June 9, 2013

Gang of Eight to import more stoop laborers because current ones too well paid

This photo taken Saturday June 1, 2013, in Fresno, Calif. shows farmworker Cristina Melendez posing with her seven children and one grandchild. A Mexico native who came to the U.S. at age 13, Melendez and the children have for years struggled with poverty in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the richest agricultural regions in the world. Photo: Gosia Wozniacka
California Central Valley metropolises like Fresno and Modesto have some of the lowest, most Third World standards of living in America. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
In nation's breadbasket, Latinos stuck in poverty 
By GOSIA WOZNIACKA, Associated Press 
Updated 12:54 pm, Sunday, June 9, 2013

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — On a warm spring day, farmworker Cristina Melendez was bedridden and unable to make her way back into the asparagus fields of central California for the kind of backbreaking work she's done since childhood. 
The 36-year-old mother of seven was desperate. Her bank account had been at zero for months, the refrigerator was nearly empty, and she didn't have enough to cover the rent. Lacking health insurance, Melendez couldn't see a doctor or afford medication, so her illness dragged on — and another day came and went without work or pay. 
A native of Mexico who was smuggled into the United States as a child, Melendez had once dreamed big: to be a bilingual secretary, to own a house and a car, to become a U.S. citizen. Agriculture, she hoped, would be the springboard to a better life — for her and her U.S.-born children, the next generation of a family whose past and future are deeply rooted in the fertile earth of America's breadbasket.
California's San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year. But the region also consistently ranks among the nation's most impoverished. Sometimes called "Appalachia of the West," it's where families, especially Hispanic immigrants and their children, live year after year in destitution. 
This divide causes concern because of what it may foretell as the nation's Hispanic population explodes and the U.S. moves toward becoming a majority minority nation. Census data show that non-Hispanic whites will cease to be a majority somewhere about the year 2043. The shift is largely driven by high birth rates among Hispanics as well as by declines in the aging white population.
Already there are a record number of Hispanics living below the poverty line nationwide, and the number of Hispanic children in poverty exceeds that of any other racial or ethnic group. Largely less educated, Hispanic workers are concentrated in relatively low-skill occupations, earning less than the average for all U.S. workers. 
"America's communities have become divided between economic winners and losers," said Daniel Lichter, a Cornell University sociologist and past president of the Population Association of America. "Increasingly, Hispanics begin life's race at a decided disadvantage, raising the specter of new Hispanic ghettos and increasing isolation." 
As poor working Latinos settle across the country, fueling local economies in industries such as manufacturing, construction and agriculture, some are left with little room to climb the job ladder. 
That holding pattern leads to a cycle of poverty that shows up in the next generation of U.S. citizens. With poverty stunting childhood development and stymieing educational attainment, experts say many Latino children are on track to remain stuck in low-skilled, underpaid jobs. 
Harvard economist George Borjas projects that the children of today's immigrants will earn on average 10 percent to 15 percent less than nonimmigrant Americans, with Latinos in particular struggling. The trend could have broad repercussions. 
"Much of the nation's labor force growth, its future growth, will come from the Hispanic community," said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, pointing to research showing that childhood poverty affects education and jobs. "This not only has implications for Latino families, but for the nation as a whole." 
The cycle is especially evident in the fields, vineyards, orchards and groves of the San Joaquin Valley, which stretches about 250 miles between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. ... Despite agriculture's modernization and its steadily growing revenues, surprisingly little has changed for the workers themselves. 
Farmers have always relied on hiring racial or ethnic minorities ranked at the bottom of society. Valley crops once were harvested by Chinese, Japanese, Punjabis, Filipinos, Mexican braceros, southern Europeans, African-Americans and the white American Dust Bowl arrivals that were an exception to the immigrant mold. Today's crops are picked primarily by Hispanic immigrants like Melendez or their American-born children. 
Hispanics account for half the population in Fresno County, and one-third of them live in poverty. Nationally, 1 in 4 Latinos lives below the poverty line, the second-highest percentage of all ethnic and racial groups, after blacks. That compares with an overall national rate of 15 percent and a rate for whites of about 10 percent. 
Nowhere are these differences more apparent than in Fresno, California's fifth-largest city and the state's unofficial agricultural capital. 
Fresno's north side — home to bankers, doctors and teachers — is dotted with gated communities and McMansions with manicured lawns. It boasts newly paved streets, bike lanes, generous sidewalks, a popular mall and parks. 
Melendez's neighborhood in southeast Fresno is a world away. Children on bikes crisscross cracked streets, their gutters strewn with trash. Shabby apartment complexes stretch for blocks. Melendez's three-bedroom home sits on the bottom floor of one such complex, shared by Latino immigrants and Hmong refugees.
Melendez's journey here began with her father, who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in the late 1970s to pick oranges. He returned to Mexico within a year, but Melendez's mother, Maria Rosales, then came to pick grapes, almonds and peaches. 
"People told me I would be sweeping dollars with a broom in California, but what I swept were only pennies," said Rosales, 60, who is now a U.S. citizen and still lives in Fresno. 
At 13, Melendez, along with two of her sisters, joined her mother in California, having trekked with a smuggler across the border. The family settled in a small farmworker town in Fresno County. After school and on weekends, Melendez and her sisters picked the grapes that surrounded them. 
"It was loneliness. It was sadness," Melendez said. "I hated grapes." 
Melendez dropped out of high school to get married and to get away from working the vineyards, but she and her husband soon separated.

