The Outstater
‘Prosperous’ Is a Matter of Deminiation
A BALL STATE ECONOMICS PROFESSOR is saying forcefully in multiple interviews and articles including yesterday’s Indianapolis Star that the thousands of Haitians dropped into Logansport have made the town more “prosperous.” He cites data to prove his point. He is a pointy-headed fool.
The professor’s conclusion is based on an assumption that certain businesses in the Logansport area would suffer if Haitian labor were unavailable. It is even possible that other businesses might be attracted to Logansport to hire even more Haitians.
That is unchallenged here, but it is a static assumption. It presumes the community and its economy are powerless to adjust to changing labor markets in any other way — an odd position for an economist to take.
What is challenged is that persons can be plucked arbitrarily from anywhere on the globe and “prosper” in America, that intelligence and ability are 100 percent nurture, 100 percent manageable — that nature, culture and motivation play no part.
And there is another way to look at it, that is, in the context of the professor’s own neighborhood. Would he feel more “prosperous” if, say, two of the six homes on his Muncie cul-de-sac were rather suddenly inhabited by persons of uncertain civic virtue, persons who did not share his language, his values or his respect for common law and private property? Or indeed have any cultural basis for understanding what those things mean to him?
The professor is undeterred by these questions, saying such an influx is the “magic elixir” that will reverse the decline of Hoosier small towns. These immigrants possess “very high human capital,” he says while granting nobody has really measured that.
In this rosy view he confuses the immigrants of earlier generations who came here to work and “prosper,” to do or die, with those today who are offered what to them are relatively lavish benefits independent of productivity or even a willingness to work.
Moreover, what if his new neighbors were not inclined to assimilate, take in, our professor’s values or even acknowledge that they are worthy attributes of citizenship? What if they chose instead to establish unabated the failed culture of their impoverished homeland? And again, what if his government made that choice easier by subsidizing the newcomers with a wide welfare net meant only for disadvantaged U.S. citizens, not for those from every country in the world?
It is a good guess that the professor would be sitting down at his kitchen table with his wife trying to figure out a way to protect their home investment and to move somewhere else.
Would that be surrendering to prejudice, bigotry? How so, if this has all made the professor’s neighborhood (or Logansport) more “prosperous”? Clearly, we need a more holistic definition than is bandied about in the faculty lounge of Ball State. — tcl
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