Why Liberals Should Oppose the Immigration Bill: It's About Low-Wage American Workers
If I have a plea to my fellow liberals more broadly, it’s that they focus more of their empathy on fellow Americans being left behind. Because we increasingly live in bubbles, many of us are at best only abstractly aware of how cruelly circumstances of unskilled Americans have deteriorated over the past few decades. Even as these Americans have lost their well-paid manufacturing jobs, Washington has looked the other way while millions of low-skilled unauthorized immigrants have competed with them for low-skilled service jobs. The insouciance of privileged Americans toward the effects of this on life among less-privileged Americans is, in my view, a betrayal of citizenship.
As he points out, to a large extent, immigration reform is a method by which the wealthiest Americans get low cost workers, while Americans at the bottom of the job ladder get more competition, driving down wages.
If the Republican Party were not completely sold out to the same crooks that own the Democratic Party, they would be loudly opposing illegal immigration for the enormous damage it does to the poorest Americans. But that is another flying pigs event.
Great article. And only one person in the comments disagreed.
ReplyDeleteI think a bigger problem is that too many are ideologically averse to seeing the problem. They're not corrupt, they just don't want to believe it. We Republicans tend to favor business, but in this era of hyper-partisanship, it's too easy to let ideology be not just a guide, but blinders.
ReplyDeleteIn that sense, too many Republican leaders and pundits live in the same information bubble as their ideological enemies.
You can find worse ideological blinders on this, though - check out what Libertarians have to say. Too many think that there should be zero checks on immigration. A good example of this can be found at Coyote Blog, run by a very smart but, on this topic, ideologically fettered Libertarian.
Since the 1980s, the Republicans have explicitly supported immigration *in order* to provide lower-wage labor to businesses, with the beneficial side effect of breaking unions. (Cesar Chavez called illegal immigrants "scabs", for good reason. Do you remember when the UFW was actually a union which could bring most of its workforce out on strike?)
ReplyDeleteWhat I don't see is how the Democrats justify increasing immigration to their base.
Statist journal defends regulation? I think those pigs are still on the ground.
ReplyDeleteStatist journal defends regulation that does not benefit their political agenda long-term. That's still flying pigs.
ReplyDelete