Flying with an H-1B
chewing the fat with my nephew's replacement
At SeaTac Kenny decided to get a burger. Hungry or not, I look at the airport prices and always pass on food, but prices don’t bother my son when there’s a debit card burning a hole in the pocket. I found a table, grabbed the green apple out of my bag and took in the scene. It was loud and packed with people from all over the world, especially from Africa, the Middle East and India. The cleaning staff, nowhere to be seen, couldn’t keep up with the holiday throngs. The tables and chairs were dirty. In the bathrooms, garbage overflowed and fell to the wet floors. I would try to describe the people but it just seemed like a teeming cross-section of humanity from everywhere inside the square created by the four points of Algiers, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur and Lanzhou. In other words, hardly any white folks and hardly anyone speaking English.
Of course I had to grouse about it when Kenny came back with his hamburger. “Why does my city, my country, and the entire Western World have to turn into the third world?” I asked. Kenny lives with me in still-white Montana, the fleeting anomaly, but he’s visited dying European-stock lands enough to not be surprised by the scene at SeaTac. He was a bit annoyed by my complaining and just wanted to enjoy his burger.
K- Why do you worry about it? What are you going to do about it?
D- I’m not worried about it. I accept what’s going on around me and don’t let it bother me. You know me- I like to complain; it doesn’t cost me much.
I looked at the father at the table across from us. Both he and his wife were squat and fat, he in a turban and she in a huge, loose fitting abaya and hijab. He was balancing his cute little daughter on his knee.
D- I’ve got nothing against these people individually. I guess I’d do the same in their case and come on over.
K- OK, so you don’t dislike these people and you don’t let it bother you. So why complain about it?
D- Because this shouldn’t be happening. I just want to go after the people who let them in en masse for the purpose of replacing us.
I met my nephew’s replacement, so to speak, on the flight to Tokyo.
Kenny and I were both assigned middle seats on the ANA flight, he in row 24 and I in 28. I sat between a black or mulatta* businesswoman-ish lady on my left and a Chinese guy on my right. From the get-go they both opened a book, while I had my smart phone open, checking my mail before going out of range. That’s right- I had my fondle phone open while on either side of me, in economy class, books were being read. Flanked by slim, educated, decently-dressed people, I didn’t feel so bad about getting sandwiched in an economy-class middle seat for the ten-hour flight.
(*neither AI nor the search engine is much help at finding the right word here. Apparently mulatta can be considered offensive. What am I supposed to say, Creole? Half-caste? A Quora query by a guy who asks, What do you call a biracial person who is half black and half white? gives some answers but none seem to pass the you’ll-be-fine before-the-DEI-high-tribunal-with-this-one test. And a bunch of people are incensed by the question alone. Hey, ass! How about ‘human being’? What does it matter anyway?! Well, I’m a writer just here trying to describe my surroundings. That’s why it matters- Okay, Quora police?)
The businesswoman looked a bit serious and not wanting to be bothered, and the Chinese dude looked like a young and spry, This-is-library! type, so I figured I’d be bothering him more for my lavatory trips. I thought I’d strike up a conversation.
Dan- Are you going to Tokyo, or just connecting there?
Jonathan- I’m going to Tokyo. I’m on vacation.
Jonathan spoke fluent English with an American accent. He was from Indonesia and had been in a private, Brit-run school in Jakarta K through 12.
D- Where’s your Bri-ish accent?
J- That’s what my parents always asked me.
D- All that money and you end up with an American accent.
J- Yeah. Too bad, huh.
D- Must have been all the youtube videos you watched.
J- Could be.
I asked Jon about being Han-Chinese in Indonesia. He said the Chinese population is about 10%.
D-Do the Chinese and Indonesians get along?
J- Uhh. So-so.
Jon lived in Seattle, a town he was ambivalent about. “It’s kind of small and not much to do,” he said. Tell that to a couple mid-teens from Darby, Mt. on three-day weekend with their rich rancher uncle to go see the Seahawks. They think it’s Gotham City Shangri-La! I asked Jon if he’d been around the university much.
J-Yeah. UW has a nice campus.
D-Yeah, that’s my alma mater.
J-Really?
He didn’t bother asking what I studied. Instead he remarked on the commercial section along University Avenue, what everyone calls the Ave.
J-So you know the Ave?
D- Yeah, been there millions of times.
J- I don’t know, it’s kind of run down and dirty.
D- It kind of always has been a bit grungy.
J- Yeah, I don’t like it much.
D- Japan is much cleaner, eh?
J- Yeah. Totally.
We talked a little about our lives, our holiday plans, nothing deep. He was working in the Seattle tech industry of course. Programmer. He seemed like a decent kid. He had no interest in the crap offered on the in-flight entertainment. I thought he was a bit bold to use the stewardess button to get her to come and bring more cookies, just before our second meal no less, but he was very polite when asking for and receiving her help. I asked him whether he spoke Cantonese or Mandarin, and he said neither. “I speak Indonesian and English.” I wondered if I’d committed a presumptuous faux pas there, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He was a likable kid. On the other hand, there wasn’t much in his conversation to make me want to continue probing. He talked about the places he’d been in the USA, but didn’t offer any interesting insights or perspectives that would land us on a good topic for conversation. His trip to Japan basically consisted of visiting neighborhoods of Tokyo, just like the last time he was here.
D- It’s cool to not have a plan and just wander around for hours through the narrow streets of Tokyo, eh?
J- Yes. Sometimes I don’t schedule my day with too many museums and stuff.
