Ta-Nehisi Coates is a comic book author, with comic book solutions to grievous American problems. His most notorious comic book solution was an article in THE ATLANTIC, in which he espoused reparations to solve the on-going grievous problem of Poverty among American Blacks.
Coates’ reparations would be a monetary compensation for the American sin of Slavery. Mr. Coates' solution achieved instant credibility among Liberal apparatchiks and their literati.
Liberals do not see a corruption in Mr. Coates’ comic book solution; this Blogger does. Slavery was and is a sin; Coates wants to buy off the sin. Sins cannot be bought off; sins can be expiated. The act of expiation is a way to atone for something you did that was wrong.
Expiation cannot be done in coin but in blood. America has expiated its sin of slavery at Shiloh, the Wilderness, the Bloody Angle, the Peach Orchard, the Wheat Field and the River of Death, Chickamauga.
Mr. Coates’ plan is to ladle out a dole to American Blacks for sins committed between 1619-1865.
This Blogger believes that American Blacks do not need a guilt infested dole but JOBS.
What if America could find jobs for unskilled Black Americans which could lead to an income of 80k per year?
Is that not better than a dole? A Job paying 80k?
Well, there are those jobs, in Washington D.C.
High paying jobs, rather than a dole, would be a great boon to unemployed blacks in Washington D.C. Jobs not only offer money but dignity.
“black unemployment rates among blacks in Washington D.C. was at 12.9%”
Black Americans need high paying jobs to lift themselves out of poverty, not a benighted dole; but those high paying jobs in Washington D.C., for unskilled labor, are being consumed by El Salvadorian migrants.
“A few minutes before going to work deep beneath Washington’s streets, the Salvadoran construction workers checked off the projects they had built for the city’s residents: storm water tunnels, new Metro lines and train stations, and shuttles at Dulles International Airport.
Now these workers are at risk of losing their jobs and being removed from the United States. They are among 400,000 immigrants from six nations whose legal immigration status, based on violence or environmental disaster in their native lands, was revoked last year by the Trump administration, which argues that conditions there have improved enough for them to return.
The administration’s decision will cause economic ripples in other cities, but few will feel it more directly than Washington. Roughly a fifth of the capital’s construction workers are in the United States because of the program, known as temporary protected status.
Already facing labor shortages, contractors warn that projects will face delays and that costs could rise if the workers are sent home or end up staying illegally. Most are from El Salvador, with smaller numbers from Honduras and Nicaragua.
“If we lose them, it’s not going to be easy to replace them,” said Rick DiGeronimo, a vice president at Independence Excavating, a construction firm based in Cleveland that has several projects in the Washington area. About one-third of its workers have temporary protected status. “We’d struggle to finish some of our jobs because there aren’t workers of this quality out there,” he said.
Construction appealed to new arrivals from El Salvador because the jobs did not require special skills or knowledge of English, said Abel Núñez, the executive director of Carecen, a social services organization for Latino immigrants. “The construction industry was booming and these people wanted to work,” he said.
….some have brought homes and cars and have settled into middle-class lives. Many have children who are American citizens.
There are nearly 46,000 people under the program in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, according to the Center for American Progress, a liberal group that opposes the Trump administration’s move. Over all, the Washington area is home to nearly 200,000 Salvadorans, the largest group of foreign-born residents in the region.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Alexander Garray, who has temporary protected status and spends his days 120 feet below Washington, boring a huge tunnel for water and sewage that will result in cleaner rivers in the region. “I pay taxes, I’ve never had a problem with the law, and I own a home. I don’t understand why they are trying to kick us out.”
“I don’t understand why they are trying to kick us out,” said Alexander Garray, who has made more than $80,000 a year for the past several years as a construction worker in the Washington area.
“They’ve been allowed to work on these critical projects but now it’s like they are not fit to remain in the country,” said Mr. Desmond, the business manager of Local 11 of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. He estimated that 20 percent of his union’s members were in the United States under the temporary protected status program.
….El Salvador was the first, but the program was eventually extended to citizens of 10 countries, mostly in Central America, the Middle East or East Africa. Applicants have to be in the United States to qualify when people from their countries are designated for protected status.
The program was extended periodically by Republican and Democratic administrations, and those who had temporary protected status typically renewed it every 18 months.
But last year, the Trump administration moved to end protected status for immigrants from six of the countries — El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan — arguing that it was never meant to provide a permanent haven. In the case of El Salvador, the Department of Homeland Security concluded in January 2018 that the conditions that prevailed starting in 2001 “no longer exist.”
