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June 11, 2005
Why Liberal Ideas Are Counterproductive for the Poor
By Thomas Sowell
Sometimes it seems as if liberals have a genius for producing an unending stream of ideas that are counterproductive for the poor, whom they claim to be helping. Few of these notions are more counterproductive than the idea of "menial work" or "dead-end jobs."
Think about it: Why do employers pay people to do "menial" work? Because the work has to be done. What useful purpose is served by stigmatizing work that someone is going to have to do anyway?
Is emptying bed pans in a hospital menial work? What would happen if bed pans didn't get emptied? Let people stop emptying bed pans for a month and there would be bigger problems than if sociologists stopped working for a year.
Having someone who can come into a home to clean and cook and do minor chores around the house can be a godsend to someone who is an invalid or who is suffering the infirmities of age -- and who does not want to be put into an institution. Someone who can be trusted to take care of small children is likewise a treasure.
Many people who do these kinds of jobs do not have the education, skills or experience to do more complex kinds of work. Yet they can make a real contribution to society while earning money that keeps them off welfare.
Many low-level jobs are called "dead-end jobs" by liberal intellectuals because these jobs have no promotions ladder. But it is superficial beyond words to say that this means that people in such jobs have no prospect of rising economically.
Many people at all levels of society, including the richest, have at some point or other worked at jobs that had no promotions ladder, so-called "dead-end jobs." The founder of the NBC network began work as a teenager hawking newspapers on the streets. Billionaire Ross Perot began with a paper route.
You don't get promoted from such jobs. You use the experience, initiative, and discipline that you develop in such work to move on to something else that may be wholly different. People who start out flipping hamburgers at McDonald's seldom stay there for a full year, much less for life.
Dead-end jobs are the kinds of jobs I have had all my life. But, even though I started out delivering groceries in Harlem, I don't deliver groceries there any more. I moved on to other jobs -- most of which have not had any promotions ladders.
My only official promotion in more than half a century of working was from associate professor to full professor at UCLA. But that was really just a pay increase, rather than a real promotion, because associate professors and full professors do the same work.
Notions of menial jobs and dead-end jobs may be just shallow misconceptions among the intelligentsia but they are a deadly counterproductive message to the poor. Refusing to get on the bottom rung of the ladder usually means losing your chance to move up the ladder.
Welfare can give you money but it cannot give you job experience that will move you ahead economically. Selling drugs on the streets can get you more money than welfare but it cannot give you experience that you can put on a job application. And if you decide to sell drugs all your life, that life can be very short.
Back around the time of the First World War, a young black man named Paul Williams studied architecture and then accepted a job as an office boy at an architectural firm. He agreed to work for no pay, though after he showed up the company decided to pay him something, after all.
What they paid him would probably be dismissed today as "chump change." But what Paul Williams wanted from that company was knowledge and experience, more so than money.
He went on to create his own architectural company, designing everything from churches and banks to mansions for movie stars -- and contributing to the design of the theme building at Los Angeles International Airport.
The real chumps are those who refuse to start at the bottom for "chump change." Liberals who encourage such attitudes may think of themselves as friends of the poor but they do more harm than enemies.
A debate going nowhere
By Victor Davis Hanson
Published June 11, 2005
Citizens calling themselves the Minutemen patrol the border in an effort to stop illegal aliens from entering the U.S. Mexican President Vicente Fox says Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. "are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do."
Meanwhile, many Republicans think President George W. Bush's guest-worker program either mocks the law or is unworkable. In California, a frustrated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger blurts out, "Close the borders in California and all across Mexico and the United States."
Illegal immigration is again in the headlines, but the debate isn't going anywhere. Instead, all the tired controversies are again being aired.
Some believe illegal immigration is a win-win bargain: An impoverished Mexico obtains critical dollars, while job-hungry America receives industrious unskilled workers. Critics counter that millions of illegal workers undermine the sanctity of the law and only abet a corrupt Mexican government that uses remittances to avoid needed reform.
Both sides agree that when newcomers arrive legally from Mexico in the thousands, rather than unchecked in the millions, they become some of our best citizens.
The politics by now are surreal. Those of the corporate right want cheap labor. So they join the self-interested multicultural left in politics, journalism and academia who don't mind seeing a growth of unassimilated and dependent constituents.
Contradictory statistics -- showing illegal immigration resulting in either a net gain or loss to the U.S. economy -- are used by both sides. Human-interest anecdotes circulate about both the amazing successes and abject failures of illegal entrants. Yet rarely mentioned are the illiberal aspects of millions coming to the United States in violation of the law.
(1) For starters, take remittances. Billions of dollars are sent annually back to Mexico from its citizens who come to the United States -- one of the largest sources of foreign exchange for the Mexican economy.
But that cash does not come out of thin air. If such transfers aid depressed parts of Mexico, they also drain capital from struggling immigrant communities here. Workers without high school diplomas who send back much of their wages often cannot pay for their heath care, education or housing here.
Entire towns in the American Southwest are deprived of critical revenues that could be invested in infrastructure to alleviate the need for state and federal intervention to ensure some parity with American citizens.
(2) When employers hire millions of young laborers from Mexico -- often paid off the books and in cash -- poorer American workers cannot organize and thus must watch their own static wages eaten up by rising costs.
(3) What do we tell the millions of equally poor immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa who wait years to come here legally? It is not especially liberal to require an indigent Filipino or Ethiopian to learn English, find a sponsor, hire a lawyer and queue up for years, while others simply break the law and enter illegally.
(4) Progressives are understandably proud of environmental legislation, zoning laws and the culture of recycling in states like California. But when millions in this country don't speak English, are impoverished and uneducated, and live outside the law, it is only natural they lack the money to worry about how many families live in a single house, whether cars meet emission standards, or discarded furniture is disposed in authorized landfills rather than on roadsides.
(5) Concern for the underprivileged doesn't always seem to extend to our own citizens. California, for example has imprisoned more than 14,000 illegal aliens, costing yearly more than twentyfold the annual budget of the underfunded new University of California at Merced -- located where it could best serve the underrepresented poor and minorities.
(6) Finally, there is something elitist in this new idea that American youth should no longer work summers and after-school hours in agriculture, hotels, restaurants and landscaping. These hard jobs were once seen as ways to gain experience and understand the nobility of physical work. An entire generation of Americans is growing up that has never mowed a lawn, pruned a bush or washed a dish.
For too long the debate over illegal immigration has been demagogued on hot-button issues of economics, ethnicity and relations with Mexico. The subtext always has been that those who support open borders are somehow more caring or ethical than their purportedly insensitive opponents who wish a return to measured and legal immigration.
In fact, the opposite is true. More often it is an uncaring elite -- among both Democrats and Republicans -- that advocates not enforcing immigration laws. It is past time for them to explain why it is moral or liberal, rather than only convenient, to import millions outside the law to do jobs we supposedly cannot.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a nationally syndicated columnist.
