So You've Considered Moving to Oklahoma, Have You?...

Over at the AFB, my friend, Mike Tams, posted this entry yesterday. I'm going to provide the link to Katie's Dad's entry here, as well that posted on the same topic at VA's.

This story is an all too familiar story for your's truly. And though I can't say that my business, my employees, nor my family have been nearly as negatively impacted financially speaking as this particular contractor and those associated with him has, I can say without hesitation that all of these have indeed suffered at the hands of cheap, illegal, mostly Mexican labor...

Months back my brothers and I discussed this very topic and the negative impact my interests had suffered on several occasions due to the influx of illegal Mexican construction workers in my area over the last couple of years. Interestingly, while I was away over this past weekend, I managed to get a visit in to one of my good friends whose initials, MB, I'll use from here on out. MB also has his own business, and he employs about six people full-time I think.

MB and I were in his office along with his wife and my two employees just shooting the breeze. I don't recall exactly who or what got the conversation started, but somewhere along the way we began discussing the illegal alien situation. I made a statement to the effect of "ah, don't fret it, man, come November 1st it's reckoning time. He asked what I meant so I told him that November 1st is when Oklahoma's tough immigration legislation goes into effect...thanks to the defeat of the amnesty bill. This legislation, as I related to MB, deals not only with illegals, but with their employers as well. And the fines incurred by the latter for employing illegal aliens get substantially stiffer with each offense so that it becomes increasingly more difficult to justify employing illegal aliens.

The reason I tell that story is because MB said something to me in the wake of my little rant that hit home pretty well. He said that there was a time in the not so distant past when he himself had thought pretty highly of these Mexican illegals because he considered them to be hard workers, pretty reliable, and overall to have good work ethic. His next statement, though, put his initial statements into proper context; he said to me that "I think I'm over that now." Of course we got a good laugh out of it, and certainly I agreed with MB that I had held some of his very views concerning Mexican illegals until I got properly educated.

I've complained to my brothers at the AFB before about the fact that finding good (American) help these days is extremely difficult. And believe me, it doesn't matter how much you pay them; that's not the issue. This being the case, I ran into a situation a couple of years ago wherein two of my four employees quit work (that is, they quit working altogether, for anyone), leaving me with a workload that the three of us left could not handle on the schedule predetermined for, and agreed to by us. I was turned on to a young Mexican immigrant who was supposedly legal and of age, and I hired him. It weren't very long before I realized that I'd made a mistake, however.

I was a little suspicious of him to begin with, so as is my general approach to things like that, I simply listened more than I spoke. And eventually he let out more information than he intended, as per the usual. He had a distinctive accent, but he spoke english very well. The fact was that he had been here several years with his parents who came here illegally. As it turned out he was only 16 years of age, he had no driver's license, no insurance, no tag and no registration in his name. As he was commuting about sixty miles a day, one way, I asked him, upon learning some of these facts: "you realize, do you not, that you're going to get stopped one day during your commute to or from?....what are you going to do when you get caught? His answer was simply this, and in these exact and nonchalant words: "go back to Mexico!"

I approach my nationality in the same sort of way that I approach my immediate and extended family members. Which is to say that while I may complain about the way certain of them act from time to time, and while I may curse their actions on occasion, they are my family so I consider myself allowed. Whereas, someone else had better not curse them with me being present unless they care to get an earfull from your's truly. And it works the same way with my countrymen. We're all Americans, and while I may complain about this and that which Americans do, or about this and that which the President does, that doesn't give an illegal alien license to curse them, or to complain about them in any way, shape, or form. And here again, they had better not in front of me. Well, this young Mexican employee of mine made that mistake, saying some very unflattering things about our President and Americans in general, and very boldly so in my very presence. Not only was he 'biting the hand that fed him' in a direct sort of way, but indirectly he was biting all the hands that feed him, and I didn't like it, no; not one bit! You can use your imaginations to conclude what happened next.

