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Perry’s Rapid Decline

25 Sep 2011 by Roman Dmowski

The Big Hearted Rick Perry

It seems a lot of normal Republican primary voters, ranging from the hard core to the merely moderate, have lost faith in Rick Perry.  He has blown it chiefly through his lack of preparation for the primary debates and his complete tone deafness on immigration.  Specifically, his remark that it would be “heartless” to deprive illegal aliens living in Texas from the benefits of in-state tuition pissed nearly everyone off.  Not only is his position wrong, but like George W. Bush, he has the annoying habit of implying bad faith and racism among his opponents.  No one likes that. 

I want every illegal alien in this country deported, and that’s not heartless, but rather an acknowledgment that our laws need to be enforced.  No injustice is inflicted upon anyone here against the law by sending them back to their home countries. And the complaint that their native-born kids will be hurt is made highly selectively. Families are separated all the time for their parents’ lawbreaking.  Immigration lawbreakers shouldn’t be given any special benefits in this regard.  Worst case scenario, the whole family moves to Mexico . . .  a place, recall, where Americans frequently go on vacation.

Was Perry asleep in 2005 when the amnesty battle was waged by President Bush?  Apparently.  Or, more accurately, he was stuck in the Texas bubble, the power of which cannot be underestimated.  Texas’ elites are made up chiefly of native Texans or highly assimilated newcomers.  Texans go to college in Texas, work in Texas, and can’t see too many reasons to leave Texas. 

Texans also have, in recent years, white washed their own history–one of white Americans, uncomfortable with Mexican culture and government who decided to revolt–into a happy multicultural story of multiracial resistance to tyranny.  I know this because I lived there for six years and found, while I am very conservative and like a lot about Texas, it’s odd combination of Southern country-club exclusiveness, self-satisfaction, and parochialism was a little much to bear.*

Texas is a genial, wealthy, successful, and mostly capitalist state.  It also has a long history of white coexistence with highly assimilated Mexicans.  Starting 15 years or so ago, the state became completely inundated with Mexican coolie laborers.  But the leadership of Texas–mostly white and Republican–doesn’t mind this for a number of reasons.  For starters, a great many rich Texans aspire not to work but to play.  They have gotten rich by having land in the right part of the ugly-as-sin Permian Basin. And these folks, not much liking hard work, have a very patrician attitude about Mexicans.  They can’t think of this demographic without thinking of their loyal and hardworking servants.   They believe just a little magnanimity will make them all successful, assimilated, and inclined to vote Republican.  The Mexicans’ native political traditions and liberal-leaning domestic politics are completely ignored.

Second, Texas’ mostly white middle class, like the white middle class nationwide, is also finding manual laborer increasingly distasteful, so they are happy to have armies of Mexicans to mow their lawns, clean their homes, etc.  Since these workers are illegal, they don’t make too much of a fuss and don’t qualify for a great number of social welfare programs.  It’s not uncommon to hear Mexicans compared favorably to blacks, who are considered more dysfunctional and less hardworking as a group.  Of course, the false dilemma ignores that Mexicans in America have higher social problems across the board, as represented by their epicenters in the Rio Grande Valley or East LA.

Finally, because of the higher rates of assimilation of earlier generations of Texans of Mexican descent, particularly in El Paso and San Antonio, the leadership is sanguine about the prospects of assimilating the latest batch. Facts don’t count. While there are some signs of unease among the working class and even assimilated Hispanics, these people are not part of the power structure of the place.  Plus, money coming out of the ground, as it does in Texas, tends to make everyone happy enough with their lot.

Perry has imbibed this cultural view.  And he has not paid attention to the fact that Bush’s assimilation fight led to mass revolt by rank-and-file Republicans.  Indeed, like Bush, Perry was probably surprised to see Hariett Miers opposed so vociferously after Bush nominated her to the Supreme Court.  That’s how things are done in Texas; you wait your turn, and you’re rewarded.  It’s old school WASP conformity and consensus building, coupled with cowboy boots.  So you don’t make too much of a fuss about Mexicans or affirmative action or anything else “too controversial.”  Being liberal on immigration is fairly common among Texas elites, partly because it allows them to feel inoculated against the charge of racism that has haunted the entire South.  Further, a certain view of Mexicans is also a way for them to accentuate their distinctive Texan identity, which activity is extremely important to pretty much everyone you meet in Texas.

Perry does not distinguish illegals and other aliens from American citizens.  If they live in Texas and are not completely anti-social, he views them with fatherly compassion.  The displacement of blue collar native workers is not a terrible concern to him; in his eyes, like most upwardly mobile and urban Texans, it was an aspiration from early in life to work in an office (with air conditioning!) doing something respectable.  Going out to the “ranch” on the weekends is enough to keep his manly street cred intact. So he presumes all people in Texas are happy to play farmer on the weekend, shooting guns and “removing brush,” while working in an office somewhere and living in the city.  Illegals are there to do the real dirty work.  Presumably, they’ll have the same aspirations, and thus a constant flood of new illegals must be brought in to do manual labor in what is a Ponzi Scheme of sorts.

