Writing in 1984 (“Subsidizing Egos”), Thomas Sowell observed how “thousands of poorly educated Mexicans cross the border every week and go right to work.” Sowell went on to ask how “people new to the country and its language constantly keep finding jobs that elude native-born Americans.”
In a subsequent column (“Work and Output,” September 7, 1984) from his collection of them in his book Compasssion Versus Guilt, Sowell added that “When I travel through California’s vast agricultural areas, the people I see working in the fields under the hot sun are usually Mexicans. So are many of the people who clean the hotels. But when I have been approached by a panhandler in San Francisco or Los Angeles, it has never been a Mexican.” Well, exactly.
Panhandling speaks to the values of poor people, values that Mexicans crossing the border for something better don’t bring with them. Of course the ones who made it here weren’t coming to beg.
Which brings us to the present day, and a Donald Trump-supporting show host and influencer, Benny Johnson. The telegenic, smart and surely clever Johnson was reveling in Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem’s participation with ICE agents in a raid on a Chicago-area Home Depot. As most readers know, it’s at businesses like Home Depot that new and old arrivals from Mexico frequently go each day in search of day labor, or more. Yes, they’re once again crossing the border for better work opportunities, and better to them is not infrequently the backbreaking work on offer at Home Depot.
Johnson’s glee at the roundup of these striving individuals, some who no doubt have wives, children and other dependents was sick-inducing. How else to describe it? Why would a clearly ambitious and hardworking individual like Johnson, someone who rightly revels in his beautiful home life that includes a wife and four kids, express such pleasure at federal agents raiding private businesses to restrain the natural right to contract between desperate-to-work individuals and employers willing to put them to work?
To which Johnson and those defending him might say that he and others support the right of legal individuals to find work in the U.S., thus freeing them to gleefully cheer the actions of ICE. Which is a copout. If we ignore excessive government limits on the legal inflow of humans, we can’t ignore that as evidenced by where the ICE agents go to find “illegal” Mexicans (yes, invariably places of work), there’s an extraordinary market need for what ambitious Mexicans bring to the American workplace.
It brings us back to Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt was published in 1987, the Ronald Reagan years. With the economy booming as an effect of Reagan’s policies associative with economic growth, the major media (at the time ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal) that largely leaned left attempted to change the subject to allegedly rising homelessness in the U.S. Sowell was having none of it. In the book, he lamented how individuals formerly known as “bums” had been sanctified as “homeless.” Which rates thought now.
It’s popular for Trump defenders to associate his rise with “forgotten” Americans allegedly stuck in parts of the U.S. bereft of opportunity. Nonsense. Paraphrasing Sowell in 1984, how can Mexicans lacking the language constantly keep finding work that eludes the native born? Much worse, why are Americans who rightly venerate the U.S. as the land of opportunity cheering the arrest and deportation of those with rich-person values (migrating to opportunity) in the name of protecting layabouts presently and falsely sanctified as forgotten?