And then where did the rest of her seven children come from? The stork? Demographic vibrancy asserting itself? Where are the father(s) these days?
Though she spoke good English, she still lived in the country illegally and lacked a high school diploma, barring most employment. She again turned to the fields. 
When Melendez can work, she picks every type of crop, from asparagus and grapes to chili peppers. In the offseason, she ties vines and trims branches.
Paid by the hour, Melendez generally receives California's minimum wage of $8.

Let's see, if she worked full time annually (2000 hours) at $8 per hour, that would be $16,000 per year for her family of eight, or $2,000 per capita. That's a dollar per hour. Peter Schaeffer recently pointed out that if you divide national health care expeditures by national hours worked, the medical bill comes out to about $12 per hour. I'd say that the Melendez lineage unto who knows how many generations looks like they are going to have a hard time paying for their health care. But just keep repeating "Immigration is good for The Economy!" and "Crops are rotting in the fields!" and stop trying to think quantitatively. What are you, some kind of Richwine? All that matters is Dreaming.
But whenever possible she works "piece rate," getting paid a set amount per box or bucket picked. Running through the fields to pick as much as she can, she once grossed about $3,000 for a few weeks of work. 
But lean months with no work inevitably follow such windfalls. Without legal status, Melendez can't file for unemployment. She obtains food stamps for her U.S.-citizen children, but otherwise receives little government help. To make ends meet, she sometimes peddles barbecued beef, tamales and beauty products door to door and rents a room to a friend. ...
Her children know this, too. Her eldest sons, age 18 and 21, have high school diplomas but no jobs. The oldest, Cristian, started attending Fresno City College's automotive technician program with the help of a loan but then dropped out. Last winter, with help from a local employment program, he got a two-month job at a bakery. He's also filled temporary positions in maintenance and at a vacuum cleaner company. 
Now a parent himself, with a 3-year-old son to support, Cristian said he's desperate to find something permanent. He worked as a farmworker in high school and last year picked peaches, nectarines and grapes. He eventually hopes to get a business degree and open a tattoo parlor and smoke shop

The Great Mexican-American Dream: a tatto parlor and smoke shop in a strip mall.

I'm always fascinated by how oblivious SWPLs remain to the role of Latin American immigration in the Idiocraticization of country.
, but still fears following in his mother's footsteps — never finding a way out of the fields. 
"I don't want to work in the fields, busting my ass for low pay. That doesn't make sense," he said. "But if I don't find work soon, we're low on income, so I'm going to have to go to the fields."

Fortunately, the Gang of Eight has a solution for this Mexican-American American citizen: more competition for him, complete with an increased guest worker system to drive down farm labor wages even further. (Why? The all-purpose Occamite explanation for predicting what's in the bill is that The Eight Banditos hate American citizens. You may scoff, but is there an alternative explanation with more predictive power?)
In Fresno, advocates and experts for years have noticed the inextricable relationship between agriculture, the Hispanic community and poverty, and sounded the alarm. But little has been done to tackle the root of the problem.

The root of the problem is having large numbers of Hispanics. The Eight Banditos will solve that: no longer will we have large numbers of Hispanics, we will instead have vast numbers of Hispanics.
"The number of working people in poverty is increasing, and we're falling further behind in education and health. We need to reverse that trend. Otherwise we'll continue to be seen as a poor area with bad statistics," said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Valley-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. "And it will get worse. ... We won't have a sustainable community." 

