Posted on 07/15/2008 7:46:28 PM PDT by Delacon
Just back from my first trip to the Berkshires (in western Massachusetts) where the affluent of the East Coast megalopolises like to summer and play, and I was just stunned to see nearly every visible job filled with an English-speaking American.
This is intriguing because it is among the nation's elites that we find most of the resistance to passing the SAVE Act or other legislation mandating the use of E-Verify to ensure that illegal aliens don't keep U.S. jobs -- with the elites complaining that without all the illegal foreign workers, large parts of our service economy would fall apart.
I can sort of understand why they think this because so many of them live in immigrant-saturated giant cities where some of them haven't seen anybody with a U.S.-born parent bus a table, run a cash register or clerk a store in years.
Yet, now I find that there is a place where elites spend time just a couple of hours north of New York City where Americans appear to work all the jobs that they were doing before Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy began the immigration flood 43 years ago.
One of the big arguments of the coastal elites (West, East, Gulf & Great Lakes coasts) is that jobs that once depended on a lot of native teenagers and young adults simply won't get done without foreign workers.
You can see why they might think that. Federal data show that teenage employment levels are at their lowest level in recorded U.S. history!
But is that because today's American teenagers are more lazy than in the past? More arrogant so that they think they are too good for these jobs?
Or is it because the federal government has flooded many parts of our country with so much foreign labor that our own teens and young adults are simply pushed out of the job markets where immigration is high?
When some of us say that no more foreign workers are needed, the open-borders elites who are favored by today's congressional leadership sometimes snidely respond that we are wishing for a return of a Norman Rockwell America that can never be recovered.
For those of you too young to know, Norman Rockwell painted extremely popular magazine covers for the Saturday Evening Post that often celebrated the virtues and challenges of small town New England life.
For his last 25 years, he lived and painted in Stockbridge, an absolutely delightful little town in the Berkshires. I stopped into a cafe on main street to analyze the attributes of a homemade raspberry-peach pie and a strawberry-apple pie, where I was surrounded by American waiters and busboys (as I was everywhere else I ate over the last few days). Most of them were well-scrubbed, enthusiastic young people.
When my young waitress engaged me in which pie was superior, I asked if she had come to the area for the summer from elsewhere. No, she lived in the neighboring town. She said most of the young workers in the motels, restaurants and other parts of the hospitality industry were home grown.
This was my observation in the motels, as well.
I just arrived back in the Washington D.C. area and looked up the stats. Sure enough, the Berkshires have one of the lowest immigration rates in the country.
A Norman Rockwell America apparently is still possible where the federal government's reckless immigration policies haven't had a chance to distort the labor markets.
Please don't misunderstand the point I am making.
I'm not suggesting that these white New Englander kids are superior to the mostly Asian, Latin American and African immigrants who bus and wait the tables here in Washington.
My point is that the open-borders elites who are fighting the SAVE Act are wrong when they insist that white and black American kids (and increasingly native-born Hispanic American kids) won't or can't do the service jobs that are so essential in every locale in America.
I have long known they were wrong because of my travels in the Missouri Ozarks, the northern Wisconsin dairylands, the Mississippi Delta and out-state Pennsylvania, for example. Frankly, I'm pretty certain you can find primarily native-born Americans doing most of these jobs in perhaps 80% of the counties in the country. When you see the natives of those counties doing all the work in the motels, restaurants, convenience stores, toll booths, construction projects -- well, you just have to ask yourself if there really is something that deficient about the Americans who are born in places like California, Texas, Florida, D.C., New York and Chicago that they aren't capable of doing those jobs, too.
What really is different is that the youth and young adults in low-immigration areas do not get the message that service work is beneath them or doesn't want them.
And now, I know that this is also true in the BERKSHIRES! Imagine that.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the news media, entertainment, business, religious and academic elites spending the summer in the Berkshires could just look at their busboys and begin to question their prevailing immigration assumptions? Wouldn't it be something if they questioned their prejudice that the SAVE Act would cause the hospitality industry to shut down?
We have two more weeks to force a vote on the SAVE Act.
We are 28 signatures short on the Discharge Petition.
Please see our list of Members of the House. The names in red are the ones refusing to sign the petition to force a vote to finally begin the four-year phase in of all employers using E-Verify. This would take away the job magnet for illegal foreign workers and once again open up whole occupations in some parts of the country to the American workers of all ethnicities who have been shut out.
Please find the red names in your state and call their offices today, asking them to sign the Discharge Petition while there is still time.
Roy Beck is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA.
"We have two more weeks to force a vote on the SAVE Act.
We are 28 signatures short on the Discharge Petition.
Please see our list of Members of the House. The names in red are the ones refusing to sign the petition to force a vote to finally begin the four-year phase in of all employers using E-Verify. This would take away the job magnet for illegal foreign workers and once again open up whole occupations in some parts of the country to the American workers of all ethnicities who have been shut out.
Please find the red names in your state and call their offices today, asking them to sign the Discharge Petition while there is still time."
What he said.
Same is true of New Hampshire and Maine.
25 Years ago, native born whites did these jobs in Eastern Massachusetts as well. It was always something of a culture shock to go to Virgina and never, ever, see a white face working at a MacDonalds or car wash.
Now it’s mostly foreign born whites doing these jobs in Eastern Massachusetts, with more Hispanics as you approach Boston.
