So it is true that anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric continues unchecked, driven by the prolonged Republican presidential primary campaign, fed by the fights in places like Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina over mostly unconstitutional state laws on immigration and festooned by the antics of the hate-filled Joe Arpaio. And the tone of the attacks that like shrapnel explode in every part of the HispanicLatino community might get shriller still. However, a sliver lining adorns every cloud.
Category Archives: Economy
National Decline: A Burden for HispanicLatinos
The phrase national decline finally has entered the lexicon of American political thought – and not soon enough. How much time America has to address its national decline is an interesting question given that the nation’s government has entered a period of stagnation and ideological paralysis. The institutions of government, paralyzed by the nation’s increasingly polarized and monetized politics, show no signs of being able to put forth strategies to sustain the nation’s future.
Justices Damage the Nation and HispanicLatinos — Its Very Future
The damage the Supreme Court inflicted on the country with its wrong-headed ruling in Citizens United should be evident enough even to its most ardent proponents, except for the columnist George Will, of course. The justices, with the likes of Will pulling at the floodgates, enabled multi-billionaires to pour millions of dollars into a presidential campaign that demonstrates how unceremoniously and crudely Citizens usurps the constitutional intent that the vote of any one individual is no more equal than the next.
Now come the warning signs that the court is going to undo programs that seek to increase the number of minority students in institutions of higher education. The court has accepted for review a case involving The University of Texas at Austin that five justices will use almost undoubtedly to roll back so-called affirmative action programs.
Without Solutions, Things Could Get More Complicated Still
HispanicLatinos are more important to America than simply holding up a national population that otherwise would be in serious decline. Yet they are a complicated blessing, given their complicated history. Significant-enough discrimination, legally-mandated exclusion, ample geographic isolation and individual self-neglect in many HispanicLatinos sheltered their culture from full-fledged assimilation in American society.
Thus hindered and restrained, HispanicLatinos began to fall behind early and have lagged through the years. But change can happen quicker today than in any time in history. HispanicLatinos now can develop a new way to manage their immediate future, and they can look to the just-immediate past to see how the prospects of a whole country can change in the span of only a few years.
A Challenge for HispanicLatinos: To Wholly Understand Themselves
How America proceeds into the future with a growing but economically disadvantaged HispanicLatino population is hardly a question on the national agenda. In almost defaulting on its financial obligations last year, the United States demonstrated in real time that after 40 years of economic change, precious few Americans understand how the country got to this point and fewer have a clue about the way forward. Having barely devoted time to understand the larger economic and demographic story transforming the country, the vast majority of Americans could not possibly understand the criticality of raising the country’s debt ceiling.
HispanicLatinos are no different. Beyond knowing the general framework of the problems and challenges facing the country, few have any idea about what they should do next. Even though many more HispanicLatinos are sensing how critical they are to the nation’s future, the true scope of their importance does not animate their daily lives.
You Can Take It With You
It is hard right now to quantify the impact that immigrants leaving the country are having on the national economy. Soon enough, though, a think tank will put pencil to paper and we should have a better idea. But it stands to reason that those of us who through the years have seen cities revitalized from one coast to the other will not be surprised at the data that will show a downtick in economic activity and increased joblessness across the board. Indeed, entire towns and industries in the Midwest and in the South are being saved from extinction by immigrants who do work no one else wants.
We seem to forget so quickly that a growing population drives an economy forward. It is a simple lesson. The term ‘ghost town’ might invoke scenes from old western movies but it also is an economic epitaph: No people, no economy. No economy, no city.
Drugged and Ignorant
I have stopped paying attention to most people who think they know what they are talking about when it comes to the situation in Mexico and Latin America regarding the drug threat. In almost all the public pronouncements of know-it-alls from presidential candidates to the lowliest of citizens, they seemingly all profess to know how to best handle the border against drug smuggling. Fences. Lampposts. Sensors. Armed guards. Pilotless drones. Moats. Walls.
Morons. Few ever consider that the fault lies on this side of the border.
The Eagle Ford: Hope from the Ground Up
So the story of the Eagle Ford Shale is fairly well known to anyone who reads a newspaper. The story is rooted mostly in South Texas, a poor and often marginalized region of the country that today carries significant national and geopolitical ramifications for the future. The story has to do with the discovery of an oil and gas formation that stretches across 30 counties, some the poorest in the country. Together with new and greater volumes of oil and gas production in Canada, North Dakota, Mexico, Brazil and other areas off the coasts of the continents, the South Texas find is realigning the components of the international energy equation that is essential to the country’s energy security and lessening dependence on the Mideast and its chronic instability. With activity in the area expected to last for decades especially as new technology maximizes production, the importance of the Eagle Ford and South Texas to the country’s geopolitical interests should be evident. Continue reading
Time + Ideas = Success
I recently sat down with a mid-career HispanicLatino who wanted my advice about where he stood in his professional life. At the age of 35, he is in a job that he sort of likes, but not really. I asked him if he had other interests than his job and, of course, as I feared, he responded energetically with a list of activities related to entertainment and sports.
This is a reasonably young man who had he had better schooling and better counselors should have his own medical practice. But he spends his truly invaluable time seemingly irrationally – a product of the kind of neglect that seems to be a societal curse these days for even the brightest of HispanicLatinos. By the time they mature and are ready to raise families, young men and women such as these who remain unfocused end up underperforming for themselves and for the country as a whole. But perhaps there is madness in their method. Continue reading
Remaking the Future by Reconstructing the Country
The HispanicLatino population through its continuing growth is remaking and reconstructing the country’s population at the same time that the country’s infrastructure also needs to be remade and reconstructed. Continue reading