February 02, 2004

Why did Bush do it? I have read many accounts, most of them outraged, about Bush’s bizarre acceptance of perhaps 10,000,000 foreign citizens, all of whom are in our country illegally. Many writers have accurately detailed the destructive effects this will have on American society; there are many and they are all severe.

So why?

Well, I’m glad you asked, because this is a topic I know first hand.

I lived for many years in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod. In the time I was there the town went from a fishing village/summer tourist town to a wealthy playground/summer metropolis. It went from a community where folks still lived in the houses in which they’d been born to an exclusive residence where few who had been born there could afford to stay. During this time I was very active in local government serving on the Housing Authority, the Finance Committee and the Board of Selectmen. I saw first hand what was done and how it was done and crucial to the unfortunate change was the importation of foreign workers.

For generations the Provincetown economy was one of intense money making in the summer, followed by a peaceful off season when the locals lived off their summer savings and a little unemployment insurance. There was no social distinction between business owners and their employees; more than once I stood in the unemployment line next to the fellow I’d been working for all season. But times changed and big money and big businesses moved in. As the town began catering to an ever wealthier crowd everyone’s cost of living rose sharply.

Then, about 15 years ago, through various state and federal programs, foreign seasonal workers became available to businesses willing to “sponsor” them. Sponsorship meant providing housing and work. To qualify, employers had to show that no American citizens were interested in the jobs being filled. To do this they simply advertised for summer help at rates that no local could afford to work for and still have a place to live. Just like today, with Bush’s nationalization of this same scheme, we were told that citizens didn’t want the jobs being taken. This was not true. Americans were willing to do American jobs if they were paid American wages so they could pay their American taxes and interest rates and health insurance. They created those jobs in the first place; to say that they didn’t want them was ridiculous. What this program actually did was give the big employers a way to make wages artificially low, to manipulate the pay rates and completely avoid a free labor market; to literally pay third world wages while raking in first world profits. While every conceivable cost of living skyrocketed, incomes were being reduced.

Almost every restaurant job below the rank of chef was done by imported labor as was virtually all housekeeping; most semi-skilled labor, which is the backbone of any tourist based economy, was done by foreign help at low wages.

Eventually so many workers were brought to town that housing them became a problem. Big businesses would buy up buildings and convert them to stables for their imported crews. Prices for rental units rose way beyond the reach of the remaining local workers. Summer rents were so lucrative that most property owners who rented apartments would no longer rent year round. Many other apartments were sold as condominiums for fabulous prices. In the last 20 years most properties increased ten fold in value. And incomes were being reduced.

Yet one of the most disturbing aspects of this program was not its ruination of the local middle class but its control over the workers themselves. Business owners would keep their staff’s passports in the office safe. They could not quit, they could not seek better paying work or seek additional jobs without their ‘sponsor’s’ permission. There could be no strikes; no bargaining; no arguments; no negotiation. The working citizens of Provincetown could not compete in such a completely unfair labor market. Some, like me, sold out at good prices and moved. Of those who stayed, many cannot find affordable housing and there is absolutely no possibility of ever owning a home. So now the town government, in partnership with the state and feds, has entered wholesale into the construction of subsidized housing, the conversion of public buildings into subsidized rentals, and tax write offs for subsidized landlords. The town’s wonderful egalitarian society is gone; nowadays most residents are either very rich or struggling and subsidized. The irony, of course, is that none of this would now be necessary if they had all just stayed out of the labor market to begin with.

But perhaps these unfortunate events in Provincetown, and some other tourist communities, were simply establishing a precedent, a model for replacing American workers with cheap and, even more important, completely controllable foreign labor. Of course there will be increased corporate earnings and therefore more taxes flowing into the federal trough, but I believe it is the ability to control these people that is at the root of this new treachery, that is why Bush is doing it. With supervision over 10,000,000 Mexican workers the federal government can insulate itself against the repercussions of its increasingly illegitimate actions. If the people get fed up with being spied on, lied to, stolen from and trifled with, just what can they do? A general strike would be pointless now because the feds will have a vast horde of workers with few rights and whose passports are locked away in Big Brothers safe. They can be ‘reassigned’ whenever needed and there are millions more just a few phone calls away. Remember, these are not citizens; they are all unarmed, not entitled to some of our few remaining legal protections and most unlikely to complain about any of it. And if a few million members of the American middle class wind up on welfare in the process, so much the better. Now they too are docile dependents and since the government doesn’t pay taxes they don’t have to finance any of it. We do.

In the past a sign of the incipient decay of a great civilization was the increased use of mercenaries instead of citizen soldiers. Armies that were fighting only for money and plunder, who had no interest in the culture or even the survival of the mother country, often proved to be more dangerous than the enemies they were paid to fight. Our rulers in Washington are creating economic mercenaries, an army of workers who have no understanding of their host or our dying way of life whose grave they have been hired to dig.

©2004 Lee Robinson

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