I see the two Red/Green Congressmen from the “free state” of New Hampshire haven’t signed yet...maybe the wave of home invasions sweeping Manchester will change their minds. Or not.
bump for the morning
Of course Americans will do those jobs. What the service industry is really afraid of is that real Americans probably won’t do those jobs for the starvation wages they want to pay, along with the fact they’d actually have to pay SSI/Medicare/Worker’s Comp on their workers, too. Those businesses protesting should all have to prove the legality of their workers.
Come with me tomorrow night to the camp where I do a dance every week in the summer. This is on “Golden Pond” (Squam Lake) in New Hampshire. They have over 100 Russian kids working at this place because they have been unable to get American kids to do anything but be in the Recreation department. When it comes to kitchen help, maintenance, housekeeping, it’s almost all done by foreigners. They are top quality people. They speak English very well and I find them to be hard working and industrius.
When I first started there in 1991, there weren’t any foreign kids working there.
Wow, even my good for nothing dem congressman signed! What’s up with Ron Paul not signing yet?
And I just came back from a vacation on the beaches of Delaware. Everywhere I turned the youngsters servering my food, and cleaning my hotel room spoke some slavic language. Considering what it takes to come here illegally from Romania, Russia, or wherever, I’d be willing to bet that most of them are here LEGALLY. Paying taxes, observing and being protected by the laws. Now if you want to have a debate on the amount of legal immigrants the US lets in that compete with native born youths and others, well then you have a point about the amount of people we should allow in legally who will always drive down wages. Its worth debating. But my issue right now is with the illegals. Certainly that should be solved first.
Joe Wilson, my guy in Congress, has signed. But, Clyburn and Spratt, also from SC have not. But I guess that’s to be expected... they’re RATs.
Context people! Context! A line cook in New York city makes considerably more than one in Buffalo or Morgantown. Yet the former are almost entirely immigrants. Why not the "young white American boys" simply move to NYC, where they can earn more money, if this were as simple as this gentleman is stating.
“Why not the “young white American boys” simply move to NYC, where they can earn more money, if this were as simple as this gentleman is stating.”
It really is simple. If the laws were enforced in NYC so that no illegal immigrant could get a job, then you’d see nothing but youths who are native born or here legally doing those jobs that many claim they wont do. I don’t give a damn if they are “young white american boys”. In fact, if the laws were enforced “young black american boys” would stand to benefit most.
Whenever I read articles like this I am reminded how 25 years or so ago you had to be in the “in” crowd to work at the local Mcdonalds where I lived.
Mass. reps all in RED on that list (on website) as non-signers. What a surprise, that a state run by Mass-holes would be lining up with Teddy Kennedy to continue to subvert our borders, our laws, and our security.
In the fall, apple orchards were ripe for harvest, and it was the college students, even from some of the elite schools there, who did the harvesting.
I can tell you that putting unfiltered apple juice in the back of ones closet, for a few days, will turn into some potent hooch.
I know this for a fact.
The Russians had a different reputation here: some of the young women were notorious for making additional wages on the side (wink, wink).
The only reasons there aren’t immigrant/migrant kids doing those jobs in Mass Maine and New Hampshire is due to the opening of the EU trade zone, anti-US sentiment in Europe, the collapse of the dollar, and the new work visa rules that require in person interviews at American embassies/consulates.
The companies that used to ship over European and South American kids for work holidays to New England are almost all gone at this point.
$1.60 to 1 Euro
plus the US now has a worse tax rate disadvantage compared to the European countries who adopted the flat tax
= no more gap year Europeans coming to the US to work.
Those working in restaurants etc. are not “white” people. They are the children of working class Italian, Polish, French Canadian, Irish and Slovaks, all of whom suffered prejudice for years because they were being considered “not real Americans” by bigots like you.
When I worked in the Berkshires, Jews weren’t allowed in the local country clubs, and my parter in medical practice was the token Irish Catholic allowed membership in his country club.
Are you implying my Hispanic and Asian Grandkids are not real Americans... Even though my Asian husband is a WWII vet and my son in law is a veteran of Iraq?
Americans probably won’t do those jobs for the starvation wages they want to pay
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It isn’t just the service jobs that offer low wages! Within the past week I was perusing a list of job openings in my area and was amazed how low some of the opening rates were.
One that really caught my eye listed the following requirements,”must have a knowledge of electrical, plumbing, carpentry and painting, HVAC certification a plus but not required, must have driver’s license, own vehicle and have no criminal record. The starting pay was listed as ...$9.00 per hour. This paragon of maintenance is expected to work an hour for less than one pound of T-bone steak! Or you could say just over two gallons of gasoline per hour. Back when I was a swabby the MINIMUM wage was $1.25 an hour and that would buy four gallons of gasoline in this area and probably two pounds of T-bone. I hope this job remains unfilled at this rate of pay.
I have no doubt that they are all here legally. My point was to the fact that they are here because American young folks CAN NOT BE FOUND who will do the kind of work they are doing. Some say that if these places paid a living wage, they would have plenty of help. For crying out loud, these are pretty much temporary summertime jobs that every college kid and many high school kids used to be happy to get not so many years ago. What are those kids doing now? That’s what I’d like to know. Are they so rich they don’t need to lower themselves to this kind of work? Have they jumped right over entry level to middle management? Or maybe in the past 35 years, we aborted all of our people who might be doing that work?
There’s going to come a day of reckoning in the not-too-distant future and it ain’t gonna be pretty. Some people are going to get a wake up call that they will not be able to answer.
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