My guess is those war hounds who were howling for blood and cheering the fall of Baghdad from their lazyboy loungers weren't expecting refugees to come here.
The area in southeast Michigan where 2,000 Iraqi refugees are expected to resettle already has 169,000 people out of work.[...]
The mayor of Warren, which has a large Arab-American population, recently said the refugees will strain services and drag down an already struggling state economy.
But others, such as University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes, say the entrepreneurial attitude and advanced degrees of many Iraqis might help turn the ship of state around.
Now there's a real Bush supporter. How many of the two thousand Iraqi refugees have advanced degrees? Well, maybe a lot. Maybe the Iraqis with advanced degrees are best able to get out of Iraq. I don't know.
What I do know is that we've seen and heard numerous examples of Americans claiming that all Iraqis are the enemy. I have a feeling that many of the 169,000 unemployed in Michigan might just be amongst that group.
"People who have lived here their whole lives are having trouble finding jobs," said [mayoral spokesman Joe] Munem, a first-generation Arab-American. "If you're going to have refugees coming here and you want them to be self-sustaining, why aren't we talking about sending them to Texas and Florida, which have a comparatively booming economy?"
Now we're trying to pass off our refugees, are we? Like our toxic waste. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling Texans might not be real happy about that. A lot of them are still complaining about Katrina refugees, and those people are Americans, even if they are dark skinned. And they speak English. But isn't that just human nature? Here the guy is the son of immigrants and he wants to limit immigration. I got mine.
And while we're talking about immigrants, which is more destructive to the local wildlife, a border fence or the illegal traffic?
(Booming? Texas?)
"Advanced degrees" probably refers to their burns--second and third degree. Who knows--it might mean more work for the doctors at the UM Hospital's burn clinic.
ReplyDeleteAnd you'd think a UM economic professor would know that Michigan has no shortage of advanced degrees--just a shortage of jobs for them. Paul Craig Roberts wrote about the nonsense of trying to educate ourselves out of our economic woes last year: "The assertion that we hear every day that America is falling behind because it doesn't produce enough science, mathematics and engineering graduates is a bald-faced lie. The problem is always brought back to education failures in K-12, that is, to more education subsidies. When CEOs say they can't find American engineers, they mean they cannot find Americans who will work for Chinese or Indian wages. That is what the so-called 'shortage' is all about."
excellent points by both you and roberts. (the burns thing - wish i'd have thought of that.)
ReplyDeletethere's a shortage of jobs for pretty much any level employee from what i understand. i remember reading a paper some years ago that pointed out that in new york city, even if you could take every available job and put an unemployed person in it, without even factoring in whether they were qualified for it or not, there would still be 60,000 unemployed people in the city.
but of course as long as the corporation's bottom line is maximum profit, the drive will be to hire at the lowest wages possible. and i'm guessing those iraqi refugees will be willing to take some pretty low wages.
as ever, thanks for your comments.