The helot class

On Saturday, we drove out to the country to attend the open house of Rehoboth Ranch, the Hutchins family farm (if you read "Crunchy Cons," you'll remember the Hutchinses as a conservative Christian farm family raising livestock organically, because they believe that's as God intended). Their meat and eggs are fantastic. While there, we ran into Connie Hale, who was also in "Crunchy Cons"; the Hale family farm, Windy Meadows, specializes in chickens. I told Connie how excited Julie and I were to see recently on the menu of an upscale restaurant here in Dallas a baked chicken labeled "Windy Meadows." It was a pleasure to see so many people at the Rehoboth event. Julie and I made some new friends, and had a grand time with old ones too.

Robert Hutchins talked on his tour of the fields about how much costlier it is to raise livestock the natural way, but how they wouldn't do anything else. On several occasions he mentioned the hidden costs, nutritionally and otherwise, that our society pays in its mania for efficiency. We want it fast and cheap, no matter what. But we pay in other ways.

In that light, consider this e-mail from a reader:

Excellent post on the immigration bill. I think you're absolutely right that the key is what Americans want to pay for things, and, more profoundly, what kind of society they want to live in. You can't have it both ways. I'm sure you remember cabs in NYC. They're expensive by US standards but by European standards, they're preposterously cheap. The reason's simple: the immigrant labor. The same is true of food, landscaping, you name it. But are people really willing---and that's where I think you're right to ask the question---to envisage an America without helots?

Personally, I doubt it. As far as I can see, the 'Brazilianization' of the US, a herrenvolk democracy of whites and Asians with a servant class of blacks and Hispanics (I'm simplifying wildly, of course: there is a black bourgeoisie and some Hispanic groups, notably Cubans have joined the 'masters' of our society) is already a fait accompli.

Americans hate immigration, yes. But they'd be lost without it.

I understand people who want illegal immigration stopped, no matter what the cost. And I understand people who are fine with high levels of immigration, and consider it to be on balance a benefit to the economy. What I don't understand are people who want prices and services to remain as they are now, but want the illegals to go home and the borders to be closed. Can't be done. One way or another, we're going to pay.

Everybody ought to read the original reporting series the Dallas Morning News did on the illegal worker culture at the (subsequently raided) Swift meatpacking plants in Cactus, Texas. Again, there's something there to disturb Americans of all political persuasions. We simply cannot keep living like this as a country. The costs -- financial, criminal, and above all moral -- are too great.

But you know how we contemporary Americans are: expecting something for nothing, never expecting the bill to come due.

UPDATE: Once again, a provocative reader comment on Andrew's site. Excerpt:

The proposed immigration "reform" bill does very little for the immigrant and nothing for the communities which are unable to absorb their masses, but is a boon for corporations and liberal grandstanders needing to show their tolerance for diversity.

For the record, it is Big Business and liberals - not racists, "Bible thumpers" and "raving Dobbsians" - and sweethearts like your reader who relates the discussion about the farmer and his 35 cent peach, who wish to institutionalize a type of serfdom, one where employers do not need to provide brown-skinned Mexican worker bees with a minimum wage or benefits of any kind. All perfectly legal as long as we keep getting our fruit at a discount and our tables bussed cheaply.

And it is liberals - champions of government services - who apparently want to ensure that cities like Los Angeles where I live, must forever bankrupt and shut down community hospitals and emergency medical services; endure public schools jammed to the rafters with children of immigrants illiterate in their native language let alone English; and paralyze public transportation and other infrastructure simply by being overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of immigrants pouring across the border every year.