I didn’t peer over to see what he was reading, but I did catch a peek when he opened his computer. He checked texts and emails and did a bunch of work. The texts were from friends all over the place.
from Vin- You shoulda come Bali! haha
from Emily- That was fun last Saturday.
OK, I stopped with the peeping at the personal texts. But I did have a look at the work he was doing, and yes, like I said, he was on vacation. Jon must have had a tiger mom because I saw the resume he was working on. Cornell graduate with post-grad work at MIT. Work history included Tesla and Amazon, and all kinds of innovative programming work. Plus he makes cuadruple what programmers make in Jakarta, and Amazon is still getting a bargain. And he could pass for 19! Sky’s the limit for Jonathan Wong, H-1B extraordinnaire!
Reader sez, in nasally voice- See Shumway! These are the types of things. Kenny’s right- you should shut your mouth about immigration and appreciate how lucky you are to have Johnny Wongs and all the rest of them!
I don’t know, when we got to still relatively homogenous Japan and the efficient trains and clean bathrooms and water fountains with correct pressure and over-the-top customer service, I thought about mass immigration and our porous border and our crippled health and welfare system and our debt and Seattle airport and all the legacy Americans living on the street while Amazon and Tesla hire half the engineers in India and Pakistan to replace us. I’d rather not deal with all that even if we missed out on a few Jonathan Wongs.
And what about my nephew in his 20s, soon to be looking for work? Or any legacy American kid his age and younger. What good is a flood of cheaper labor, blue collar or white, to him? How does that help him get a good job, buy a house and start a family?
I get pulled aside by my good-think relatives in Seattle sometimes to be gently lectured about the latest thing that I’m apparently a backward reactionary on.
I didn’t report with glee that my best buddy in California just told me his daughter came out as gay. “That’s pretty common these days,” said nephew Mark.
Cousin Steve and his wife Beth told me how they were flabbergasted when Steve’s mom and step dad left their old Presbyterian church for a more conservative one that didn’t fly the rainbow flag. This was unforgivable bigotry of course.
When in an email I reported to Steve that I was happy to not have to attend the family party where we were supposed to address second-cousin Christopher as Carlotta, I sent along a clever tune by a satirist entitled You’re not a Woman! I got an icy silence for that and Steve’s wife took me aside at one point to tell me how great Carlotta was doing and how she was funny and sunny and very comfortable as a woman.
Dan- Has she had any surgery yet?
Beth- No, just the hormone treatments.
Step-brother Matt brought up the subject of a party he and his wife Sarah had gone to where Kayla, her best friend’s niece, wanted to show off her new baby daughter. Matt told me about Jose, Kayla’s husband from Honduras, and he and Kayla’s 3-yr. old son. “The kid is a perfect combination of Latino and German. He’s about the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen. And Jose is amazing. He’s got a job at a startup in Los Angeles and is just killing it. And his parents were illegals when they came with him! It’s like the total Cinderella immigrant story!”
Good grief I’m not against success stories and hard-working foreigners and half-breed kids! Look at my own situation, for crying out loud! I’m talking about a question of scale. There’s no reason SeaTac and half the state of California have to turn into a crowded dump! We can and should have managed immigration so that it doesn’t severely disrupt the ethnic makeup and therefore the culture of the nation. That was promised when they were getting the Immigration Act of 1965 rammed through.
Wake up, you normies! The mass immigration isn’t only to give Bezos and Gates a better balance sheet- it’s to replace us! Think about your nephews at least! Phuphh!
Anyway, enough of my crotchety, reactionary opinions. I’ll finish with a long quote out of one of Michael Hoffman’s latest Substack articles. We all know about the price we pay for unfettered illegal immigration, but what about the good, legal ones, like Jonathan Wong above, who dislike litter and dirty countertops and come to make America strong again? Here’s Hoffman’s take:
It is the Jeffersonian concept of the human being as God's image-bearing creature, endowed with rights from the Creator, not from any ruler or government which is the philosophy which built America and molded us as a people. We're getting away from that understanding in pursuit of high tech, and living on Mars. How much of our humanity is being sacrificed here in America to achieve the prophesied techno-utopia?
To what extent will the American rural working class be colonized by new arrivals from foreign lands where passing academic tests, doing calculus and climbing the career ladder is the measure of a human being?
I went to school with the generation that put two men on the moon in 1969. We had a state-of-the-art science lab in our new middle school, yet we also had English teachers devoted to cultivating our souls with the canonical literature of the West, and history teachers grounding us in the memory of the founding spirit of America.
With that grounding some of us proceeded to college and afterward, for a few years, we wandered "in the backroads by the rivers of...memory," in the words of John Hartford, to find ourselves.
If [we] engage in that quest now do we risk being branded as backward American losers unfit for competing with Third World dynamos?
The yardstick being used to judge and disparage native-born Americans is artificial. It is contrived by authoritarian personalities who prescribe the measure of what constitutes success. I reject their measurement.
I celebrate the traditional American spirit of the working man and woman, and the unions they formed to fight for an eight hour day, a 40 hour week, overtime pay, a living wage and health care and pension benefits — militating against regimentation and oppression by plutocrats, who insisted that their vision was the higher one that must be adopted by society as a whole.
I will never submit to a techno-aristocracy. I reject the rise of a royal class in America.
Now that is good and crotchety!
A wonderful essay! I get your sentiments.
All I can say is, boy do I relate! (Especially to the part about dealing with “good-think relatives”.)