’t be getting welfare at all, but should be allowed and encouraged to work legally and on the books paying taxes like everyone else.
My experience with the Hmong was in about 2016 or so. I can't say what benefits they were getting all I know is it must have been substantial for them to turn down the work we offered. They had a nice little church of a couple of hundred souls and I guess one of the shockers for me was that the Pastors wife was encouraging fraud among the congregation!
Our society, it seems to me, is not any longer encouraging self reliance nor the melting pot. Misplaced compassion is damaging a whole generation of immigrants. Not all, of course, but many!
The Haitians in Springfield are getting $600 to $1600 per month on a debit card according to Kyle Koehler, a local candidate running for state office.
I'd like to hear the details. OTOH, that's not a lot of money, really. It's also possible that the money is for children born here, who are citizens. Dunno exactly what the welfare programs are in Ohio, though. A quick Google suggests that if a family has two citizen children, they might be able to get $500 in food stamps alone. Though cynically I'd note that food stamps come out of the general federal budget, most of which is paid for by affluent people in the infamous blue coastal metros. It's likely that it's a significant flow of money moving into Springfield.
They are employed thru a temp agency who brought them to Springfield. The temp agency is owned by the same person who owns 50-60 properties in which cots are rented out to 20-25 immigrants per property at $250/cot. There is exploitation and possibly human trafficking involved. It is reported that the FBI is investigating fir human trafficking.
Speaking as a Brit I'm not surprised.
Nothing sadder than a dying town. Immigrants flock to their own. Little Italy. Little Senegal. Etc. As opposed to mass dumping, place like Connecticut mass imported Italians to work in their new factories. And a by product is New Haven pizza. Bring them on.
Because there's no difference at all between Little Italy and Little Senegal. The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze me.
Heh, Little Italy back in the late 1800s was generally considered to be a den of thieves. Remember that Italians were essentially banned in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. All we remember now is a romanticized version.
All new immigrants demonized. The Italians. The Irish. Etc. Are you a Native American? Or did your people come from somewhere ?
I would not have allowed a single Italian into America. They were toxic. Like the Jews. But fucking Senegal? Thats ten thousand times worse.
Great point about immigration in the past (before welfare benefits) being based on job opportunities and local networks- often the latter being more important than the former (or rather, there are often better jobs elsewhere than the spot the immigrant chose out of comfort).
Refugees are a different situation because they are sometimes “dumped” somewhere (Minnesota for Somalis) and that somewhere becomes a comfortable cultural nexus regardless of the quality of job opportunities relative to other places. I can’t speak to the Haitians of Springfield because I don’t know what proportion were placed there vs what proportion came later once there was critical mass.
However, once there is a government safety net, particularly for families with children, mobility decreases and economic decision-making becomes less important. Why do poor native-born families and single mothers choose to live in cities which are more expensive, more dangerous and have poorer schools than cheaper rural or suburban or small town areas that would offer better lives for their children? There are plenty of places where
a housing voucher would cover the rent, groceries are cheaper and more plentiful and schools are safe and decent relative to the nightmare cities/neighborhoods these people live in now.
Speaking of cities, you need to get out more if you think all young people have a preference to live and work in big cities like NY or Chicago. The vast majority don’t and do not. Amongst the wealthy kids whose parents work (but rarely live) in those cities, kids who went to elite schools and seek employment in high paying/high status industries - they do gravitate to those centers of industry (not always in big cities), but the majority of them leave for the suburbs later and these elites are a very small slice of the populace.
America is a service economy. The vast majority of jobs created in the past two years have been in government, healthcare, leisure and hospitality and social services. Manufacturing employment has been flat for two years.. Tech and finance laid off people post covid but are hiring again (though young people in finance in NY are a fraction of their past populations). Amongst our milieu, working in tech or finance or consulting and living for a time in a big city is common. However, our milieu is not common.
The arrival of cheap immigrant labor can keep businesses alive that should have moved elsewhere, but it also retards capital investment.
