Yes, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys died at age 82 after a life of brilliant song writing and multiple bouts with drug abuse and mental illness. Brian Wilson was absolutely brilliant – one of the true geniuses of popular music. He was the creative mastermind behind The Beach Boys’ sound, writing and arranging those incredible harmonies and melodies that defined the California sound of the ’60s. His work on Pet Sounds (Rolling Stone considers it the second most impactful album after Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Heats Club Band) is just mind-blowing – the orchestration, the emotional depth, songs like God Only Knows and Wouldn’t It Be Nice. The way he could layer voices and instruments to create these lush, complex soundscapes was revolutionary. It’s amazing how he went from those early surf rock hits to creating some of the most sophisticated pop music ever recorded. His influence on everyone from The Beatles to modern indie bands is huge. But that chapter of human existence has now come to an end. I won’t say it was an untimely end because he seems to have lived to a moderately ripe old age. But it is a sad passing for people of my generation anyway. We will now have to work harder to have fun, fun, fun.
Our world here in California (and to a slightly lesser extent, the rest of the country) is getting less fun, fun, fun by the minute and is being defined at this moment by two phenomena. The first and most prominent at the moment is that Los Angeles, a mere 100 miles from our hilltop, has somewhat artificially become the center ring of the Trump immigration battle. Based on the most recent data I found, over 800,000 undocumented immigrants live in Los Angeles County according to the 2024 State of Immigrants report from USC’s Equity Research Institute. This represents a significant portion of the county’s immigrant population. To put this in context, immigrants make up 35% of the population in Los Angeles County and, according to The Pew Research Center estimates, 1.8 million immigrants in California were undocumented in 2022. But then again, nearly 70% of those undocumented immigrants have lived in L.A. for at least a decade, which means they are part of the economic fabric of the city and not particularly representative of some dastardly criminal element as Trump likes to portray. One of the reasons I suggest that L.A. is the precursor for the rest of the nation on immigration is that California’s undocumented population fell from 2.8 million in 2007 to 1.8 million in 2022. If you’re wondering where those 1 million people went, just look in all the other cities and areas of the United States. They have done what immigrants in America have done for 200 years, they have absorbed themselves into the broader American society. They are now part of the “melting pot” of America.
The term “melting pot” as a metaphor for American immigration and cultural assimilation was popularized by Israeli-British playwright Israel Zangwill in his 1908 play titled “The Melting Pot.” In the play, one character declares: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!” However, the concept and similar metaphors existed earlier. The idea of America as a place where different peoples would blend together appeared in writings from the late 1700s and early 1800s. For example, French-American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur wrote about the “new man” being formed in America from a mixture of different nationalities in his 1782 work “Letters from an American Farmer.”But it was Zangwill’s 1908 play that really cemented “melting pot” in the American vocabulary and consciousness. The play was hugely successful and the phrase caught on immediately, becoming the dominant metaphor for how America processes immigration and cultural diversity. The timing is interesting – 1908 was during a period of massive immigration to the United States, so the metaphor resonated strongly with the national experience of that era. I’m not sure what this era will use as a metaphor for how immigration is connecting with American culture. I suppose that some would segue to the notion that the melting pot has boiled over and needs to be controlled. Others, like me, would perhaps go in a different direction. I might say that America has gotten so lazy that they want pre-packaged processed food rather than the flavorful stew from the melting pot.
The funny part about all that is that it is the immigrant population that provides most of the processed food for America. Immigrants make up a significant portion of food processing labor. They make up 28.7% of all workers in the food processing industry nationwide . In some states, the percentage is even higher – in California, New Jersey, and Florida, more than 40% of their food processing workforce are immigrants. Immigrants make up more than half of hand packers and packagers, almost half of meat processing workers, two in five other food processing workers, and fully forty percent of meat and poultry processing plant workers. While immigrants accounted for 17% of all civilian employed workers in the United States between 2019-2023, they play an outsized role in food production, making up 21% of workers in the U.S. food supply chain. About 200,000 undocumented immigrants are believed to work in food processing and manufacturing, representing a subset of the broader immigrant workforce in this sector…but that is probably grossly underestimated. So, while the exact percentage varies by specific type of food processing, immigrants generally represent around 30% of food processing workers nationally, with much higher concentrations in certain occupations and states. It turns out that Trump may be throwing out the chicken tenders and hamburgers along with the melting pot.
The other issue that Trump can’t seem to leave alone is trade. I saw a chart that shows how tariff revenues are spiking of late. Then I saw another chart which shows how infinitessimally small tariff revenues are in the context of the overall American economic revenue base. And of course, as we all know, despite Trump’s attempts to pretend otherwise and cajole Walmart otherwise, tariffs are an added cost to American consumers. And yes, it’s true that the tariff war is hurting China’s exports, but guess what? It’s hurting American exports even more. The U.S. trade balance deficit is, indeed, coming down, but at what expense? The U.S. economy, according to recent World Bank estimates, is projected to be about to fall off a cliff. That, of course, is only part of the problem. The real problem is the uncertainty that has been created and there is no worse environment for prosperity than uncertainty. Fun, fun, fun.