One of the advantages of wealth is that it insulates you from the negative effects of wrong-headed governmental policies and cultural detritus. For instance, rich politicians and Hollywood types can get the best health care money can buy. The average person working 9-5 or more usually has to take whatever his employer offers unless he can afford extra coverage. The rich don’t have to trek to government hospitals already gutted by uninsured illegal aliens for treatment.
People with a lot of money can send their kids to private schools instead of government schools overcrowded with kids with poor English skills, adding to the burden of schools already in the academic basement. That’s why when I hear Hollywood types on TV droning on about other “cultures” and “tolerance,” I almost lose my lunch.
These same twits don’t associate with these “cultures” unless they hire an illegal alien to do their yard work or clean their toilets. The middle- and lower-class in America can’t afford to be so generous with their money, especially if they’re trying to pay the mortgage and send their kids to decent schools.
Conor Friedersdorf of Beyond Borders has written an op-ed called Multiculturalism’s double-edge sword. He discusses the sort of class conflict that ordinary Americans are faced with every day as they compete for scarce resources:
I sense a great many Westerners are beginning to feel that way about illegal immigrants, who bear the added strike of being uninvited guests. As the costs and inconvenience of their presence grows, our tolerance for it shrinks. Soon overburdened schools, rising social welfare costs and demands that we acquiesce to cultural changes undermine support even for legal immigration.
The transformation is ugly, whatever one thinks about immigration policy. Generally good-hearted citizens feel anger and animosity toward generally good-hearted immigrants seeking a better life. Race and class tensions muddy the surrounding debate, dividing citizens against one another.
I predict that tensions between black Americans and Mexican illegal aliens, for example, will increase in the coming years, and wealthy people like George Bush, with his penchant for wide-open borders, will remain unscathed. Despite the tone of this post, I am in no way resentful of rich people; in fact, I hope to be wealthy one day myself. Or marry wealthy. 
But I resent elites, especially liberals, telling me how I ought to think.
I just want Americans competing with illegal aliens to know they have the power to change things. They should focus less on political parties and more on policies these politicians are advocating. Or avoiding. Illegal immigration is running a close second behind Islamic terrorism as the most important issue facing our country, and no American should treat these things lightly.
Clearly wealthy elites, conservative and liberal, aren’t worried about competing with illegal aliens for jobs or concerned about government schools systems or bankrupt hospitals. They can afford to be nonchalant about the unintended consequences of “tolerant” social and educational policies. While affecting an “average Joe” image by day, they head straight for gated, locked-down-tight communities after the sun goes down, probably thanking whatever deity they worship that they’re able to live as far away from “minorities” and multiculturalism as they can get.
We all know the type.
