Racial Profiling at its Best

Here is a story and a sociological essay all rolled into one.

My son the recent college graduate only thinks about cooking. I encourage his inclination, of course. Compulsion does not work. Most people do well only what they like to do. Besides, I am an immigrant from France. Scabs of French pessimism stick to my brain. I don’t know how long the current economic crisis will last. In Japan, there were ten dead years, a full decade lost. I tell myself that cooks never go hungry and neither do those who are close to them. I adore my son’s girlfriend. I want her to have enough to eat, happen what may. I used to work in kitchens myself, around the 18^th century. I believe that even the leavings from the average restaurant kitchen will keep you pleasantly fat forever. Go for it, I tell him.

My son has been cooking part-time since he was a teen-ager and throughout the embarrassingly long years it took him to complete his political science major. He has experience in a variety of fairly humble kitchen positions. I also think he has some talent. I don’t say this because he is my son. I am a mean father by California standards, a stern figure more or less from the Old Testament, you might say. Not long ago, I thought my son was worse than worthless. I am not afraid to be “judgmental,” bet on it! But he has changed. His brain has caught up with his glands at last. Having finished college, he is naturally looking for a full-time position, or better. He is meeting with an obstacle we did not expect but that was expectable if we had thought about it: He is not Mexican.

In California, where I live, everywhere in California, I think, during the fat cow years, immigrants from Mexico took over nearly all the kitchen jobs, Those are mostly hard jobs, stressful jobs offering low pay. The native-born young shunned them in favor of retail “sales associates” positions that are easy and allow for a fair margin of laziness although they don’t pay any better. The Mexican take-over began with Taco Bells and private tamales stands, and, naturally, taco shops. But immigrants are predictable. Many went considerably further.

It does not matter where immigrants come from. They are a self-selected group and the selection is based neither on indolence nor on passivity. Every wave of immigrants comprises more than its share of hard workers, of ambitious, tenacious individuals with a vision. Yes, I do think that as far as these qualities are concerned, immigrants rank higher on the average than the native-born. That’s the case everywhere: in the US, in Canada, in the UK, in France. Accordingly, many immigrants make their way up within little-prized occupations. There are so many of them trying that some are bound to achieve high positions within these occupations. It’s the same at all levels of educational achievement. Immigrants are overrepresented in kitchens, in universities, and in innovative high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. I would bet they are under-represented in government jobs.

Courage, tenacity and vision often make up for initial linguistic incompetence, and even for continuing incompetence. The same qualities help immigrants overcome the reputed obstacle of culture. It’s much exaggerated anyway, as far as this country is concerned, at least. In the US, hardly anyone puts pressure on immigrants to assimilate beyond the strict requirements of their job. It’s even truer in Canada, and only a little less true in other open, tolerant, democratic, capitalist societies. (As I write, the French political class is arguing endlessly about forbidding the burqha, the complete, supposedly Islamic cover for women, in government offices. That’s in France!)

Note what I am not talking about: affirmative action, preferential hiring, or preferential promotion. If you invited yourself to the party, I say, you should not expect to be served first, or the best morsels. If your parents or grandparents had the good idea to come here, most likely uninvited (like me), congratulate them on their good sense but their inspired move does not give you any special right. It’s absurd to think that their immigration creates a debt for the society that took them in. It’s silly to think so even for a minute. But I digress. Back to the story of my son and of his search for a full-time cooking job. But first, a necessary personal digression.

