On May 10, 1869 an eight-man crew of Chinese workers laid the last rail.(1) After that, prosperity leapt in America for thirty years until the Great Depression of 1893.(2)
(Author´s Note: a read of this source article sounds much like the Great Recession of 2008 in its content.)
However, many of the industrious Chinese found that there was little employment following the completion of the railroad, so they began to accept jobs from American employers in other industries and to form their own Associations and businesses. This lead to such a scare of Chinese illegal immigration it was called the “Yellow Peril”. Immigration reform was called for. New tougher laws.
In 1892, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration from China for the next ten years.(3) California later passed an even harsher law as a means to deport its excess of Chinese workers competing for White jobs in a western state rife with racial and economic panic, the 1909 Smoking Exclusion Act.(4) The law was the first of the drug laws and for the first time in America we had “illegal” drugs—this one being the smoking of raw opium—as a new tool to protect Americans from unwanted (illegal) immigrants.
African Americans in the south had no easy time of it either during, or after, the Great Depression of 1893. The Temperance Movement in the United States was against alcohol in all of its forms, and was particularly concerned about the percentage of alcohol used in medicines containing heroin and cocaine. Their influence raised the price of alcohol and newly freed African Americans then turned to cheap cocaine as a recreational alternative, calling it the “5-cent sniff.”(5)
The use of cocaine was especially worrisome in the South because of its euphoric and stimulating properties. Southern Whites feared that Negro cocaine users might become oblivious to their prescribed bounds and attack white society. According to an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association “the Negroes in some parts of the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice—that of ´cocaine sniffing´ or the Coke Habit.(6) Other serious allegations of the day reported in the news and believed to be true by the general public were:
(Source of these 3 quotes, Illegal Drugs(7)
The Temperance Movement went on to gain considerable influence in America and as a result the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed prohibiting the manufacture, import or export of alcohol-laced liquids. The Volstead Act passed by Congress soon after made the manufacture, distribution and sale of alcoholic beverages illegal and on January 1920 President Herbert Hoover signed the law making America officially dry.(8)
Soon afterwards, in 1915, the grandfather of all illegal drug laws was passed, The Harrison Narcotic Act, and for the first time in history, illegal drugs and narcotics became synonyms for one another.
While the Harrison Narcotics Act made heroin and cocaine illegal, and thus more expensive, it did little to curb their use.(9) This resulted in the first “War On Drugs” in 1924 when heroin production became illegal in the United States. By 1930, 35 percent of all new convicts in the United States were being indicted under the Harrison Narcotic Act.(10)
The Chinese and African Americans were not the only minorities whose discrimination paralleled politicians worried about tough economic times. The next great economic bubble, the pre-depression Roaring Twenties of the early Twentieth Century, found a new minority to demonize when the bubble began to pop—Hispanics.
In the booming economy of the 1920s, Mexican immigrants were welcomed into the western states as workers for farms and industries. However, the Great Depression of 1929 brought a backlash against Mexicans as an unwelcome labor surplus. They came to be associated in the popular press with marijuana, and as early as 1919 there were complaints of increased crime and violence due to their use of that drug.(11)
Anti-Mexican sentiment in the western states was not enough, however, to convince the federal government to make marijuana illegal. The movement needed the help of an influential national figure. It found one in the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Cannabis was the best and most economical raw material in the manufacture of paper. But Hearst had invested heavily in northwestern forest paper mills. To protect his operations from competitive cannabis paper, he wanted to make cannabis illegal. He commanded his newspapers to use the Mexican word marijuana to replace the earlier terms cannabis and marihuana, to make it sound more foreign and menacing and took every opportunity to characterize marijuana as a dangerous drug.(12) On October 1, 1937, the United States Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act.
Source: Illegal Drugs(13)
Today, we are in another Great Recession. One, which I predict, has not ended and which will ultimately lead to another Great Depression. As you have seen, demonizing one minority or another has been a leading indicator of difficult economic times ahead. And this time we are targeting the Hispanic population once again as the public’s diversion from the true source of these economic woes. However, rather than taking the position of right or wrong in this argument, I´d rather ask the more interesting question, “what happens if Americans get what they are asking for?”
Let us live in an America with a solidly closed southern border for purposes of answering this question. American farmers, and industries must hire only American workers—presumably White workers since that is what most American workers are today. One result is the cost of produce skyrockets (as it is beginning to do now) when farmers must pay Workers Compensation Insurance, Unemployment Insurance, FICA and so forth. They don´t absorb that 30 percent increase in taxes, they pass it on to you. Then there is the issue of wages. Farmers of any scale will be affected by the $7.25 to $8.25 (depending on state) minimum wage rather than the $2-$3 wage they pay today. That too goes directly into the produce price. Are you willing to pay $5 for a head of lettuce, $3 for a cucumber, and $12 for an avocado? Probably not, and both growers and retailers know that.
Here´s my prediction of what happens next. Mexicans and other Latinos will continue to harvest crops, but not in the United States, they will do it in their home countries. Distributors will then use NAFTA to import the food duty free and more of the produce you eat will be grown outside of America. Great, you say? Not so fast, those countries do not have the FDA oversight on them. And, even the oversight today is far from perfect on imported foods. Salmonella poisoning, mad cow disease, and a host of other diseases get through our inspectors at the borders in produce, meat, and dairy products. Do we really want to ramp those imports exponentially? If you are a fan of the Services Economy, maybe you do because it will surely create more jobs, but again there is this nasty problem of “ratios”. One job created, four lost.
