{"id":2194,"date":"2010-08-04T07:11:43","date_gmt":"2010-08-04T11:11:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=2194"},"modified":"2010-08-04T08:12:58","modified_gmt":"2010-08-04T12:12:58","slug":"of-feral-cats-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/08\/of-feral-cats-fear.html","title":{"rendered":"Of Feral Cats & Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fear\"<\/a>Fire up the fear machine, let’s all tremble over the scourge of multiculturalism.\u00a0 Frosty Wooldridge<\/a> is a journalist whose stock in trade has become raging against illegal immigrants in particular, with a wide enough swath to slap immigrants in general for good measure.\u00a0 Making the email rounds lately is a piece he wrote back in 2009 titled, “How Immigration and Multiculturalism Destroyed Detroit<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

The essay is a scary depiction of the demise of what was once one of America’s great cities.\u00a0 I lack the ambition to fact check all of his data, but he offers a fair bit.\u00a0 And while I suspect he’s directionally correct, he’s clearly playing a little fast and loose with his numbers.\u00a0 In one paragraph he laments that Detroit has become “a majority black city with 67 percent African-Americans.<\/em>”\u00a0 In the next paragraph he states:<\/p>\n

Detroit plummeted from 1.8 million citizens to 912,000 today. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants converged on the city, so much so, that Muslims number over 300,000. Mexicans number 400,000 throughout Michigan, but most work in Detroit. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, 67% of 912,000 is about 611,000 Blacks.\u00a0 Therefore, of the 301,000 remaining, 300,000 are Muslims and some number that constitutes “most” of 400,000 are Mexican.\u00a0 Um… that don’t add up.\u00a0 Even if you assume some overlap because of African-American Muslims, it’s still some funky math.<\/p>\n

Still, Detroit is a shambles.\u00a0 On that I suspect we can all agree.\u00a0 Yet the larger point of the article is not to convince the reader Detroit is a mess, it’s to assert that it got that way because of the influx of immigrants.\u00a0 Now we could argue about whether this constitutes racism, or classism, or some other form of discrimination, but I think there’s a clearer point to be made.<\/p>\n

Indulge me in a smaller scale analogy.\u00a0 Let’s assume you live in a typical middle class neighborhood.\u00a0 You and all your neighbors are all employed by the local plant, and life seems pretty good.\u00a0 That is, until one day when the plant shuts down and you’re all out of work.\u00a0 One by one, people trickle away because they can’t afford to live there.\u00a0 Many houses are abandoned because there are no buyers anxious to move into a town with no jobs.\u00a0 Over time, the abandoned houses are overrun with feral cats.\u00a0 The cats multiply and before long the neighborhood is full of them.\u00a0 Does it make sense in this scenario to blame the demise of the neighborhood on the cats?<\/p>\n

I’m not remotely suggesting that immigrants are the equivalent of feral cats, so please don’t get carried away with the analogy.\u00a0 The point being, that Detroit lost its major industry.\u00a0 The city blight and the exodus of the historic population was a direct result of the unemployment, which the article repeatedly screams about as if somehow the immigrants caused it.\u00a0 Unemployment soared, housing costs plummeted, people fled to greener pastures.\u00a0 In essence, a population vacuum was created, and it doesn’t seem too surprising that immigrants (and poor ones at that) were attracted to this apparent void.\u00a0 It was an easy and affordable place to settle for very little down.\u00a0 Unfortunately, once they got there the realities of unemployment hit them as well, but unlike their predecessors, they could not afford to escape the situation.<\/p>\n

Now any group, impoverished with little to no way of getting a good job and securing a future, will inexorably degrade into the urban hell that is modern-day Detroit.\u00a0 Corruption, crime, drugs, illiteracy, high drop out rates, is any of this a surprise?\u00a0 And not because they are immigrants, but because they are poor and hopeless.\u00a0 Had this happened to a group of Christian white bread good ‘ol boys, the result would have been about the same.<\/p>\n

What’s happened to Detroit is a shame.\u00a0 But there is no evidence I can see for blaming it on the Blacks, Muslims, and Mexicans living there.\u00a0 If anything, it was destroyed by the greedy rich white guys who drove the industry in the ditch and then bailed.<\/p>\n

This article is fear mongering, pure and simple… and yeah… racist to boot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fire up the fear machine, let’s all tremble over the scourge of multiculturalism.\u00a0 Frosty Wooldridge is a journalist whose stock<\/p>\n

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