But, but, but ... crops rotting in the fields!
Fresno's mayor, Ashley Swearengin, hopes to reverse the trend and last year led a citywide program called Learn2Earn, which helps residents earn their high school diplomas and encourages them to pursue higher education and job training. 
"We're talking about changing the mindset of people who think this is their lot in life, this is all they are ever going to do," said Linda Gleason, who leads Learn2Earn. "It's about tapping into people's internal motivation — and showing them education and a better job are not impossible dreams."

Why didn't any nice white people ever think of any programs like that over the last half century? Being the first such program ever tried, this one will no doubt work.
___
Associated Press writer Hope Yen in Washington contributed to this report.
___
Follow Gosia Wozniacka on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GosiaWozniacka 
EDITOR'S NOTE _ "America at the Tipping Point: The Changing Face of a Nation" is an occasional series examining the cultural mosaic of the U.S. and its historic shift to a majority-minority nation.


Why does the Gang of Eight want to Fresnoify and Modestoize the rest of America?

Obviously, it's because stoop labor immigrants and their children and their grandchildren and great grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren are making us vibrant. They are our Dreamers. No white bread American from Modesto ever had any dreams about anything.

By the way, here's what life in Modesto was like a half century ago. Totally nonvibrant:

58 comments:

Superman said...

I'm struck by the fact that George Lucas made American Graffiti as an homage to his childhood in the Central Valley, yet despite this nostalgia he doesn't seem to have ever publicly lamented the fact that his people and their way of life was driven out of there. Or perhaps he has and I missed it?

Anonymous said...

"Why does the Gang of Eight want to Fresnofy the rest of America?"

Greed, hatred, and corruption, backed up by not a little bit of insanity (especially in the case of Senator Graham).

This bill is an economic H bomb. Once this passes, nothing will stop businesses from a drive to the bottom, not even if individual businesses don't want to go there. It will be a competition and the businesses that win will be the ones that behave the least ethically. The only upside is that maybe perhaps possibly Americans will finally link our economic decline to mass immigration. If revolution isn't already around the corner it will be after passage. (Hello, NSA!!!)

eah said...

They'd be "stuck in poverty" in any case. At least her -- a low earner with seven kids in a high cost of living state.

Just like she'd be "stuck in poverty" back where she came from ("smuggeled into the United States as a child" -- yeah, sure, how convenient for her at this juncture in time).

Yada yada.

Retiring American baby boomers: that's who's supposed to pay for your SS and Medicare. I guess via the proposed immigration bill the government plans to make up in quantity what's lacking in quality. Or something like that.

Anonymous said...

This article has it all.

The first thing that stuck out to me was the authors name: GOSIA WOZNIACKA. This is a Polish name and either she immigrated to the U.S. herself, or her parents came off the boat. I rarely meet US-born Polish brethren in the US with Polish first names.

The next thing,

"A native of Mexico who was smuggled into the United States as a child, Melendez had once dreamed big: to be a bilingual secretary, to own a house and a car, to become a U.S. citizen. Agriculture, she hoped, would be the springboard to a better life — for her and her U.S.-born children, the next generation of a family whose past and future are deeply rooted in the fertile earth of America's breadbasket."

This is quite funny, they never stop dreaming, its a never ending fantasy land. On a tangent, most first generation immigrant Poles don't dream much, they just want to make some money. 2nd-3rd generation of Poles, they still don't dream much, but they do tend to at least integrate, get college degrees, and become productive members of society.

"California's San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year."

Revenues don't mean profit, and do not necessarily indicate success. But, they did in communist Poland. http://www.gosiawozniacka.com/ She was born during communism, so that makes sense.

raising the specter of new Hispanic ghettos and increasing isolation."

I'll go out on a limb and predict Hispanic ghettos will foster a new generation of rap and hip hop superstars. A hispanic Beyonce and Jay-z.

That holding pattern leads to a cycle of poverty that shows up in the next generation of U.S. citizens. With poverty stunting childhood development and stymieing educational attainment, experts say many Latino children are on track to remain stuck in low-skilled, underpaid jobs.

You can never leave this out of an article, classic spam.

