When millions of individuals from our southerly neighbor deposit themselves in America, particularly into one region, the result is not increased diversity (so idealized by elites) but Mexicanization. That flavor of demographic transformation propels a cultural change where objectionable Mexican social norms take hold, which Americans should find deeply alarming. Because when Mexicans come to America by the millions, they bring their culture of everyday grifting with them.
One of the most common forms of corruption in Mexico is bribery, a socially acceptable rip-off which permeates the country. Kids learn to bribe by paying teachers to obtain better grades. Bribes are paid to move paperwork through the sluggish bureaucracy. One survey found that 87 percent of Mexicans have paid a “mordida” (meaning “bite”) sometime in their lives. A study by Transparencia Mexicana determined that Mexicans paid $2.77 billion in bribes and “tips” in 2010.
Another example of culturally accepted corruption was the 2008 teachers’ strike in Mexico, where the educators demanded that their jobs remain inheritance based. Forget about professionalism or competence or social mobility.
“We’re fighting to guarantee jobs for our kids,” striker Oscar Miranda remarked during a protest in Cuernavaca. “Throughout history,” he continued, “the sons of carpenters have become carpenters. Even politicians’ children become politicians. Why shouldn’t our children have the same right?”
This attitude is common in backward societies where youngsters are brought up to follow in dad’s footsteps, even when it requires tweaking the law to maintain the nepotism if junior is untalented in the family business.
Mexicans do not have the same belief as Americans that the law is central to the equitable functioning of a complex nation. Mexico is the Third World.
In the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, Mexico scored a very poor 3 out of 10. By way of comparison, the least corrupt nation is deemed to be New Zealand with a grade of 9.5, and the United States got a 7.5. Mexico is rated the same as Benin, Malawi, and Tanzania, among other backwaters. Mexico ranks as the 93rd most corrupt of 158 countries in the world, according to the Transparency investigations.
In other words, America’s next-door neighbor and the largest national supplier of “immigrants” to this country is a corruption champ.
You can take the Mexican out of Mexico, but you can’t take Mexico out of the Mexican. Or at least it appears so when examining their behavior after they cross the border. Are they grateful to reside in a society where fairness is a strong social value and bribery is not? Do they respond with appreciative dialing back of bribery behavior?
Of course not. Mexicans keep their mordida custom even in First World America.
In Houston, Texas’ largest city, construction workers are nearly all Hispanics, but not because building is a job Americans won’t do. As reported in an excellent series about workplace corruption by Greg Groogan for Fox News Houston, Mexicans have managed to take over hiring in the construction business and keep citizens out based on demanding bribes from their countrymen plus offering an inexpensive, exploitable workforce to employers. A Mexican who wants a job has to pay hundreds of dollars upfront just to start, plus a weekly payoff of $50-$70 to keep his position.
It has helped the investigation that whistleblowers came forward and explained the situation from ground level.
One long-time construction worker said that major landmarks in Houston were built by illegal alien labor gangs which excluded citizens. “Duane” (who didn’t want to use his real name for fear of being blackballed) said that Reliant Stadium, the Toyota Center and other big projects were erected by largely illegal workers.
A local contractor’s group agrees that 90 percent of area construction workers are Hispanic, yet the 2010 Census found that 40.8 percent of the population of Harris County has that background. The businesses that benefit from cheap labor want to continue the fable that Americans don’t want to work in construction any more, but the truth is that both contractors and workers have been pushed out by the cut-rate wages of exploitable foreigners.
Ricardo Charles, another whistleblower in the series, explained how Mexican racism plays out in the illegal labor gangs. He observed that “Blacks are out of the question” to be hired in the new corrupt world of construction in Texas. “Nobody wants a black person in there,” he said.
White Americans are not hired either, because Mexicans prefer to be around others of their tribe. Furthermore, the mid-level bosses wrangling the crews want submissive underlings who understand the Mexican way of work and won’t raise a ruckus to the media or authorities about the everyday grifting. “They are afraid that white people are not going to put up with their unethical acts,” Charles remarked.
Mr. Charles has written and self-published a book about the problem, Mexican Cliques in Construction, which is available from Amazon.
The whistleblowers say job-site bribery goes on across Texas, but it’s likely that the same sort of corruption occurs in other areas of high Mexican residence, based on cultural patterns of behavior.
As whistleblower Charles said, “They are all in the same conspiracy. It is a gang, like organized crime.”
The situation is job theft and corruption by Mexicans on an industrial scale. It directly harms American workers during a wretched recession in which accumulating years of unemployment have pushed some into poverty and has caused bankruptcies, divorces, and the loss of homes. If there has been an official investigation or arrests, it has been kept very quiet.