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I asked a guy yesterday why he wants immigrants gone. He said, “They take jobs.” I nodded like I understood, then watched him load his groceries into a truck made in Mexico, welded by a Filipino worker, shipped on a Korean boat, handled by a Salvadoran wholesaler.
We hate in reverse.
Fact one – the Bureau just dropped numbers. Twenty-eight percent of American kids have at least one foreign-born parent. Those kids aren’t “taking jobs”; they’re taking spelling bees and prom photos.
But fear sells better.
Fact two – wages. Sure, undocumented labor undercuts drywall crews. Yet Harvard’s latest paper shows undocumented laborers pay twelve percent more in taxes than they get back in services. Translation… your kid’s school nurse is partly funded by somebody you want caged.
Still, some of us yell “deport.”
Why? Because stories stick, data doesn’t. Some point to ethnic restaurants stealing jobs. They ravage restaurants owned by immigrants like middle Eastern, Laotian, Merican, Guatemalan, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Pakistani families. Some of these families arrived in the USA with fifty bucks and a wok. They hired otherwise unemployed Americans and grew their businesses into successful enterprises. None of them “stole” a thing. Rather they opened at five a.m. so truckers could eat eggs before hauling materials across the country.
Psychology 101 – humans love scapegoats. Immigrants arrive speaking Spanish, Chinese or another native language, wearing different clothes, wiring money home. Easy target. Easier than admitting the real wage killers are automation and CEOs who ship factories to Shenzhen so they can fly private.
And culture – “They don’t blend.” Yet our grandpas drank beer and chewed tobacco – just spoke German while doing it. By nineteen-ten half of Pennsylvania coal towns were Prussian. Nobody deported them; they just learned to spell “pretzel” with a drawl.
Bottom line – we dislike what we need. Immigrants clean pools, code apps, harvest tomatoes, fix roofs in hailstorms, drive ambulances at midnight. We want them gone until the power flickers and nobody answers the outage line.
Curious twist – same folks screaming “border security” buy tortillas at Walmart, stream Messi on Univision, toast with Patrón. They don’t see the label that reads “Made by immigrants, bottled by their kids, sold by the niece who overstayed her visa.”
So next time you hear “deport them all,” ask what flavor of hypocrisy they’re serving today. Might be bitter, but it’s home-grown
Bill Gindlesperger is a central Pennsylvanian, Dickinson College graduate, Pennsylvania System Of Higher Education (PASSHE) Governor, former Shippensburg University Trustee, awarded numerous patents, as well as Founder and Chairman of eLynxx Solutions. eLynxx provides cloud-software for automated sourcing and managing of mail marketing, swag, packaging, and all things print. He is a board member, campaign advisor, successful entrepreneur, published author and commentator. He can be reached at Bill.Gindlesperger@eLynxx.com.
