She is a very beautiful young woman…delicate and graceful. She is an immigrant from Kosovo who works alongside an older woman also from that Eastern European nation. They clean houses and do it well. But she is a serious musician – playing the flute – a member of a group of musical countrymen who are good enough to be playing at Carnegie Hall next May.
Listening to her talk about her experience in America is listening to an immigrant’s reality – leaving a home country which simply cannot provide the opportunities for earning a living and making a life what it wants to be instead of what it has to be just to exist.
She is deeply grateful for her life here and is very aware of young Americans in her age group who don’t seem to have had the education she had in Kosovo, and appear to her not to take work or very much else very seriously…certainly not as seriously as she does. Her remarks are made almost apologetically because she is talking about Americans to an American couple whom she works for about young people who don’t seem to realize how lucky they are to be living here with all the opportunities America provides.
How true.
IMMIGRATION
We used to call America the land of opportunity.
What did we mean? In the very earliest days we didn’t mean anything. The thirteen colonies, formed on the Eastern end of a vast, unexplored land mass, fought a war to be free of British rule.
That war started with a very symbolic act: the Boston Tea Party where colonists emptied a British vessel of the tea that it had brought from England for the British who lived, worked and governed the colonies.
The country that would be would be a capitalist nation with an economy based upon the concept of free markets and free trade…though “free” might have been a bit of a stretch.
Once done, with a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution to guide us, we were now free to build a nation that could support and defend itself, teach its children to read the Bible and expand West to the furthest end wherever that would be and whatever we might find.
In that process of growth, we had developed a “North” and “South” of us that represented not simply a direction of growth but a very different form of lifestyle and industry.
The Northern colonies found an ability to industrialize their economy as they developed the elements to meet the needs of their people in a very early form of technology.
The growth of the South found that their climate made using the very land itself to provide the entire young nation with food and materials needed to both support the growth of all and the continued expansion into the unknown vastness of the land beyond.
It was that development that made the South the agrarian territory that demanded far more money and manpower than existed.
And with that need came our first opportunity for immigration.
Sadly, that immigration came from nations far from the boundaries that existed here and it arrived in the form of slavery from black Africa.
Slavery made it possible for those with the money that controlled the South, to provide the free labor that allowed the South to compete with the North in the development of its economy with some form of equality.
We know now that when the North – where our government existed – chose to end slavery this country ended the free labor that the South profited from in every form.
What ensued was the Civil War that killed more Americans than all the Wars we have fought since. In a way revealed through today’s politics, that war never really ended.
Today we consider Red States vs Blue States in our never-ending electoral process. You really have to live in the South to see, feel and hear this truth in its deepest moments.
But what of immigrants that followed?
America, as no other nation in the history of the World, continues to be the singular destination of people from all over the Earth who come here first and foremost to gain a life through work that they cannot ever achieve in their home countries.
No matter the country, the ability to earn enough money to make a decent life is essential to all people. When that ability does not exist, those ready to work go to a country where that ability exists. America leads that list. No other country is close.
This is true of the Mexicans who cross the border to keep Texas running as it does. Without them, all Texas would have is its accent. Immigrant Hispanics make New Jersey the Garden State because they cut the grass in front of all the homes in the State even as they are hired by the white “organization” which controls the State. Immigrants from India and South Asia come here as students and stay as doctors, surgeons, dentists, nurses and those who run physical therapy businesses. Those from the Mideast who want a greater sense of freedom from governments which ignore individualism, come here to be free.
Just a few years ago Texas began bussing immigrants to New York City who had crossed the border illegally from nations in South and Central America. Thousands came uninvited with no idea they would be sent to New York City. They had no plan, no idea of what to do. New York did as much as it could to house, clothe and feed them with all sorts of arrangements to make that help available.
Slowly, little by little, most found themselves on the way across the State or to nearby places like New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, finding work that they could do or learn to do.
Nothing like this had happened since the early days of the 20th Century when immigrants came from Europe in such large numbers that there were frequent laws written to stop the flow from various nations like Italy and Ireland. Those laws generally worked to control the rate of arrivals but there are many stories of Europeans who “swam” from large ships to shore with families waiting for them.
Again and again, America has made room for immigrants because WE NEED THEIR LABOR and their involvement in the continued strength and productivity that has made us the World Power that we became.
The difference – and the problem – is this: then immigrants were white. Today immigrants are brown.
