This American Life has a great two-part podcast on a chicken plant in Alabama that went through this very same immigrant influx a few years ago.
I knew people who worked in packing plants here when that happened probably 30-40 years ago. The work environment went from an English dominated white environment to a Spanish speaking dominated latino environment. People who had worked there for years eventually lost their jobs because they could not communicate with the other employees.
As someone who has lived in Texas seemingly forever i certainly have experienced the transformation from white-majority to white-minority first hand on a vast scale - ie, not just tiny town gets 50 new immigrants and the world is upended.
I think fundamentally the impoverishment of the middle glass, ruthless globalization, and businesses eagerness to import workers at below livable wages have all contributed to these massive demographic changes. Apple having more money than the Bank of England and industrial businesses importing workers to work at wages the native population refuses to (or can’t afford) are all part of the same systemic dysfunction.
Texas otoh for whatever reason is like hostile ground to these kinds of investigations - Texas is too relatively rich, and too certain of it’s Texas-ism, too large and too ugly to be interesting to “out of state” reporters to too often don their pith helmets and wade into the wilds of Conservative-zemlya, but the transformation in certain parts of towns are so complete that it’s essentially like living in a foreign country for a non-Hispanic family.
The question shouldn’t be “what happens when all these [undocumented] workers show up in one [racist] Alabama town?”, as these things are usually framed, but rather, “why are industrial businesses refusing to pay livable wages to local factory workers?” So these adjacent issue economic arguments are annoying, imo, because they imply that as long as something is profitable to “society” or the tax base (overall, not in anyway certain on a local level) than you have no moral standing to oppose it.
OTOH, in practice conservatism today is rabid, nationalistic, immoral, populist nonsense. The neoliberal view wins the moral argument by default when the opposition shows up with boots on their heads and perform marching band formations to look like swastikas carrying tiki torches.
Count me as deeply skeptical of that claim.
Indeed, throughout US history there have been waves of immigration from one region / ethnic group or another, and every wave has been greeted with the same kind of bigoted or racist reaction. The Irish would destroy our culture. The Germans would destroy our culture. The Italians would destroy our culture. And so on.
But that is the big difference - a difference liberal people don’t like to recognize - is that such immigration was actual policy on the federal level. When in the 1920s racist immigration criteria were implemented immigration slowed to a crawl.
What liberals are saying now, in essence, is that people in the US do not have the right to slow immigration even if that immigration is illegal. That the moral right transcends the legal right.
Okay…one.
I am not talking management. I am talking the average worker. They went from from the dominant culture to the outsider in a couple of years. And maybe they weren’t all fired, many left because they were no longer welcome by co-workers.
I get that they had become the minority that was no longer part of the work culture, and so felt uncomfortable and left. And you can bet the new employees were paid less and complained less because many of them were not legal.
Not everyone cares about the “culture”, they care about their job and their family.
Certainly there are those on the left who believe that immigration is a natural moral right which it is unlawful for a government to impede. Someone like Chris Bertram comes to mind. That said, few liberals are saying that, and none that I know of here, and none who are significant national political players. I mean, can you name any?
On the other hand, some leaders on the right are engaging publicly in the racially motivated demonization of immigrants who they say will destroy our culture. I mean, we can actually name those people, right?
I’m glad I was skeptical. We’ve gone from ‘they lost their jobs because they could not communicate with the other employees’ — which implies it was against their will, that they were fired — to ‘maybe they weren’t all fired, many left because they were no longer welcome by co-workers‘ in just one exchange.
Were any of them fired because they couldn’t speak a foreign language? Can you name anyone? I assume you’re talking about personal knowledge because you framed it that way. If not, can you point to any information you have about this case?
Alfred E. Neuman.
You really asked for a name? What kind of idiot are you? :)
Yes, I actually knew real people to whom this happened. They went from an English speaking environment where they could communicate with their co-workers to a Spanish speaking environment where they were the outliers.
And yes, this would be the same as being replaced by the Irish or Germans or Poles back in the day. America has a wonderful tradition of those already here disliking those that replace them at the workplace. And of course all those groups eventually learned to dislike another group.
Why should that surprise you?
Vance and Frank are basically running a grift, a con. What sells right now is the idea that if white folks are racists, then it is the fault of the liberals who pushed policies which ‘forced’ white people to become racist. Never mind that the entire history of the country could reasonably be described as a white supremacist project, starting with the dispossession and genocide of the native inhabitants, then centuries of slave trade, then decades of Jim Crow and segregation, then the criminalization of protest and liberation movements, then the use of the war on drugs to incarcerate millions. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that black persons are to be counted as 3/5ths of a person for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House; though on no account can they cast even 3/5ths of a vote.
The kind with a well-developed bullshit detector. Thanks for helping me calibrate it.
There’s actually quite a bit of that in the second part of the This American Life story. Also, they go through great pains to show how initially, the largely white populace wasn’t racist to the Mexicans. It was only later that things got ugly.
This is the heart of the problem now in 2018 IMO. The rhetoric and policy coming from the top is actively encouraging people to fight/beat/work against anyone who is not them. Instead of asking people to come together, they’re being told that they should work to tear it all apart. And as I said above, that’s just plain easy by comparison with cooperation.
For many of these people, it is hard to accept change. For people in general, I think that’s probably problem number one in their lives. Figuring out how to accept or more importantly initiate change. The dirtbag that’s President would like to turn back the clock to 1950 which for many of these people is a mental space their head still occupies while everything around them has moved on.
When their leader is saying you don’t have to change, they see that as the easy way forward. We all know it isn’t like that and can’t be, but this guy keeps saying the truth is fake news!
Trolling is fun, isn’t it. :)
There is no rational reason to think that Scuzz is lying about his experiences. He’s been here for years, and has never been known to be a liar.
If we’re lucky, this could be corrected if Trump ends at 2 or 4 years in office. But it feels like we’ve lost so much of the gains that were there prior to Trump and this xenophobic shift. Or, perhaps I’m just naive and it was never a really solid ground we were standing on before, Trump just pulled the sheet covering what was there (and then said it was okay to wear them as capes and hats.)
Other than the way the story evolved after I voiced skepticism? I’m open to the idea that he’s exaggerating, or engaging in rhetorical excess, etc. The story just sounds like that kind of story, e.g. ‘I knew I guy once that happened to etc…’
You are a “bad faith” listener. Always assuming the person you are disagreeing with is somehow lying to you or trying to hide things.
You also take this shit way to serious.
This is my fault of course because I really should have known better than to discuss anything with you. After all, you are the guy who thinks contractors can charge anything they like and people have to pay it. :)
I wish I knew how to add that “I’m watching you” gif.