Look at the wine industry or meat processing. The tech exists to automate lots of the work. Wine growing countries like Australia (and even much of Europe ) have automated much of the work in the vineyards (millions of immigrants can’t walk over the border into Australia each year). The California high end wine industry is backwards. They are only starting to make capital investments in the past five years that were common elsewhere 20+ years ago, and US manufacturing companies have almost no market share in the equipment the vineyards are buying (see also manufacturing robotics generally). Faced with labor shortages in recent years the vineyards first reacted by training the wives of their vineyard workers to prune and harvest and only then turned to the tech common in other countries.
Why invest in robotics or automation when one can hire immigrants for low wages or just manufacture in China or Bangladesh? It is sad that making capital investments or working with schools and government to train young people already here don’t seem to be the top choices. We’d rather borrow money to import.
Let’s not pretend that cheap illiterates are some kind of miracle solution. My Italian immigrant grandfather came to Paterson, NJ with his family around 1900 because there was a huge Italian immigrant population there. The silk mills there imported weavers from Naples, Italy in the latter 1800s to keep the mills going (my relatives weren’t weavers, just campesinos). Within a few decades, though, the industry there collapsed because competitors used automated processes. Cheap labor is often a stopgap rather than a real solution.
Lewiston, ME (like many smallish former mill towns in New England, is a dump. Its heyday (like many mill towns) was before electricity when water power ruled (Paterson, NJ was also a mill town). It is not coming back. Same for most of the former grain elevator towns in the Midwest. Farming is large scale and automated and Cargill doesn’t need an elevator in every little town. These mill and farming towns popped into existence due to key geographic location and the needs of the industry taking advantage of that geography at that time. Few people “need” to be in the middle of nowhere Maine or Kansas.
Importing people to populate a town only invented based upon geography and tech from 150 or 200 years ago is insanity. And we’ve seen what happens when government benefits allow people to stay in a town that has no jobs - Bridgeport, CT and lots of other mid-sized former mill towns in the North as well as the South (Winston-Salem, NC, say) managed to retain population even as industry left. It seems having a critical mass of people and maintaining population isn’t a panacea. People living in some of these places would have been better off moving their families out.
I am pro-immigration but it needs to be selective (including a proportion of low wage workers on time-limited trial visas) and controlled and drawing from around the world. No American should have to speak Spanish or Creole to get a job at a factory or McDonalds. Immigration should only exist alongside internship, apprenticeship, training and work-study opportunities for citizens (not just in manufacturing but also, say, in tech project/program management. Our schools seem to believe that everyone is going to college, the union backers of Dems don’t like the idea of student labor or private tradesmen/women and our profitable tech companies would rather outsource rudimentary program management to second tier Indian graduates than training our own second tier graduates.
The issue of temporary foreign workers holding back capital investments has quite rightly become prominent in the Canadian version of this debate (not about changing the composition of small towns, more about suppressing wages and pushing housing and healthcare to the breaking point).
What you're saying is these towns need anchor businesses that employ low skilled labor. The towns that find the anchor businesses and have a source of labor will win.
Of course, the kids of the immigrants will mostly want to leave.
I was born, raised and now live in a small mid western town. This essay repeats several common misapprehensions about the issues we face. While it is true that young people move away, a lack of housing is a much more significant cause of this. We have about 18,000 actively employed in the county but a survey of local employers shows that they need another 2,000. A large share of these open jobs pay well in excess of $20.00 an hour. They don't stay because they don't want to move back in with Mom and dad. Our housing is in such short supply that vacancy rates are below 1%. However developers will not come here when there are no subdivisions to exploit and the costs of creating a new one exceed $40.000 per lot. There is substantial money available at the state and Federal level but the bias toward larger cities shown by both developers a government officials leads to 90% of the funding to go to urban projects. I am also put off by the focus on meatpacking plants. They represent a tiny portion of the opportunity. The factory has changed. 40 years ago low skilled positions probably did constitute 70% of the need. Today that percentage has shrunk. significantly. This is very important when considering the future of education. Finally I would add the the comment about respect for work is correct. Speaking about the meat packing jobs in the article's manner is not constructive.