He eventually hopes to get a business degree and open a tattoo parlor and smoke shop

I don't think you need a business degree to do that. What is the minimum Intelligence/IQ threshold needed to actually tattoo proficiently? You know, within the lines. I've never met a tattoo artist, but I assuming it requires a good amount of visual intelligence to complete a complex tattoo.



The only people dreaming were Wozniacka, Lichter, Borjas, and Lopez. The entire article could be submitted as a Phd thesis to Oberlin.

Kind of funny how the only successful immigrant in this quagmire is the Polish Journalist?

Yeesh said...

"...but she and her husband soon separated..."

Not that their separation deterred her from bearing several more children by one or more men who aren't worth the trouble of mentioning.

Why do we need more illegal immigrants when the ones we already have supply us with so many pre-unemployed youths?

guest007 said...

I guess grapes and oranges not rotting in the fields are more important than the standard of living of illegal immigrants (people rotting in the fields). That is why the Democrats keep pushing for more immigration.

Also, Democrats keep claiming that private companies like Wal-Mart externalize some of their employment costs but isn't the whole point of amnesty to externalize the costs of illegal immigrants onto the taxpayers so that Democrats get more automatic votes.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGFsQluyoss

Someone said 'dramady'.

Roland said...

I suppose that quite a few Okies also had seven children. What changed for them that their descendants no longer work in the fields?

Anonymous said...

1990s: Learn to Earn
2010s: Learn2Earn
2030s: learn4money
2050s: dream4mony
2070s: mony4you
2090s: mony247

Anonymous said...

This article almost makes the case that the amnesty debate is a sideshow.

This illegal had SEVEN anchor babies, all US citizens thanks to the 14th Amendment.

Suppose the 7 children average a relatively modest 4 children each. This single illegal will have produced 28 lawful US citizen underclass peasants, the vast majority of whom will be net drains on law-abiding taxpayers over their entire lives.

The debate is focused on amnesty for the one, when it should be on how American society can possibly cope with the 28, scaled up to millions and millions of illegals.

anony-mouse said...

1/ Modesto in '62 looked a lot more like '57 everywhere else.
What happened?

2/ Maybe the kid should start a tattoo removal business instead of a tattoo business.

3/ Once again, why is everyone mad at the Senators? Isn't there another House?

Anonymous said...

Remember the Chicano in American Graffitti? Ritchie Ramirez or something like that? His crew the "Pharaoes"... Funny bunch they were. Fun times, very vibrant indeed. Did you know Lucas crashed his car and was seriously injured when he was 17/18? We can't do that anymore with gas prices being the way they are.

countenance said...

Remember, Rand Paul said a few weeks ago that his big problem with the Gang Bangers of Eight bill is that it doesn't grant enough work permits-visas, and that the bill would need to be rewritten to do that get him to vote for it.

Fresno's mayor, Ashley Swearengin, hopes to reverse the trend and last year led a citywide program called Learn2Earn, which helps residents earn their high school diplomas

Sure, because there are throngs of good paying jobs out there that only require a high school diploma.

Slightly OT:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2338410/Senator-takes-kids-day-survivalist-holiday-desert-island--takes-food-water.html

You know what’s sadly ironic about this? All Jeff Flake wanted was some time alone with his sons, i.e. people who are closely related to him on his family tree, in practically the middle of nowhere where they couldn’t be bothered.

Yet, this is the same Jeff Flake who is part of the Senate Gang Bangers of Eight that wants to flood his and our country with millions more people not like us into cities that in many cases are already crowded to the point of going postal insanity.

Alcalde Jaime Miguel Curleo said...

That would be cool if the Fresno mayor were a relative of Al Swearengen from Deadwood

the DREAM factory said...

American Graffiti was actually filmed in Marin County...

some guy said...

I wish they had found water instead... Water makes men work; oil makes them DREAM

Anonymous said...

"But if I don't find work soon, we're low on income, so I'm going to have to go to the fields."

It must be nice to have something to fall back on. Low paying or not, it's a job. When black or white people are out of work, there's nothing left but begging for handouts.

Mexican farm workers block off their industry from potential American compettition in the same way Indian programmers do. But the Mexican farm workers are about 2 generations ahead, and now utterly dominate the market in California. The black man looking for fill-in work, or the white teenager looking for an after school job, are both not only discouraged from applying, they're often openly threatened. Very few of us even bother trying, since we've never even heard of it being successful.

Puggg said...