Richard Reeves, a serious and respected writer of current events in the last half of the 20th Century, predicted in the 1990’s that by the year 2030 America would have more brown people than white ones. That prediction seems right on the money.
POLITICAL APPROACHES
America elects a President every four years. A Vice President comes along with that package.
Heritage maintains a control over our national politics to a degree unknown in our history.
While Mr. Trump employs his very special personal approach to leadership in which the President and not Congress leads the nation, Heritage has already established the Vice President as the real spokesperson for it as we quietly but definitely begin to see.
In 2009, a Gallup poll showed that 55% of Americans rated the ethical standards of members of Congress as low and very low placing them right alongside of used car salesmen (51%) at the lowest bottom of the list.
By 2025, another poll reported that the number of Americans suspecting that low Congressional standard of performance and honesty had jumped to 86%…a number quite a bit higher than the public view of used car salesmen.
Now, political commercials fill the air concerning a Congressperson’s use of illegal insider trading to make a great deal of money for themselves and urge them to make those trades disappear.
And today, more than ever, we see how the forces that really run America – the ten percent of Americans rich enough to own 90% of the country -keep growing and expanding their influence on government while millions of citizens openly hate our government convinced that those we elected don’t give a damn about us.
We have written before of the failure of the national political parties to pressure for Congressional involvement and as neither do, we look at an army of TV commercials identifying candidates for Congress who do not identify their party affiliation if they are Democrats and who quote Mr. Trump’s support if they are Republicans.
The failure of the national parties has stunted the impact in New York specifically of the “third” or minor parties who made elections in NY State especially involving.
That reality and the difficulty of third parties to automatically secure and maintain a place on the ballot, has weakened the system and narrowed its scope.
New York’s Republican Party barely exists. The Democratic Party simply got lost.
Further, it is noticeable that many candidates for Congress no longer have a genuine history in government. They just decide to skip experience in local government and go directly national because they think they have a background – like serving in the armed services – that automatically qualifies them to be in Congress.
The arrival of half a dozen women in Congressional seats several years ago established the idea that anyone – especially a woman- can qualify just by stepping forward to run.
That approach was heightened not by a national party approach to government but by the winning focus of an organization – the Democratic Socialists of America – who saw the opening and after waiting for 34 years to do so – came on strong to take on the Democratic Party by announcing its strength as a left wing of the party able to win elections against Republicans and even against Democratic candidates.
Its most recent successes in New York City and in select States across the nation have given it strength it never possessed.
And they know how to use it.
THE HERD MENTALITY
In 2015, Bernie Saunders lit up what would become the Gen Z generation with a campaign for the Presidency which had absolutely NO CHANCE of being successful – and he knew it.
To say that he was totally stunned by the response of young America doesn’t begin to describe it. The political establishment felt the same way.
What he didn’t realize was that his essential idea that 10% of the people should not be able to own 90% of the nation carried the emotions of millions of young people who wondered what their future was going to look like when they took their noses out of their cellphones…because this was the first generation that had lived in their cellphones all their lives and would become -without them knowing it, the least educated generation in modern American history.
Bernie was not talking socialism. Bernie was talking old fashioned Liberalism which had been forgotten by a Democratic Party which as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had said knew how to become its own worst enemy – and had just done so once again.
Quietly without any word or notice, the Democratic Party was no longer the party of the blue collar working class but had attracted support from largely college-educated men and women across the nation.
And so the negative attitude that Americans have about politicians was once again strongly supported by their neglectful approach to the public they are supposed to be serving.
The Democratic Socialists born in New York City focused on New York and learned with their support of a pretty girl from Westchester, New York that if they surrounded her with a friendly mob of young people enjoying each other and their job of knocking on doors to introduce AOC and themselves – they had something special going on.
That “special” took advantage of the fact that Gen Zers are essentially a lonely group which loved to be part of a larger group to have fun with – think the New York Knicks celebration or Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden – which attracted tons of very happy Zers and you have the answer to why a complete unknown Gen Zer – Zohran Mamdani – became Mayor of New York.
Sadly for New York, he clearly has trouble knowing what to do.
But this he does know: the Herd Mentality works and so he pays a woman $175,000 to reach 1,700 influencers to keep the herd on the move
at every occasion.
What lies ahead is an $8 billion deficit… and a Governor who once reelected will not be so obviously kind and seemingly supportive.
In the end, money counts.
And counts a lot.
In fact, in the America we live in today -that seems to be all that does.