America: the Melting Pot

Exactly. And that's the problem. If Suzy and I don't like each other for totally illogical reasons, we'll probably muddle through life okay because there are plenty of other people to hang out with, work for, etc. But when an entire nation--or at least a large influential segment of it--doesn't like another nation, that's how wars get started.

We don't "exploit" them and they don't work "cheap." In a rural region where very few heads of households earn $20 an hour for the very good reason that the cost of living isn't high enough to make it necessary, it's ridiculous for punk kids to expect to be paid $20 an hour to cut grass--and not even provide their own hardware. The little pendejos don't think they have to learn to work for a living because they're all going to grow up to be investment bankers, even though not a single one of 'em can make change for a dollar without a POS terminal. We pay ten bucks an hour for yard work and that is a princely sum in a local economy where food and rent are cheap and everybody wears blue jeans. The Mexicans think we're crazy and they fawn over us.

It's easy for us Americans to look down our noses at people who haven't had a bloody revolution, or at least not one that worked. The fact is that quite a few nations on this planet are still struggling with despotic political systems, many of them far worse than Mexico's. Mexico already had two revolutions, and after all that time it's become such a big joke that the major political party, with a straight face, calls itself the "Institutional Revolutionary Party." It's not easy to "fix" a country, especially when the U.S. kind of likes Mexico the way it is. When you figure it out, be sure to share your secret with the people in Uzbekistan, Moldova, Macedonia, Paraguay, North Korea, Uganda, Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, and a few dozen other sad places.

No, they just toss that in to give themselves a veneer of respectability, just like Lincoln tossed in race as a red herring to make the Civil War seem like a noble cause. The Americans who are now scuttling on the surface of the linoleum with anti-illegal immigration picket signs are the same ones who have been biding their time under the linoleum for the past fifty years, waiting for racism to become fashionable again. They all say they "don't mind" Latinos who come in legally, but they don't date them or want them living next door or competing for their job. Sure it's a big country and the minority of them who honestly feel that way make up a large enough group to get the interviews and the photo ops, so the racists can stay in the background, but in my observation they are indeed a tiny minority.

Well that is not what I've said and we'll just have to respectfully disagree on your underlying premise. I spent most of my life in Los Angeles, which in those days was arguably the illegal immigrant capital of the country, and they contributed more than they took back. On the one hand you say we're "exploiting" them by paying them less than their labor is worth, and on the other you say that they take more than they give. How about making up your mind?

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Would that be the American race? We overthrew a sovereign nation, the only secular pro-Western one in the entire Mideast, and turned it into a giant gang war. Our corporations are as corrupt as the communist parties of the old Soviet Bloc, and out citizens are so dumb that they elected a President who can't even speak his native language.

Yes yes, I lived in L.A. for four decades. Teachers have been abandoning their posts since the 1960s, when New Math and Transactional Analysis turned classrooms into zoos. Not to be unsympathetic to your plight or ungrateful for your admirable desire to keep trying, but pretty much all American kids act that way these days. They are all little pendejos. Truancy is now institutionalized, kids are actually allowed to skip a certain number of days per year without an excuse or any punishment. Vandalism is rampant, bullying is an epidemic, they're having sex on campus, often in public, and colleges have to teach remedial English because a huge percentage of them are allowed to graduate despite being functionally illiterate. I have a friend who threw in the towel when an eight-year-old anglo student tried to push her down a stairwell. Their parents just don't give a damn. Their fathers either ran off or their mothers threw them out because they weren't perfect enough, they've been raised by a steady stream of "uncles." In their defense the parents between them have to work three jobs to make ends meet, so people like Bill Gates can sell us software that barely works and buy himself a private island.