Some of my friends take me for an inveterate food snob just because of my French accent. I am not; I am not even a foodie. I just know what I like and I have no tolerance for make-believe gastronomy, especially for presumptuous dishes. “Eyes-only” food is a plague all over this country. If that’s what you want, you are not a gourmet but an interior decorator, and probably gay, at least if you are a man. (If you are a woman, you are the chi-chi kind and almost certainly mediocre in bed.) Anyway, the occasions when I feel the urge to compliment a chef are rare. They are rare enough that I remember the last five with ease. On the last occasion, I enjoyed a quintessential traditional dish you never, ever find in so-called “French” restaurants in this country. (If I ever see another “French onion soup” slathered in cheap melted cheese, I will yell crudely!) Anyway, the dish is: “blanquette de veau.” I don’t want to sound brutal but frankly, if you have not had blanquette de veau at least ten times in your life, you have had a rude, bland, nasty existence, a life hardly worth living. On that occasion, I was so happy that I asked to talk to the chef of that otherwise unremarkable, small chain establishment. And yes, you guessed it right, the blanquette de veau artist, the masterful chef, was a Mexican immigrant, a man in his forties.

As I said, my son the graduate is hard-working and intelligent. He is also full of initiative in the kitchen and at work in general. Moreover, he was brought up in a household where the most traditional French cooking interrupted the rhythm of two kinds of Indian cuisine, North Indian and Bengali. He has had the exposure at least. He is not narrow-tasted. (I made that word up, by analogy with narrow-minded.) I employ him frequently on various repair tasks around my sweet Victorian house. I prefer him to most casual laborers I have employed. I pay him better than the going local rate because he deserves it. Under my guidance, he has even learned to dress in a way that is not distracting to employers. (No skateboarding championship t-shirt and no “Fuck Communism” t-shirts either.) So, he looks neat most of the time.

With all these qualities, my son can hardly cross the threshold of a restaurant without suffering rejection. He says managers hardly take a second look at him. “No opening” they affirm. This cannot be always true. People are still eating out in spite of the current prolonged crisis and the restaurant business is notorious for personnel turnover. I think rather that restaurants owners and managers discriminate passively against my son. They profile him.

It’s easy to imagine how it happens. When José, the second cook decides to go visit his old mother in Mexico, he recommends his cousin Jesùs to take his place for a while. And why shouldn’t he? The cousin is more likely to give him back his job when he returns than a stranger, especially a stranger who is not even Mexican. When Antonio gets fired, the first cook, Miguel, is first to know and he immediately offers his brother-in-law, Luis. The system makes for smoothness of operations by minimizing disruptions. Besides, when you observe Mexicans in a kitchen, you quickly notice that they have their own cadence of work, their own tempo. The current mechanism works well. Why risk throwing sand in its gears by bringing in a new guy, an unknown quantity who will be comparatively unpredictable simply because he is not Mexican?

In this closed market, my son enjoys a slight advantage over the average Santa Cruz surfer, say. In California, currently, the probability of a blond, tanned surfer getting a job in a restaurant kitchen is about the same as that of my winning the lottery. And I rarely buy tickets. My son was adopted from India and has brown skin. An unobservant or distracted restaurant manager might fail to notice that neither his first name nor his last name sounds Spanish. I keep hoping my son will be taken for a Mexican, that he will be mistakenly profiled and be given a chance. I encourage him to learn more Spanish, to form complete sentences in that language so someone will think he is just a slightly mentally challenged young Mexican man.

Obviously, this profiling looks unfair. But why not? The Mexican de facto monopoly over kitchens succeeds for nearly everyone concerned. It’s good for the Mexican immigrants, of course. It works well for the owners, as I just explained. The patrons don’t complain, except me, and that, only seldom. I eat Mexican food frequently by choice (I am fond of tacos de lengua, and of menudo on Saturdays.) I just wish almost everything you eat in California did not taste like Mexican food. But I tell myself, virtuously, “If you don’t like it here just go home where you come from, you stupid foreigner!” That usually takes care of it for a while. In the meantime, our reasonably laissez-faire policies are pretty successful overall. Our unemployment rate at its worst, now (March 2010), looks like normal unemployment in much of Europe.

What ails my son is clearly discrimination. It’s racial profiling of the crudest kind. And so, what?