“Many reconstruction projects have now been completed,” the department said. “Schools and hospitals damaged by the earthquakes have been reconstructed and repaired, homes have been rebuilt, and money has been provided for water and sanitation.”
….For now, any action by the government to deport the protected workers can’t happen before next year.
“The statute is clear that the administration has the authority” to end temporary protected status, said Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress.
….In June, the House approved legislation that would allow those already covered by the program to apply for permanent residency, but the bill is unlikely to advance in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Ever Guardado, 38, came to the United States from El Salvador illegally through Mexico in 2000 after he was unable to find work at home. When the government offered protected status for Salvadorans the next year, he signed up.
Mr. Guardado said the administration’s decision to end his protected status had put his life in limbo. “I never thought they would take it away,” he said. “Now I’m scared every day.”
Although he had no experience in construction — he had worked on farms back home — other Salvadoran immigrants helped him find jobs on building sites. “I could see I could make money,” Mr. Guardado said.
“I thought I would be secure forever,” he said. He earns nearly $30 an hour working on transportation projects, owns a home in Sterling, Va., Nationally, construction is the second-largest employer of those in the program, employing some 44,000 people. Only companies that do building-and-grounds maintenance have more.
Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of America, said that construction in Houston, another center of Salvadoran immigration, would also be threatened if the program were terminated. Nationally, he said, more than three-quarters of construction firms say they cannot find enough workers.
“Mr. Garray, the tunnel worker, came from El Salvador in 2000 on a tourist visa to visit his sister and mother. There were few job opportunities to go home to, and he soon found work in construction in Washington.
When Salvadorans became eligible for temporary protected status the next year, Mr. Garray signed up. Since then, he has worked his way up from laborer to equipment operator, and he now earns $32 an hour.
With overtime and double shifts, he has made more than $80,000 a year for the last several years, enough to buy a home and help raise his two daughters, both United States citizens. By contrast, his mother, an American citizen, earns $8.50 as a housekeeper at a Virginia hotel. Unlike him, she does not face deportation, a prospect that gnaws at him….NEW YORK TIMES.”
If Mr. Coates were any kind of a Black Nationalist (his father was a noted Black Panther) he would not be advocating for a dole but would be at work sites demanding that construction companies hire native American blacks before Central American migrants.
In a world of Mass Migration, a job is better than a dole.
The Liberal mentality of keeping American blacks out of jobs and on the dole is egregious in New Orleans.
“In April, the U.S. jobless rate for African Americans fell to 6.6 percent, the lowest since the Labor Department began tracking it in 1972. U.S. unemployment for whites was 3.6 percent last month, while the rate for all races—recorded since 1948–was 3.9 percent. Each of those numbers is seasonally adjusted.
In Orleans Parish, unemployment in March was 4.3 percent, not seasonally adjusted, down from 9.8 percent in August 2010. The state will release April figures for Orleans in late May.
Black male joblessness in Orleans Parish was 43.9 percent in 2015, versus 52.4 percent in 2011, based on U.S. Census data. But in 2016, it bounced back to 48.4 percent in the latest available numbers….. Louisianan weekly”
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans; there was a desperate need for manual labor to rebuilt it; a perfect opportunity for unemployed American black males to learn skills, and advance to the 80k jobs.
Mr. Coates, Black Panther advocate that he is, should have been in New Orleans, making that happen.
Instead he was daydreaming about reparations in the sky while Central Americans were imported to rebuild New Orleans.
They have even built a statue in New Orleans to honor the efforts of Central American manual laborers in rebuilding a black American city.
“Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana. The 2005 storm was one of the deadliest….in the aftermath,….. One of the things we saw as a result of the hurricane was many Latinos who arrived in the city to help rebuilt…. a new statue in New Orleans honored the Latino workers, for their work.
A local doctor commissioned the statue, made of bronze and marble, but it’s clear that the Crescent Park monument means something to many others. Council member Helen Moreno told 4WWL, “We watched the destruction that happened because of the storm, and we wondered, ‘how in the world are we ever gonna come back?’ But thanks to so many people who came and helped us and the influx of Latino workers that we had in our city, we were able to come back, and not only New Orleans, but surrounding parishes as well.”remezcla”
There is no reason on earth which can justify the rebuilding of a predominately black American city, after a catastrophe, by imported labor. Those reconstruction jobs should have gone to American blacks, putting them on the road to 80k jobs, and homes.
Mr. Coates’ solution to black American poverty- A DOLE, is sophomoric, infantile, dare this Blogger say it- comic book.
NO TO REPARATIONS and YES TO 80k CONSTRUCTION JOBS GOING TO AMERICANS.
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