Page 2 of
2 Exurbia: Built on paradox and
hypocrisy By Julian
Delasantellis
immigrants that are
appearing in their New Jersey neighborhoods". (The
Metropolitan Institute at the Virginia Polytechnic
Institute reports that exurbia is more than 92%
white.)
They want to get away from parents
who smoke and slap their kids, away from
families where people watch daytime talk shows
about transvestite betrayals or "My Daughter Is
a Slut", away from
broken homes, away from
gangs of Goths and druggies, and away from
families who don't value education, achievement,
and success ... Demographic studies show that
they look like 1950s suburban America - intact
two-parent families, 2.3 kids, low crime, and
relatively low divorce rates. You sometimes get
the impression that these people have fled their
crowded and stratified old suburbs because they
really want to live in an updated Mayberry with
BlackBerries.
Government, the traditional bugaboo
of the political right, barely exists in the
exurbs. Many of them only exist as
unincorporated county areas separated from less
than fully interested county seats many
kilometers away. In its place, the uniquely US
phenomenon of the megachurch, huge Protestant
congregations of upward of 2,000-10,000 members,
is filling the socialization vacuum as a central
instrument of group social cohesion,
identification and community service.
Even with the megachurches' adoption of
modern instruments of communication, such as the
Internet, podcasting, and state-of-the-art video
and sound projection so that everyone in the
huge audience can see and hear the pastor, these
institutions are usually profoundly
conservative, both in terms of resistance to
change of religious doctrine and in terms of how
they relate to society's issues of social change
such as abortion, homosexuality and marriage.
With all these socially conservative
influences in the developing cultures of the
exurbs, it is hardly a surprise that their
political orientation is conservative as well.
Brooks notes how "people in the exurbs, while
instinctively apolitical and often cynical about
the political process, are, when they vote,
overwhelmingly Republican. These places are
sometimes 70-30 Republican, and if you look at
every state where Republicans scored an upset
senatorial victory in 2002 - Georgia, Colorado,
and Minnesota, to name a few - they did so with
huge gains from the fast -growing exurbs."
This pattern repeated and intensified
with the 2004 presidential election between
George W Bush and John Kerry. The Metropolitan
Institute at Virginia Polytechnic Institute
reports that Bush received 62.3% of the exurbia
vote in 2004, as opposed to his nationwide
percentage of 51%.
However, in selected
exurban areas, most notably Florida's Interstate
4 corridor connecting Tampa with Orlando, Bush's
vote totals, in some cases approaching 80% of
the popular vote, were so large and lopsided as
to raise fears of a vote-rigging conspiracy
orchestrated by White House political guru Karl
Rove. Of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the
US, Bush won 97.
In those days there was
very good money to be made in building exurbia.
With vacant space for new home lots scarce in
most of the traditional suburbs, much of the
recent activity in the home-construction
industry has been in the newer areas. The
companies that actually did that construction
did very well, indeed.
Starting from
under US$5 in 2001, the share price of Toll
Brothers, one of the leaders in US home
construction, soared upward, reaching just under
$60 by the summer of 2005 before heading back
down with the current housing bust. Share prices
of other home builders, such as Ryland, Centex
and Hovnanian, had equally meteoric rises and
falls.
Is all of this, exurbia's rise
from wildernesses to thriving communities, just
another example of American initiative, of the
American dream triumphant once again? It might
be, were it not for the fact that it's all built
on the backs of a criminal enterprise of
staggering proportions.
I once asked my
students how they were paying for their fancy
business-school education. Besides the huge
student-loan debt they were all amassing, they
described their various labor-intensive
employments when not in school.
One said
he worked summers doing home construction.
Assuming that there was quite a social contrast
between this student, always impeccably attired
with a fresh Izod under his Burberry, and what
must have been his very blue-collar co-workers,
I asked the student how he interacted with his
fellow builders.
"I don't," he replied.
"They all speak Mexican."
"Don't you
mean to say that they all speak Spanish?"
"No. The job sites I work on are so
dominated by illegal Mexican immigrants that
it's like they speak their own specific national
language."
This is exurbia's dirty
little secret. Its houses were built by people
the current residents now don't want anywhere
near them.
Mark
Thornton, senior resident fellow at the Ludwig von
Mises Institute and instructor of economics at
Auburn University, recently wrote:
Immigrants, particularly illegal
Mexican immigrants, have largely found jobs in
industries associated with the housing bubble.
Immigrants work at jobs in the construction,
landscaping, and road-construction industries.
Employment in the construction industry alone is
currently nearly 2 million jobs above trend (7.7
[million] versus 5.9 million). Of course many of
the illegal immigrants are not even counted in
such statistics, but just take a look at
residential, landscaping, and road-construction
sites and you are likely to find many
non-English-speaking
immigrants.
Thornton goes on to
attribute much of the recent boom-bust nature of
the housing markets, of which we now are passing
through the bust (see my previous articles Rocking the subprime house of
cards, Asia Times Online, March 6, and
The subprime dominoes in
motion , Asia Times Online, March 16),
to this factor.
The cheap, illegal (it is
against the law to hire illegal immigrants in the
US - employers are mandated to take positive
actions to confirm either US citizenship or legal
residency) foreign labor made home-building so
wildly profitable that it encouraged the
residential overbuilding that, along with the
crunch in demand that is resulting from the crash
in the subprime lending market, is now threatening
to depress real-estate prices severely.
For a corporate sector whose social
conscience extended no further than next quarter's
corporate earnings report, illegal Mexican
immigrants made the perfect workforce. With many
of them leaving their families behind in Mexico,
they would work far cheaper than would American
workers, and, with the workers being just one
phone call to the US Immigration and
Naturalization Service away from arrest and
deportation, never was heard a discouraging word
about minimum wages, workplace safety, workers'
compensation, or any of the other New Deal
labor-protection regulations that the corporate
sector had so long bemoaned, and now had finally
found a way to circumvent.
This situation
is thick with paradox and hypocrisy; in supporting
a draconian immigration crackdown, right-wing
white America is rebelling against the builders of
the modern-day fundamentalist-anarchist paradises
that so many of its voters find so enticing. Just
as the Hebrew slaves built the pyramids for the
pharaoh, Mexican slaves built exurbia for white,
middle-class America.
And just as the
people of Egypt were visited with the 10 plagues
as punishment for not allowing the Hebrews to
leave, the people of exurbia, if they get their
wish and a substantial portion of the Mexican
illegals are deported, may be visited with a
similarly unpleasant modern plague for not
allowing the Mexicans to stay. They may finally
have to pay a fair market wage to those who
perform their manual labor.
Julian
Delasantellis is a management consultant, a
private investor and an educator in international
business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached atjuliandelasantellis@yahoo.com .
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