I had a late lunch today at a small restaurant in Dallas. The manager of the restaurant, a non-Latino immigrant, came over to the table to say hello. I don't know the man well, but he's always friendly, and because I came in so late, he had a chance to come by to chat. After we made small talk, I told him we on the editorial board struggle over the immigration question a lot, and we hear that many business owners wouldn't be able to operate without a substantial Latino immigrant workforce. I asked him if that was true.
"Absolutely, without a doubt," he said. "There's no way I could run this restaurant without Hispanic immigrants. We check their papers, and they're all legal, so it's not about hiring illegals. But we have to hire Hispanic immigrants. I'm white, but I've got to be honest with you, you can't get white or black employees who have the same work ethic as the Mexicans. It's like another planet."
I observed that his staff seems to be entirely Hispanic. "I don't hire only Hispanics," he said. "But I'll tell you, 80 percent or more of the applications we get here are from Hispanics. When people say that Latino immigrants are taking jobs from Americans, I just don't see that here. I'd be happy to hire whites or blacks, but they don't apply. And like I said, the Mexicans hustle a lot more, and are a lot more dependable. I've had the worst luck with black employees. If you offer them any criticism, no matter how constructive, they turn it into a racial issue. One guy we had here told me that he didn't have to work hard, because his ancestors had been slaves. I was like, 'Dude, what are you talking about? I wasn't even born in this country, so don't blame me for that.'"
"And that's another thing that bothers me about the way people talk about the Mexicans," the manager continued. "I overheard one of my former employees, a black guy, telling one of my Mexican employees that he was nothing but a wetback, and he ought to get back across the Rio Grande. That really made me angry. How is it that these Mexicans can come to this country not even speaking the language, and work hard and build something for themselves, but black guys like him are born here knowing the language, and they blame racism for all their problems? It doesn't make sense. When I came to this country, my family had nothing, I didn't know the language, and nobody gave me any breaks. I have a lot of respect for these Mexicans. They work hard, they take care of business, and they're getting ahead. Some of my employees work two jobs and never complain, and I'm supposed to feel sorry for Americans who think working hard in my kitchen is beneath them?"
I report, you decide.
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>Charlie B.
Why haven't these superhuman workers, unburdened by 20% of the population being shiftless and ungrateful, raised Mexico far above the United State's productivity?
Or maybe living in communities where crime is rampant, the cops corrupt, and education opportunities hampered does make a difference in your general attitude.
BTW, the minimum wage in Mexico is around 60 pesos a day or about $5.50. You know I might even wash plutonium covered dishes with gusto for the equivalent of $500 a day.
REGARDING MEXICO: I know this might come as a shock to us Americans who love our President and congress and city halls and are never irritated with unfair advantages the wealthiest have been known to sometimes rake in: But the problem with Mexico is not the people but the government, and the fact that 95% of the country is owned by 5% of that nation's people… still 500 years later owning massive land given in the early Spanish Conquistador grants.
I have a friend whose family has owned their ranch near Taxco (southwest of Mexico City) for 450 years, massive. They pay very little in taxes. I know this is shocking, but sometimes governments of both parties are either corrupt or inept. But the people, particularly the men, want to work. And they do NOT spend it all on Friday night. They save and have dreams of homes for their families. And they pay their way to that dream by building the homes for OUR families; quickly (have you seen how fast they are? Like a fast forward Disney flick!) and well.... great tile work, wood work, etc.
They are resourceful and proud and competitive with each other for who works best and fastest and longest. I know the down side of this situation since I live near an epicenter of the immigration ground zero. And the issues are many and real. An unlike many who are most vocal about this group, I know firsthand what I am talking about since I live among them. They are not an abstract ‘them’ to me. But we are talking here about work: why they are valuable and worthy of honorable treatment and certainly respect.
Both respondents seem to make clear they regard Mexicans as a whole as noble Rousseauvian beasts of burden, still incapable after 500 years, though, of mounting a just and equitable society of their own in which they can thrive without falling prey to a decay in their general attitude from oppressions other populations have historically surmounted, albeit usually at a costly blood sacrifice to themselves.
It's strikingly ironic that the apologists for Mexicans here would be the most patronizingly ethnist, or, in our uncritical contemporary parlance of political opportunism, racist.
Then again, Carlos Slim Helú (Rod's likely next employer ), half-Mexican son of a Lebanese Maronite Christian immigrant TO Mexico, in one generation managed to leapfrog a nation and become the second richest man in the world, with no granted land, no special privileges, merely by buying and selling judiciously. Statistically, there should be at the least several dozens of subsequent Helús--all Mexican, part-Mexican, non Mexican--in a country as naturally rich as Mexico, regardless of education, regardless of corruption, but there simply are not. Well, actually, there are: they run the drug cartels.
So I think, regardless what good workers they might be--so are manufacturing robots--this legitimately begs the question as to what we might be giving up as a nation by so disproportionately larding our national population from this single and dubious source, merely so that, for example, 26-year-old Caucasian pups can impress their dates at Ghostbar by passing themselves off as "businessmen" because they can run a crew of illegal immigrants that can throw up residential fencing at $13 a foot rather than $24, the discount at which our good judgement can be purchased.
Charlie B.
Rod, I am a moderate who occasionally comes to your blog for a well reasoned and well written viewpoint from the right. I am puzzled about the conservative reaction to the immigration debate. Beyond passionate, they seem to be unreasonable and determined to follow their gut feel without informing themselves about anything beyond their small spheres of experience. Maybe you could explain their viewpoint a bit better.
Rod, you're trying (like so many others) to confuse the issue.
I'm not against legal immigrants. My wife is a legal immigrant (and now a naturalized citizen). I'm against _illegal_ immigrants. It's not really a difficult distinction to make, but half the pundits in the media seem to have trouble making it.
The bill our illustrious president keeps trying to shove down our throats is trying to do strikes me as analogous to taking a man who robbed a bank of $10 million a few years ago and suggesting his sentence be dismissed because since then he's invested the money and donated the proceeds to worthy charitable causes.
As for this...
---
'Is this a wage thing?'
'No,' said my friend, exasperated. 'It's like I told you: the Mexicans bust their ass working; whites and blacks don't. I don't much like the way things are changing around here, but them's the facts.'
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...it strikes me as a load of crap. How much is the guy paying people to work on his farm? $100 an hour? $500 an hour? Or more like $5 an hour? The simple fact is that he cannot find people to work for him _at what he considers a reasonable wage_. If he offered a much higher wage (in the range he considers unreasonable), he'd find people jumping at the chance to work for him. (Heck, for $100 an hour, I'd come down there and do it, no matter how nasty the work seemed.)
It's _always_ a wage thing. Employers complain that they can't find anyone to fill the jobs they're offering, but they leave the second part unsaid: "...at the wages we're offering." If they want sympathy for their troubles, then let's hear a little honesty on their part first.
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