Yes yes, I lived in El Sereno for many years. Nonetheless, the programs you speak of, while they indeed siphon tax money off from more worthwhile pursuits, are a drop in the bucket. Have you ever added up all the money that your district wastes on "administrative" staff who do nothing but make life harder for teachers, students and parents alike? What's the teacher-to-administrator ratio in your district? Are teachers really that incompetent that they require that much management? Do you? I wasn't joking before when I said I know people who have master's degrees in "Educational Administration." They should be ashamed to admit it.

Well you have to admit it's a backhanded compliment to the American Dream, that the biggest nutritional problem among our poor people is obesity.

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The teenage pregnancy rate is out of control everywhere. Your barrio school is hardly special in that regard. A lot of girls want to have babies because for the first time in their lives they'll have someone who loves them and who is actually around, not off working two jobs or screwing his secretary or her delivery boy.

You do realize that you just illustrated my point about how screwed up the public sector is? Surely they could have done something more effective with that money. Some large pendejo with a master's degree in "educational administration" made that decision for you, right?

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Yet the pattern has held for more than two hundred years: No matter how much contempt we heap on immigrants--legal or illegal--their children, and with utter certainty their grandchildren--assimilate and become indistinguishable from other Americans. It's especially true of Latinos, who have always had the highest intermarriage rate of all ethnic groups, only recently challenged by a new wave of less clannish and racist Asians. You can hardly find a "third generation Mexican-American" to tally. Amusingly, today's immigrants as a generic class share a lot of values with the "conservatives" who bash them. Religious, capitalist, anti-drug, anti-gay.

I told you the same thing above. American kids don't want to get their precious little hands dirty. The unions and the other good-old-boy networks make it difficult to get work done affordably. A friend of mine wanted to do just a rudimentary job of finishing his basement, and a contractor bid something like $10,000 on the job. He rented a truck, picked up four mojados at Home Depot, bought the materials for a few hundred bucks and had them load it, then paid them $1,000 to finish the whole damn job in a single day. They thought he was insane and were embarrassed to take his money. We're not talking about "taking jobs away from American workers." We're talking about introducing American "workers"--if you can call them that--to reality.

Hold it dude, my wife and I between us have about fifty years of municipal government experience and she was even a social worker. Most of what you say is blatantly untrue. Undocumented immigrants simply cannot qualify for most of those programs and you can be sure that the social workers are not in business to look the other way. Yes their kids get a break, we Americans are kind of soft on children. Maybe we realize they will grow up to be good citizens, get good jobs, and pay their taxes.

It's kind of charming. Reminds me of Europe, where everything is multilingual.

Not on our watch they didn't. You are way exaggerating and we've got the credentials to call you on it. Illegals get medical care because doctors are in the business of helping people and public hospitals won't turn anybody away. Their children get services because statistically they will more than repay us for them during their working lifetimes.

You can blame that on two generations of American parents who have abdicated their responsbilities and raised two generations of little pendejos. This country would not be noticeably safer or cleaner without illegal immigrants. We'd still have the Bushes to worry about, after all.

Ten bucks an hour for cutting grass is hardly "cheap," in an area where people raise families on lower wages than that.

We lived in Latino neighborhoods more often than not. She loves them. She tried to get a job as a substitute teacher in the barrio. Even though she has an M.A. in English, from a presumably satisfactory government university, they wanted her to pay money to take an English proficiency exam. Then they told her they would put her to work in a ghetto school all right, twenty miles away in south L.A., while presumably the substitute teachers in Torrance would get to drive to East L.A. These are the M.A.s in "Educational Administration" at work. Instead she got a job working in a private tutoring academy in the San Gabriel Valley, working with Asian-American kids. She discovered that it was fulfilling to work with kids who are not disadvantaged, if that's what the system forced her to do.

BTW, you are obviously an honorable man even though we disagree. My apologies for getting off on the wrong foot. If you're a teacher--especially today--you're okay by me.

