I’m not sure what to make of Race, Immigration and the Problem of Hard Labor. In it, Lee Harris makes some unusual points (tangentially) about Vincente Fox’s comments on Mexicans willing to do work “not even blacks” will do, starting with a history of slavery in the New World:
Immediately, however, the would-be slave-drivers of Indians discovered that there was a fatal flaw in their grand plan of exploiting the indigenous population of the New World. They could not be forced to do hard labor by whip or by musket. Accustomed to the relatively easy life of the tropics, and a social system in which no one was in a position to exploit anyone else’s labor, the decision to exploit the native population was a miserable, though unspeakably brutal, failure. The Indians, when confined by their conquerors, simply gave up and died off — many taken by the diseases inadvertently introduced by the Europeans, others from sheer despair.
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The African slaves who were imported into the New World didn’t die off, but instead they actually managed to do the hard labor that no one else seemed able to do, neither the native Indians of America nor the Europeans who had hoped to exploit them.
His real point:
Successful societies produce people who begin to despise hard labor as beneath their dignity. Yet since this kind of work has to be done in any society, such societies must figure out where to tap into a supply of laborers of an inferior social status, who were still willing to do such work. In all societies up until quite recently, these laborers either came from an established class of peons, whose lower status was rigidly enforced by law or custom, as in Russian serfdom or else they were imported from other lands, and were called either indentured servants or slaves.Today we are drawing these people from across our borders. They come here quite freely, and not on slave transports. All of us reap the advantages of their cheap labor and their hard work, but many of us want to pretend that, somehow, they are not necessary to us and that we can get along without them. Our educated class has deluded itself into thinking that the problem of hard labor no longer exists, simply because they and their children don’t have to do it anymore. But someone does, and always will. What President Fox was trying to tell us, in his awkward way, was that those who argue that we can get along without illegal immigrants are living in a fantasy world, and that the sooner they wake up, the sooner Americans can begin working out a realistic solution to a problem that faces both our nations.