I don’t have a great deal to say about the outcomes of the New Hampshire primaries which I’m sure you’ve all read about other than to point out that the winners have something in common: they’re both the candidates of angry voters. There’s a lot to be angry about.
They’re angry that the jobs that Americans won’t do are in fact jobs that Americans are training their replacements to do. If anything gives the lie to the notion that the H-1B visa employees coming in have skills that can’t be found domestically, that’s got to be it. If they had the skills, they wouldn’t need training.
They’re angry that they’re being promised good jobs if only they get college educations only to find that there are no jobs for people with the skills they’ve gained and they’ve become slaves to the debt they acquired in the process of getting those college educations.
They’re angry that even in small town America even the most trivial chore has become difficult because the people supposed to assist them don’t speak English or are incomprehensible in English.
They’re angry that kids are being murdered by the government rather than helped by it.
They’re angry that invading Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries hasn’t made us any more secure and there doesn’t seem to be any way out.
They’re angry that nine years later most of the counties in the United States haven’t recovered from the Great Recession and that those that have are either in oil-producing states or the counties near Washington, DC or that state capitols are located in.
Do I need to go on? They’re angry.
If they had the skills, they wouldn’t need training.
By Americans who supposedly don’t exist.
But you know, Disney has to hold the line at $20 a day parking and five dollar hot dogs….
Does anyone know how many H1B visa holders there are in the US??
@Guarneri: Per Wikipedia: 315,857 in 2014.
There are similar visas besides H1B though.
Here’s something you won’t hear every day:
I just had a pleasant interaction with the IRS. That’s two in the last three months. The reason I was calling them was no fun, but it wasn’t their fault (not mine either), but they were helpful.
Incidentally, by the end of both calls the person on the other end seemed palpably relieved to have NOT been catching Hell or delivering Hell. Call center work sucks generally, it must suck even more working for the IRS.
H-1B visa holders tend to be concentrated in the IT sector (as are Internet users).
Yep, people are angry, and they’re angry at a time when the institutions and assumptions that insulated them from fear and soothed their anger can no longer be relied upon by them, or by the rest of us.
A lot is changing in a very short time. This internet thing is bigger in terms of its psychological impact than I think we realize. It is a huge thing, the iPhone. I can bank and set my DVR and locate the nearest restaurant (and see reviews of same) and see a doctor and text my daughter at her school and watch people coming and going from my house, all from my pocket. While sitting at a red light, or waiting in line at Starbucks. For the first time in history we are never lost, never out of touch, never unable to recall a fact, never separated from work, never at a loss for entertainment. I’m sure people will poo-pooh the importance of this, but I believe it is profound and the results are not always benign or always predictable. A revolution doesn’t have to be violent to unsettle people.
I think you’re right that the Education Lie is a big part of the sense that the ground is shaking under our feet. For decades we’ve been selling the simple formula Diploma + Degree = Security. And it just isn’t true. It hasn’t been true for a while – in the 80’s I worked at a restaurant where I was literally the only front-of-the-house person who was neither a college student nor a college graduate – but rather than episodic downturns, we are now rushing toward permanent partial human obsolescence, and the education formula has become all-too-visibly false.
I think black people are desperate, not just because of thuggish cops, but because they are losing their position as the chief minority group, being marginalized as the spotlight turns to the growing Latino population. And because they’re seeing that their economic picture has not been improved by the first black president.
And I think political correctness (there are other terms of art, but let’s keep it simple) is eating at working class white people who feel that they are hanging on by their fingernails while at the same time being lectured on their privilege. You have to be a moron to deny the fact of white privilege, but it would be a lot easier case to make if the white middle class wasn’t on the fast track to becoming the white lower class.
And finally, the political/media powers have been lying to the people, systematically exploiting their fear and their aspirations in order to reap campaign contributions and ad dollars and votes which they then repay with still more lies.
People may not get the history or the politics, they may have no idea what to do about it, but even the un-savvy and the unaware can read the numbers on their paycheck (or notice the absence of same) and they are having a hard time selling the whole nose-to-the-grindstone thing to their kids.
If you can’t look your kids in the eye and at least show them a way forward you don’t feel very good as a parent. You need to believe that there is some guidance you can impart. You need to believe that there is hope for them. The old saw that you are never happier than your least happy child applies, and if all you see in their future is minimum wage or lifelong idleness the inevitable sadness and disappointment and powerlessness breeds anger.
That’s a point I’ve been trying to articulate without, unfortunately, a great deal of success. I don’t think it’s just that blacks have been the “chief minority group”. I think the dynamics of a political system that’s 80% white and 15% black is very different from one that’s 17% black, 20% Hispanic, 5% East Asian, 5% South Asian, 6% other, and 47% white. The levers that black intellectuals and politicians have become accustomed to using just won’t work anymore.
