- Banned
- #1
How did an exhausted, self-professed Shakespeare scholar become an infamous anti-immigration activist? According to Streitz, it began in 2002, when his daughter turned twelve and he began to look into collegesand found himself astounded at the high cost of tuition. The search for the reasons behind this became Streitzs new passion, a passion that would translate into his next self-published book, The Great American College Rip-Off. In the book, he turns his attention to his beloved Hamilton College.
Pointing to the Hamilton College Sesquentenial pennant hanging over his desk, Streitz boils down his thesis to the fact that tuition rates are all demand-drivenyoure willing to pay for it. They spend it and ask for more.
Streitzs meditations on college tuition led him to explore broader economic questions facing America. Hamilton would continue to play an even larger role in his subsequent endeavors. When I started thinking about economics, I was a University of Chicago free marketeer. But it wasnt Hamilton College that occupied his attention, but Alexander Hamilton himself. I started reading Hamilton, and I realized that it was protectionist policies that made the U.S. so dominant. It became obvious that free trade and globalism were going to lead to the destruction of the country.
Upon further research, he pinpointed the major problem as being the substitution of American labor with cheaper alternatives, such as slave labor in foreign countries, outsourced jobs through electronic means, and importing low-wage workersimmigrants.
An econ professor can keep their job by frivolously espousing free market theories, says Streitz, but you as a blue-collar worker lose your job. It is the placement of ideology over results of economic policy, driven of course by corporate elites.
It is in the context of this debate that Paul Streitz concluded that immigration is the biggest threat to the future of America. You are probably inundated at Yale with this multicultural theory, that everybody should have equal access to everything in the world, that we are all one big happy family. But the reality is that we need to exclude people. Not because we are racist, but because we want to protect our citizens.
The more Streitz researched, the more he became convinced of the threat. I became more Hamiltonian than Hamilton, he says. He analyzed trends in the wages of blue-collar workers, and concluded that their wages havent substantially increased in over ten years. As he investigated the governments economic policies, everything pointed back to immigration. It is an absolute catastrophe in this country, he says. It all started with the braceros program, to have migrants come in and work for California lettuce farms. But people who come in to work dont go home. There is no effective way to get them out of there.
Streitz was frustrated with the way that pro-immigrant groups framed the debate. It is always a personal argument, always humanitarian. They paint immigrants as hard-working people coming here to improve themselves. They claim these illegals have rightsmulticultural, universalistic rights. To them, there is no such thing as illegal.
Streiz finds no purchase in this moral argument. They say that these people have a right to come to improve their lives. They problem, he says, is that they dont have any intention of integrating into American culture. They say, Im proud to be a Venezuelan. So why the hell dont you stay there and try to solve those problems? He sees even graver social consequences in this lack of integration. When two cultures that [have] opposite ways of looking at the world coincide, there is usually violence: Irish Protestant versus Catholics, Chinese versus Malays, Muslims versus everybody else. The multicultural world proposes an ideal world as people should behave, not a real world as people do behave.
Streitz says he discovered immigrants are also doing economic harm to the U.S. He claims that his research dispelled the myth that immigrants take the jobs Americans dont want.
The big business argument, which is a complete lie, is that we need the workers, we have shortages, our lettuce crops will rot, Americans wont do construction. He points to the example of Tyson Foods, factories filled with illegals, and they drop [the] wage rate from 16 to 7 dollars an hour. The price of meat doesnt go down, they just get high profits. There is no benefit to American citizens.
In addition to taking American jobs and lowering wages for blue-collar jobs, Streitz also accused immigrants of being free-loaders who force Americans to pay for their education and medical costs. He also found environmental concerns. Where are you going to get the water for 450 million people to drink? Youre going to turn this county into China.
For Streitz, the process by which illegal aliens become integrated into the economy has become all too familiar: One contractor in a city will take the risk and hire five illegals. Because of the low cost of immigrant labor, this contractor will start getting all the contracting jobs, which then forces the other contractors to start hiring them. So pretty soon, you have every contractor hiring illegals, so you have 200 in town, not five.
Then comes the next stage: Housing. Some contractor says, Ill buy a house [and] have 20 illegals living in it. This communal living, though cramped, unhygienic, and often illegal, is much less expensive than standard housing and allows immigrants to work even more cheaply. Then they have minimal expenses, except liquor and food. If Im an African-American, how can I support my family on those kind of wages?
