Steve Sailer writes in 2012: To avoid inflaming his liberal critics, Charles Murray specifically states that he won’t talk about illegal immigration in discussing the state of changes in the white working class over the last 50 years. Fortunately, Ross Douthat in the NYT points out how unrealistic this is:
Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* The white American underclass has been created by many of the same trends that created the British underclass: deindustrialization and loss of high-wage work, increasing real estate prices and decreasing “affordable family formation” for everyone, anti-family welfare policies, pop culture, changing social mores, more competition in the labor market from immigrants.
Many are unaware just how much alcoholism, addiction, family breakdown, property crime, and poverty are in plenty of predominately white rural areas. No you won’t get shot by the Crips and the Bloods, but you’ll encounter a fair number of marginally employed substance abusers and are at risk of theft from meth heads.
There are even some white urban areas which have tipped from working class into the underclass. Mostly around the rustbelt (Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Jackson, Flint, upstate NY, Baltimore, Scioto County, etc). Charles Murray’s industrially decaying Fishtown, which is based on a white neighborhood in Philadelphia, has a crime rate almost 4x the national average.
* I can’t imagine that loss of decent jobs, whether through off-shoring or by importing cheap foreign labor to take the jobs that can’t be off-shored, isn’t a big contributing factor in pushing down the white working class. It doesn’t take too long either.
I live in SW Virginia. About 5 years ago when things started downhill, a Volvo plant nearby laid off a bunch of workers. These folks were making $20+ an hour with decent benefits. Down here that’s good money. You can live very well, especially if your spouse also has a reasonably decent job and you’ve been more or less prudent in your personal life.
Last year, Volvo started calling back some workers. Great news!! However, a surprising number couldn’t be hired back because they couldn’t pass the drug test. The likelihood of their finding anything that could touch those wages plus benefits are slim. Volvo, of course, had no problem filling those jobs with others.
The amazing thing is, these guys were clean when they worked for Volvo and it isn’t as if Volvo dropped by their house unexpectedly to give them a pre-hire-back drug test. They knew what was coming.
It’s just like the young women I see at social services and emergency assistance where I do some volunteer work. They can barely take care of themselves and they have two stair-step children and are pregnant with their third.
These people may not be dumber than their parents and grandparents, but, boy, do they lack judgement, and you don’t get that at college!
* Back in 1960, a large fraction of the working-class was employed in very well-paid auto industry and other industrial jobs, and these have been devastated. Meanwhile, the wages of other once-well paid jobs in construction have been greatly reduced due to immigrant competition. Finally, the private sector unions, which had kept those wages high, have been almost completely annihilated. I think about the only really well-paid working-class jobs left are the elite public sector ones such as police or fire departments.
Probably Murray is playing games with statistics, and comparing two-income blue collar households of today with one-income blue collar households of 1960. But that completely ignores the huge additional family costs incurred when wives enter the workforce. And I’m sure Murray’s also leaving out the enormous rise on the expense side of the family budget ledger, including health care and education. Elizabeth Warren has a great YouTube lecture covering most of these issues that can be found on the Internet.
* Germans went through hell in WWII but didn’t become trash after the war. 15 million Ost-Germans were uprooted, up to 2 million died, and they resettled in Western Germany with only clothes on their back.
Americans suffered far greater economic duress in the 30s. Yet they didn’t become trash.
Blacks suffered discrimination and poverty for a long time, but their family was intact until the 60s.
Chinese went through hell during Warlord period, WWII, Civil War, Great Leap, and Cultural Revolution but they’re working to build new China.
While it’s true that there has been economic hard times for poor whites in UK and US, what explains the total cultural and moral rot?
* Short answer: modern liberalism.
People of the middle and upper classes were no longer expected to hide their bad behavior and people of the lower classes were no longer expected to emulate the good behavior of their betters.
People were also encouraged to express themselves rather than repress themselves. The primacy, even the supremacy, of the individual was trumpeted unceasingly. When everybody is a somebody, then nobody has any reason to behave better than anybody.
Respectability, neatness, dress appropriate to the occasion, good work habits, intact families, the uncomplaining assumption of one’s personal and social responsibilities were all disparaged as risible and undesirable holdovers from the repressive and racist 1950’s (and earlier, of course, but the 50s really lent themselves to the left’s condemnation and ridicule).
The whole thing has been awful, which, I suspect, was the left’s intent all along.
* My wife works as a proofreader. Recently, there’s been a trend in the industry at farming out “low-level” copyediting and proofreading to workers overseas and paying them pennies on the dollar.
Most of these new outsourced employees don’t speak good English, and some don’t speak any at all. Instead, they go by a series of instructions and rules that they recognize by sight, without comprehending what the mistake in the text is or why they’re changing it. This process must take a great deal longer than native-speaker recognition and comprehension, but clearly the extra time is outweighed by the greatly reduced wages.