California's San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year.

That's what happens when you can pay your stoop labor next to nothing. If the cheap Hispanic labor wasn't available, with necessity being the mother of invention, the work that Hispanic stoop laborers currently do would be done by technology. But with a constant stream coming fresh over the border and many more potentially legalized soon, there is no necessity therefore no invention.

Anonymous said...

Areas filled with Latin Americans become like Latin America. Maybe in another 50 years we'll have this one figured out; as it is, we're stumped.

Average Joe said...

Why does the Gang of Eight want to Fresnoify and Modestoize the rest of America?

Just look at who their donors are. As the old saying goes: follow the money.

no joy in mudville said...

To paraphrase General Casey:

As bad as turning America into a third world slum is, if diversity were to suffer instead... that would be even worse.

Anonymous said...

Just look at who their donors are. As the old saying goes: follow the money.

Indeed.

"Soros Funded National Immigration Forum Confirms It’s Paying for Evangelical Radio Ads"

http://juicyecumenism.com/2013/06/09/soros-funded-national-immigration-forum-confirms-its-paying-for-evangelical-radio-ads/

Whitehall said...

Reading the life and times of Machiavelli, he once advised the Florentine government that the way the ancient Romans dealt with a rebellious province was either to kill all the leaders or import foreigners so that the rebellious people were a minority within their own country.

Think Schumer ever read the complete works of Machiavelli?

Semi-employed White Guy said...

The 36-year-old mother of seven was desperate.

If we are going to give amnesty to the hordes of illegals, can we at least demand that they stop breeding like rats? Hell, I'd bet even rats are smart enough not to breed when there is not enough food around!

David Davenport said...

I suppose that quite a few Okies also had seven children. What changed for them that their descendants no longer work in the fields??

More monogamy, more old-school Protestant-ism, and genetically higher IQ's.

On the whole, 1930's white American migrants from the middle states to to CA were not as down and out as they are to depicted to be in the movie Grapes of Wrath. By the next decade, the 1940's, most Okies in California were part of the nascent middle class suburban boom.

Anonymous said...

Steve you are a hypocrite, you are always against illegal immigrant but praise the 4th worst illegal immigrant metro area Houston. Houston is only beaten Ny La, Chicago and New York And those on the right need to be aware that Texas in number 2 in illegal immigrants at 1.6 million and only a small group of politicians there support e-verify.

Anonymous said...

The other great movie worth referencing is Fast Times at Ridgemont High. All those after school jobs worked by those high school kids in the mall to pay for the upkeep of their car and save for their education are now lifetime careers for Mexican immigrants on MediCal and food stamps.

Contemprary SoCal white kids have to take out soul crushing loans to get through a UC or CSU where they will be lectured by Bangladeshi grad students while their six figured salaried professors sip wine at some academic conference in Italy in a five star hotel.

Anonymous said...

"Farmers have always relied on hiring racial or ethnic minorities from the bottom level of society".

Lets make that...

Farmers have always CHOSEN to hire the cheapest labor they could find because they are too cheap and mean-spirited to pay a fair wage and prefer exploitation. Its just a modern form of neo-slavery, the reinvented 'slave power' lobby of the old pre-war south.

Anonymous said...

"I suppose that quite a few Okies also had seven children. What changed for them that their descendants no longer work in the fields??"

Okies did not come from a culture of migrant field labor. It was not their normal lifestyle. Many had been small family farm owners back in the midwest, before their farms were foreclosed. The Okies were pretty much a real hardscrabble Scotch-Irish population.

From the LA times, "Okies--They Sank Roots and Changed the Heart of California: History: Unwanted and shunned, the 1930s refugees from the Dust Bowl endured, spawning new generations. Their legacy can be found in towns scattered throughout the San Joaquin Valley", October 18, 1992, JULES LOH, A.P.

"... the Okies did not come as the customary migrant laborers to follow the harvests. They came as families, strong and close families for the most part, looking for a piece of land where they could take root. And did.

... one study estimates that as many as 3.75 million Californians, one-eighth of the state's 30 million population, claim Okie ancestry.

... pulled themselves up in a single generation to high levels of success, even prominence, across the whole spectrum of society. One became president of Bakersfield College, another head of a commuter airline, another the chief of a chain of hardware stores. ...

The Okies brought with them not only the externals--their country music, for example, and their distinctive speech--but they also brought the idioms of Southwestern populism as well."