With this formulation, the problem is simple for Streitz: Bring in illegal immigrants, drive down the living standard for Americans.
Pointing to the Hamilton College Sesquentenial pennant hanging over his desk, Streitz boils down his thesis to the fact that tuition rates are all demand-drivenyoure willing to pay for it. They spend it and ask for more.
Streitzs meditations on college tuition led him to explore broader economic questions facing America. Hamilton would continue to play an even larger role in his subsequent endeavors. When I started thinking about economics, I was a University of Chicago free marketeer. But it wasnt Hamilton College that occupied his attention, but Alexander Hamilton himself. I started reading Hamilton, and I realized that it was protectionist policies that made the U.S. so dominant. It became obvious that free trade and globalism were going to lead to the destruction of the country.
Upon further research, he pinpointed the major problem as being the substitution of American labor with cheaper alternatives, such as slave labor in foreign countries, outsourced jobs through electronic means, and importing low-wage workersimmigrants.
An econ professor can keep their job by frivolously espousing free market theories, says Streitz, but you as a blue-collar worker lose your job. It is the placement of ideology over results of economic policy, driven of course by corporate elites.
It is in the context of this debate that Paul Streitz concluded that immigration is the biggest threat to the future of America. You are probably inundated at Yale with this multicultural theory, that everybody should have equal access to everything in the world, that we are all one big happy family. But the reality is that we need to exclude people. Not because we are racist, but because we want to protect our citizens.
The more Streitz researched, the more he became convinced of the threat. I became more Hamiltonian than Hamilton, he says. He analyzed trends in the wages of blue-collar workers, and concluded that their wages havent substantially increased in over ten years. As he investigated the governments economic policies, everything pointed back to immigration. It is an absolute catastrophe in this country, he says. It all started with the braceros program, to have migrants come in and work for California lettuce farms. But people who come in to work dont go home. There is no effective way to get them out of there.
Streitz was frustrated with the way that pro-immigrant groups framed the debate. It is always a personal argument, always humanitarian. They paint immigrants as hard-working people coming here to improve themselves. They claim these illegals have rightsmulticultural, universalistic rights. To them, there is no such thing as illegal.
Streiz finds no purchase in this moral argument. They say that these people have a right to come to improve their lives. They problem, he says, is that they dont have any intention of integrating into American culture. They say, Im proud to be a Venezuelan. So why the hell dont you stay there and try to solve those problems? He sees even graver social consequences in this lack of integration. When two cultures that [have] opposite ways of looking at the world coincide, there is usually violence: Irish Protestant versus Catholics, Chinese versus Malays, Muslims versus everybody else. The multicultural world proposes an ideal world as people should behave, not a real world as people do behave.
Streitz says he discovered immigrants are also doing economic harm to the U.S. He claims that his research dispelled the myth that immigrants take the jobs Americans dont want.
The big business argument, which is a complete lie, is that we need the workers, we have shortages, our lettuce crops will rot, Americans wont do construction. He points to the example of Tyson Foods, factories filled with illegals, and they drop [the] wage rate from 16 to 7 dollars an hour. The price of meat doesnt go down, they just get high profits. There is no benefit to American citizens.
In addition to taking American jobs and lowering wages for blue-collar jobs, Streitz also accused immigrants of being free-loaders who force Americans to pay for their education and medical costs. He also found environmental concerns. Where are you going to get the water for 450 million people to drink? Youre going to turn this county into China.
For Streitz, the process by which illegal aliens become integrated into the economy has become all too familiar: One contractor in a city will take the risk and hire five illegals. Because of the low cost of immigrant labor, this contractor will start getting all the contracting jobs, which then forces the other contractors to start hiring them. So pretty soon, you have every contractor hiring illegals, so you have 200 in town, not five.
Then comes the next stage: Housing. Some contractor says, Ill buy a house [and] have 20 illegals living in it. This communal living, though cramped, unhygienic, and often illegal, is much less expensive than standard housing and allows immigrants to work even more cheaply. Then they have minimal expenses, except liquor and food. If Im an African-American, how can I support my family on those kind of wages?
With this formulation, the problem is simple for Streitz: Bring in illegal immigrants, drive down the living standard for Americans.
