The History of Slavery, Cheap Labor & Immigrant Groups – Commentary by Norman Black
History shows how slaves, cheap workers, and immigrant groups can affect American society
The demand by U.S. employers for a steady supply of cheap workers continues, unabated and a tidal wave of Mexicans and other Hispanic immigrants is creating major changes U.S. culture, politics, and racial makeup, as did earlier poorly paid immigrants..
The U.S. census of 1920 did not even include Hispanics as a population category. In the 1970 census, they were 4.5% of the population. In 2004, the Census Bureau estimated them to be 14.1% of the U.S. population. In the same years, the black population went from 9.9%, to 11.1%, to 12.2%, and the Asian population went from 0.2%, to 0.8%, to 4.1%. The white population has gone, in the same years, from 89.7%, to 83.5%, to 67.4%.
White birth rates are substantially below those of the Hispanic and non-white population. As a result, the Census Bureau forecasts that, if these trends continue, white Americans will comprise only 50.1% of the U.S. population, by the year 2050 AD. In some states, the present, white majority populations will become plurality populations long before that.
The tremendous increase of legal and illegal Spanish-speaking residents in the U.S. has already resulted in business and the U.S. government providing extensive services in Spanish. Those immigrants that speak other languages have not had that effect on either businesses or the U.S. government. That is because they speak so many different languages that none of their languages are used by a significant percentage of population. As a result, they cannot form a politically significant block, as have Spanish speakers. Another result is that they use English more readily than do Spanish speakers.
Immigration’s history
The previous tidal wave of cheap labor was Negroes from western Africa. These “immigrants” were enslaved by African tribes and sold to European and New England traders that then sold them in other parts of the world, including the U.S. This addition to the U.S. population continues to ferment and be an outcrop from the main societal stream.
Since then, Irish Catholics, eastern European Jews, and southern Italians have come to the U.S., in large numbers, and each has changed U.S. culture and politics for shorter or longer times.
The Irish tried unsuccessfully to drive a wedge between anglophile U.S. leaders and England, but gradually assimilated. Large numbers of Eastern European Jews arrived and did not assimilate. Their descendants have hijacked U.S. foreign policy for the benefit of Israel and Jews elsewhere. Southern Italians brought, in their midst, criminal gangs that flourished, in the U.S., for about a century. Those crime organizations are now either gone or less omnipresent, and people of Italian descent have assimilated.
The demand for cheap labor is as old as mankind, and is the reason for chattel slavery, which, everywhere in the world, pre-dates written records (It continues today, in black Africa, and also in other areas where white-female sex slaves, from Eastern Europe, are exported and imported, by Israelis and others). The current tidal wave of poorly paid workers, into the U.S., consists mainly of illegal Mexican immigrants. Their sheer number has already changed the culture of many states and modified the monolingualism of the U.S. government and most corporate businesses.
The most critical political feature of illegal Mexican immigration is the selective non-enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, by Pres. George W. Bush and the tremendous under-funding of border security by Congress. This happens while Bush and Congress spend billions daily for what they call national security, even though it is known that thousands of drug dealers, illegal immigrants, very possibly even terrorists march to and fro across the U.S. border with Mexico daily.
Rome’s decline and fall
The only time in history comparable to the Hispanic immigration tidal wave in the U.S., is found in the history of the Roman Empire and its desire for cheap labor. The Roman Empire’s huge import of slaves, as cheap labor, permanently changed the culture and racial content of southern Italy,
Large plantations and cattle farms worked by slaves eventually covered Sicily and southern Italy. They displaced and pauperized yeoman farmers that had previously owned and farmed the land. They also depopulated the countryside and created a parasitic urban proletariat in cities, and especially in Rome.
All populations within range of the Mediterranean coast became sources that supplied the demand of an insatiable Italian slave market, and vast numbers of slaves carried to Italy from all countries around the Mediterranean
Agricultural slavery was much worse for slaves than Rome’s previous domestic slavery. Wherever slave-cultivated plantations spread, agricultural productivity and plantation-owners’ profits increased markedly.
Plantation slavery’s end was largely the result of the breakdown of Rome’s monetary economy, upon which agricultural slavery’s profits depended. It was also part of Rome’s general social breakdown, during the third century after Christ.
The financial breakdown happened, in turn, partly because large-scale slavery, had eaten away at Roman society during the four preceding centuries. Thus slavery arrested Roman society’s development, and contributed to its final collapse.
When the economy no longer provided the incentive for the over-class to continue to run their plantations and imperial Rome declined, the slaves gradually became the basic population of Sicily and southern Italy. By that time, the culture of Sicily and the southern Italian peninsula had been changed by this new, post slavery population.
Surplus population then left agricultural occupations, and Rome’s urban proletariat grew. To prevent political problems, Rome provided circuses to entertain its proletarians and keep their minds off politics. (The U.S. government achieves this result by ensuring there is and abundance of tax-benefited-spectator sport, tax-benefited religion, cheap liquor, commercial entertainment, and state-run and commercial gambling to distract its urban and suburban proletarians and keep them from analyzing what their various levels of governments do, why they do it, and how that affects them.)
Conclusion
The U.S. debt burden may eventually destroy the nation’s super-power status, but a continuing flood of Hispanic immigrants shall continue to change our society. There is, however, no need for this to happen, for the work now done by Hispanic immigrants should either not be done or should be done in Latin America. When Hispanics are used as cheap labor, they do work unemployed black Americans could do, and when they do such non-essential work as caring for Americans’ yards and cleaning their homes and cars it is clear they do work that is not essential.
It is also clear Hispanic workers and other cheap immigrant or “guest” workers should not work on U.S. farms. They should, instead, work on farms in their own countries where agricultural produce can be grown and then sold in the U.S. at prices well below those of U.S.-grown agricultural produce. This is a logical part of the international division of labor, which the Congress and president resist, while they talk about its wisdom, when it suits them.
Will Mexican and Hispanic immigrants become a sub-culture, like Black Americans, and exist in contention with mainstream society? Will they eventually assimilate, as did the Irish Catholic and Italian immigrants? Or will they be more like the Eastern European Jews, which, in their case means: will they permanently contort U.S. domestic policy in favor of Spanish and bi-lingual governmental services, and foreign relations, in the interest another country? If they do, they will come to resemble the way southern Italians are viewed by many Italians elsewhere in Italy, that is, as an identifiable and permanently different U.S. population and sub-culture.
If U.S. politicians fail to deal with the challenges posed by Hispanic immigration and the demand for cheap labor, the odds are Hispanics will permanently contort the nation to the detriment of, and against the will of, the great majority of Americans. They will have the population-based political power to do so, and few groups or their leaders can resist using power.
Norman Black is the Press Relations Director
for Georgia Heritage Council.
EMAIL THIS
PRINT THIS
