Immigration Part 2: American Immigration's Modern Axis Powers
Who's really in agreement on border policy
In my last column on immigration, I described the ultimate reason we should all demand that our borders be enforced: it’s the law and it’s what we want. The American people haven’t wavered and there haven’t been any trends away from this conviction – in fact, it’s the main reason Congress has been “unable” or “unwilling” to change our immigration laws. Democrats and Republicans alike are loathe to touch immigration, lest they incur the wrath of We the People. So why won’t the president simply execute the laws faithfully, as the constitution requires? Why won’t Congress hold the president’s feet to the fire and force him to follow the law? The answer is – some of The People are more equal than others. I call these people the modern-day Axis Powers of immigration: the Democrats, the Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the Libertarians.
The modern Democrat party needs poor, unskilled and uneducated immigrants to replace the countless millions of American voters who long ago moved off their plantation of dependency. The Democrats have successfully established and funded the honeypot with benefits for immigrants including nutrition, education, medical and housing programs. A newly-arrived immigrant (and we won’t even touch his legal status) is treated to a cornucopia of benefits, which only expands the moment he finds a paying job. What the Democrats want from immigrants: their votes. But non-citizens can’t vote, right? Well, that’s the law in most places – but Democrats are working this aggressively. If you’ve already made it illegal to require a photo ID to vote – then what difference does it make who votes? So long as they live here, right? For now, that is. Next step will be voting people who don’t even live in America – why not? After all, American policies affect everybody else on the planet, right? So the Democrats are all in on immigration, legal and illegal, because they believe immigrants will vote Democrat forever. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t true and that over time the Democrats will have to find another dependent coalition. They’d be better off finding some winning ideas that American citizens can support.
The Chamber of Commerce (or Establishment) Republicans (eGOP) are, like their Democrat allies on the issue, all in on unfettered immigration – legal and illegal. Officially they’ll state – for the record – they oppose illegal immigration. But that’s just a fig leaf of modesty on the subject. The reality is, corporate profitability benefits from cheap labor. And this nation has a near 50-year history (dating to 1974) of importing enormous quantities of unskilled, cheap labor. These are the people who do “the jobs Americans won’t do”. Well, Americans would do those jobs if American employers were willing to pay more – but they don’t have to, because there’s an endless supply of cheap, unskilled labor pulling the wage scales of all Americans downward – most significantly at the lower quintiles. I should say of course, all Americans except for the gilded gentry of America’s wealthiest families. For them, the very thought of “wages” is an obscenity. For the rest of us, we’ve seen average family income remain stagnant or decline for nearly 50 years (save those brief beautiful years of the Trump presidency). And if paying people commensurate with their productivity isn’t enough, there’s another choice America’s corporate welfare artists could make – they could invest capital into innovation to make their labor more effective. Buy why do this when you can alternatively just hire cheaper labor? I hate to sound like the campus Marxist here, but the blue bloods of the Chamber and Dow Jones are just being lazy and complacent – and it’s not a “free move”! This cheap labor subsidizes incompetence and stifles innovation just like the slave trade subsidized incompetent farming practice and stifled agricultural modernization in the antebellum South. But Wall Street could really not care less about profitability beyond the next year.
The Libertarian view is important for two reasons: first, the Libertarians are at least as influential a voting bloc as the Socialists on the Left, and secondly, similarly to how Socialists influence the Democrats, Libertarians strongly influence the Republican party (interesting how both see themselves as the “conscience” of a mainstream party). Libertarians advocate for the freedom of movement for all people – and the economic advantages gained through allowing labor to move freely to wherever it maximizes its return. They tout the economic benefit of having a large, mobile (no roots in the community) supply of labor that rapidly responds to workforce shortages as an economic benefit to the nation. One problem with this view is that America is but one player in the global economy - if everybody isn’t playing by the same rules, the nation (read: it’s corporate owners) can be badly damaged economically in the process. The government owes a duty – at least – to its citizen-owned corporations to protect them from targeted economic warfare whose very intent is to drive Americans out of a business area and solidify a monopoly position on markets. Realize that the Chinese are certainly taking every step to protect their industries. Thinking of other countries as rational economic actors is defective reasoning (there are infinite reasons for national economic behavior) and it isn’t in the nation’s long- or short-term interest to permit unrestrained targeting of American markets. This would be akin to permitting the Chinese to bomb our factories with missiles and airplanes and then remarking “Ha! The jokes on them! They have pay for those bombs and missiles!” The other key problem Libertarians will struggle with is the Constitution. Even if we wanted to indulge a Libertarian utopia, we’d first have to get around the Founding document. Socialists have this problem too. Our actual economy isn’t an abstract model – the lives of hundreds of millions of people right here need it to work to their benefit every single day. And they rely on it with their very lives. Unfettered immigration isn’t a hypothetical to our citizens.
So our immigration laws, as enacted, are being widely ignored because this cabal of indifference is happy to leave it this way. This is why Trump was elected and why we refer to our nation’s capital as “the swamp”. A truer populism hasn’t existed in this country’s history. It’s also a glimpse at the powers that needed him gone - badly - in 2020. There really are two Americas. And as impossible as it would seem to be, in one of those Americas the Democrats, the eGOP and the Libertarians make for strange bedfellows.