Much of the western world is mired in higher unemployment rates: 9% in the US, 7.5% in the UK, and in Spain it’s over 20% already. In California, the rate is staggering – 12.6%, according to one source.
What makes things worse is the realization that many unemployed are no longer being properly counted as they can’t claim benefits after 99 weeks (approx. 2 years). This means that while the unemployment rate may appear to ease in the coming months, part of the easing is the missing 1000’s of unemployed who can no longer claim.
There are many complaints, too, for example that immigrants are taking jobs from Californians in the news, as in the UK. However, and it’s a big however, there’s really little proof that this is the case. Yet a quick look through Los Angeles job search will highlight many jobs that can’t be performed by immigrants because of lack of qualifications.
Most of the jobs immigrants perform in the workplace are jobs that locals either can’t or don’t want to do in the first place, for whatever reason. In Taiwan, there are similar complaints but in reality, few jobs are taken from locals, other than the ones locals don’t want to do.
In the factories, construction sites, and worksites here, there are thousands of immigrants being paid less than minimum wage to work longer hours than any local would consider. While the contracts are short (about 3 years), and legislation is strict, because of fears, in reality no one aspires to those kinds of jobs. No one.
The hard truth: most immigrants, just like most locals, work hard, pay their taxes, save their money, and try to build a decent life for their family. They migrate, as people have since the earliest migrations recorded in history, because they see a competitive advantage in doing so. They aspire to get ahead.
Yet for many ‘nationalists’ or bigots, depending on your position, they are shunned, frowned upon, insulted, vilified and attacked, simply because of this desire. It’s a pity those who perpetrate such explicit racism didn’t themselves share the ambition to build a decent life, but instead choose to give into their self-important ideology and sense of entitlement.
The hard reality is, societies that develop are those that look outward, welcome ambition and hard work, and extend an invitation to those in other countries to come and share their ‘dream’. Societies that lock the door, resist external influences, and harden their hearts to the new ultimately pay the price for this: living standards decline slowly at first, the economy starts to falter, prices rise, and everyone in that society begins to pay the price.
You need only know a little of the history of the communist world to realize what happens to a society that turns its back on immigration and the outside world. The Soviet Union for one managed to keep up the pretense for decades before it was revealed as a bankrupt and spent force.
So are you really prepared to vote for that? Really? If so, ask yourself this: take a look at ten jobs immigrants in your society perform regularly, are you really so envious that you would be willing to do ANY of those jobs?
I can’t think of a job that a foreigner does here in Taiwan I would want to do, and I can’t see myself doing any of those: working on a fishing boat, on a construction site, babysitting for a couple of kids 18 hours a day, looking after grandma who doesn’t remember her name, …