The Immigrants Must Go

This is not about culture, this is about money.

I drive through the pot-holed street in Pittston, Pennsylvania. My 2013 Freightliner shakes with each divot and washed-out piece of asphalt. I can feel my spine compress, the skin on my chest bounce, and my hands get jerked from side to side, trying to hold onto the wheel. The paperwork slides onto the floor as I slow down to make the left-hand turn into the Lowe’s distribution center. I pull in, and the asphalt actually disappears on the outbound side of the entrance. The rocks and dirt exposed from a hard plow season or 10.

I have been coming here since 2013, when I first started driving intermodal trailers from the rail with JBHunt. I spent some time over the road and with other companies, but this was always a stop, no matter who I drove for. I currently work for a medium-sized company that franchises thier number to the owner of the company, for whom I am an independent contractor. I enjoy the freedom afforded to me. There is no forced dispatch (they won’t fire you for turning down a load), you can choose when you work, and there is no points system. There is also no camera staring at me as I drive down the road, and no computer analyzing my driving, causing calls every time I roll through a stop sign in a warehouse yard at 3 am, when I am the only truck there. They give me my work and send me on my way. It is not bad.

I pull against the side and get out to slide my tandems back because the company offloaded responsibility for workers' safety onto the truck driver, rather than their jockeys, so they could pay them to do less work. As I am sliding my tandems, a JB Hunt truck flies by at 30 MPH in the driveway, skipping over the two Americans who stopped to prepare before they pulled up to the guard shack.

I finish and head up the line, show my ID, and walk inside. The driver who skipped over us is already in there at the window, and he is, of course, an Indian.

I have been on the East Coast or Mid Atlantic, as some would call it, my entire life, so people of different stripes and colors have been the norm. Recently, though, things have changed distinctly. After COVID, we went from some Africans having a shop in the mall or a few Mexicans working landscaping to walking into a local Walmart where no English was spoken. There are no American blacks, no Puerto Ricans, no Italians, no Irish, no Germans, just hundreds or thousands of Sri Lankans, Africans, Pakistanis, and Indians.

I don’t believe in democracy because, well, I have never seen it actually work. The thing is, though, as with most humans in the Western world, I would like to have a say in the places where I live. I would at least like to get a vote when they want to dump 300,000 new humans into the area where I live.

I have a question for all of you. If your pay was going up each year, and they put it up for a vote, and they asked you to allow for them to dump 200,000 new people into your field in the span of 3 years, would you vote for that measure?

What if they dumped 30 million extra humans into the labor force of your country in 3 years? Would you vote for that?

If you knew they dumped these people in and your pay went down 75% in a month, would you be upset?

Would you ask for compensation?

Would you be ok with these people staying in your country, continuing to drive down wages, and taking jobs before your sons or daughters get hired?

Would you be ok with it if they didn’t break the rules and all assimilated into the economy’s culture? If they all died their hair purple and screamed about privilege, would you let them stay? If your wages remained stagnant and they started wearing cowboy boots and getting tattoos of the Constitution on their arms, would you let them stay?

Would you be ok never getting a raise and letting them continue to come in as long as they “Did it the right way”?

This is the real issue. When it comes down to economics, supply and demand give zero fucks about your morals.

I am not sure why we continue to have this conversation about assimilation when the reality is that the jobs that are the most dangerous, dirty, hard, and isolating should pay the most, and now pay as much as a Walmart cashier.

The Federal Reserve Chair understands economics as well as anyone on the planet and is well aware of the reasons why the border was opened after COVID. He printed money, and the population shrank due to deaths from despair, disease, and heroin. The life expectancy for the millennial and Gen X cohorts went down due to their mistreatment by the economy and policy over the past 40 years. This means fewer people, which means more demand for their labor, which means higher pay, which means the newly created currency gets pulled down to them, increasing velocity and therefore driving up inflation.

So the answer is to drive down wages by increasing labor supply, therefore restricting capital access to workers and pushing down on the price of services.

You will say, “But the cost of housing will increase, and credit will expand.” These are both true, and both happened. The increase in housing prices helped boomers and homeowners while also funding local and state municipalities that were underwater on their pension obligations.

Side note. In 2016 the boomers began mass retirement and the collection of pensions from these institutions and they cracked the books open for the first time. The municipalities discovered that they had set these up in the 1950s and 1960s to get 13% returns with an expansionary labor force matching what the baby boomers needed and just forgot about them. Most states were so under-funded it was comical.

Top one is from a year ago.

This is from 2016. Notice how bad it was?

There are things you know and things you don’t. The local municipalities have been overvaluing housing in most of the country to get this cleared up. Yes, they have been committing mass fraud, and no, there is nothing you can do about it.

I have been covering the pension crisis since 2017. I was wrong, I thought they would go bankrupt, but god damn are they clever. When Chicago shut off its lights at night to save money and stopped all road construction to fund their pension obligations, I was like, there is no way they keep this up, but here we are, no collapse yet. We didn’t know the extent of the boomer treachery then.

When the government first decided to destroy the working class and break unions, they left an offramp. They went back to the 1900s with the company store model. Instead of paying you, they offered credit at the company store. Your home became a HELOC, allowing you to withdraw excess capital to cover the basic expenses of your lifestyle. Boomers have gotten really used to refinancing their homes to cover their expenses. Why get more money when you can offshore manufacturing, make luxuries cheap, and import millions of low-skilled laborers to sell and serve those luxuries to you?

Today, though, we are at a crossroads. We must decide whether it is better to starve the beast and take our medicine, kicking out the immigrants, or is it better to just let this system keep on rolling till we end up living in favelas. The choices we make today do not affect us as much as they affect all of those who come after us. I personally think it is better to have cheaper housing, let the banks fail, and have high-priced luxury goods. I understand white women may revolt and even close their legs for a few months while they detox from their fraapa cappa lapa mocha triple white girl with extra pumpkin spice latte habits, but we could save our sons, daughters, and civilization if we just KICK OUT THE IMMIGRANTS.