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Will farmers go away? No. Farmers will expand the practices they have already begun to expand upon. Soy exported to China and Japan will replace corn eaten in America. Fruit and other produce that is still grown domestically will be exported to Asia where farmers can take advantage of the weak American dollar, getting a relatively higher price for their products than U.S. consumers will pay.
Ranchers are a good leading indicator of what farmers will do in an immigrant-less America. Meat packers have been importing meat for some time now. We´ll see them import more and more meat from South and Central America in addition to that already imported from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Today, the lack of cheap foreign labor in the ranching industry has driven the price of meat above what consumers will pay. Particularly with hamburger, or ground beef. There are sources of [ground beef] that are lean and cheaper [than American beef] to support the extremely competitive fast food industry in the U.S. It is at the hamburger market where the beef industry competes most intensively with pork and poultry. Lean beef imports sourced from Australian range beef, New Zealand dairy beef, or Canadian cull cows are mixed with steer and heifer trim thereby providing competitively priced ground beef and a way to utilize trim product that would have almost no value otherwise.(14) (Italics mine).
“Only legal immigrants,” you say. “I want only legal immigrants!” I heard reported on the news last night that over one-forth of California´s population is illegal immigrants and Arizona is almost as bad. If that sound bite of news is anywhere near the truth there is a certainty that those two states will compete for economic collapse chasing illegals over their core businesses of Agriculture and Tourism. With any knowledge of the Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) at all, you will know that it has a long-standing horrible reputation in doing its job. Legal immigrants to do this work in the replacement quantities needed would take decades if they could be replaced at all.
So here is the million dollar question: When America´s population is reduced by millions of low-paid workers, and American businesses are encumbered with billions of dollars in higher labor costs and new taxes. Do you believe your wages will double to absorb having gotten the immigration reform we are asking for today? Before you answer, let’s review some of the facts of my past articles.
The Social Security Administration has been asking Congress to double FICA tax for years. The Social Security Trust Funds are devoid of any currency whatsoever. Excess FICA taxes today are used to run the government and are replaced with government IOUs in the form of Treasury Bills. That´s been happening for decades.
The Federal Reserve has been depreciating your wages for fifty years by multiplying the amount of cash flowing in the economy 1,100 percent. That is what has been going on to keep this Services Economy facade afloat.
Based on the facts, do you really believe that sealing our borders from illegal immigration is in your best interest? Do you still believe that the drug violence we hear about is based on something other than laws that American politicians passed to control social panic, targeting minorities as a means to divert our attention away from poor governance, as the source of our woes? One drastic side-effect of these laws is that they drove up prices of drugs made illegal by thousands of percent. So much in fact that expensive American weapons are affordable and are a primary export southward to drug-cartel militias. Weapons that couldn’t be afforded if not for the tremendous profits created for them by past American politicians. Now, heavily armed privateers guard lucrative drug shipments going North into the U.S. and they shoot our border patrol agents with our own bullets. A sad, sick irony all born of American fear and greed.
Seeing the history of how today’s problems were created north of the border, you can surmise that the problems we face today are as well. So, too, lies their solution, by each of us paying attention to who is ruining our economy once again—it isn’t the Mexicans and it isn’t President Obama either. It is the same groups of people who have caused each great depression in global history—entrenched career politicians and the special interests who control them that are making sure the status quo favors them. When the Great Fall does come, they want to have enough money to be part of the elite, the ruling class as opposed to the rest of us.
America was, and is still, a great experiment of the strength of the many over the oppression of the few. That means to always be attentive, even suspicious, when we are told the “why” of things. And, in our case today, it also means to get away from the television set, that great programmer of mass mindset, and read. Read books, read articles, read all the paragraph, not just 15 seconds clipped by a media monopoly that caters to advertisers at any price—including your freedom. Left and Right are words without meaning today. Paychecks, jobs, and an impending economic collapse affect you. The truth is out there. I show you what I can of it. You have to do more if we’re going to change the course of our future.
References:
1. “Chinese-American Contribution to Transcontinental Railroad”, Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, http://cprr.org/Museum/Chinese.html.
2. “The Depression of 1993″, Economic History Association, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whitten.panic.1893.
3. Chinese American History”, Wikipedia.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_American_history.
4. Illegal Drugs, A complete Guide to Their History, Chemistry, Use, and Abuse: Dr. Paul Gahlinger, M.D., Ph.D, ( New York: The Penguin Group, 2004), pg 58.
5. Gahlinger, pg 41.
6. Editorial JAMA June 1900; 34:1637, as cited by Gahlinger, pg 42.
7. Ibid.
8. Temperance Movement, JRank.org, http://law.jrank.org/pages/10714/Temperance-Movement.html.
9. Gahlinger, pg 59.
10. Ibid.
11. Gahlinger, pg 61.
12. Gahlinger, Pg 61-62.
13. Gahlinger, Pg 62.
14. Why Does The U.S. Both Import & Export Beef? MidwestAgNet.com,
