Occasionally people say to me, “Dr. Wes, how do you feel about all these illegal immigrants coming to America, taking American jobs away, and making so many of us real American citizens unemployed and causing us to be homeless?”
At times like that I like to always begin with a DISCLAIMER: None of the opinions expressed by me, Dr. Wes Browning, ever reflect the views of Real Change, the views of homeless people in general, or those of any other actual person, living or dead. In fact the views expressed by Dr. Wes Browning may not even be his own, owing to the fact that this is Adventures in Irony (look it up), not Adventures in Wes’ Final Answers Dished Out Clear and Easy for the Sake of the Irony-Impaired.
That said, the premise of the question is a crock. Illegal immigration can’t be blamed for the current high rate of homelessness. In fact illegal immigration is not a problem at all. Ask me how I know that! Go ahead; ask me!
I’ll pretend you just did ask me. The ultimate consideration is what’s the effect of all immigration, illegal or otherwise. And what matters there is the total percentage of foreign-born residents in the US resident population as a whole. That measures the potential social impact of immigration.
“So what’s the per capita of foreigners among us, and what are we going to do about it, because it’s getting to be way too much, isn’t it, Wes?”
No it’s not! The Census Bureau works out the per capita foreign-born rate, and it’s NOT too much! The current rate is near 10%, which is high compared to its all-time low of 5% in 1970, but less than what it has been almost every year this country was in existence prior to WWII.
In fact, from 1860 to 1930, the foreign-born rate was generally in the vicinity of 13%. And those were the Good Old Days, when we had family values and no hippies!
The only time in history when the American rate of foreign-borns was high enough to have a serious impact was before we became a country. True, around about 1607 and continuing for some years after, a huge surge in illegal immigration resulted in our languages being replaced by a foreign language (English), but nothing that serious is happening now.
I think it helps to understand the problem of illegal immigration and its impact on homelessness to compare it to the problem of illegal drinking in Saudi Arabia and the impact that has on the price of gasoline in Omaha, Nebraska: zip.
Or compare it to the Drug War.
In 1873 there was no heroin addiction in this country, even though heroin was completely legal. That’s because it didn’t exist yet. In 1874, it was made in a lab and called diacetylmorphine, but it still wasn’t a big problem. Heroin addiction started to be a social problem after the Bayer Company came out with what they called Bayer Heroin Cough Syrup in 1898, giving us the name. Twenty-five years later it was estimated that 0.2% of all Americans were heroin addicts, and heroin use became illegal. So today your heroin addiction isn’t just a health problem, it’s illegal, just like a lot of immigration. It became illegal because legislators made it illegal.
So you could ask, what role do today’s illegal heroin addictions play in creating our country’s increasing homeless problem? And the answer would be, FORGET ILLEGALITY, look at the overall rate of heroin addiction. After 8 decades of laws against it, it’s still only around .2 or .3 percent. So that can’t explain the homelessness, can it?
Consider those opinions as fodder for further discussions.
One last note, for you history buffs out there: George Bush has decreed that the Star Spangled Banner should be in English. He obviously didn’t know that in 1919 our very own US government issued its own Spanish translation, for educational purposes. Isn’t history fun?
Showing posts with label hippies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hippies. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Syria's Friends Are Layabouts?
Periodically I encounter young people. And one of the things young people like to ask me is, "Why did you hippies screw up America back in the sixties?" "Ha, ha," I respond, "I wasn't a hippy, you ignorant child," but later I feel bad because I sense that I could have provided some insight to someone who was sincerely seeking answers. Then still later I watch the Simpsons and fall asleep.
Put another way, the question that arises is, what were all those long-hairs rebelling against back then? Well, now it can be known. Consider the following quote from Donald Rumsfeld.
"The (Syrian) government's making a lot of bad mistakes, a lot of bad judgment calls, in my view, and they're associating with the wrong people."
That, my friends, is a sixties dad. "That kid (alternately: my son, or that minority person, or that rock singer, or that protestor) is making a lot of bad mistakes, blah, blah, in my view, AND they're associating with the wrong people." Pure sixties dad.
Now multiply that by how ever many millions of sixties dads there were and count in the fact that most sixties moms were backing up this kind of clenched-teeth belligerence from the sidelines, and you can see what all the fuss was about. The long-hairs were rebelling against a zillion petty Donald Rumsfelds in various pants and skirts. (Women always wore skirts in those days. Or else.)
The one non-sixties-dad like thing about Donald Rumsfeld is that he writes poetry. However, when Donald Rumsfeld writes poetry, it is very recognizably the sort of poetry a sixties dad would write if he broke the stereotype and wrote poetry. So the stereotype doesn't really break.