It sounds as if the communists targeted Okie fieldworks, hoping to organize them... heh, heh. Wrong population.

Harry Baldwin said...

The other great movie worth referencing is Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Another movie that seems like a time capsule is "Clockwork Orange." Burgess had a brilliant imagination, but not visionary enough to foresee an England in which the lion's share of the Ultra-Violence and Twenty-to-One would be carried out by Africans and Pakistanis.

Hey England--Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, wrong link (http://articles.latimes.com/1992-10-18/local/me-622_1_san-joaquin-valley):

From the LA times, "Okies--They Sank Roots and Changed the Heart of California: History: Unwanted and shunned, the 1930s refugees from the Dust Bowl endured, spawning new generations. Their legacy can be found in towns scattered throughout the San Joaquin Valley", October 18, 1992, JULES LOH, A.P.

And the communists targeted Okie fieldworkers, not fieldworks, though that would have been spectacular.


Shesh, Steve, you should pay us bloggers more bettar.

Anonymous said...

Harry Baldwin said...

Burgess had a brilliant imagination, but not visionary enough to foresee an England in which the lion's share of the Ultra-Violence and Twenty-to-One would be carried out by Africans and Pakistanis.

Enoch Powell foresaw it.

Anonymous said...

As per the Okies, another question? If America had another great depression, would the illegals stop coming, or better yet, go home? Was there any illegal immigration to speak of in the 1930's? Maybe there was a silver lining in that cloud?

Anonymous said...

All Jason Richwine did was to point out exactly the same thing as this boo-hoo-hoo article, but from a tougher, quantitative, analytical and non-anecdotal perspective.
- and all he got was to be crucified for his efforts.

On another note, why would an individual, with a brain, apparently trapped in a bad job, wish to have 7 children?
Perhaps there are many things in her life she cannot change, but this was something she had conrol of.

James Walker said...

Strangely enough, Gang member McCain's son hasn't married an attractive Hispanic from Arizona or even a Dreamer. He married a black woman who loves "Real Housewives of Orange County" and reviews hair stylists on Yelp:

http://cocoafab.com/renee-swift-jack-mccain-wife-racists-comments/

Boehner's daughter lives in Florida and recently married, but no Cubans or Dreamers for her--she married a dreadlocked Jamaican pothead. Now we know why he drinks so much and cries all the time.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2314818/Dominic-Lakhan-The-Jamaican-born-fianc-John-Boehners-daughter--arrested-possessing-marijuana.html

Do either of these two chaps realize how bad the amnesty will be for American blacks?

Anonymous said...

McCain's son and Boehner's daughter seems to be part of an interesting trend worldwide of the children of elites marrying people of different races and even nationalities.

Al Gore's daughter married a Taiwanese-American guy.
The last PM of Australia Kevin Rudd's daughter married a Hong Kong guy.
Putin's younger daughter married a Korean.
One of Indian PM Manmohan Singh's daughters married a white American and lives in NYC.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

I'm beginning to wonder about "poverty" in the United States. Why do we still use that term?

According to the Narrative, Senora r-Selection here should be way too calorie-deprived and lacking in access to medical care to bear seven healthy children to term. But there they all are, with a roof over their heads, clothed, fed and edumacated. Nobody sold into slavery, nobody begging by the side of the road, nobody left in a ditch somewhere.

The West really has done the seemingly impossible. We have practically eliminated poverty, the default condition of humanity for millenia. Hell's bells, we generate so much surplus wealth we can fund a population explosion in the most remote depths of Africa and Asia.

You can tally up every single village ever slaughtered by conquistadors, every slave death in the Middle Passage, it will be an unremarked blip compared to the mass die-offs when the West is no longer the West.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Another movie that seems like a time capsule is "Clockwork Orange."

Don't forget Blade Runner, the L.A. alternate-future where Han Chinese perform genetic engineering in sidewalk bazaars and there isn't a Latino or black anywhere. How very, very quaint.

Anonymous said...

"Poverty" = income inequality.

And because those in poverty are the "whom," the victims of their fate, those not in poverty are victimizers and thus bad people... unless they proclaim fealty to the elimination of "poverty" by political means. Therefore Mark Zuckerberg is Good. You, dear reader, are Bad.

Anonymous said...

Any word on Jason Richwine? Has he found a job somewhere, like East Carolina Community College or something?

