Anyone supporting unlimited immigration into the United
States might review the history of the antebellum South of the 19th
Century.
While there’s no doubt that slavery was perverse, causing
incredible harm against African Americans, it had another victim that few
likely know – lower class, independent, white, businessmen, sometimes poor,
sometimes middle class.
They were the service providers, fixing fences or performing
odd jobs around an owner’s plantation.
William H. Freehling, a retired history professor at the
University of Kentucky, writes in his two-volume series detailing Southern
life, politics and economics prior to the U.S. Civil War, entitled The Road to Disunion, small white
businessmen were often at a disadvantage because they were competing against
either free blacks or slave labor.
Often it was easier and cheaper, Freehling writes, for a
plantation owner to turn to his slaves when work needed to be done around his
estate that didn’t include planting or tending to the crops.
History repeating
itself?
Nearly 150 years since the end of the Civil War, yesterday’s
New York Times reports (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/us/suit-cites-race-bias-in-farms-use-of-immigrants.html?pagewanted=2&src=twrhp)
a similar issue exists today.
Only it’s not about lower class whites being at a
competitive disadvantage. It’s mostly
about lower class African Americans, The Times reports, unable to secure work
on a farm, Southern Valley, in Georgia.
Their competition?
Immigrant labor but with a new twist: It’s not about pay, say the owners and operators of Southern
Valley, it’s about attitude.
Southern Valley’s Director of Operations Jon Schwalls compared
Mexican and guest workers to Americans this way:
“When Jose gets on the bus to come here from Mexico he is committed to
the work. It’s like going into the
military. He leaves his family at home. The work is hard, but he’s ready. A
domestic wants to know: What’s the pay? What are the conditions? In these
communities, I am sorry to say, there are no fathers at home, no role models
for hard work. They want rewards without input.”
The story reports a lawsuit was recently settled by some of
the workers and it included, The Times said, Southern Valley agreeing “to make
certain changes,” which were left unclear in the article.
Lawyers for the American workers, The Times reports, say the
guest worker program, which allows foreign laborers to work for limited periods
of time in the United States, “is rigged to favor low-cost foreign labor
because, given the conditions and the pay, no one else will do it.”
In U.S. politics, the Democratic Party’s constituency is often voters
on the lower end of the economic spectrum. If Democrats can’t help low-skill laborers, like the ones
formerly employed by Southern Valley, are there other constituents they can’t
help? Are these workers the
Democratic Party’s sacrificial lambs because they’re in a Red State?
