Blame the problem, not the solution

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

By Grace Hammond

Last week, at “Reading the Paper with the Editors,” one person asked: “Is immigration a scapegoat? Does it become a political issue mainly when unrelated things go wrong?”
I spent three summers during college working seasonally for a Western tourist attraction in the Dakotas. The majority of employees, maybe 70 percent, were American; the rest were foreign seasonal workers. We lived together in employee housing, worked side-by-side as line cooks and were all expected to maintain that Jackalopes were real when the tourists asked.

 The idea of the West was the lifeblood of the third-generation family business, and its over-the-top delivery was the main draw. Tourists stalked away, angered, when the Polish hostesses clad in checkered cowgirl shirts couldn’t direct them to the Western Art Gallery in short, clear sentences. A biker dropped his drawers and pooped on the bathroom floor in front of a Slovakian maintenance worker - “This is my country,” he declared.

The store’s human resources manager explained why the business hired foreign workers.
“American college kids used to work over the summers to pay for college. Even in the 70s and 80s, working for a summer at a place like this could fund the whole next school year. Now, college is so expensive that students opt for summer internships instead - things that will advance their careers so they can start paying off their loans as soon as they graduate.”

Without foreign workers, the store could close - taking many American people’s jobs with it, she said. “They’re becoming the backbone of the business.”
The common complaint I heard from tourists - “They’re taking our jobs” - was scapegoatism. National problems do not always arrive at our shores but can sometimes be found right at home - in this case, the cost of American colleges and the resulting debt, which restricts American students’ mobility.

Data from the Project on Student Debt showed that student debt for graduating college seniors grew by 8 percent in 2006 while wages increased only 4 percent. The National Center for Education Statistics recently reported that the average undergraduate student has $19,237 in debt on graduation day. One in four American undergrads borrow more than $25,000 and one in ten more than $35,000 to pay for the first four years of school.
 
America’s biggest problems aren’t sneaking across the border and they’re not arriving on commercial airlines. Immigrants can play a part in our crises, sometimes exacerbating them, sometimes making them better - like the workers coming from the Czech Republic to keep a third-generation Dakotan family business from closing its doors. As a nation, we must be open to self-examination and unafraid of following perceived problems from the branch down to the root - even if we find that it is planted in American soil.
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Blame the problem, not the solution | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

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