And, yes, I think that blacks, many inculcated in machine politics, expected Obama to “bring home the bacon”, something he emphatically has not done. Well, they can’t say I didn’t warn them.
@michael. Excellent comment.
On race, what strikes me now after living in this town with rather defined racial communities for over 20 years is how little has changed, and if anything it appears the racial divide has become worse. I always thought that progress was inevitable, that removing de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination would slowly uplift the descendents of slavery.
But the change that has come is that in the relatively privileged part of town, there is diversity. There are African immigrants, bi-racial households, Latinos, and for want of a better term, high socio-economic homosexual couples. It’s unclear how much of this diversity is the result of government affirmative action, probably some, though not as much as might be thought by the descendents of slaves who think their recompense is being re-directed or working class whites who think their children are being denied a chance. The racial privilege narrative is being undermined by these changes, and it was in that context that I understood Coates’ formless argument for restitution, it is making less sense as time goes by.
PD:
This video shown in Henrico (Va) schools to the inevitable howls of outrage from morons, is over-long and not exactly Pixar quality, but it conveys I think the essence of the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6gtMrbAFVo
PD:
Also, yeah, I think the conversation is shifting from one primarily about race to one that includes class. Bernie’s responsible for that, and it has the potential to make a dramatic shift in the conversation.
The foreign workers who work for temp organizations generally are here on L-1s. IMO that’s a violation of the terms of the statute but I know for a fact that it’s done.
Agricultural workers use an entirely different visa. I don’t recall the designation offhand. H-1B is just for workers with skills not available domestically which is why so many of them show up in IT.
In Chicago what has changed is that the opportunities that were here 20 years ago don’t exist any more. And black folk are voting with their feet. The population of Chicago declined from 2000-2010 and most of the decline has been in black folk.
I think it sounds fairly desperate. IMO the problem with the reparations argument has always been the same. Who should pay what to whom? I see little justification for taxing a recent and struggling Korean immigrant to pay reparations to a recent and prosperous African immigrant.
Not to mention that African-Americans are not the only group we’ve shat upon. I don’t see a lot of Sioux or Cherokee walking around. Not to mention that given systematic underpay and underemployment, women have a claim of their own. And the fact that reparations would throw fuel on the racist fire.
No, I think reparations is a nutty idea.
@michael, my main reaction to that video is of sadness that it seems to re-enforce despair and helplessness. There has to be a way to communicate the difficulty with encouragement to try harder.
The message that affirmative action fixes things is deceptive. Affirmative action involves such a small slice of jobs that most of the kids won’t benefit from it. Go ask the young man working behind the counter at McDonald’s, where did you spend your affirmative action? Hey you, in jail for selling drugs, where did you spend your affirmative action? Kids of all races, classes and creeds can be born into situations that they have no control over; they need some constructive hope.
PD:
I agree that the “affirmative action” pay-off is exceedingly weak. I think it goes to the fact that there is an economic split within the black community as well as the broader society. Affirmative action has helped – in academia. Black academics can be as disconnected from the rest of the population as white academics are.
Activists jumped all over me for writing a boilerplate Tweet about young writers not giving up. It wasn’t in reference to anything, and there was nothing racial about it. But the attack was to the effect that I was somehow refusing to admit my white and/or male privilege and thus it was wrong to encourage kids to keep at it.
It was astonishing to me. They actually seemed to believe it was my job to tell young writers of color that it was hopeless. This came from the people who want more diverse books and authors. Because apparently in their addled brains you get to more writers of color by telling people of color to give up. I was not surprised to discover that this was coming largely from academics and the credulous ninnies who follow them. Almost anyone can create some stupid, but if you want the very best stupid, you need someone with a PhD after their name.
I get the intent of the video, but I think the message is poorly communicated. Another issue is that the generalization doesn’t always hold when looking at smaller cohorts and individuals. Plus I’m not sure what the point is since pushing the idea and/or pointing fingers about white privilege seems obviously counter-productive to me.
As for affirmative action, I don’t think it can ever succeed given how it’s currently implemented in the US. The results so far have been mixed at best.
The problem with the cartoon is that it does not begin early enough. It is not the South that launched white prosperity. It was the industrial North and the Protestant work ethic, and both of these came from Europe. Since the Pilgrims came from England, the English should be blamed, and their ancestors as well.
@Dave Schuler may be able to help trace the origin of the Protestant work ethic. It may be that the Romans or Greeks are to blame. Each were also slave owning, but I doubt that the Italians or Greeks will be paying reparations any time soon.
The “Protestant work ethic” derives from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. That in turn stems from certain interpretations of the New Testament.