Housing issues are always associated with urban areas in the public discourse, it hadn't occurred to me that they could also be severe in smaller towns. Thank you for pointing that out.
My brother is a city councilor in the small town I grew up in. He reports facts about like what you mention. OTOH, $20/hour comes to about $40k/year, and the cost of building a single-family house is around $200k these days. (The tight labor market has driven up the cost of construction workers, among other things.) A family that makes $40k/year can't really afford that, though a couple that makes $80k/year could. In the case of his town, what keeps housing from being built in town is that there are a lot of outlying burgs of circa 100 people that are within commuting distance. That housing is slowly decaying because people don't prefer it, but for the time being, poor-ish people find it cheaper to live there, which puts an upper limit on what a developer can get for a new house.
One thing to check is whether there are local regulations that limit the construction of apartments. I'd also check what "there are no subdivisions to exploit" really means, e.g. platting a new subdivision is relatively simple.
Haitians did not spontaneously migrate to Springfield. Springfield city launched a Welcome Springfield initiative to attract immigrants, which has become controversial with residents. That is an important fact to understand.
(I'm a different Lisa ) I wonder if this was incentivized behind the scenes by proposed Amtrak routes that Sen Brown has talked about. There was an email that went out in Dec 2023 wherein he provided a map of proposed routes and existing routes. Springfield is on a proposed route. I will also say it looks like East Palestine, where the toxic train accident happened in the opposite corner of Ohio, also is located at the nexus of a current and proposed route.
In Australia, the state governments have the right to sponsor visa for permanent migration just like businesses. They use issue a 5 year visas to work in a regional area after which you can apply for permanent residency. Although "regional" in the Australian migration context is any place other than Melbourne and Sydney.
In MY mind, of course you are right.
The problem, though, is technological progress over the long sweep of history has strongly favored centralization, and everything educated people believe is based upon that bedrock truth. However, we have a sharp increase in technological progress in communications technology that favors the opponents of centralization. These people may not have any sort of winning strategy for how to build a competitive civilization, but they now have the tools to fight a real war against centralizers.
Immigration is the poster child for centralization. It represents the idea that all people are pretty much the same, that people rightfully ought to get up and go where things are better, and that the people who are already there ought to accept newcomers as long as they meet the requirements set by CENTRAL NATIONAL AUTHORITY.
Does it matter that a community such as the ones you are describing really need these immigrants to reverse their decline?
Well, of course it matters to me. And it matters to the kinds of Republicans I know who run things in town. As I gather it matters to the people who run things in Springfield. But to the disaffected, that's not how it looks.
In their eyes, globalization caused the problem. Furthermore, unfettered freedom of movement played a huge role -- inevitably, this destabilizes small communities. (Read Patrick Deneen if you think I am putting words into their mouths.) Now, they are supposed to solve a problem of others' making by agreeing to wholesale alteration of their local culture by welcoming blocks of foreigners into their midst.
Their leaders and their poll answers might SAY that the number one issue is economic, but that is not candid talking. What this ilk really means is that the centralization crowd (they experience it as a conspiracy) promised economic benefits and this turned out to be a lie.
Which (in their minds) justifies any lying that they and their preferred leaders might do in response. Which is where our communications technology has turned out to be such a weapon. And it is what J.D. Vance means when he claims entitlement to repeat rumors, true or not, to gain attention for his constituents' concerns.
(Truly, it gets worse. The likes of Peter Thiel fully intend to use this crowd to overthrow the existing order and install a radical government of the techno-elite. Which means that this movement is unlikely to fade in the near future.)
I bring all this up, Noah, because I think it has become all too common to misread the nature of the opposition in today's media environment.
Our main opponents are not good faith opponents interested in facts, reasoning, or the good of the nation. It's not enough to prove that anti-immigrant policy would be bad for such communities (these people don't care) or that their sentiments are xenophobic. The question is how to fight back against the power of digital memes, where it is very difficult to counteract rumor, distortion, and outright lies that appeal to peoples' darker sides.
Very nice... well done