 

Actually we don't seem to have much of an illegal immigrant community up there in northwestern California. The population is too small for them to be able to stay under the radar. And I fail to see how paying somebody what in our county is a university graduate-level wage to do high school dropout-level work is "exploitation." American kids aren't simply following the laws of supply and demand. They're off on a different planet where they can get what they want without having to work for it. Gee, I wonder where they learned that. Maybe in school, where they keep getting promoted from one grade to the next without actually having to complete their learning assignments?

The laws of this country are set up so that it is impossible to avoid violating them. I think the figures are that on the average each of us violates one every hour. They're just bullshit set up by people in power to keep the rest of us in our place. Don't get hung up on them. They change them every time they feel like it, and it has very little to do with "right" and "wrong," and even less to do with what any of us actually wants. Have you not noticed that the Religious Redneck Retard in the White House routinely violates the Law of the Land, the Constitution, and doesn't even bother trying to cover it up? The Supreme Court has not upheld the Constitution since FDR began using it for toilet paper in 1933. Eisenhower, a player in the "Republican" Conference of the Republocrat League, established the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, completing FDR's dream of making the entire 1929 Communist Party platform a reality and effectively supplanting the Constitution and turning America into a socialist worker's paradise with all laws open to subjective interpretation by those in power. With role models like that, how can you pontificate to any individual--inside or outside the country--that the laws nonetheless apply to him?

I'm a fast typist. My momma insisted that I learn to type in high school and I worked my way through college as a typist. Little did anyone suspect back then that the day would come when almost everybody would spend a substantial portion of every day huddled over what is essentially a typewriter keyboard. I get a kick out of the early "feminists" who refused to take typing classes. Today they can barely keep up with their e-mail.

 

Well for starters a lot of it is simply bonehead math. A huge number of them are using somebody else's SSN. That means when that citizen or legitimately matriculated resident retires, he will be collecting the contributions from the illegal, who will get doodley squat. Some of them may be in a low enough income bracket to dodge the income tax. (I think we call that bracket "poverty" and since they all have at least two jobs few of them are in it.) But they all shell out the same value-subtracting taxes that we all do everytime they spend any of their income. Directly, such as sales and excise taxes, or indirectly, such as the portion of my own tenants' rent that I collect but kindly pass off to the bureaucrats. In virtually bus-less L.A., most immigrants have to drive to work, so their gasoline taxes are subsidizing that handsome subway that the bankers and jewelers ride to work under Wilshire Boulevard.

We moved away in 1997. We had always planned on retiring in Humboldt County, where we vacationed every year to get away from those intolerable summers. My conscience finally forced me to walk away from my government job and I became a consultant. It dawned on us that since I was no longer driving to work but flying, we no longer needed to live in a major metro, but just some place with a decent airport. So we decided to make the move while we were still (just barely) young enough to withstand the rigors of moving. Ironically my wife is still taking care of our five acres of redwoods, ten dogs, and various other enterprises (with the help of some people who are not afraid to get their hands dirty), while I was forced to come to D.C. to find work when the bottom fell out of the consulting market on 9/11. I've gotten reacclimated to living in a vibrant urban environment, and my travels have taken me back to dear old Aztlán enough times that I often wonder whether we made a mistake in leaving. There are even people here that I can speak Spanish and Chinese with.

Boy you're a dog with a bone on that issue, aren't you. Is there anything you can't blame on the minorities? An entire generation of predominantly white American parents abdicated their roles and filled the schools with children that had no understanding of the basic rules of living in the world. The schools tried valiantly to start raising them, about four years too late, using every wacky technique they could find, but it was a hopeless cause.

The myriad white teachers I've known are mostly knee-jerk liberals who want to dedicate their lives to helping the minorities. One even joined a black church and sings in the choir.

So is the adult pregnancy rate. They're on par with their elders. If it weren't for our immigrants with their high fertility, the USA would be losing population and the Ponzi Scheme known as Social Security would collapse fifteen years sooner.

