Above, a gif of Trump campaigning in West Virginia, 2016
It is now almost twenty years that I’ve been writing Labor Day columns for VDARE.com. My first, at the bottom of the list below, is titled Happy (Fairly Priced) Labor Day! That gets to the point of Labor Day: It’s about the American worker, the man the American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers (an immigrant himself from England) wanted to protect from cheap foreign labor. A more recent one was titled Happy Riot-Free Labor Day!—No Thanks To The Economic Policy Institute.
That later article was a general critique of the EPI’s “economistic” approach to labor importation, with no thought of the rights of specifically American workers.
EPI had written: Brazilian Protests: Could They Happen Here? June 24, 2013. I replied: “Well, the answer to that is: It’s much more likely that the United States will suffer riots of the kind that rocked Brazil in June if it keeps importing the kind of people who do that kind of rioting.”
I’m no longer able to wish the US a “Riot-Free Labor Day.” But in 2020, the problem isn’t mass Latin American immigration. The recent riots are the result of the previous importation, between 1619 and 1807 of the ultimate in cheap labor—African slaves.
Slavery was and is an African custom which should never have been imported to the US. The reason for this importation, back in the day, is that Africa was (and is) the only place that people were for sale. But pre-Revolutionary planters could have found English or Scots immigrants to do the work—like the modern day US Chamber of Commerce, they just didn’t want to pay them.
At the moment, American workers, especially those with what I may call “real jobs”—i.e., not sitting at a computer, like me, but moving, building, fixing, or actually doing something—are suffering from the lockdown. It’s been going on for quite a while: An earlier, non-Labor Day column was headed “Easter During Coronavirus: The Resurrection Of America Will Come” five solid months ago.
However, there is one bright side—immigrants are by and large not taking the jobs that are left…and there are fewer of them to take American jobs.
Here are the headlines of Edwin S. Rubenstein’s National Data columns for the last six months showing that:
(Ed is updating tomorrow—it’s dramatic; watch this space!)
What this means is that Trump’s election mattered a lot. And his re-election is likely to matter more.
Trump is the only candidate of either party to appeal to American workers against the plutocrats and the immigrants coming to take their jobs. My 2011 and 2012 Labor Day columns were headed No Jobs For Labor Day In Obama's America and No Jobs For Labor Day In ROMNEY'S America, Either?
I don’t know what my headline will be in 2021. But I hope for the American worker’s sake that it reads “In Trump’s America” rather than “In Biden’s America”.
Happy Labor Day to all our readers, especially those lucky enough to have a job to take the day off from!
Previous Labor Day coverage, back to 2001.
