Migration and its Challenges

Nearby Asheville is having soaring population growth since COVID taught Americans that (a) some of them could work from anywhere, and (b) the government would lock you down if it wanted, which sucks a lot more in a major city than it does somewhere where there is easy access to outdoor enjoyments. As a consequence -- mirroring areas like Jackson Hole and Denver, but at an even faster pace -- Asheville has had massive migration made up of rich people: the city's median income has soared 36%!

The downside to that is that prices are also soaring, as more dollars chase a more-or-less fixed amount of goods. It now costs more to live in Asheville than in Chicago or Atlanta. Even the homeless can't afford Asheville's cost of living; those who want to own a home, well, good luck with that. One of the big challenges is that the people the rich want to work for them can't afford to live nearby. The rich migrants bring tax revenue, so you can invest in schools and public transit and public safety. Your workers and their families won't profit much from this, because they'll have to live out of town -- and since they're the people you'd need to be your public safety workers and schoolteachers, it'll be hard to draw them even at relatively generous salaries. 

Meanwhile, here in a far-flung and rural county, we have a different kind of migration. My informal survey of car passengers taken whenever we have to direct traffic around accidents or fires and the like indicates that about a third of the population is now non-English-speaking Hispanic. At the last census, just four years ago, the population of Hispanics of all races was about two percent. I don't know how many of these people the census missed -- I'd guess almost none of them have legal status, and while the census is desperate to capture them it's very hard to do so. Still, plainly there has been a massive population change in these four years.

Unlike the rich people moving into Asheville who are driving out the indigenous population that they want to service them, these poor people from Latin America came to work but can't add to the tax base. As a result, a recent survey of the school system shows it under extreme strain -- it suddenly has to serve a much larger number of children than was predicted five years ago, on a tax base that if anything has shrunk due to inflation and economic hardship. 

Nevertheless, we also have a housing crisis, because these people need to live somewhere and various government agencies and charities are willing to pay for that. Thus, the cost of living here has skyrocketed even well outside the city. If you wanted to live here and commute to Asheville, you'd still find it tough to buy a home. 

Asheville gets the better deal: it at least has the ability to plan for the problem and fund those plans with increased taxes on people who can afford to pay them. Here, there's no more money to pay for increased services, but the array of service needed has suddenly increased quite a bit: for example, we need a lot of teachers, nurses, and government workers of all kinds who can speak Spanish. We don't really have any, not to speak of. Students who don't speak English still need to be taught, somehow, but that means that teachers are scrambling to try to figure out how to do that -- to the detriment of those students they were planning to teach, who get much less attention because it has to be divided. Those students were already badly served by the school system even before this crisis. Now it's struggling to feed everyone with its insufficient number of lunchrooms and kitchens. 

I've written about all this before. Notice that while language matters significantly, otherwise many of the challenges of mass migration are the same whether the migrants are rich fellow Americans or poor folk from awa'. Wealth can be a buffer, but it creates its own distortions (and indeed another wave of mass migration as current residents are driven out by rising prices). Mass migration is disruptive in and of itself
It's not really an objection to the people coming in as if they were inferior people: it's an objection to communities and cultures being destroyed, when those things are where we get almost all of the sense of meaning we derive from human life. 

A culture is defined as "a way of life." Ways of life exist among people who live together and share personal connections. You don't know and can't know everyone, but you do know the nice lady at your favorite coffee shop, or library, or bar; you know the people you met at church, or work, or school. You grew up participating in institutions like a church or the Boy Scouts or your town in your home state, with its local sports teams and friends you know from interactions around the place where you live. Together you have built a culture, and it really does depend on the stability of all those things. 

While you get a certain amount of your sense of meaning in life from philosophy or your personal engagement with religion, most of your sense of meaning and being important comes from your interactions with other people. Those are the people who are part of your culture, including your family. When the institutions, including the family, are badly disrupted you lose the connections that make your life meaningful and worth living. 

Publications are run by people who favor migration; Republican ones seem to want us to accept that this is economically rational behavior, and Democratic ones pretend it's about justice when it's really about driving down their political donors' labor costs. Leaving aside talk about crime, or race, all of this is really destructive and imposes vast costs. It's nothing personal. I like the Mexican migrants much better than the rich Yankees.* I would far rather work on my Spanish to converse with the former than have to endure listening to the latter lecturing, in perfectly good English, about how much they're going to need to change things down here so things won't be so backwards and ignorant. 

A little more cultural stability would be a good thing for everybody. I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to move, but I am suggesting that we need a new way of thinking about all this that takes this basic human good into account. It doesn't seem to fit anywhere in our national dialogue, but it needs to because it's having significant destructive effects that we don't know how to think about, talk about, plan for, or address. 

UPDATE: A very old post from 2006 on the same topic. There's a lot of harmony in spite of the nearly-twenty years that has passed, though back before the decades of sporadic mass migration I was more open to the idea of it than I have become. The depressive effect on American wages was apparently less clear to me then, too.



* I use the term in the specific sense of 'disagreeable loud-mouthed rich folk from up North who moved down here for the weather even though they hate the South and want very much to abolish it' rather than the more respectable use intended by some of our valued and respected comrades from New England. I gather the term means something honorable there. 

11 comments:

  1. I see your point. I swear every retiring social worker and psychologist in New Hampshire has relocated to the mountains of NC. And we probably fit in better than the ones from VT, MA, and CT.

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  2. As Trump said about Mexico "we're not sending you our best."

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  3. and Democratic ones pretend it's about justice when it's really about driving down their political donors' labor costs.

    Umnnhhhh.....there are lots of Repubicans who love reduced labor costs, too. Up Nort' here, there are dairy farmers, e.g. They vote Pubbie 9 to 1, and hire illegals all day long. No different from various construction contractors.