I remember well when these illegals began to arrive here in relatively small numbers. At that time there was enough work to go around for everyone, and in many cases customers were forced to wait as long as a month on some of us contractors to get to their jobs. I'd like to discuss more about how that a certain amount of independency on the part of contract laborers works very well to the advantage of not only the contractor in question, but also to that of the customer. But that's yet another subject for another discussion. The point here is that these illegals began arriving here in very small numbers, and under extremely difficult circumstances. So much so that myself and other contractors I know not only welcomed them against our better judgments, but we loaned them essential tools they needed yet did not have, as well as to help them to find places to live and to help them get jobs, and all sorts of things like that. Such I guess is the nature of many Americans.

While I certainly understood the idea that mass immigration to this country of any kind, and from anywhere was bad (just remember, anything done in the extreme is bad), I still felt sorry for these individuals who were 'just trying to make a better way for themselves and their families.' It was only a couple of years, and several very strained relations between myself and some of my former accounts, before their numbers increased exponentially in my area and they began to compete with me for many of the jobs that formerly I would only have had Americans to compete with. The difference being, of course, that Mexican illegals pay no taxes and they're generally not held to the same standards by law that American contractors are held to. Therefore they can charge as little as half our prices and still come out ahead of us in the end. And of course a general contractor, or a homeowner, or whomever is enticed by these potential savings to their own pockets, so they hire the illegals to do their jobs many times when they would otherwise prefer American labor over Mexican labor.

This all came to a head (but it was far from the only incident of its kind I had personally experienced) when I secured a large commerical contract with one individual who later reneged on his obligation about two days before the actual work was to begin. The exact same Mexican illegal, along with his somewhat larger crew now, had come in and undercut my bid by about half. When I learned of this I immediately got on the horn with some of my nativist friends and we began to start to make phone calls to I.N.S., and to some of our state legislators, expressing our severe displeasure with the immigration situation in our State and our area. This was before we kicked out the democrat bums who had held power in our Congress during the entire existence of this State, and replaced them with a Republican controlled legislature that started work on correcting this immigration deal immediately.

Now here's the deal, this same crew is still out and about undercutting contractors like myself, and funneling in new illegals almost on a daily basis. This has effectively caused a great power shift to take place wherein myself and others like me either have to give up some of our independency, or to cowar to the implicit (sometimes explicit) threat that "ok, we'll just get the Mexicans to do it, and they'll do it whenever we say to do it, and at a cheaper rate too." Since I'm not really one to cowar to anyone, and since I enjoy the independency that my profession provides me, not to mention that I understand certain aspects of it, as I said before, that actually works to the advantage of the customers themselves, though it's hard for them to see it unless someone points it out to them, I have since been dedicated to ridding this State first, and the nation second, of these illegals whose compass oughta be pointing south.

But there's a lot more to it than these personal experiences I've had, of course. So very jealous am I of my liberty, my independency, and the ideas of government that have secured them to me in my own State, that I don't even like to see Americans from other States moving into and establishing permanent residency in mine, particularly folks from some of the more liberal States in this nation. And indeed, as I've discussed before with Mike and Edmund, and as my crew will confirm, I don't hesitate to make this known to these migrant Americans whenever I happen upon them. My approach to them on an individual level is usually to give an extreme example of some goofy individual moving in on us from somewhere up in the northeast. Invariably these individuals bring with them inordinate and fallacious ideas of government learned in their former environment and they begin to assert them upon their establishment of citizenship within this State. Their goal is to 'improve upon' what Okies have long since determined to be their own self-governing methods. Our State looked so very inviting to them until they lived amongst us for awhile and finally decided that we're just too d*mn independent here, not to mention that the idea of 'self-government' means just that down here in flyover country - the government of oneself and of one's affairs and concerns without undue influence from on high.

This is generally the line of thought that I engage with these migrants. And of course I also let them know that "we have enough nut-jobs of our own; we don't need anymore moving in on us, so if you have those kinds of ideas that you need to improve upon what Okies have already settled in this State, please leave them at the door because in the end you're destroying the very foundations of the things you found so attractive about our State before you decided to move here."

Now, if I have those kinds of negative feelings about migrant Americans moving into my State generally, how much more must I have the same kinds of feelings with regard to immigrants from other countries? And I ask you, where am I going wrong?

-DW