Indeed, Perry’s Texas miracle is not such a miracle if you consider that many of its beneficiaries are illegal aliens and other non-Americans.  The following statistics from the CIR report on the proportion of Texas jobs going to illegal aliens is not too surprising; the demographics have literally changed by an order of magnitude in the last ten years and have put serious strains on the jails, schools, hospitals, and other resources of the entire state:

* Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).

* In terms of numbers, between the second quarter of 2007, right before the recession began, and the second quarter of 2011, total employment in Texas increased by 279,000. Of this, 225,000 jobs went to immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived in the United States in 2007 or later.

* Of newly arrived immigrants who took a job in Texas, 93 percent were not U.S. citizens. Thus government data show that more than three-fourths of net job growth in Texas were taken by newly arrived non-citizens (legal and illegal).

* The large share of job growth that went to immigrants is surprising because the native-born accounted for 69 percent of the growth in Texas working-age population (16 to 65). Thus, even though natives made up most of the growth in potential workers, most of the job growth went to immigrants.

One George W. Bush was enough.  The last thing we need now with our culture and economy in shambles is a half-educated and inexperienced Texas governor, indifferent to the plight of the native working class, cocooned in a state somewhat uniquely blessed with natural resources, whose foreign policy instincts have been honed from a lifetime of following college football more closely than current events.

* Houstonians, of course, will say that’s only because I was in Dallas!

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Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

16 Responses

  1. on 26 Sep 2011 at 8:04 pm Tschafer

    “One George W. Bush was enough”

    I think that about sums it up. Republicans need to find someone else to nominate besides Governer Obamacare and Governer Amnesty, and fast.


  2. on 27 Sep 2011 at 1:20 am UnPC

    And the complaint that their native-born kids will be hurt is made highly selectively.

    I have never liked this argument. How is taking a native-born American kid, whose parents are only fluent in Spanish, to Mexico more cruel than taking a Mexican-born kid, whose parents are only fluent in Spanish, to America? Every day people are bringing their foreign-born kids, who don’t speak English, to America. But I never hear people complain about how cruel that is.

    Finally, you can’t have a list of crappy Texan politicians without mentioning LBJ. He might not have been governor, but his record is on par with W’s. And we don’t need another Texan in the Oval Office.


  3. on 27 Sep 2011 at 4:11 am Black Sea

    3rd paragraph, second sentence, “the power of which canot be overestimated.”

    Sorry, but I’m an English teacher and it’s like a reflex at this point.

    Your analysis of the Texas mindset is quite interesting. Although I’ve never lived in Texas, it seems pretty accurate when I consider the Texans I’ve known. Whites who live around large concentrations of blacks and who wish to be seen as non-racist (almost all whites) find it very difficult to negotiate around the fairly widespread social pathologies that ensure that many blacks will never be successfull in middle-class terms. In fact, many such whites find that the only way they can address the obvious is through “ironic” comments, which at least allow for plausible deniablity . . “Hey, I was just making fun of people who think that way.”

    It’s therefore attractive to have a semi-underclass group which one can embrace, hence the “hardworking, family-oriented, faith-based” hispanic neighbors, who really aren’t so much neighbors as servants, at least to the white upper class. High school drop out rates (they’re dropping out to go to work!), illegitimate births (but they’re all Catholics), and gang affiliations (extended family values?) are all conveniently air-brushed away.

    Eric Hoffer once said, “We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves,” and politicians like Perry are lying to themselves, and trying to convince the rest of us to do the same.

    I don’t have a personal animosity toward Latin Americans who come to the US illegally, but I believe there are all sorts of reasons why immigrations laws exist and should be enforced. I work and live (and raise my kids) in a country of which I am not a citizen. If I continued to do that without legally residency, and got caught, I don’t think I’d have much cause for complaint when they threw me and my family out of the country.


  4. on 27 Sep 2011 at 4:14 am Black Sea

    3rd paragraph, next to last sentence of my own comment. Should be “successful,” with one “l” at the end.

    Se, it really is a reflex.


