As part of my April 2026 move-out-of-Cambridge experience, I went to the Home Depot in Somerville, Maskachusetts. Four “youths” were riding full-size e-bikes around the aisles. The checkout lady appeared to be a Somali and was in full Islamic attire. One of the young clerks was white and Following Science (wearing a surgical mask to protect him/her/zir/theirself against an aerosol virus), but mostly it was an environment that would have been alien to a working-class native-born American.
I remember Somerville as a white working-class suburb when I arrived at MIT in 1979 and we would head over to Somerville Lumber in Bennett’s station wagon to buy loft-building supplies for my dorm room (I don’t think MIT ever charged me for the wall damage done by the toggle bolts!). ChatGPT says that it was 95 percent white in 1980 vs. about 60 percent non-Hispanic white today.
Malden was another bastion of the white native-born working class. Today is at least 43 percent immigrant, as shown on this January 2019 PDF (perhaps Malden is up to 50% by now; MA was at 17% in 2019 (below) and today is closer to 20%).
The transformation seems to have occurred well prior to the Biden-Harris open borders period. Here’s some 2016 data on “newly diverse places” (as of 2016, non-Hispanic whites were already a minority in Malden):
Some specifics regarding Malden from the above, again using 2016 data:
Note that the newly diverse communities don’t include places where the decision-making high-income elites would be likely to live (Cambridge might appear to be an exception, but the city maintained an Underclass of Color even in the old days). It seems that the white working class in Massachusetts (voters without a college degree) actually voted against a continuation of the Biden-Harris open border policy by voting, in a narrow majority, for Donald Trump 2024. Naturalized immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat than native-born Americans. So it seems that the native-born white working class of Massachusetts voted solidly against this transformation and yet it was imposed on them.
Consider the effect on someone who grew up in Somerville or Malden and was 20 years old in 1980. This person is now 65 years old and, if still in his or her hometown, part of a literally alien society. Here’s old white guy/Senator Ed Markey at the Malden Islamic Center:
Maybe this particular old white guy wants to talk about the “victims of Gaza”, which the mosque seeks to support, but does the average native-born white person want to do that? In order to live in a society that resembles that one in which the Somerville or Malden Boomer grew up, he or she would have to move to The Villages (NW of Orlando), which is roughly 95 percent non-Hispanic white and only 5 percent foreign-born. (Moving to Florida isn’t as much of a financial win for a Maskachusetts peasant as it would be for an elite. Social Security income isn’t subject to state income tax, for example, and the state estate tax exempts the first $2 million in assets.)
Finally, a New England senator says that the U.S. is short by hundreds of hospitals for the existing population. At the same time, it makes sense to continue bringing in 1-2 million legal immigrants every year to add to the population that is facing the hospital shortage:
I’m struggling to find the point here. Weren’t Irish Catholic immigrants trashed by the WASP elite back in the day as undesirables? My guess would be you are saying they are now undesirable out of lack of need for them, rather than bigotry. Right?
Re: Bernie — Posting on TwitterX, or paying any attention to the posts, isn’t going to yield progress or Progress of any kind. Disconnected dots leading to no conclusion, other than what I already know — Democrats want to spend my money on free stuff to get votes, and Republicans want to spend slightly less money and funnel “tax cuts” into military spending as enticements.
“Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.” — Miss Crawford, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
We can also hold constant the “customer experience”, if we dare to keep using that term, in our search for meaning in this post. I set down $100 worth of media at a used media store in my town, when two white “gamete donors”, or parents, let a kid scream at the top of its lungs. The employees did nothing. I walk out of my home improvement store occasionally, sometimes due to rude employees and customers — black, white, hispanic, or jew — doesn’t seem to matter. I swear never to go back. Today I returned “waterproof caulk, guaranteed not to crack.” Just washed off in the shower like frickin’ toothpaste. Missus Hippy made me clean it up at 11 PM, so she could have a quick shower. 9 bucks for a cartridge now!
Note the reactionary anecdote about the good old days. Probably some old codger looking at Phil going “I don’t like the look of those MIT punks. Damn newfangled bicycle contraptions.” (Hikes up pants.)
Ray Delahanty’s last video was about tax base fragmentation. He discovered the super rich vote for the koolaid but keep it in their own jurisdictions so the poor jurisdictions get poorer while the rich jurisdictions get richer. He found it more extreme in Calif* & Fl*rida than Bostonspun.