The Wall Street Journal is famously schizoid
Peter Brimelow noted here in Wall Street Journal Concedes: Immigration Depresses Wages!
the news pages are written by conventional liberal media Democrats. The Editorial Page, once controlled by conservative Republicans, is now a stronghold of Neoconservatism (a very different thing).
His point was that sometimes
some vague memory of the days when liberals cared about workers
caused the appearance of stories like the one he discussed, documenting the damage done to the American worker by unrestrained mass immigration.
The WSJ Editorial Page remains solidly in the grip of the Neos, of course, but worker-sympathy amongst the news writers is now rare—unless the workers are third world immigrants.
Job Fight: Immigrants vs. Locals Tennessee Residents Compete for Work They Once Scorned; An All-Night Wait for Slaughterhouse Shifts By Miriam Jordan The Wall Street Journal May 26th 2009 seems in fact to take a certain amount of pleasure in recounting how economic collapse has brought skilled American workers to the gates of a Tyson Chicken plant hunting for arduous unskilled $9.85 an hour jobs, (a scene reproduced elsewhere):
Mr. South made $26 an hour as a bricklayer before losing his job in October, he said. Because he was self-employed, he couldn't collect unemployment insurance and soon lost his home...
"Man, I'm staying in line all night for this job," said Mr. Eady, 45, an out-of-work trucker who said he's been checking almost daily with the employment office about the next Tyson call. "I gotta eat, and I got a three-year-old son."...
Outside Phoenix, a metropolis that helped define the recent building boom, college-educated Americans are applying for jobs at the JBS SA beef-processing plant, says human resources vice president Bob Daubenspeck...
Jordan's story begins and ends with sensitive portrayals of - the immigrants involved.
The problem the Americans faced: ferocious well-organized competition from squads of immigrants, many of them recently-arrived "Refugees".
Burmese refugee Cho Aye traveled 60 miles from Nashville on a Thursday morning in late March to take a place at the head of the line outside Shelbyville's state employment office.
The next day, the office was to take applications for $9.35-an-hour jobs processing chicken at the local Tyson Foods plant. Directly behind Ms. Aye, sitting on blankets atop the concrete, were 16 more Burmese refugees...Groups of immigrants began arriving in vans as early as 8 a.m. the day before — first Ms. Aye and the 16 other Burmese, followed by Egyptians and Africans.
(Burma! What debt do Americans owe utterly alien Burma? The Refugee Industry has become as brutal an attack on the American worker as the illegal influx. To its credit, the local Shebyville Times-Gazette realises this.)
Well before the state-run agency opened that morning, officials from churches and refugee resettlement agencies had transported several vanloads of Asian and African applicants from Nashville. An Egyptian minister ferried a group of congregants from a Coptic Christian church.
Much to the outrage of the native Tennesseans, Tyson says it cannot discriminate in their favor (which is probably true - although Tyson is no Teddy Bear).
The result: Tyson hired 51 applicants including 14 of the Burmese. Mr. Smith referred to above was also hired, but, Jordan cheerfully points out, was dismissed a few days later for flunking a drug test.
VDARE.com knows Miriam Jordan and her drum roll of pro- immigration stories at the WSJ all too well. In fact, she won Joe Guzzardi's 2008 Worst immigration Reporter Award.
I see she was educated at Stanford and Columbia and speaks several languages including Hebrew.
Ask Miriam Jordan can she speak - or feel - American?
(The comments to the article are currently a neocon atrocity zone, but note reasonable remarks by a Felipe Rodriguez.)
Hat tip 24Ahead.com