Anonymous said...

Central California is America's breadbasket? Silly me, I thought it was the Great Plains. I love how reporters can never make the connection between illegal immigration and persistent poverty, it always manages to elude them, I wonder why?

Anonymous said...

Do either of these two chaps realize how bad the amnesty will be for American blacks?


The worse off Americans blacks are, the more fervently they will cling to the Democratic Party and its elaborate system of patronage.

Anonymous said...

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Vamos ahora! Takes < 2 minutes. Make it happen. Kill Bill!

Anonymous said...

Yea Texas is the worst. Please when your company transfers you here as the inevitably will since Texas is the only well (I mean horribly ) managed megastate quit rather than be subjected to the hell hole known as Texas. Yes sir the oil is about to dry up, Austin is a ghost town and Houston isnt fast driving New Orleans out of the shipping game. For the sake of my commute (I mean your children) please don't come here.

Anonymous said...

"Do either of these two chaps realize how bad the amnesty will be for American blacks?"

It'd be bad for blacks if they wanted to work. They don't, so more immigration is good for blacks. Immigrants provide cheap labor to white and asian businessmen who make money and pay taxes, and taxes provide free stuff to blacks.

Are blacks better off in LA or in Detroit?

Anonymous said...

'I'm beginning to wonder about "poverty" in the United States. Why do we still use that term?'

Control the vocabulary, you control the debate.

Control the debate, you control the narrative.

Control the narrative, you control the people.

Anonymous said...

People seem to think that there is a fixed supply of poverty in Third World countries, and that bringing poor people to America to make more money therefore reduces foreign poverty.

This story is a clear refutation of that kind of naive sentiment: mass immigration just allows Third Worlders to have more children than they would otherwise have, in both the source country and the destination country. The end result is not an improvement in living conditions in Mexico, but rather the Mexican colonization of the US.

Likewise, Muslim immigration to Europe does not mean fewer Muslims or less poverty in the Middle East and Africa; It just means more Muslims and more poverty in Europe.

In the long run, the primary demographic effect of mass immigration is to accommodate the fecundity of dysfunctional societies, and possibly to suppress family formation in the First World to boot.

Ah, but The Children, The Children!

Bah. What suckers we are!

Anonymous said...

"Was there any illegal immigration to speak of in the 1930's?" - Immigration was shut off in 1925, so no there was not. Politicians of the time weren't afraid to point out that America's unemployment problem wouldn't have existed if it had been shut off sooner.

Anonymous said...

Control the vocabulary, you control the debate.

Control the debate, you control the narrative.

Control the narrative, you control the people.


Source for these assertions?

Steve Sailer said...

Source for these assertions?

Huh, how about like: Thanks, great line, I will plagiarize it repeatedly!

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile:

Over the past 12 years, hispanic college enrollment has surpassed whites(of those hispanics who do graduate from high school, it should be added).

Which leads me to point number two, the amount of hispanic high school dropouts have declined by over 50% over the last decade.

See more here:

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/05/09/hispanic-high-school-graduates-pass-whites-in-rate-of-college-enrollment/

There is still a lag in the attendance of 4 year old instutions, but even this is fading. Her story is cherry-picked for the emotional impact but the last 10 years have seen strong gains from latinos, which is part of the reason why their birth rate is now below 2.1 and has been cut 30% in the last 5 years.

Meanwhile, the age expectancy for working-class whites is now lower than for blacks.

What we're seeing is a total underachievement from white america and in some cases even abject misery that is the highest of any racial group(at least for working-class whites).

What we see is a conversion of fates. Hispanics are doing better and better and whites are dragged down the mud. Only Asians do very well now. Their unemployment is only 4.8%, their povery is very well(with a few exceptions like the Hmong etc) and so on.

But are you going to see stories about that? Mustn't disrupt The Narrative!

Anonymous said...

"Muslim immigration to Europe does not mean fewer Muslims or less poverty in the Middle East and Africa"

Well, Iran now has a birth rate of 1.8. Turkey just recently hit a birth rate below 2.0.

Egypt is crawling down to 2.1 very fast, but is not quite there yet. I mean, if you look at the birth rates in the Middle East we're talking about the greatest decline in human history for such a short time-span.

So, while I wouldn't link immigration to Europe with fewer muslims(as in lower birthrates), the fact is that the correlation is there(even if it is not necessarily causation).

