War on the Middle Class

John Derbyshire today, from his August diary:

We’re hearing a lot about this — Lou Dobbs runs a regular segment on it. I think the real war is on the working class, who are being priced out of jobs by floods of illegal immigrants. Of course, nobody much cares. In a modern meritocracy, all the articulate members of the working class — the kind of people who might organize, agitate, and make trouble — are siphoned off into colleges and law schools at an early age, to become members of the elite, agitating for elite interests. Those left behind can eat cake, or welfare — that seems to be the general attitude, certainly the elite attitude.

The lower-middle and middle classes really do seem to be hurting, though. I mean, I live among such people, and I hear about it. I don’t care how many feelgood pieces Larry Kudlow posts on NRO, telling us how wonderfully well the economy is doing. It may be doing fine by Larry over there on his gated private estate, but I’ve never heard so much grumbling down here on Main Street.

The following is not an original observation, but it’s one worth repeating: Much of the talk we hear from economists and government financial panjandrums nowadays treats the national economy as a thing in itself, to be egged on and expanded and caressed and cherished, without any concern for the actual citizens of this country. Sure, I’d rather live in a rich country than a poor one, and a healthy economy is a jolly good thing; but “expanding” is not necessarily synonymous with “healthy,” not for economies any more than for waistlines. A swelling economy is not ipso facto a good thing. It might lift all boats; or it might just lift a few and swamp the rest. It depends how things are organized. As Oliver Goldsmith noted: "Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." That’s about where we’re at, it seems to me. And no, it’s not a leftist remark; Goldsmith was a Tory.

Front page news here in Dallas yesterday: wages in north Texas are declining. Economists blame it on an influx of low-wage immigrant workers. How legal do you think they are? Yesterday I had a long conversation with a middle-class homeowner who recently left the Dallas area for up north. He said that he lived in a decent middle-class neighborhood north of the city. Ethnically mixed, which was fine by him, because everybody took care of their properties, and got alone fine. About five years ago, there began to be an influx of Latino immigrants. They started running businesses out of their rental houses. Almost overnight, there were cars parked all along the street, even in yards, which were piling up with junk. He assumes they were illegal, but can't prove it, and it wouldn't matter if he could, he said, because nobody in the city was going to do anything about it. Not even code enforcement.

He said he and his wife sold their house at a loss, just to keep from losing more money. They could see where the neighborhood was headed. He's a conservative Republican, but says he's sick of the multiculti left and the open-borders, big-business right. Nobody is speaking up for people like him, he said, and the media is bound and determined to portray them as racist. He said the issue never was having Hispanic neighbors, which is fine by him. The issue was having lawbreakers move in who had no respect for the traditions and practices of the neighborhood. And nobody in Washington or anywhere else giving a damn.

Interestingly, I also had a conversation with a very, VERY liberal activist reader here in Dallas yesterday. She lives in a mixed neighborhood not far from my own. She said she's sick of seeing all the illegals piling into her neighborhood, and of the idea that if you want to speak critically about it, you are automatically suspected of harboring racist bigotry. This is a woman who has not been shy in letting me know over the past few years that she thinks I'd make a good Tonto for Attila the Hun. But she's had enough.

I dunno, maybe Caleb Stegall is ahead of his time.