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What is going on in Springfield, Ohio? 20,000 Haitian arrivals into a town of 60,000 seems insane, but the New York Times seems to back it up. I definitely don’t trust the NYT to give an honest portrayal of what the situation is like on the ground, but I don’t really trust a lot of the rumors going around Twitter either. I am seeing reports of Haitians killing the ducks at the park and eating them. There are even secondhand reports of Haitians eating pet cats.
What I am not seeing however is geolocated footage or images. How hard can it be to send a guy to the park to see if there are any ducks left? I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.
On the contrary, it makes perfects sense. If you take people from a chaotic and poor country, and not the best people and send them to a place that's not poor and not chaotic and just let them loose, without close supervision, they're going to behave in a chaotic manner.
They, or a substantial part of them were apparently relocated there as a part of a scheme to provide cheap workforce, but I find it doubtful that most of them even work. We know the statistics, we know they don't know the language and have low ability on average. So low that profitably employing them is a challenge.
Haiti is one of the poorest countries on Earth. You surely know of the observations Scott Alexander made and then deleted off the internet out of fear?.
I was reading Scott's review of Hive Mind recently. The part that stands out to me is this:
A decent manager would probably be able to find something productive to do with the functionally illiterate office worker Scott mentions in your link. The problem becomes compounded when that person's boss is also an idiot, and so on and so on.
If there really were 20,000 unemployable retards wandering the streets of Springfield, we would be seeing video clips, not second and third-hand rumors. So I am tentatively willing to believe that they are employed. Is there really that much demand for cheap low-skill labor? That is one of the things I am confused about.
Sure. If there isn't a welfare state to tempt him away from working in the first place. And if there isn't a minimum wage law to prevent him from working at his natural wage. And if the overseer is allowed to give him a stiff beating when he catches him stealing on the job. And if...
I'm not so sure the manager can actually find something useful for the illiterate worker to do within the constrains of 21st century America.
If the hypothetical manager of company A cannot, then said hypothetical manager is replaced by hypothetical manager of company B, unless you believe there are no industries that can find use for low-skill labor in 21st century America.
Depending on the minimum wage laws it absolutely can be the case. Not to mention that the big problem isn't just being low skill - we have some black market work for those, even if it isn't ideal - it's unreliability. If you can't depend on a person to at least show up on time, stay for the agreed-upon time, do the work, and not opportunistically steal from the company, than a person can easily be worth negative money for a company. If you read up Haiti and more generally african countries, it's this unreliability that drives most of the dysfunction, not just merely being low-skill.
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