Mass importation of labor is a tricky thing. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t. I am not going to say that it is a total crapshoot. There are early signs that hint at long-term success or failure, but often they go unheeded because people are short-sighted.
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Let’s analyze the first big experiment with importation of labor into North America. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t African slaves. England, in the 1600s, had lots of unemployed, impoverished workers that the colonies could easily employ to grow tobacco. In fact, that was the initial source of labor for Southern tobacco planters. The scheme worked well for a while, until word got back to England that workers transported to the colonies died in droves. At the time, no one knew why. New European arrivals were wracked with fever during their first year in the colonies. They called it being “seasoned.” If at the end of that period one were to survive, then one could finish one’s term as an indentured servant and be free to plant one’s own tobacco.
What they didn’t know, and we know today, is that the fever was due to Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest species of Plasmodium that causes malaria in humans. Transmitted by infected female Anopheles mosquitoes, it accounts for over 90% of global malaria-related deaths. Plasmodium falciparum does not survive north of the Mason-Dixon line, and plagued the South until modern science eradicated it in the 20th century.
Interestingly, Plasmodium falciparum is not native to the New World. It is a native of Africa and was introduced to the New World by Africans who first came to the New World with the conquistadores, or later as slaves to work sugar plantations. No one is quite sure. The early sugar planters in the West Indies and Brazil observed that African blacks were immune to the mysterious illness that disabled and killed so many Europeans and Native Indians. This knowledge was widely known amongst Caribbean sugar planters by the time several of them resettled in Charleston, South Carolina.
Thus, the habit of importing African slaves to perform labor in the North American colonies was derived from a practice that was well underway in the Caribbean and Brazil on sugar plantations. It did not go unnoticed at the time that importing African slave labor might be a bad idea. Adam Smith objected to it in The Wealth of Nations. He argued that slave labor often appears cheap to the owner of slaves but is inefficient because enslaved people have no incentive to work productively. His argument was that free labor is usually more productive because free workers have incentives, property, wages, and prospects of improvement.
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Moreover, the specter of revolt haunted the Southern planter from the start of the experiment with slavery, but it persisted and underpinned a thriving plantation economy in the New World based on sugar, tobacco and, later, cotton. With hindsight, we look back scratching our heads saying, “What were they thinking?” We infer rightly that Southern planters’ appetite for black slave labor has led to the intractable problems of black welfare dependency and crime that we live with today. Apparently, our ancestors were very short-sighted men.
The third American experiment in mass labor importation coincided with America’s rapid industrialization from 1880–1920. There was an almost insatiable demand for labor to forge the steel, build the railroads, and mine the coal needed for rapid industrialization. The economy grew in lockstep with the population. Some of the worst labor strife that this country ever experienced occurred during this period. These were growing pains that most industrializing countries were experiencing at the time. When the door for immigrants was closed at the end of that period, 24 million immigrants had arrived in a country of 100 million. Like today, the native population had their concerns about whether the immigrant population would culturally assimilate. By 1950, just thirty years after the wave of mass European immigration ended, it was obvious to most that they had. A shared common European ancestry between immigrants and natives eased the transition.
The fourth American experiment with mass labor migration was an internal reshuffling rather than an import. In the relatively short period from 1940–1960, over 2.5 million blacks migrated to Northern cities from the predominately agrarian South. Their assimilation has been arduous. From the start, in the 1960s, unrest and rioting became commonplace in black neighborhoods during summer months. Since then, black violent crime has been a hallmark of our cities.
We are presently struggling with a new immigrant labor problem. The recent wave of immigrants come from the Global South, a catchphrase for non-Europeans. It is really a grab bag from all parts of the world and all cultures, that is all non-European cultures. Therein lies the rub. These new arrivals do not seem interested in adopting, let alone conserving, traditional Western values of self-sufficiency, civic duty, and fiscal prudence. To the Democrats, mass immigration is another way of assuaging their eternal guilt for being white and providing a ready-made voting bloc to disenfranchise native citizens that have obstructed their socialist legislative ambitions. Both parties saw immigration as a source of cheap labor to cushion the burden of caring for an aging population. However, as the recent disclosure of Medicaid fraud within the Somali community has shown, the new arrivals are more adroit at gaming the welfare system than caring for the aged native population. Seeing the signs of an impending disaster as a result of our open borders policy in recent decades, can we honestly say that we are any less short-sighted than our ancestors were with their importation of slave labor?
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