However, one theory could be that they see how comfortable life is in Europe and women may not want to be drones.
I see this among young muslims where I live. The vast majority of the young don't even go to the Mosque any more.

However, that doesn't mean integration is rife. Their new identity is increasingly racial, but I think this is in large part because most of Europe is saturated with American culture which is obsessed with the "white vs the rest" frame.

So many of them awkardly adopt the black narrative, but fail. Also, when you live in a 90% white state and act as if it was a 60-40 state like America, you get a lot of backlash which can be quite humerous! In a sense, I'm pleased. The debate has mvoed away from Islam itself and more onto racial matters in Europe. This is what I always wanted, because the right in Europe(like the right in America) tries to avoid the topic at all costs, while the left is pushing it and has succeeded in entering it into the debate.

Melendwyr said...

I've always wondered about the sort of person who goes around Wikipedia adding 'citation needed' to any factual statements, even mind-boggingly obvious ones.

We don't need to cite a source when we make elementary statements, Anonymous.

Bob Loblaw said...

California's San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year.

Is $6.8bn in top line revenue a big number for the area's primary business? Doesn't seem like it to me.

Anonymous said...

"Central California is America's breadbasket? Silly me, I thought it was the Great Plains".

On a per capita basis, no other farmland in the US is more productive than that of Central California. The year-long growing season and plentiful irrigation means they can grow a seemingly endless variety of fruits, vegetables and nuts. Go to the produce section of year nearest grocery store - odds are most of it comes from California. While the Great Plains may surpass California on total volume, most of it is temperate growing cereal grains like wheat and corn. And a lot of it - specifically corn - doesn't go towards human consumption.

The lack of variety in the Midwestern farms probably explains why mechanization took root there and not in California. The greater variety in California means it is less cost effective to mechanize, since the picking machines would have to be re-tooled for each different type of crop. Or less cost-effective than paying mestizos to pick them, at any rate.

Anonymous said...

It wasn't this womans' fault she was born into poverty. But why did she have to perpetuate it by having seven children? This was one thing she could have controlled, but didn't.

Anonymous said...

Reply to anon at 2:29 pm.

Whatever. I fail to see ANY upside for Europe, or anywhere else in the west, from muslim immigration. So they 'cease' to practice the superstitious cult of Islam, you still have a color problem in what was previously a homogeneous country with no racial tensions.

Anonymous said...

This article is full of lies and spin designed to appeal to brain-dead SWPL S. F. liberals who have no clue what life in California is like outside of their Bay Area bubble. I am from the same general area as this professional brood mare and I know.

1.) Her seven anchor brats qualify for a lot more gubermiento assistance than just food stamps: WIC vouchers until age five; free school meals (breakfast AND lunch), Medi-Cal, Section 8. She would have gotten "free" maternity care and delivery from Medi-Cal for ALL of her numerous pregnancies at 6K a pop x 7.

2.) Nobody that fat works regularly in the fields. Sorry, just no. Her stories about fieldwork are from 10 or 15 years ago, not today.She lives off of the gubermiento support generated by her little meal tickets.

3.)She's "bedridden" at age 36? My mom worked in the fields when she was in her mid-50s. Again, just no.

4.) Real estate is incredibly cheap in the Central Valley .The "rich white people" who live in the "rich" part of town in their "McMansions" would be considered lower middle class in the Bay Area, i.e. a cop married to a dental hygienist, or a shoe store manager married to a school teacher. In other words, ordinary white people who managed to acquire some type of salable skill and limited their family size to two kids instead of getting pregnant at 15, dropping out of school, and squatting out baby after baby after baby with no visible means of support except the gubermiento cornucopia.

5.)Up until the mid-70s, most rural farm work in California was done by local poor and lower-middle class white people, not "minorities" at the "bottom of the racial scale". College and high school students on summer break, local housewives looking to make extra pin money (and it was legal to take kids over six with them, which they frequently did), local blue collar men who were between jobs or down on their luck for some reason.

Any "migrants" were what would be called "homeless" people today--back then, we called them "transients." Lower class white men, often alcoholic or mentally impaired, who lived in cheap flophouses and moved from town to town to earn money for their next few bottles of Night Train. Don't believe me? Look up the photos of the 25 farmworkers that Mexican labor contractor/serial killer Juan Corona murdered in the Sacramento Valley in 1971. Every single one of them was a middle-aged white man.