The Jews Were Willing to Do What U.S. Natives Would Not
The film industry wasn’t glamorous in the early days. That’s what’s conveyed at Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital, an exhibit featured at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The creators of what eventually personified glamour to the world were the opposite of glamorous, and deemed unworthy of work in traditional entertainment.
Getting more specific, “Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe” were the individuals who created an industry that entertains the world to this day. It’s just that these immigrants were looked down upon. And no, broad disdain for them didn’t include qualifiers about how “the Jews are actually really smart.” No, they were seen as unworthy. The exhibit indicates that “antisemitism barred them from pursuing professions associated with the upper-class, but because cinema was considered lowbrow, it was relatively open to Jewish entrepreneurs.”
It’s yet another reminder that immigrants never look good when they reach the United States. Or almost never. That’s the point, and that’s one reason they’re reduced to work that the natives won’t do. It’s a reason acknowledged by supporters and critics of immigration alike.
Supporters point out that they’re coming from much worse to avoid death, fix their poverty, or both, which means they arrive looking desperate. Immigration critics say much the same: their worry is that immigrants arriving without an invite from the federal government are bringing violence and qualities associative with poverty that would sap the vitality of the United States.
Except that as investors say, the past is a lousy predictor of the future. Apple didn’t start out in a garage because investors thought it had a bright future. Similarly, Nvidia’s motto to this day about it being 30 days from bankruptcy didn’t arise from capital being easy to access. In The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby reports that before Yahoo became the prosperous face of Silicon Valley, its offices were littered with “unwashed cloths and pizza cartons.”
A tendency to judge the proverbial book by its cover has cost investors enormously for the longest time
A similar mistake wasn’t made in Los Angeles, and the non-mistake pays dividends to this day. As the Academy exhibit indicates, the decidedly unglamorous film industry began at a time when the population in Los Angeles was “sparse,” and when oil was the city’s biggest industry.
While correlations are never perfect, the rise of a film industry created by individuals deemed unworthy of jobs in more established areas of entertainment revealed itself as Apple, Nvidia, and Yahoo-like when it came to the powers-that-be misreading the future. It turns out film was glamorous, that the people would flock to what the undesirable Jewish immigrants from – yes – “shithole countries” were producing, only for the population of Los Angeles to soar.
By the 1920s Los Angeles was one of the five largest U.S. cities, and as is the case with all industrial development, the “jobs multiplier” (think Cal economist Enrico Moretti’s 2012 book The New Geography of Jobs) from film proved profound. Considering manufacturing alone, by the 1920s manufacturing in Los Angeles was only exceeded by what was happening in New York City, Flint, and Milwaukee.
It’s all worth remembering as armed agents of a growing and increasingly costly federal bureaucracy not only enter places of work to arrest and deport immigrants, but literally stop people with ethnic qualities on the streets as they drive. This isn’t just un-American, it’s economically foolhardy as the past reminds us. What will be great almost never looks great initially.
Which is the point about immigrants. Their haggard look upon arrival in pursuit of something – anything – necessary to feed themselves and their families is a powerful tell that they’re not just immigrants, but American in their thinking and ambition.
How dangerous to arrest and export such uniquely American traits. What an obnoxious economic conceit.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.