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  4. one more niggle: much as I understand your definition of 'culture,' you later seem to separate it from philosophy and religion.

    But culture (as we have discussed) is the child of religion; that is, religion is "cult."

    In the case at hand, Christianity is the cult, and that accounts for the 'nice' and homogeneous relations found in most US communities. The "not-nice" are mostly Religious in Name Only--or not religious at all (but yes, there are exceptions both ways.)

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  5. I think I was giving the Republicans credit for not being hypocrites about the profit motive. That's what they claim to care about; the only hypocrites on that side are the ones who insincerely claim to care about illegal immigration.

    But culture (as we have discussed) is the child of religion; that is, religion is "cult."

    We have talked about that, but I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The Mexicans are mostly Catholic, but I don't think you'd say they shared our culture in the strict sense. Meanwhile even other Catholics don't share the philosophy -- Pope Francis, for example, is definitely at least philosophically different even though he is the formal head of the religion. It's a point of contention whether we even share a culture with him, religion notwithstanding.

    I don't think it follows anymore. "Cult" and "culture" both derive from "cultivate," which was natural and sensible in ancient days when the fertility of the land was believed to derive from divine grace. The Greeks sacrificed to the gods, then used the rotted flesh of the sacrificed animals to fertilize the fields. It worked, but we don't do that anymore because we understand fertilization better. The cultivation is separated from the cult, and the culture may be as well.

    We have common ground with people of different faiths but similar philosophies. We have less common ground with fellow Americans who have different philosophies, even if they formally have the same faith. The old idea doesn't seem to hold.

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  6. Gringo10:57 PM

    AVI: As Trump said about Mexico "we're not sending you our best."
    LOL. I was amused at the "good liberal" outrage at Trump making that statement- "racist"... But Starr County on the Rio Grande border, a county that is 95% Hispanic, increased its vote for Trump from ~ 18% in 2016 to ~47% in 2020. That is difficult for the "good liberals" to comprehend.

    When I moved from New England to Texas some four decades ago, I became a snowbird. But I was a snowbird with a difference. As my mother's parents were Texas-born-and-raised Okies, and I had spent a summer in Oklahoma, I had developed a live-and-let-live attitude. I had previously learned that my grandmother wasn't going to succeed in converting me to her church- though I'd attend church with her if I was visiting on a Sunday- and I wasn't going to change her political and religious opinions.

    There is an interesting situation in Nashville where a California transplant has filed umpteen complaints against a neighboring meat market.
    California Transplant To Nashville Sues Local Butcher Over Smell Of Grilled Meat
    According to the entry on the GoFundMe page, Roy Meat Service’s “new neighbor” labeled the business a “nuisance” because of the smell of meat cooking.

    As of now, 46 complaints have been filed against the butcher to city and state agencies. “The complaints include ‘concerns’ about the establishment’s fencing, lightning, ‘junk’ on the store’s property, and even the store front’s sign,” the GoFundMe account states.

    The conservative website BizPacReview reported that the plaintiff, Natalie Castillo, is a transplant from California.

    In response to the WZTV report, conservative activist Robby Starbuck defended the butcher on X.

    “Some great people have moved to TN in recent years. You are not one of them. You left CA but what made CA fail LIVES IN YOU. It’s an ideology and we don’t want it here in TN,” he posted on Wednesday.

    “The narcissism in your ideology blinds you to the reality that people like you ruined California. So you fled probably with the thought that none of CA’s failures were your fault. They are your fault or at least the fault of voters like you.”


    Along the same line, which also mentions the meat market brouhaha:Dear Progressives. This is Why We Hate You.

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  7. Anonymous7:16 AM

    .....Pope Francis, for example, is definitely at least philosophically different even though he is the formal head of the religion.....

    Ahhh NO.

    Not Pope, probably Anti pope. Probably CIA NWO plant.?
    We are not obliged to follow this heretic who obviously hates Christ and Catholics.

    We follow the 2000 year Magisterium teachings of the Roman Catholic Church
    not the Magisterium of Jorge Bergolio

    Greg

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  8. 1610s, "worship, homage" (a sense now obsolete); 1670s, "a particular form or system of worship;" from French culte (17c.), from Latin cultus "care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence," originally "tended, cultivated," past participle of colere "to till" See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/cult

    Benedict XVI used the term 'cult' in the 1670's sense, broadened to include the theo/philosophical foundation of Christianity.

    There are plenty of people who claim "Christianity" and/or "Catholicism." Not all of them are actual practitioners, no matter what the Press says about Biden (e.g.). I maintain that for many people, the actual "cult" is that of Mammon, with Unlimited Free Sex a close second, perhaps tied with Self-Worship. (Nor do I claim sainthood!!!)

    The Mexicans are--in most cases--adherents to the Judaeo-Christian cult. They are not Shinto, Mohammedan, Hindu, nor Animist. But as with Americans, there are 'not-Christians' who claim Christianity.

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  9. So is the point that the US benefits more from Mexican immigrants, because they adhere to the cult, than it does from other Americans who do not (perhaps being members of the cult of Mammon)? I had not understood you to be in favor of mass immigration from Catholic Latin America, but here it sounds like you might favor that as a way of diluting the influence of non-Christian elements within the country.

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  10. I am not in favor of "mass immigration" from ANYWHERE. But I'd be very happy were the current (legal) system changed to strongly favor peoples with a Judaeo-Christian heritage/culture.

    So happens that PJBuchanan thinks the same; that's where I stole the idea.

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    1. Did I ever tell you that I voted for him in my first election even though his security ran me and my friends off from his event at the Varsity? I guess we looked like teenage heathens and no-goods, which was mostly true but we were still there to hear him out.

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