- It's both libel and lie, but it's repeated again and
again by immigration lobbyists. Be they liberals, libertarians or plain
la Raza racists, they all say the same: illegal aliens only take the jobs
Americans refuse to do.
-
- The nation's elites are forever singing hymns to illegal
aliens for allegedly rescuing Americans from sloth. Terry Anderson does
not. His testimony in 1999 to the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims
ought to have made Congress sing a different tune. Sadly, it didn't.
-
- Anderson, an auto mechanic turned radio talk-show host
and activist, lives in South Central Los Angeles. He speaks for "those
... at the bottom who have no power" ñ blacks like himself
who were once gainfully employed as auto mechanics, body and fender repairmen,
roofers, framers, drywallers, gardeners, and truck drivers.
-
- "We, black Americans are being displaced in Los
Angeles," Anderson told an indifferent Congress. "We are being
systematically and economically replaced. And the next time somebody tells
you that the illegals only take jobs that blacks won't do, just remember
that we were doing those jobs before the illegals got here."
-
- As hard as it is for open-border internationalists to
believe, once there indeed were plenty of black janitors in Los Angeles.
In the early 1970s, before the trickle of cheap foreign labor turned into
a torrent, these Americans (yes, gasp, Americans!) even did construction
and house painting.
-
- Try telling the young woman who cuts my hair that her
husband is too lazy to do hard manual labor. The young man is a construction
worker and ñ forgive the necessary bluntness ñ a white boy.
Fortunately for this young couple, they don't live in California, Texas
or Arizona. If they did, one breadwinner would doubtless be unemployed.
-
- As Anderson notes, in places in the country where there
is not yet a problem with illegals, you can still get your grass cut, your
dinner served, your dishes bussed and your hotel room cleaned by local
Americans who presumably need these jobs else they would not be performing
them.
-
- But, the "pincers," as Peter Brimelow puts
it, are closing in fast on these low-wage young Americans.
-
- "The immigration situation is really hard on our
young people," seconds Anderson in a follow-up editorial for the Houston
Chronicle. His neighborhood, now 60 percent Hispanic, was once a "respectable,
blue-collar area of hard-working black folks." But now, he relates,
"A 17-year-old kid on my street couldn't get a job at McDonald's because
he didn't speak Spanish." The employer viewed the presence of this
black American lad among his illegal Mexican kitchen staff as a cultural
"disruption."
-
- There is a diverse and varied labor force in the United
States. While many Americans are highly educated or skilled ñ and
hence employed in high-earning occupations ñ others are uneducated
and in desperate need of low-skill, entry-level work. The fabrications
of the free-immigration crowd notwithstanding, bussing tables, washing
dishes, flipping burgers and mowing the neighborhood lawns were once vital
jobs for young, poor Americans, white and black.
-
- The vicious slander of America's poor by the open-border
devotees is rendered more disingenuous considering the minimum-wage laws.
How on earth can anyone say with certainty that Americans are not willing
to work for lower wages if the law bars employers from hiring them at a
market price?
-
- By fixing the price of labor above the market rate or
the employee's productivity, minimum-wage laws always increase unemployment
among the poor and the unskilled. The jobs exist, but, government forbids
employers from hiring American workers below an artificially set wage.
-
- At the same time, law makers and enforcers turn blind
when the employer enters labor agreements with illegal aliens, who also
happen to be heavily subsidized by the American worker. Congress thus implicitly
endorses the hiring of non-nationals.
-
- In conjunction with the cheap, de facto legalized labor
of aliens, minimum-wage laws compound the dire situation among America's
needy. Their effect is to legislate these jobs out of the reach of America's
poor.
-
- If Terry Anderson thinks his community is decimated now,
wait until Californians pass yet another of their barmy minimum-wage ballots.
(San Francisco has in the works an initiative that'll raise the minimum
wage from $6.75 to $8.50.)
-
- Solutions? First, drop minimum-wage laws. Americans will
then be legally free to take up low-paying work. Then enforce the borders.
Preventing a foreign invasion is perfectly within the purview of the "night-watchman
state of classical-liberal theory," in the words of the late philosopher,
Robert Nozick.
-
- Supply and demand should be allowed to determine the
price of labor. Once the borders are shut to the deluge of illegal laborers,
the supply of cheap labor (as well as the steady "supply" of
crime and welfarism) will no longer be limitless. With a smaller pool of
workers, wages for "menial work" will soon rise ñ all
the more so as employers, no longer seduced by the interminable flood of
cheap, illegal labor, begin to bid for the most productive workers. The
resulting higher wages, in turn, will induce more Americans to do such
work.
-
- It's all very well to disenfranchise meek, guilt-ridden
WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). But by encouraging the displacement
of black Americans, promoters of unfettered immigration ñ black
leaders included ñ may have slipped up strategically. Given their
history, blacks are less inclined to fade into the night. They've already
been sold down the river before.
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- © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
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- http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35475
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