A Little More on Immigration. Yesterday's L.A. demonstration was reported again today, with a little different information. Some idiot Hispanic quoted in today's version disowned the idea of Hispanics as terrorists by asking 'Who do you think built the World Trade Center?' If he really thinks that the extremely well-paid, unionized labor that built the WTC was illegal aliens from Mexico, he is demented.
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When we speak of illegal aliens, we're not talking about skilled labor, because skilled workers can ordinarily get into this country legally, assuming there is a real demand for their skills that is not met by domestic supplies. Illegals here are not building our great towers but picking crops, cleaning houses, busing tables, washing dishes, doing unskilled labor at construction sites, and other menial jobs with long hours, lousy pay, no benefits, and minimal worksite safety standards. Why do they put up with it? Because it's better than what is available to them in their home countries.
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I hate to agree with Dubya on anything, but he's right to try to reinstitute a bracero program.
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I was aware of the bracero program when it existed and when it was, for reasons beyond my comprehension then or now, abolished. It was basically an agricultural program in which Mexicans were brought in to do the work we really do have trouble getting Americans to do, the backbreaking labor involved in harvesting crops that cannot readily be harvested by machine. But they were brought in only for the agricultural season, as temporary workers. And then they went home, with some money in their pockets that they couldn't make at home, but no dislocation, and none of the cultural disorientation that would arise from being permanently submerged in a foreign culture that comes from permanent relocation.
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In Cuba during the sugar harvest, the government simply mobilizes the townsfolk in compulsory service, or sends enthusiastic (brainwashed) Communist youth into the fields as a 'sacred' duty. Here, we don't even try to mobilize ghetto or college youth to take temp jobs in the fields, especially given the unfortunate mental association for blacks of fieldwork with slavery. I can visualize harvest as a type of fun collective activity, a sort of working-with-your-hands "spring break" for hundreds of thousands of high school and college kids given a respite from studies to find out what life is like for 'the other half' or what life used to be like for almost everyone thru most of time. A structured event could alternate hard work with parties and social/sexual opportunities. Those parties would be restrained by weariness to some degree, but that might actually be a very good thing, in giving kids an early lesson about 'a time and place for everything', and 'everything in moderation'.
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But as long as we can import mestizo or indio labor from Latin America, we don't need even to try such a thing.
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A revived bracero program would have to be well regulated to provide good housing, medical care, and careful oversight to make sure that people are paid what they are supposed to be paid, and are treated in accord with labor standards, safety standards, etc.
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But a revived bracero program does not have to draw upon self-righteous Mexicans. After all, we could perfectly well charter a few dozen ships to bring in hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers from India or China and take them back home when their work is done. The world is filled to overflowing with poor people who would love to work part of the year in the U.S. and take back what is to them a lot of money, home to Asia or Africa. After all, the British Empire imported Indians into Africa to do types of work they didn't rely upon locals to do.
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Hispanics should be very careful not to rile Anglos. We certainly can afford to build a Great Wall of America — with coolies from India (where, oddly, the word originated, even tho we generally picture a 'chinee' with a pigtail when we hear the word "coolie"), or from China, Brazil, Nigeria, or any number of other countries.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,322.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:20 PM