Immigrant Labor And The Southern Economy

"All you colored people better look out," She said. "You know how much you can get for a mule."
"Nothing, no indeed," the old man said, "not one thing."
"Before it was a tractor, she said, "it could be a mule. And before it was a Displaced Person, it could be a nigger."
The old man laughed politely. "Yes indeed," he said. "Ha ha."

The Displaced Person describes the advent of a third contender in the power struggle between blacks and poor whites in the labor market of the American South. The Southern labor market had been, up until this point, comprised of blacks and poor whites. The Southern economy could even be said to have been stagnated by the tension between these two parties: poor whites assumed an intrinsic racial advantage over blacks which would guarantee them their presumed position on the social hierarchy, while blacks relied on their reputation as cheap, hard workers to maintain their own position. The inception of a zealous and skillful European workforce in the wake of World War II offered, on the one hand, a chance for innovation and progress, and, on the other hand, threatened to displace both parties which constituted the Southern labor market.

When the hard-working Guizac family first arrives on the McIntyre farm, Mrs. Shortley, one such poor, white farm laborer, posits in the above passage that the "colored people," Astor and Sulk,will be the first to go. She ignores her own vulnerability to competition, assuming the precedence of a non-existant intra-racial loyalty over modern business rationality. She cannot possibly imagine that she belongs in the group of "sorry people," "poor white trash," that she overhears Mrs. McIntyre talking about: "Mrs. Shortley could listen to this with composure because she knew that if Mrs. McIntyre had considered her trash, they couldn't have talked about trashy people together" (293). Astor, however, is wise to the workings of a competitive workforce dominated by principles of cost efficiency; his simple, scathing reply to Mrs. Shortley implies a knowledge of what is to come, that is, that the Shortleys will be the first to go. I think that Astor's predictions are informed by his knowledge of how the struggle between blacks and poor white southerners came to be; this was not the first time poor white southerners would be displaced by a new, competitive labor market. There is indeed a "displaced person" in the struggle, and it is not the Guizacs.

Why does Mrs. McIntyre eventually reverse her decision of ousting the Shortleys in favor of the Guizacs? Is she too somehow threatened by the influx of immigrant labor?