PS It’s not unethical to offer my son a try-out and it’s not embarrassing to me. If you have an interesting cooking slot, even a temporary one, let me know. You can contact me through a Comment on this blog or email me at : jdelacroixliberty@gmail.com

© Jacques Delacroix 20010 (3/14710)

IF YOU WANT  TO LEARN ABOUT MY VIEWS ABOUT ILLEGAL MEXICAN IMMIGRATION, SPECIFICALLY,  FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW. IT WILL TAKE YOU TO AN ARTICLE CO-AUTHORED WITH SERGEY NIKIFOROV  AND PUBLISHED RECENTLY IN THE INDEPENDENT  REVIEW. THE ARTICLE PRESENTS A REAL LIBERTARIAN VIEW OF THE ISSUE. IT WILL PROBABLY SURPRISE YOU SOME.

http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_6_delacroix.pdf

Possession two (or too)

Part Two: No Place to Stay

Update: In a previous blog (“The A.A President,” posted 10/7/09 ), I argued that President Obama’s current string of failures was not surprising because he had never accomplished much of anything in his life under his own power. I mentioned that his passing the bar exam might prove me wrong. There is nothing on Wikipedia about his having passed the bar anywhere. There is nothing I could find on the Internet. Not trusting the thoroughness of my search, I went straight to the source. Nine days ago, I emailed the White House website asking when and where the President had passed the bar. No answer to-date.

In the first installment of this essay, I began to attempt to use a small-scale entity to explain the damage done by innocent government intervention. The small-scale entity is my town of Santa Cruz (population about 40,000). In Part One, I showed how the municipality’s practice of taking possession of buildings downtown to shelter social services impoverished the tax roll. There is worse.

Santa Cruz has two main parallel arteries. On one side of the river, lies Ocean Street, leading to the Boardwalk, a permanent carnival near the beach. Ocean avenue is appropriately lined with fast food joints and motels. It’s as devoid of interest as any similar commercial artery anywhere in the US.

Parallel to that commercial thoroughfare, across three bridges is Pacific Avenue, the main axis of the old but renovated downtown. Pacific avenue was largely but not completely destroyed in the 1989 earthquake. It hurts me to admit it but it was redesigned and rebuilt into a gracious model of small-scale urban planning. It hurts me because this was accomplished under the guidance of a Leftie local political elite. Be it as it may, Pacific avenue is a very nice place to hang out, to eat, and to shop.

The latter is an important detail because the city has only two significant industries left: The University of California and tourism. The more visitors spend the better off we all are, including the socially assisted population.

Downtown, Pacific Avenue, would also be a lovely place to stay except there is no place to stay there. Incredibly, there are no tourist hotels and no beds and breakfast anywhere in the area. This is much of a pity because the city is 45 minutes from Silicon Valley on a good day, 90 minutes on a bad weekend day. Still-prosperous Silicon Valley is in our economic catchment area. This proximity is all the more fortunate because Silicon Valley is quite boring for most of those who live there. There is no there there, to plagiarize a statement made originally about Oakland. And what there there is there is almost entirely reachable by car only. There is no strolling and eating and drinking and shopping. (Valleyites will pathetically try to argue that I am wrong, that there is rich Los Gatos and moderately priced- downtown San Jose, and fairly pleasant Palo Alto. Both San Jose and Los Gatos are closed down by 8 PM most nights, for different reasons but with equivalent consequences for attractiveness and therefore, for commerce. Palo Alto is clear at the other end of Silicon Valley.)

Downtown Santa Cruz, Pacific Avenue, is the perfect place to linger after the boardwalk, or the beach, or after visits to the many art studios and to the even more numerous antique shops in the county. The retail shops on the avenue close late. They would be enticed to close even later if there were throngs of non-locals around. The same general area should offer residents of Silicon Valley a perfect excuse to skip the awful and dangerous Saturday late afternoon return trip across the Santa Cruz Mountains. Even some visitors from far-away and cold San Francisco ought to be tempted to come if they could stay overnight because Santa Cruz boasts a warm micro-climate.

