The Compact Mag Piece Proves that there are Winners and Losers in the Job Market

I’ve had immigration and jobs stuck on my mind for a while so when the latest Current Thing appeared, I sort of automatically made a connection. There is a piece by someone named Jacob Savage, who I’ve never heard of before, in something called “Compact Magazine,” which I’ve also never heard of before, which went ultra-viral, I guess you would say? It was about white men being discriminated against for their race and gender through DEI. Personally I didn’t see what the hubbub was all about. Did people really not know this was going on? We’re on like, clown world year ten at this point.

Anyways, for whatever reason, it caught on and people are talking about it. I guess it’s good for left-wing bigotry to be called out and for people to pay attention. I didn’t read much of it because again, to me, this would be like reading an article that explains to you that water is wet. From what I did read, what stuck out to me was that the author apparently makes a living by scalping tickets, and has done so for fifteen years. My first thought was, you can actually pay your bills doing that, and even make a career out of it? Damn.

My second thought was that it provides such a clear example of how powerfully the job market affects people even if they never miss a rent payment. The author explains that he got this close to getting a screenwriting gig—an actual job, that he actually wanted to do—but was denied due to being the wrong race and gender. Back to the ticket mines for him, I guess, at least until that Compact Mag piece took off, I’m sure he’ll have a career in writing/social media now, if he wants it. Even if Mr. Savage has never wanted for money, I think anyone can understand why he might feel a bit bitter about ending up as a ticket scalper instead of a screenwriter.

I’m a millennial, I think, and I took this sort of harsh reality for granted from the time that I was a young adult. I could have tried to do something in academia, but I saw how narrow the door was and how many people were lined up ahead of me. Being a Very Online right winger, I also knew, apparently a decade or more before most people, that my race and gender would be millstones around my neck. So I didn’t even bother to try and I believe that was the correct move.

I knew that the world did not want me to have a voice in anything. At best, I’d be in for an incredible uphill struggle, and even that was a long shot. The most likely outcome was that I’d end up similar to Mr. Savage, unable to even make it to the base of the hill, with a side possibility that I’d get canceled for a perceived micro-aggression at some point. I didn’t have the luxury of just giving it my best shot on an even playing field. I had to be realistic about my life.

My goal instead was to just take whatever I could find that one, pays the bills, and two, is tolerable enough that I don’t dread waking up every day. I’ve been fortunate enough to achieve that. My expectations matched to my outcomes and all things considered I have a lot to be grateful for. But I’ll never influence public discourse in any way other than this blog, and even that I write as an anon. Meanwhile, unknown swathes of people get to have a voice just by showing up, because they were born with the right skin color and genitals.

I’m rambling a bit so I’ll get to my point. Everyone accepts that this sort of discrimination is bad because it consists of handing out spoils to people based on innate characteristics that they can’t choose and can’t change. What occurred to me is that this is also true when it comes to hiring practices that favor immigrants, regardless of the reasons why the immigrants are favored. After all, no one gets to choose what country they were born in, any more than they get to choose their race or their gender.

The simple retort would be that many immigrants are hired because they are willing to accept lower wages, not because they were born overseas. But then, why are they willing to accept lower wages, I wonder… ahh, that’s right. Because they weren’t born in America, and so the ability to live in America is worth a lot of money to them. That’s a feature which is every bit as innate, unchooseable, and unchangeable as race. I think this makes it pretty clear why then, for instance, American tech workers might feel resentful when they are replaced by H1-B Indians who will work for a pittance just to get out of India and into America.

That’s the first and most obvious point I wanted to make. The second is the radical shift in mindset that many people—especially liberals!—adopt with regards to the job market when talking about racial discrimination vs talking about immigration. If you complain about immigrants taking jobs away from Americans, liberals will insist that the job market doesn’t work like that, actually those immigrants also create more jobs, with the implication being that there are essentially always enough jobs to go around at any given time.

The tale of Jacob Savage demonstrates how this can be technically true while still missing the point entirely. Suppose that you’re a tech worker who is squeezed out of the tech industry by H1-Bs. You go from being a software developer to being, let’s say, a ticket scalper. Scalping tickets still pays the bills. But would anyone really say that nothing bad happened to you, and that it’s NBD because bro, the economy still gave you something to do, or something like that?

Well, liberals might, if the tech worker in this example is a white man. Let’s say instead, though, that you have a black guy who wants to be a software developer, and yet his attempts to break into the industry are foiled at every turn by white racists who don’t want to hire black people. The black guy ends up having to scalp tickets to pay the bills. He always has a “job,” his bills always get paid—what does he have to complain about, right? I mean, the economy still found something for him to do! Everything should be hunky dory!

So why did we pass that whole Civil Rights Act thing, then? And if situation number two is actually so bad that we had to pass a sort of secondary shadow Constitution to stop it, why is situation number one totally a-okay? The only conclusion I can come to is an unfortunate one—it’s actually just a result of good old fashioned bigotry. A lot of people—especially liberals!—aren’t very bothered by bad things happening to white people, especially white men. Things get way more bad if they happen to non-whites or women or LGBT. I don’t really see how else you explain the discrepancy.

By the way, this also gets at the reasons why people are so resentful towards worship of GDP. To say that someone’s career prospects shouldn’t matter to them because the overall economy is doing well is like an abusive husband saying to his wife that the beatings shouldn’t bother her because he’s making more money at work every year and he’s going to buy her a new car for Christmas.