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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I lived there almost three years and continue to commute there twice a week for work from Austin.
Stiflingly conservative, the city is composed of tons of military, families with 2.5 kids, and Catholic Mexicans. You get the sense they think GWB is STILL the best thing since sliced bread.
The neighborhoods inside the city look dingy and run down and dangerous. Further out, the suburbs with their palm trees and trellises are wealthy but dull.
Art and creativity and entrepreneurialism seem like something kept on life support only to tout in brochures of the city.
There are the hoi polloi, the immigrants and local poor, and the fabulously wealthy, who have had money since the beginning of Texas, who 'act' like they're open to multiculturality, but look down on the rest of the city from their lairs.
Granted, the Riverwalk is world famous and actually quite pleasing, but it is all but an isolated mini Disneyland in the middle of a dull moraine. The Alamo? I've never been a big fan of history or rusty old buildings.
On the plus side, SA is the oldest large city in the Southwest, so it has many unique hole in the wall eateries.
But overall, the longer I lived there the more I hated it.
San Antonio is the future of America, it is about the very rich enduring the very poor with little in between.
I am a naturalized US citizen from South America, I have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and I have lived in San Antonio for 12 years. I would like to make a few points:
1) There IS some high-tech industry in San Antonio and it seems to be increasing. I work for a company that grew in ten years from 20 employees to more than 450 and it is owned by an Indian immigrant. It is a spin-off of Southwest Research Institute that hires about 2000 engineers and scientists. The avionics and health-science industries are quite strong. I frequent an inventors/product-developers club and I can see entrepreneurship alive and well. It is true there have been some set-backs in the last years (Sony and VLSI closed their chip fabs) but there other well paying jobs continue to come (Toyota is opening a plant this year). By the way, SWB just gobbled up AT&T, so their big honchos make San Antonio their place to live.
2) The effect on immigration is complex. In the case of unskilled labor it does lower the wages of native unskilled labor and they may have a reason to complain. But everybody else, including all the people that have time to read this, is benefiting directly or indirectly from their work. The earning power is the relation of wage to the cost of living and unskilled immigrants are making housing, food, transportation and multiple other things more affordable to the rest of us.
3) Illegal unskilled immigrants pay more taxes than citizens of comparable income. Their income is below the minimum to pay income taxes. The ones that use fake SSN get taxes discounted from their payroll but they will not be able to request a refund or claim social security. They cannot claim tax child credit that other workers with the same income can. But they pay sales tax on all the things they buy (and poor people in general pay a larger percentage of their income as they cannot put aside more money to save and invest). And they do pay property taxes through their rents. But as illegal they cannot use many of the services their taxes pay for (or work in the public sector).
4) High-tech immigrants like me probably lower a little the wages of highly skilled native citizens, IN THE SHORT RUN. But I cannot think of a better deal for the US as a whole as to bring in the best and the brightest from around the world. I believe it is the best (and perhaps only) option for this country to remain a technology leader. Better to bring the Chinese engineer to America than to outsource the work to China. Immigrants have proven to be great entrepreneurs, what is not surprising as they were willing to take on the adventure of migrating. And, personally, I wouldn't mind to bring a few more medical doctors to decrease the cost of health care . . .
Yesterday I did march on the pro-immigration rally in San Antonio. Although I am in a different situation than most of them, I think that giving a path to citizenship to the people that are already here is the right thing to do. They have not forced anybody to give them jobs. They were hired by US citizens that benefited from their work to build their businesses and their services have been used directly or indirectly by almost everybody in this country. All that while living in the shadows as second class citizens, working hard for little money, many times abused and with no rights. If we take advantage of them we do owe them something.
This article is just another in the long long line of pro-immigration articles that are churned out by PseudoLeft media organs like Salon.
Has it escaped everyone's notice that there is a HUGE pro-immigration propaganda operation underway in all phases of the mass media? Have all of you True Liberals noticed how favorably the media is treating this illegal immigration scandal? Talk radio does often treat illegal immigration unfavorably, but they never talk about it the way that you letter writers, my fellow TRUE Leftists talk about it. The talk radio talks about it as an invasion, and as added costs to emergency rooms in hospitals etc. But they never talk about how this mass illegal immigration affects wages.
Never!
The PseudoPopulist Right never talks about the effect on wages. And the PseudoLeft always portrays anti immigrationists as racists.
Almost always we have this rigorous and well defined ideological separation.
Just a coincidence?
I ask you, my fellow true leftists, what is going on here?
And does the talk radio or the TV news ever publicize OUR point of view? Rarely! No one does, not in the establishment. And that tells me we are on the right track. Whatever it is they want to avoid....THAT is what we should be focusing on like a laser beam!
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
