Boycott? I Didn't See No Stinking Boycott.

What if they gave an economic boycott, and nobody noticed? I don’t know about you, but Uno de Mayo came and went without anything visibly coming to a stop from my perspective. If you weren’t watching the evening news Monday night, you probably would never have known that there was a boycott at all. Might it just be that illegal immigrants are not the economic fuel that drives our economy after all?
I suppose that somebody, somewhere was inconvenienced by a lawn that went unmowed for a day, or that on some palatial Malibu estate, a movie starlet had to make her own bed for the first time in a couple of decades. But somehow, our roaring economy purred along without a stutter.
I couldn’t help arriving at the conclusion that they don’t just do jobs that Americans won’t do, they do jobs that aren’t all that essential. If those jobs were so important, then employers would pay what the job was worth and Americans would do the work.
So now that the economic necessity argument has been swatted away, and that we no longer have to fear economic blackmail, we can approach the issue of illegal immigrants rationally.
My own ancestors are Mexican immigrants of a sort. They didn’t actually emigrate to the United States so much as the United State border moved south and west, absorbing them. Whether my ancestors were bothered about this, I don’t know. What I do know is that my living relatives are delighted with the way things turned out. They live close enough to the border to know which side they’d rather live on.
I bring this up because I have never encountered anyone less sympathetic to illegal immigrants than my own relatives. They have watched their own neighborhoods deteriorated under waves of illegals and all have had to move. They believe that their own good reputation has suffered as a result. Unlike the image portrayed by the mainstream media, Hispanics are not monolithic and homogeneous. Hispanics who have been in this country for a few generations compete on even terms with any other ethnic group. Descendents of Mexicans who became Americans after the Mexican-American war are every bit as successful as Americans of European ancestry. Their assimilation is complete and I doubt that many would care to reverse it.
Unfortunately, our current illegal immigration tsunami has created a subculture so large that its inhabitants have little or no social pressure to assimilate. They can function socially without learning English. They can cocoon themselves from the measures of success that the rest of America lives by and set their own. In short, they can establish enclaves of Mexican culture within the borders of the United States. As harmless as this sounds, it is not borders but culture that fosters prosperity on this side of the border and condemns the southern side to poverty.
This cultural cocooning has precedent. It’s the likely cause of the persistent income gap between white and black America. Segregation, whether imposed by whites or nurtured by blacks has created a subculture that predisposes its members to less favorable outcomes. Two parent families are not valued. Illegitimacy is not stigmatized. So most children are born to single mothers. Within inner cities, good grades and proper grammar are disparaged as “acting white.” Those convicted of acting white suffer social ostracism.
Even Pullman has its own peculiar ethnic subculture. Pullman has attracted a large Korean community. We have a lot of Korean students and Korean immigrants. We have so many in fact that Koreans have managed to establish their own little society within Pullman. This is not necessarily bad. In fact, I love Korean food and consider it a real treat when one of my Korean friends invites me to share in one of their dinners.
The problem is that Pullman has so many Koreans that they are able to establish large and intricate social networks without having to include English-speaking Americans. As a consequence, Koreans seems to gain English fluency far more slowly than any other ethnic groups. Outside of work (and often inside of work), Pullman’s Koreans speak Korean almost exclusively.
And so, whatever solution we eventually settle on regarding illegal immigration will have to consider assimilation as a condition of citizenship. Culturally and linguistically isolated subcultures serve neither the country nor the immigrants.