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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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So, there's some talk downthread about Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants and such. Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country. Ironically, many of the same people who put forth those population changes are now the ones scared of immigration, so in 50 years, as is American tradition, these Haitian immigrants will be saying we shouldn't be letting in the Bangladeshi's or whomever.

But, the interesting thing is the questions about "why" anybody puts up with them and well, at least according to local business owners, because they're more likely to show up to do the job and not fail a drug test than the righteous pure American's currently living there.

https://youtube.com/watch?si=nke3DETnGvcaAHE4&v=FA80DOcJnu8&feature=youtu.be - Youtube video

https://x.com/otis_reid/status/1833578554778374462 - Quote from the factory owner.

Of course, 2016 J.D. Vance would probably agree with this factory owner about the get up 'n' go of this socioeconomic group of people instead of defending them from economic competition from supposedly mentally deficient Haitians.

Now, to quote a lot of Twitter, it is true the Haitians are ruining that community's traditions, by actually getting to work and not showing up high.

I can believe that 30 (and many more) of the 20,000 are hard workers. But does that justify the movement of tens of thousands?

If you get 2x number of good low-wage workers, 10x number of welfare users + x number of bad low-wage workers (the ones who crash the truck into someone because they're bad drivers, or cause industrial accidents) + 2x number of petty thieves and drug dealers... Is that a good deal? It's a good deal for the business owner who has his workers - maybe he can distinguish between good and bad workers, maybe he knows what he's doing and isn't just racking up legible gains and ignoring tail risks. But it's probably not good for the community or the region.

I just made those numbers up, who can say what the ratios are. We can observe that Haiti is not a very well-run country. There is no reason to think that the numbers will be good.

I mean, one should be able to look at the crime rate of Springfield, Ohio over the next few years and see if things shift that much. Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down.

Having seen the effects of recent migration to my city, the idea that 1st gen immigrants not committing more crime than the natives can only actually be true if there is a large black population in that place. Among crimes that can't be covered up by the community, like DUI, the Venezuelans we've gotten are massively overrepresented. We know there is a lot of sex crime being covered up by the community. As we see with this Springfield situation, authorities seem to be covering up immigrant crime at high rates as well.