That's true, generally, for the most part: <American experience is that the children of poor uneducated immigrants are quickly absorbed and are indistinguishable from other Americans by the time they are adults. This has been the experience with poor uneducated Irish, Italians, Greeks, Russians, etc., etc.>
It's also true in NZ.
But you are mistaking "poor" and "uneducated" as being intrinsic to the people. They are not. I have been both poor and uneducated but I knew then that I would not be staying that way for long. I knew too that the people I was working with would NOT be escaping from their situation.
Decades ago, when a youngster, I sat on some sheet steel at D McL Wallace in Maurice Road, Penrose, [not named after me but obviously a very good street] where I was working. I was eating my sandwiches at lunch time and I vowed never to forget what it was like for those poor buggers to be stuck there all their lives. I don't recall what was on my sandwiches but I remember well the work I was doing [and they were bearing up under] and the environmental conditions of the place.
The reason they would not escape, unlike me, was because I had the natural ability to escape while they did not. I knew I had the ability. Noel Orams [a class-mate] tried three times for "school certificate". He wasn't going to pass and I knew it before he had his first attempt. His parents and the school cruelly pressed him to succeed at "education" when he had no ability in that direction. He could have spent those three years learning to be a really nice bus driver or something he could successfully do instead of spending three years being taught he was a failure.
I became envious of those guys who quit school at age 15 and got going on plumbing, glazier, carpentry and what have you and by the time I escaped from "education" they were wealthy with excellent businesses. In the long run, maybe I was better to stick with the education system, but it's not at all a sure bet. Quite possibly I could have been one of those $ill Gates type dropouts.
The pretence these days is that people are fungible and we can fill New Zealand with refugee Somalis and they'll be good little Kiwis in a generation. That's not true. They are different. Not just by education but genetically. IQ 75 people cannot be educated into being IQ 120 people. It's a matter of DNA.
In an effort to seem non-racist, people pretend that we are all just clones who can be made into anything. Noel Orams was never going to invent the Theory of Relativity, or even design a low level concrete bridge, and would probably struggle with a driving licence test.
Not only are we not clones, we carry cultural baggage. So, when I lived in other countries, I did not become a good little Belgian, Canadian or Pommy Bastard [local expression from the 1970s]. Yes, our offspring adopt the mores of the local yokels, but if there are enough of us, we shift the norms towards our own cultural experiences.
So, as hordes of Chinese move into NZ, they don't become good little Kiwis. They write stuff in Chinese on their shops, eat yum cha, kidnap for ransom, and maintain a dog eat dog, Chinese Wall way of life. They certainly won't vote to work and keep stupid old lazy Kiwi baby boomers in the manner to which they have become accustomed, which is going to be a big shock for indigent old geezers.
There is also the thinking that immigrants are fodder for the citizen-serf way of life. That's the norm everywhere on Earth including the so-called "free" world which is anything but free.
Even if immigrants were equally talented and could contribute, they have not done anything to produce the value of the place they go to. It's absurd that generations of Good Little Kiwis have created $millions per capita in value in NZ and we simply hand it over to any scavenging immigrant who can crash the border. It seems literally insane. It's like people coming down my driveway, getting inside the house and declaring it to be their property - and me agreeing with them and inviting them in to take over provided they make tea once a week, or even if they don't and insist on living on welfare = I work and stock the fridge and keep the tv and electricity going and they enjoy the proceeds. Then, they decide to sell "our" house to their family. I am, of course, free to leave.
I guess that most people haven't actually sat on sheet steel and don't know what it takes to build a valve-tower, test for permeability of compacted clay, grind concrete, erect scaffolding 9 stories high, spray paint with negligible breathing protection, have tinnitus from noisy working conditions, load ships by hand, stack hay in barns by hand, roll huge wool bales around with a hook and muscle and sweat. Mostly these days, people get "education" and a cushy number in some government sinecure and think they are "working". They have no idea of how value and wealth and community are created and built. Easy come, easy go.
Mqurice |
