Globalized offshoring of auto jobs trapped white working-class Midwesterners without alternatives

Evidence

John’s father had earned an honest living at GM, and John wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. He wanted to stay home, hold a normal job, attend the same Catholic church that set his childhood Sundays, and raise his children in Lincoln Park. But he ran into a dead end after dropping out of high school and when globalization sent most of the auto jobs at Ford and GM abroad, where labor was far cheaper. For his generation, the American Dream—and the vehicles needed to realize it—were being shipped abroad. The days of new sedans elegantly cruising down Southfield Road were replaced by “hillbilly elegies” scored to the tune of “declining home values” that “trap[ped] people” in white towns like Lincoln Park, towns that faded from working-class oases to opportunity deserts. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 186

Categorization

• XREF: Hillbilly Elegy thematic resonance — connects to class-decline narratives in the US Rust Belt outside the Islamophobia frame.