By the way, the whole Santa Cruz area, including its downtown, offers a remarkably varied menu of quality musical venues, another reason to say a night or two, perhaps for a different age group.

Visitors don’t in fact stay much overnight because nearly all the hotels are on boring, pedestrian-inaccessible, no-shop Ocean Street, the other artery. Is the lack of places to stay in the vibrant downtown a historical accident, perhaps an unintended consequence of the earthquake’s destruction? Is it the result of a deliberate policy to segregate tourism on the other side of the river that bisects the town? Frankly, I don’t know the full answer to these queries. Here is what I know.

On Pacific Avenue, the good street, within three blocks of each other are two hotels. One was built since the earthquake. At less than ten years of age, it must be in pretty good shape inside, more than adequate for overnight tourists. The second hotel is located on the upper floors of a building that survived the earthquake. It’s old but of such great architectural interest that I always bring foreign visitors to admire the restaurant on its ground-floor, a splendor of 1930s “Spanish revival” style. (That’s Mexican style, revised and improved by Hollywood.) On the same ground-floor is a large bar favored by the locals, a good coffee shop and a superior taqueria. The bottom floor of this building provides exactly the kind of urban environment well-heeled Silicon Valley engineers and their spouses would favor after a day at the beach and a shower. There is no shower to be had.

The two hotels are within a short walking distance of three large bookstores, one of historical note, Book Shop Santa Cruz, and of a lovingly restored 1930s- style large movie theater. There are also several bar and restaurants within three blocks. Many of these establishments offer music on weekends

The city (or the county, or both jointly) has taken possession of both hotels. They are reserved for social cases, people who, for one reason or another, are deemed unable to provide shelter for themselves. It’s obvious to me that people fall into the pit of public largess for all kinds of reasons, including misfortune and illness. It’s equally obvious that, in a prosperous area such as  central California until recently, substance abuse sometimes plays a role in the descent into poverty. Both hotels are located within easy walking distance of the local drug bazaar, the bus depot.

There is more. A few years ago what looked to my experienced eye like a luxury four-story apartment house was completed in the same area. From the outside, its architecture is both striking and gracious. My wife and I, who already live downtown, found it so attractive and so well situated that we made an attempt to visit one of the apartments for rent  Rent was very high but we thought we could swing it if we sold our house. A snooty young real estate woman advised us haughtily that we needed to fill a form even before she would let us look. It was that kind of place. Get the idea?

Since my failed attempt to assess the place, the city took over one whole floor to shelter yet another set of needy people. I know a perfectly normal and healthy young man who lives there, sheltered by his municipally sheltered father. (And, why not,? He is very good to his old dad.)

Note what I have not said. I have not complained about the unfairness of welfare programs in general. (Government taking money from the 8-dollar an hour toiling waitress to give it to some older guy who may or may not want to work.) Nor did I mention the unpleasantness some of the sheltered people often create downtown. (Let’s not be coy; I am in the area often enough to know that some of them are habitual substance abusers.)

I am preoccupied with something else: How many rich Silicon Valley engineers do not spend their money in Santa Cruz several weekends each year because the hotels where they would stay are unavailable? How many entrepreneurs from there, and from everywhere else, have not fallen in love with Santa Cruz because they never knew that it was more than a beach and a carnival? How many jobs have not been created because they had nowhere to stay overnight? How many venture capitalists missed the opportunity to fund our abundant local creative talent because they have never stayed here long enough to notice it?

Conservatives often say that government does not create wealth. It’s worse than this. Government often stands in the way of natural wealth creation. Usually, it’s not on purpose but for good, superficially humane reasons. Government at all levels takes possession of sources of wealth, seldom relinquishes them and then, it destroys them. I miss less the money I pay in taxes than the money, and its beneficial consequences, that never came into existence because of this particular form of demonic possession.

Don’t think this is just a small town tale. The same possession occurs at the national level today, with devilish consequences for us, for our children and for their children.