My new VDARE.com column

"Good News: American Media Waking Up To Immigration." Here's an excerpt:

An article by Marc Cooper in the August 12th LA Weekly called Sour Grapes| California’s farm workers’ endless struggle 40 years later shows vividly the impact of an unlimited supply of illegal aliens upon California farm workers. Cooper writes:

"There’s a prevailing popular assumption that superexploitation of the state’s farm workers is a closed chapter in some deep, dark past… But exactly 40 years after Chavez’s UFW exploded into the national consciousness by leading the great 1965 Delano grape workers’ strike and forced America to recognize the plight of those who put our food on the table, nothing could be further from the truth. The golden years of California farm workers lasted barely a decade and then sharply began to fade… Wages among California’s 700,000 farm workers, 96 percent of whom are Mexican or Central American, more than half of whom are undocumented, are at best stagnant, and by most reckonings are in decline.

"With almost all workers stuck at the minimum wage of $6.75 an hour, it’s rare to find a farm worker whose annual income breaks $10,000 a year.’Twenty-five years ago, a worker made 12, 13, 14 cents for a bin of oranges,' says economist Rick Mines, until recently research director at the Davis-based California Institute for Rural Studies. 'Today that same bin pays maybe 15 or 16 cents—in spite of 250 percent inflation.' Virtually no workers have health insurance or paid vacations. The cyclical nature of the crops throws most out of work for two or more months per year."

Why do California growers constantly need to recruit more illegal aliens from south of the border? They aren't putting more land under cultivation. In fact, more of the Central Valley is paved over each year to accommodate the booming population.

The answer is twofold. Because wages are so low, there's little need to mechanize farm work in California. And because the state's farm work jobs are so poorly paid for the brutal conditions (three workers died of heat stroke this summer), nobody makes a career out of it if they can. So, the growers constantly suck in to this country more (and ever less educated) illegal aliens. Cooper notes:

"In a pattern that one academic calls “ethnic replacement,” succeeding waves of ever poorer, more marginal Mexicans, many of them from indigenous communities where Spanish is a foreign language, increasingly constitute the field labor force. The downward-spiraling Mexican economy feverishly churns those waves to the degree that, at any moment, as many as 20 percent of California’s agricultural workers have been in the U.S. for less than a year."

The neocon open border cheerleaders contend that these newcomers will "assimilate" into American culture. Real Soon Now. Yet, these Mixtec-speaking Indians who increasingly make up California's farm workers haven't even assimilated into Hispanic culture in the 484 years since the Spaniards conquered Mexico.

A reader writes:

I remember watching a documentary on PBS ten years or so ago about Cesar Chavez. This woman, I forget who she was, said basically Chavez died of a broken heart. That he saw his life's work unravel before his eyes and lost the will to live.

That's what she said anyway. I don't know what the coroner said.

Another reader writes:

Amazing. That Marc Cooper piece in the LA Weekly that you linked in your VDARE article includes statements near the end such as

"UFW leader Rodriguez also reversed the union’s anachronistic position on immigration [got rid of Chavez's anti-immigration stance]"

and

"And, with some luck, if comprehensive immigration reform now being considered is enacted and significant numbers of agricultural workers are legalized, the balance of forces on the ground might shift. Some observers argue that the UFW’s most significant role at present is, precisely, to continue its lobbying for immigration reform."

Cooper publishes similar nitwittery in The Nation. And since he's on the staff at USC --- so I can probably get his email address --- I've been thinking for awhile of emailing him this basic question: "Why should we permit any immigration at all?"

Do you think he'll grasp the concept?

No.

Lots of people hold views on immigration simply as fashion statements: "I'm a nice person. I'm not a nasty person like those horrible racists." [Like Cesar Chavez?]

Something else I'm struck by is that the coalition of left wing and right wing interests and ideologues who back amnesty and guest workers programs must assume they are putting one over on those idiots who belong to their coalition for the opposite reasons. Cooper favors legalization because he believes that will force the growers to pay more to their workers. The growers favor legalization because they believe it will let them pay even less to their workers. Somebody has got to be wrong here. (Of course, don't rule out the possibility that the interested parties will dream up a "solution" that sticks you and me with the costs.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer