America cuts off its nose to spite its face

We want formerly incarcerated people and immigrants to contribute to the work force. But, upholding white supremacy is more important apparently.

Booker Dunbar’s first job out of prison was making screws for a company in Nebraska that contracts with the Defense Department. Dunbar is charming. “I can talk to anyone, you know?” he tells me. He was hired on the spot. In fact, his manager liked him so much he never got around to doing a background check. But during a routine inspection, an agent with a group that oversees Defense Department contracts started eyeing him. “You don’t want to be paranoid but I was the only Black face there,” he says. A few days later his manager regrettably had to let him go. He tried several staffing agencies and they never called him back after running his background check. He tried working for Uber Eats. “A little red exclamation point came up on the app when they found the felony, so I couldn’t do that.” His most recent job, at a Xaxby’s restaurant in Georgia, ended after an employee found his social media and told the boss they didn’t feel safe working with a felon. He’d been doing such a great job the restaurant was paying for night classes to boost him to a managerial role. “Georgia is terrible,” he says. “You serve your sentence and when you get out you’re still ostracized, still judged.”

“I’m not Hannibal Lector!” he jokes. To say the least. Dunbar was charged with possession with intent to distribute marijuana in 2018. When a Georgia cop pulled him over he had a little over half a pound on him. He faced 8 years, served 4.

Dunbar is a former Marine. “I fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, the judge didn't care about none of that. It worked against me. He said, “You come from a strict code of conduct.”

It’s in the Marine corps that Dunbar learned how to build electronics by hand. The man is literally McGyver. In prison, he jerry-rigged a heater and an electric boiling pot out of like Saran Wrap and styrofoam (you can see all this on his TikTok). As we talk, I keep thinking that this dude should be an electrical engineer; or, that his inventiveness would be useful in a Silicon Valley that’s been calcifying thanks to billionaires with founders syndrome (the delightful quality where the person at the top is totally out of touch but still micromanages everything). Instead, he’s not allowed to work at a restaurant.

It’s terrible for him; but it’s also terrible for everyone else, because we could be profiting from a talented person but have decided to throw him away. (An important aside, I convinced him to start a Substack because he has stories like “Do you think it’s interesting to write about how I managed to get nookie with the nurse right before roll call?” YES. This is literally more interesting than all of Substack. I’ll post a few things by him here, please support his work).

Anyway, his talents (electronic, not seductive!) made me think of another population that offers America its talents and services and we’re like, “No thanks!” Immigrants. Immigration is practically fucking impossible. This is why people risk their lives to do it illegally. The CATO Institute (yes yes libertarians “bad” but on immigration they’re better than progressives, who are still stuck in the morass of endlessly waiting for the factory jobs to come back to the white working class).

Currently, the Mayor of “blue” New York is torturing migrants. He’s forced them to live on the street. He actually considered putting them on The Boat, a literal jail barge that floats off of Rikers Island. You can see them on the trains, selling candy, and it’s pretty obvious they’re recent arrivals because even the little kids don’t know English yet.

Economists agree, in near 100% consensus, that immigrants boost the economy. Anecdotally, all the migrants interviewed in the press is like, “I just want to work.” And we’re doing a collective, “No thank you! Sure, you’re brave and strong enough to trek thousands of miles and risk your life to build a better life in America! No need for an infusion of your kind! Americans are doing so good, what with the fentanyl and other deaths of despair! Go away!”

My (Bulgarian) Dad worked as an electrical engineer in the US for thirties years, starting in the early nineties, when we immigrated after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. When he started, the near-retirement guys, he says, were so brilliant they could draw the inside of an airplane engine by hand. Most of them had been recipients of the GI Bill, many had come from the working and middle class (I have a strong theory that the Greatest Generation wasn’t great because of WW2—even righteous wars are traumatizing—but because of the GI Bill, the largest infusion into US education). As they retired and died off in the late nineties and early aughts, it was nearly impossible, my father says, to hire young American engineers. Math and science education in public school is so atrocious that very few kids are given the tools to pursue engineering. And the ones who do run straight to Silicon Valley to become start-up millionaires. Which leaves the, I’d say, important work of developing “green energy” airplanes to immigrants. One of my Dad’s bosses jokes that he doesn’t trust anyone he interviews if they don’t have an accent. My Dad had colleagues from Turkey, India, the Middle East, Africa. His young mentee, who took his spot when he retired, got there by way of a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

We want people like that guy—as well as Dunbar, as well as the family that’s going to bring the next insanely good Halal place to NYC—in the US workforce! Oh shoot, I forgot that upholding white supremacy is more important, my bad.