If you are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan, before he was President and before he was Governor of California, he hosted and served as the spokesman for Death Valley Days. It was an early TV show sponsored by 20 Mule Team Borax. The future President would show you on camera how effective Borax was in cleaning just about everything. (Borax is still readily available as a laundry additive and borate compounds still have various uses in our daily lives.) Early prospectors did not find gold in Death Valley, instead, they found vast quantities of sodium borate in the salt flats there. For thousands of years mineral-laden water evaporated, leaving a thick layer of salts. It was 165 miles from the borax ore to the nearest railroad terminal. This made it impractical to haul raw borax ore from the salt flats to the railroad for distant processing. The borax ore had to be processed on site.
The technology was simple, but the work was brutal. Workers gathered the borax ore by hand, loaded it onto wagons, crushed it, mixed it in hot water, and allowed it to cool, which formed crystals of pure borax. Once collected and dried, the borax would be loaded into wagons and pulled by a team of twenty mules the 165 miles through the Mojave Desert to the railroad. It was necessary to attach a 1,200-gallon water tank to the wagons for drinking water for both the human drivers and the mules.
When temperatures in Death Valley exceeded 120 degrees, work stopped—not out of concern for the workers, but because the borax crystals would not form when it was that hot. Although the TV show didn't emphasize it, most workers at the Harmony Borax Works in the late 1800s were Chinese immigrants making about $1.30 per day. Deductions for food and lodging were taken from their pay.
Reagan would have known this. He knew Chinese immigrants built the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. He also knew California agriculture depends on immigration. He also knew the White House was built with involuntary immigrants (slave labor). He knew the Brooklyn Bridge was built primarily by Irish, German, and Italian immigrants. With each passing decade the ethnicity of immigrants changes. Accepting change is always difficult, even when it is for the better. America's economy has always depended upon finding a new wave of immigrants to do the truly hard work that established Americans do not want to do. Our standard of living depends in part on immigration. In Reagan's final speech to the nation as President, he went on to say, "If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."
Take a walk with Birkenstock.
