Maids
A UCLA professor in residence at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Stephanie Pincetl, asked the above question in the May 24 Los Angeles Times in response to a campaign of Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) aimed at educating the public about the impact of immigration on population growth at a time of drought conditions. The perhaps facetious question exposes one aspect of the mentality of the champions of increasing the intake of immigrants – especially low wage workers such as nannies and housekeepers.
Besides the immigrants themselves – especially those who come illegally – the other major beneficiaries are their employers who benefit in lower wage costs as long as there is a surplus of available workers. The employers are not just lawn maintenance firms and janitorial services firms, but also include the well-to-do who can afford to hire household help while they pursue careers.
This may seem reasonable if you are a talented high-earner, but you are a hypocrite if at the same time you bemoan the nation’s growing income inequality, because you are contributing to that inequality it by relying on low-wage workers to support your high-wage lifestyle.
The educational campaign by CAPS noted that the rapid growth of population in California – and, therefore, the increase in human water consumption – is virtually all due to new immigrants and the children born to them after their arrival. One estimate is that the impact of immigration on population growth from 2000 to 2009 accounted for about seven-eighths of all growth. (See http://www.immigrationandpopulation.com).
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We Wouldn’t Need All That Water for Farms to Feed the Minions
If we trimmed out the immigration overpopulation. Domestic legal citizen population is depopulating on its own.
Only 5 % of California is used for interior residential use (drinking, bathing etc) Another 5% is used for exterior residential use (lawns gardening car washing etc) 77% is used by agriculture an industry that is also completely dependent on cheap exploitable illegal labor. Agribusiness has made it clear that they want illegal labor not a guest worker program as guest workers would have some rights to things like a minimum wage, workers comp and safety protections that would impact the bottom. Illegal immigration is a problem no one on either side really want to solve so ask your housekeeper to bring you another hand full of almonds and try not to think about the gallons of water it to to produce them.
The article is very important new for me. I think it’s essential news for abroad.
The LA Times article mentions that some supposed drought experts say that the huge population growth in California in recent years does not affect the drought much, because most of the state’s water is used in agriculture. Well, most of the population growth in the US since 1965 has been from immigrants and their descendants. And guess what all that water in agriculture is used for? It is used for growing food for PEOPLE. So if you have more people in California, the US and the world they will need more food, requiring more water for agriculture! And so called environmentalists are claiming that water use for agriculture has nothing to do with population growth? Hello?
And it’s not as if agriculture has gone unaffected. Lots of citrus and other crop trees have been left to die because of lack of water.
I was reading this story yesterday and that is the exact line that struck me. Typical elitist myopia. Can the average worker afford a housekeeper? No, they’re too busy struggling to find an affordable place to live, which is another effect of a rising population on a resource that is in ever shorter supply. It’s like the Hollywood liberals who are all for the working American but they don’t want to pay more than eight bucks an hour for a gardener.
They will all go into full denial mode when it comes to the indisputable fact that a rising population puts more pressure on water supplies. And California has raided the water piggy bank. They have withdrawn ground water supplies that took decades to build up. There’s nothing left.
California is full of limousine liberals who use cheap, typically Hispanic nannies, etc. so they can live the double high income high life. Because they are Hispanic workers being paid low wages, this means their open minded employers are for “diversity”. Of course if white Americans in the American South employed black Americans in these same jobs for the same wage, the California limousine liberals would call them racists and make movies about how racist white Southerners are.
This also goes for the Silicon Valley limousine liberals, who also use cheap Hispanic labor as well as cheap H-1Bs from India and China, and if you want to restrict the number of H-1B workers and pay US citizens more to do those same jobs, they will condescendingly call you a racist who can’t appreciate diversity as much as they can. Of course they live in gated communities and fly on private jets while they exploit their cheap foreign labor in order to jack up their stock options, but they someone fail to see how hypocritical they are.
Excellent points! It is nice to know that liberal professors think of Hispanics as menial labor. As for the H1-B, L-1 workers why not enforce the law? Let us set a national minimum wage for each Visa type, say $150,000 a year for an H1-B. Since we all know that no American is qualified for the jobs occupied by H1-B workers every person in congress should approve. If corporations have been telling the truth then we should see only increases in the numbers of H1-B/L-1 visas issued after enforcing a minimum wage.
The present system discourages the hiring of Americans.