In view of some recent events in the Middle East, some of Rumsfeld's poetry from the past starts to look like warnings of things to come. For example the 2001 "Situation" ends with the lines, " There will be some things that people will see. / There will be some things that people won’t see. / And life goes on."
Take the celebration in Baghdad when the statue near the Palestine Hotel was brought down by the tank. People saw the cheering Iraqis. But they did not see the limits of the crowd. Wide-angle photos that showed that the crowd consisted of fewer than two hundred people were available on the internet but not discussed in the major US media -- things unseen. Also unseen was evidence that the Iraqi participants in the celebration were primarily Iraqi freedom fighters brought into Baghdad by our military.
Credit has to go to our Army and Marines for doing such a fine job of propaganda. This is what we pay them the big bucks to do. It is of course desirable to convince your enemy that you have won the support of the people as soon as possible, so that they will give up the fight. It is unfortunate that in the process you also end up lying to everyone else in the world, including the people you are supposedly saving from future terrorism. But hey, life goes on, right?
Well, for some of us anyway. Not for Rachel Corrie and Tom Handoll.
You probably know Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israeli army bulldozer a while back, when she could have simply been handcuffed and arrested. You may not know that Tom Handoll, a British activist, was murdered a few days ago by means of a shot to the head, fired at him while he was trying to herd Palestinian children away from Israeli soldiers. When he could have simply been handcuffed and arrested. (They could have charged him with "giving a damn for Palestinian children," apparently a capital offense in Israel now. At least he would have had a trial.)
Shades of the sixties. I remember it now so well.
To Israel: Please find another way.
To the reader: Please support House Concurrent Resolution 111, AKA the Rachel Corrie Resolution, which calls for an investigation into her death.
By the way, I know this column hasn't been very humorous. But as Anitra puts it, "They're giving you hell to work with."
Put another way, the question that arises is, what were all those long-hairs rebelling against back then? Well, now it can be known. Consider the following quote from Donald Rumsfeld.
"The (Syrian) government's making a lot of bad mistakes, a lot of bad judgment calls, in my view, and they're associating with the wrong people."
That, my friends, is a sixties dad. "That kid (alternately: my son, or that minority person, or that rock singer, or that protestor) is making a lot of bad mistakes, blah, blah, in my view, AND they're associating with the wrong people." Pure sixties dad.
Now multiply that by how ever many millions of sixties dads there were and count in the fact that most sixties moms were backing up this kind of clenched-teeth belligerence from the sidelines, and you can see what all the fuss was about. The long-hairs were rebelling against a zillion petty Donald Rumsfelds in various pants and skirts. (Women always wore skirts in those days. Or else.)
The one non-sixties-dad like thing about Donald Rumsfeld is that he writes poetry. However, when Donald Rumsfeld writes poetry, it is very recognizably the sort of poetry a sixties dad would write if he broke the stereotype and wrote poetry. So the stereotype doesn't really break.
In view of some recent events in the Middle East, some of Rumsfeld's poetry from the past starts to look like warnings of things to come. For example the 2001 "Situation" ends with the lines, " There will be some things that people will see. / There will be some things that people won’t see. / And life goes on."
Take the celebration in Baghdad when the statue near the Palestine Hotel was brought down by the tank. People saw the cheering Iraqis. But they did not see the limits of the crowd. Wide-angle photos that showed that the crowd consisted of fewer than two hundred people were available on the internet but not discussed in the major US media -- things unseen. Also unseen was evidence that the Iraqi participants in the celebration were primarily Iraqi freedom fighters brought into Baghdad by our military.
Credit has to go to our Army and Marines for doing such a fine job of propaganda. This is what we pay them the big bucks to do. It is of course desirable to convince your enemy that you have won the support of the people as soon as possible, so that they will give up the fight. It is unfortunate that in the process you also end up lying to everyone else in the world, including the people you are supposedly saving from future terrorism. But hey, life goes on, right?
Well, for some of us anyway. Not for Rachel Corrie and Tom Handoll.
You probably know Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israeli army bulldozer a while back, when she could have simply been handcuffed and arrested. You may not know that Tom Handoll, a British activist, was murdered a few days ago by means of a shot to the head, fired at him while he was trying to herd Palestinian children away from Israeli soldiers. When he could have simply been handcuffed and arrested. (They could have charged him with "giving a damn for Palestinian children," apparently a capital offense in Israel now. At least he would have had a trial.)
Shades of the sixties. I remember it now so well.
To Israel: Please find another way.
To the reader: Please support House Concurrent Resolution 111, AKA the Rachel Corrie Resolution, which calls for an investigation into her death.
By the way, I know this column hasn't been very humorous. But as Anitra puts it, "They're giving you hell to work with."
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