This kind of thing is getting more common (see sites like this one about outsourcing writing to India, and note the ‘diversity’ shout-out in the title.
People in the industry are uncomfortable about getting pushed out of the market, but don’t want to speak out because it makes them look racist. And of course, the bosses love it. It saves them money, and unlike other cost-cutting measures, it’s almost too easy to shame anyone who complains (“you don’t appreciate diversity!” “what have you got against helping non-Americans into the middle class?”) No one’s going to stop it until it’s too late, and they’re already being lectured by the shrinking minority of Americans with good jobs about being too uppity and demanding more than $4/hour. Everyone at this level of the industry is holding back a South Park-esque “THEY TOOK OUR JERBS” moment.
* Where is the Studs Terkel of the white working class? Maybe some of the elites might want to know what it is like for the whites working in fast food restaurants, as security guards, as delivery men or as cab drivers.
The bleakness of the white lower class is rarely portrayed without irony.
Statistics are bloodless. A story can imprint a image for a lifetime.
* I remember when i had a ‘gold’ server contract with dell – one day i picked up the phone during an emergency and got near incomprehensible Indinglish on the other end of the line. Worse still, the only thing that was clear is that the ‘tech’ on the other line had never even seen a real server.
I called sales -(always the way to actually get through to a company) and got routed to ’emergency’ customer complaints – when I complained i was berated by the woman on the other end “we’re committed to diversity”
I called her on her BS though, and got routed to the small “a-team” of american techs. After four plus hours (this while the server was down) I got to an american tech, problem solved in less than 20 minutes.
* True story: A friend of my college-age daughter’s, definitely from Fishtown, developed a heroin habit at age 20. He’s a smart kid, reads Emerson and William James on his, but in a moment of stupid desperation “:held up” a convenience store with a toy gun.
He was arrested but, without a lawyer, was sentenced to one year in county jail first offense. He got out owing the state $18,000. Plus he had lost his two front teeth in a fight while in jail.
With no transportation he was forced to walk miles to work washing dishes in local restaurants at minimum wage.
A few months later he was arrested for driving without a license. This was a parole violation, so he got five more months in the slammer.
Now he is 22, off drugs, but is virtually unemployable because of his record. He’s going to the local community college where he studies liberal arts and is, so far, $1800 in dept to the school. He has to bum rides or walk miles wherever he goes. He’s fit — was a championship boxer in high school — and reasonably good looking except for the teeth. No one will hire him.
He comes to me as a mentor. What can I do.? I’m an old man. All I can do is advise him: To learn a trade instead of studying English; join a Baptist church to find a girl friend (belief is not the issue), and go to the local newspaper in the hopes that his story will be told.
If he climbs out of the hole he is in it will be a gigantic achievement. My knees buckle at the thought. Otherwise he’ll be back in jail I imagine, at God know what cost to the state.
* Immigrants recruited to America tend to be in unskilled jobs or when they are bright, tend to be in STEM fields like computers/engineering. Immigrants are almost never recruited to flood the market in highly verbal fields that Jews do genetically best in like media,the social sciences etc. As a result verbal occupations see their relative prestige and pay rise because they are the only occupations where the market is not over saturated by immigrants. If this is intentional, it is a very clever strategy to gain more power by those with high verbal IQ Ashkenazi genes.
* There’s a substanial white underclass in America. It tends to be spread out and less visible, but it’s substanial enough in size. Go to any small town and you’ll encounter plenty of whites who drink too much, get involved with meth or oxycontin, and have problems with the law. It’s not comparable to the black underclass, but it’s depressing to look at these people.
The tendency of underclass whites to not form urban slums reduces the attention they receive, but there are more white slums then you might think. The rustbelt (Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit) has its share of high crime white hoods.
* In the US, Lower-income rural white areas have quite a bit of drugs, alcoholism, dysfunction, and property crime. Lower-income urban white slums have all those issues and also major problems with violent crime (assault, robbery, rape) and social breakdown (not working, broken families, etc). However, random lethal violence (shootings, stabbings, murders) is not too problematic. It does tend to occur at an unreasonably elevated rate in urban white slums, but it’s not so absurdly high that the neighborhood becomes a war zone.
White urban slums can match up to black slums in dysfunctionality and breakdown. They can surpass black areas in drug (meth, oxycontin) and alcohol abuse (trust me). For whatever reason, though, horrendous levels of lethal violence don’t seem to go through the roof, except in rare situations (South Boston and southwest Detroit come to mind). Some have attributed this to the widespread use of crack cocaine in the black areas, but maybe genetic factors are at work too.
The worst aspect of the white urban slums is that they’re falling apart. The people, the buildings, the community, the economy, etc. For the white rural areas, the situation is milder, but not good either. As our recession goes, and immigration continues unabated, maybe things will get worse. Take a trip through south Ohio (especially Portsmouth) to see what our future could look like. It might shock you.