[Bret L]

Don Peck’s Atlantic Unemployment Cover Story: Where’s The I-Word?

By Steve Sailer

"The Democrats’ loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by Teddy Kennedy has driven Washington, which had spent most of the last couple of years worrying about subsidizing Wall Street and socializing health care, into finally starting to think about jobs.

It’s about time. The March issue of The Atlantic features Don Peck’s
long, well-researched, and deeply depressing cover story How a New
Jobless Era Will Transform America. Peck reports:

“[Men have] suffered roughly three-quarters of the 8 million job
losses since the beginning of 2008 … In November, 19.4 percent of all
men in their prime working years, 25 to 54, did not have jobs, the
highest figure since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the
statistic in 1948.”

The implications, as Peck explains, are baleful:

“… this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it
ends, it will likely … leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar
men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities.
It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen
for decades.“

Despite the gravity of the unemployment problem, there has been almost
zero discussion in the Main Stream Media of the role of immigration
policy in how we got here—and how changes in immigration policy could
help get us out of this jam.

After Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) responded to Scott
Brown’s election by announcing he was fast-tracking a bipartisan jobs
bill, eight Republican Senators released a joint letter to Reid with
their suggestions. Sen. Jeff Sessions, who did so much to save America
from the Bush-Kennedy-McCain amnesty bills of 2006 and 2007, and his
seven colleagues recommended a half-dozen commonsense steps for
reducing unemployment among American citizens by more effectively
enforcing laws against illegal immigration.

Keep in mind, these Republicans’ letter didn’t even mention anything
about legal immigration—such as imposing a temporary moratorium until
the employment problem clears up.

Of course, none of the Patriotic Eight’s illegal immigration reforms
made Reid’s bill, which turned out to be the usual Official Bipartisan
Consensus of spending increases and tax cuts. (As of Sunday morning,
that bill’s progress had stalled due to squabbling.)

And almost none of the press coverage about unemployment mentions
immigration.

For example, Ed Rubenstein has been tracking on VDARE.com for years
the closest the federal government will come to measuring the impact
of immigration on jobs: the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic
jobholders. Last Tuesday, Ed reported that Hispanic employment is up
22.4 percent since January 2001, while non-Hispanic employment is down
2.5 percent.

How often have you ever heard that figure echoed in the Establishment
press?

Or consider how immigration is the missing element in Peck’s article
in The Atlantic on the impact of unemployment. Peck, the deputy
managing editor of The Atlantic, clearly did an admirable amount of
work on the topic. For example, many of the points Peck makes about
how long term male joblessness will exacerbate dysfunctional family
trends that were well under way during the Housing Bubble are
outstanding, if I say so myself.

In fact, I more or less have said so myself many times in articles on
affordable family formation on VDARE.com.

According to Peck, high unemployment means marriage rates will decline
further:

“Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant
effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class.
‘It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job
…’”

But although I’ve been remarking on this for years, I certainly wasn’t
the first to notice it.

Ben Franklin was.

Affordable family formation—the observation that America has been a
relatively happy place because marriage and children were made
affordable by our historical legacy of abundant, and thus cheap, land
plus scarce, and thus well-paid, workers—is the oldest social science
theory in American history. America’s most valuable thinker, Benjamin
Franklin, devised it in 1751 in his essay Observations Concerning the
Increase of Mankind: “When families can be easily supported, more
persons marry, and earlier in life."

Unfortunately, it’s also perhaps the least known breakthrough in our
intellectual history. Franklin’s great insight about the fundamental
cause of American prosperity—our big, empty continent—has been shoved
down the memory hole, in part because Ben stated clearly its logical
corollary: limiting immigration would increase the happiness of
Americans.

While marriage today remains restricted to those who can afford it,
fertility, as I’ve also pointed out, does not. Peck notes:

“Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock
children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities …
Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University,
recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in
income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.”

This ongoing disconnection of marriage and baby carriage is very bad
news. Peck says:

“By the time the average out-of-wedlock child has reached the age of
5, his or her mother will have had two or three significant
relationships with men other than the father, and the child will
typically have at least one half sibling. This kind of churning is
terrible for children …”

W. Bradford Wilcox, head of the U. of Virginia’s National Marriage
Project, asserts:

“We could be headed in a direction where, among elites, marriage and
family are conventional, but for substantial portions of society, life
is more matriarchal.”

“Matriarchal” is a euphemism for the kind of familial disorder that
plagues black America, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa.. Kathryn
Edin, a Harvard professor of public policy, worries:

“These white working-class communities—once strong, vibrant, proud
communities, often organized around big industries—they’re just in
terrible straits. … I hang around these neighborhoods in South
Philadelphia, and I think, ‘This is beginning to look like the black
inner-city neighborhoods we’ve been studying for the past 20 years.’”

Could white working class areas in the U.S. go part way toward the
social decay of black slums?

Judging from Britain’s experience, the danger is real. The severe
unemployment seen in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s appears to have
helped midwife the emergence of a white “chav” culture of
illegitimacy, binge drinking, and burglary that flourished through the
English boom of the last decade. The recent media tizzy in the U.S.
over the hit MTV reality show Jersey Shore, which showcased the
proudly moronic Staten Island equivalents of chavs, suggests that our
culture could be ripe for a similar degradation.

Edin argues:

“When young men can’t transition into formal-sector jobs, they sell
drugs and drink and do drugs. And it wreaks havoc on family life. They
think, ‘Hey, if I’m 23 and I don’t have a baby, there’s something
wrong with me.’ They’re following the pattern of their fathers in
terms of the timing of childbearing, but they don’t have the jobs to
support it. So their families are falling apart—and often
spectacularly.”

Peck concludes:

“We are living through a slow-motion social catastrophe, one that
could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to
come. We have a civic—and indeed a moral—responsibility to do
everything in our power to stop it now, before it gets even worse.”

Indeed.

So, in light of how severe the situation is, can we now, finally, talk
about immigration?

Apparently not.

A quarter of a millennium after Franklin explained the economic impact
of immigration, Peck is intellectually shackled by the code of silence
prevailing around the topic today. He only mentions immigration twice
in his ten thousand-word article.

* First, he cites sociologist William Julius Wilson’s research on
the disastrous ramifications of black men exiting the work force. (In
1960, 90 percent of black men were employed versus only 76 percent in
prosperous 2000.)

Peck paraphrases Wilson on how new competition for jobs worsened black
behavior:

“… downwardly mobile black men often resented the new work they could
find, and displayed less flexibility on the job than, for instance,
first-generation immigrant workers. As a result, employers began to
prefer hiring women and immigrants, and a vicious cycle of resentment,
discrimination, and joblessness set in.”

Presumably, Prof. Wilson can afford to mention the I-word because he’s
74-years-old, tenured at Harvard, and black.

* Secondly, toward the end, Peck himself cites Harvard economic
historian Benjamin Friedman worrying that “When material progress
falters … anti-immigrant sentiment typically increases …”

In other words, Peck (and Friedman) appear to think that the point of
Americans having jobs is that then we can afford immigration.

American public debate is so stultified by this immigration omerta
that a couple of allusions to immigration over 10,000 words might be
considered progress toward a new era of intellectual realism.

But Peck himself claims we’re facing a “New Jobless Era”. How long
does it have to go on for before our political class can bring itself
to consider some new (or at least repressed) ideas?

Ask The Atlantic"

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100214_unemployment.htm