Mr. Wycliff: Today’s [Oct. 21] column of Mr. Ruben Navarrette in your editorial page is an insult to injury that illegal aliens are imposing to African-Americans. He was critical of Rev. [Jesse] Jackson and [New Orleans] Mayor [Ray] Nagin for wanting to have those jobs in New Orleans to be available for African-Americans. … You have to do a rebuttal to Mr. Navarrette right away. How can you allow this act of insult to injury in your newspaper without a rebuttal? –Antonio de Leon
I’d have been writing this week about Ruben Navarrette’s Oct. 21 Commentary page column even without Antonio de Leon’s encouragement. Not only was it frank and straightforward in ways that discussions of race and immigration typically are not; it was frank to the point of being in one place taunting and contemptuous.
Navarrette observed that, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “what has historically been a mostly black city may be on its way to becoming a largely brown city.”
“Latino immigrants,” he said, “are coming to New Orleans from as far away as California to repair homes, clear debris, rebuild roads and do other jobs. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times … many of them say they plan to stay, save money, buy homes and put down roots in the Big Easy.”
The response of Jackson and Nagin and other black politicians in New Orleans has been to deplore the advent of the newcomers–sometimes, Navarrette said, in terms that “white nativists” would be comfortable with–and try to turn back the clock and the tide that has washed so many black New Orleanians out of the city, seemingly for good. What these pols are really trying to do, Navarrette said, is remain politically relevant, “and they know they have a better chance of that happening if they can keep New Orleans mostly black.”
So far, so obvious. But Navarrette didn’t stop there. Beneath this contest over complexions, he said, is “a struggle of competing values.”
“City officials say that one thing that keeps former residents from wanting to give New Orleans another chance is the lack of subsidized housing.
“Guess what? Latino immigrants have to contend with the same shortage. The difference is that the immigrants are not sitting around and waiting for government to come to the rescue. They’re probably living two or three families to a house, and saving money to buy a home of their own.
“That’s how it used to be in this country before the advent of the welfare state. And, if immigrants win this tug of war, that’s the way it’ll be again.”
I was struck by both the Reaganesque character of that last bit of rhetoric and by the fact that, in a column in which he mentioned immigrants and immigration at least half a dozen times, Navarrette did not once use the word “illegal.”
This despite reports in the Tribune, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere that many of those immigrants flocking to New Orleans are in the country illegally.
In an e-mail exchange, I asked Navarrette if this made a difference in the issues he discussed.
His reply: “I’d have to say no, apparently not and that’s a shame.” A shame, he said, because he has never been an advocate of open borders and has long advocated greater border security. But “from what I’ve seen, most of the people doing the hiring in New Orleans couldn’t care less about whether the people they’re hiring are here legally or illegally, whether they’re here from Mexico or Mars.”
Actually, that’s probably half true at best. A big part of the attraction of illegal immigrants for many employers is that their status makes them cheaper and more pliant than American citizens or legal immigrants who can demand fair wages and decent treatment.
Tribune national correspondent Dahleen Glanton described the historical result of this political-economic dynamic in one sentence of her Oct. 14 story on the tug of war over jobs in the rebuilding New Orleans. “The issue,” Glanton wrote, “is a decades-old squabble that has been fought nationwide, pitting working-class African-Americans who traditionally have held labor-intensive jobs against immigrants willing to do the same work for lower wages.”
Glanton’s locution–”immigrants willing to do the same work for lower wages”–expresses in economically sound terms a reality that more often is described with the unsound and tendentious phrase “jobs that Americans are unwilling to do.”
Navarrette’s contrast of “welfare state” layabouts awaiting rescue by the government to the bracing example of hard-working immigrants is as ugly and familiar a refrain to an African-American’s ears as nativist rhetoric is to his.
In the present instance, I think, both stem from our ambivalence as a nation toward immigration law enforcement and from our reluctance to speak the word that accurately describes our fundamental problem: “illegal.”
