The New York Times warned that President Donald Trump’s deportation of illegal migrants will damage the nation’s decorative shrubs by forcing up Americans’ wages.
“Construction wages have been rising, even as home building has been sluggish — a potential indication that deportations in the immigrant-heavy industry are bidding up salaries,” the newspaper warned its wealthy, pro-migrant, pro-shrubbery readers on December 28, adding:
The same is true in landscaping. Immigrant crews, working outside, were an easy deportation target over the summer. Come spring, said Kim Hartmann, an executive at a Chicago-area landscaping firm, the labor force could be 10 to 20 percent smaller. “It’s going to be much more competitive to find that individual who’s been a foreman or a supervisor and has years of experience,” Ms. Hartmann said. “We know that drives costs up.”
But there are limits to how much customers will pay for decorative shrubs, and they may opt to go without.
The article grudgingly admits that wages and automation rose in the 1930s, following Congress’s decision to sharply curb migration in 1924. But it did not describe how the nation’s shrubbery survived the resulting creation of prosperous suburbia:
Although the effects of the 1924 immigration restrictions are difficult to untangle from other developments — wars, technological advancements, the baby boom — wages rose for U.S.-born workers in places affected by the immigrant restrictions … American-born workers from small towns migrated to urban areas and alleviated shortages. Farms turned to automation to replace the missing labor.
The newspaper’s worry about the threat to the nation’s shrubbery in Trump’s low-migration economy, however, is largely hidden under heart-rending stories about migrants:
… with President Trump’s crackdown on immigration gaining strength, local festivals are more thinly attended. Parents pull their children out of school when they hear about people being detained. The supervisor overseeing the construction of a high school sports stadium received a deportation letter, creating a conspicuous absence as the work finished up. The pork plant has let workers go as their work permits have expired.
‘Their M.O. [formula] for immigration coverage is sob stories,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
But reporters still have a professional obligation to recognize facts, he said, adding, “If I didn’t know better, I would think the reporters were trying to slip in some actual facts in a package that New York Times readers would find more appealing.”
Still, the article fails to recognize obvious high-tech alternatives to migration, he said. “It is a kind of presentism … a lot of immigrants are doing the jobs now, so obviously these jobs have to be done [in the future] by immigrants, and yet their own reporting kind of contradicts that.”
The article also reflects the progressive desire to view migrants as victims that deserve progressive support, he said, and that “immigrants are a victim group in this oppressor versus victim rubric that the left uses on everything.”
So, the article charitably describes the migrant in a very different tone than is normally used for ordinary Americans, he said. For the New York Times‘ readers, “working-class Americans are just contemptible, even when the immigrants display all the same qualities that in working-class Americans they find contemptible,” he explained.
The article also sketches Americans as used up, played out, and overdue for replacement by energetic, diverse migrants. For example, the article quotes one mayor who described his migrant-swelled town:
“You have more energy in the community,” said Michael Ladehoff, Marshalltown’s [Iowa] mayor-elect. “If you stay stagnant, and you don’t have new people coming to your community, you start aging out.”
“That’s what the professional-managerial class types living in New York [city] believe,” responded Krikorian.
In 2017, Never-Trump founder Bill Kristol dismissed ordinary Americans as long overdue for replacement:
Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in? … You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico.
“[I hope] this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere [because] whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse,” Kristol added.
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