Not in many ways, but as I have discussed at great length in other threads, they are the one ethnic group who didn't self-select from their population the ones who wanted to leave and try their hand at life in America. Ditto for our aboriginal people, who never signed up to be "Americans" either. My contention that the schism between white and black Americans can be blamed on Lincoln has been elaborated many times. He connived white Americans into believing that the Civil War was all about better lives for black Americans, when it was nothing of the sort. As a result, there are still millions of white Americans who believe that their great-grandparents died for the sake of black people. A spectre like that hanging in the air--especially when it is utterly fraudulent--still casts a pallor over our racial relations. I have also stated my prediction that the new influx of immigrants from Africa into the black community, people who have no connection to that sad, hubris-inflated chapter in our history, may be just what we need to get out from under this crap.

Duh? You're a teacher and you don't know about what the Chinese and Japanese immigrants went through? My university roommate was born in a stall in Santa Anita Racetrack because his family was supposed to ship out to Manzanar that day. It wasn't until the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s that the people who used to be called "Japs" and "Chinks" were suddenly welcomed into the Melting Pot.

The only faction among today's immigrants who don't wholeheartedly want to assimilate are the Muslims. And it's politically incorrect to even speak of this. They won't let us ride in their taxis if we're carrying a bottle of liquor. They won't even pick up blind ladies on their way to a doctor's appointment because their guide dogs are "unclean." Next thing you know, they'll be sending their women into banks in those scary ninja costumes.

Not only is it not illegal, it is mandatory.

You're talking to the wrong guy. I'm the moderator of the Linguistics subforum. One of the best things people can do to improve their ability to manage their lives and "think outside the box" is to learn two languages when they're young.

 

Sure, back in L.A. In our semi-rural county, most breadwinners don't make much more than that. The cost of living is very low and $20K would be a fortune for a young, uneducated person. Two of them could share the rent on a nice duplex and have plenty of disposable income. Or they could get married and raise a family on their combined $40K without pinching pennies. One of the ladies who works in the local nursery schlepping trees for eight bucks an hour has a degree in botany. Whether you evaluate salaries coldly according to the prevailing wage in an area, or more compassionately based on the cost of living, what we pay our unskilled laborers is downright generous. We're not the people who are "shorting out the homeostatic wage equalization." The upper class took over our area long ago and maintains its power by paying off the municipal governments or simply buying their way into office themselves. We can't get a Home Depot so we're forced to pay exorbitant prices at the good-ol-boy hardware store.

I understand about reasonable wages, but they got out of control for a long while. It was disgusting to watch the kids who didn't bother paying attention in school and barely graduated get union jobs standing around pushing a button, "earning" as much as teachers. The American system is famous for its overshot pendulum swings, and now it's overcorrecting for those unrealistic salaries. Just as it's done with sex (in public), drugs (draconian penalties), religion (out of control), racial discrimination (completely reversed) and intellectualism (dead and buried).

The real culprit that's killing workers of every color collar is the dominance of the energy industry since their Clown Prince took over the White House. If we haven't already reached it, we will soon reach the point where half of the American workforce could do their jobs from home. Here in the "knowledge worker" economy of Washington it's probably closer to 90%. Yet we all have to ferry ourselves back and forth across the landscape every day to support the energy companies; 25% of our petroleum is consumed by commuting. That gives people two bad choices to balance. Live in West Virginia where housing is affordable and spend three or four hours a day on the highway, letting a nanny raise your children. Or live close in where a decaying townhouse sells for $400K, work overtime to pay for it, and let a nanny raise your children. (My wife is home in northwestern California while I work in Washington in case you're as confused by that as I am.

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As for the broader issue of immigration--legal or illegal--and wages... All I can say is "welcome to the global economy." No country is going to be able to operate in a serene little vacuum any more. If we can't let the people come here and work for lower wages than our pampered illiterati think they deserve, we'll just ship the jobs themselves to Bangla Desh. And the jobs that can't be offshored? We'll automate them. We have a Roomba that does a surprisingly good job of keeping the floors clean, and a lawnmower-version of it is in prototype.