  5. on 27 Sep 2011 at 2:52 pm The Truth About Race Relations in Texas | I Have Never Done This Before

    […] do not agree with the views of this blogger as far as immigration policy goes, I think that he delivers the most truth on race relations in Texas that I’ve ever seen. Read the whole thing. Texans also have, in […]


  6. on 27 Sep 2011 at 4:42 pm Dan

    Years ago I worked in my company’s Houston office for about a year. The locals fell all over themselves trying to impress me with the cowboy myth, but the impression I got could be summed up as “Rick Perry,” the rhinestone Texan hoping to be mistaken for a ranch hand. These guys I worked with were suburbanites whose lives were in every respect identical to suburban NY, and they’d be as out of place with real hunters from Texas or in upstate NY as Woody Allen. When I think of Texans I think of the ones I’ve seen strutting around places like Vail, with the gals wearing high-heel, red leather cowboy boots and ankle-length mink coats and the guys with thousand dollar cowboy boots, with both sexes sporting Texan hats, just in case you missed where they came from by their loud, studied drawls. These are city people and little different from their counterparts on the Upper East side of NYC, where the latter affect their solidarity with the Mexicans cleaning their toilets by dressing up in their free time like Lenin.


  7. on 27 Sep 2011 at 4:57 pm The Anti-Gnostic

    Chris:

    I think this genial synergy (i.e., cheap labor) plays out everywhere, whether it’s Texas oilmen, California vintners, New York media executives, Mario Batali and his restaurant staff, etc. The old WASP elite used to feel so inclined toward Negros, but then they got too uppity to pick cotton. So now the benevolent patrician countenance shines on the Meso-American.


  8. on 28 Sep 2011 at 3:00 pm Why Rick Perry and the Texan Plutocracy Hate America

    […] paleoconservative blogger Christopher Roach has written a smashing article entitled “Perry’s Rapid Decline“. It confirms my suspicions in regards to Texan perfidy on the illegal immigration issue […]


  9. on 28 Sep 2011 at 6:58 pm A one-time Dallasite evalutates the GOP primary - City-Data Forum

    […] […]


  10. on 6 Oct 2011 at 6:21 pm I like straight talk… | The Crescat

    […] the whole family moves to Mexico . . . a place, recall, where Americans frequently go on vacation. Not only do I agree with Mr. Roach’s perspective on immigration, it is a perfect example of […]


  11. on 6 Oct 2011 at 6:41 pm From The Pews

    While we are entitled to our Opinions…To make a Blanket statement such as this one:
    “Of course, the false dilemma ignores that Mexicans in America have higher social problems across the board, as represented by their epicenters in the Rio Grande Valley or East LA.”
    And then have it link to a report not valid stats, is quite irresponsible, wouldn’t you agree? I would dare say even dangerous.
    There exists enough animosity and xenophobia without statements such as yours.
    All Human Beings, regardless of Race, Ethnic Background, Gender and Creed are capable of and sometimes commit atrocities.
    Please, I would ask that you be more responsible with the weapon that was once a Pen and is now a Keyboard…


  12. on 6 Oct 2011 at 8:34 pm Tension is a GOOD Thing! « From The Pews

    […] Blogs she talked about (yes, talked, because I can hear her in my head, among other voices), the other, though I respect their views, I feared is propagating Ignorance and […]


  13. on 6 Oct 2011 at 8:50 pm love the girls

    Mr. Roach writes :”Second, Texas’ mostly white middle class, like the white middle class nationwide, is also finding manual laborer increasingly distasteful, so they are happy to have armies of Mexicans to mow their lawns, clean their homes, etc.”

    While middle class labor was never typically servant labor. The problem is middle class labor now being done by below living wage mexican labor.

    The problem is living wage jobs in manufacturing and mining, so that what has not been, or cannot be, off-shored for production is locally done by that same low grade below living wage labor.


  14. on 6 Oct 2011 at 10:39 pm Mr. Roach

    It is not servant labor to do manual labor on one’s own land and home. That is what it seems we increasingly abhor whether it’s changing oil, mowing the lawn, or much else.

    True, a living wage is important and undermined by massive illegal immigration.


  15. on 6 Oct 2011 at 11:50 pm love the girls

    Mr. Roach writes :”It is not servant labor to do manual labor on one’s own land and home. That is what it seems we increasingly abhor whether it’s changing oil, mowing the lawn, or much else.”

    Fair enough, I misunderstood the point you were making.
    _________________________

    Mr. Roach writes : “True, a living wage is important and undermined by massive illegal immigration.”

    From where I stand, it is THE important issue to those I know effected by immigration. Legality and similar are in comparison of minor concern.

    Electricians, plumbers, mechanical, carpenters, you name it, the shift to using gangs of low skilled, low wage labor to perform simple tasks in unison has destroyed the industry of skilled living wage labor.


  16. on 23 Oct 2011 at 8:08 pm What some other people think of Texans in general and Rick Perry in particular

    […] Rick Perry he read an excerpt from an article by Christopher Roach, the entirety of which is here. The subject is illegal aliens in Texas and the curious apathy with which the problem is not even […]



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