This blog post is about crime, immigration, and economy, not in the form of a systematic analysis of their association, but as a two-part blog post laying out the problem of each. Crime and the economy are of course related, and I trust the reader to put together the implications of economics development in late capitalism for the problem of crime in America. I begin with the media reporting on recent economic trends and connect this to the immigration crisis.
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Today the media is celebrating the strength of the economy, highlighting a tight labor market. To be sure, there was a recent surge in payrolls, but the market is tight because millions of people who quit their jobs over the last several years are not looking for new ones. They have dropped out of the labor market. Since the unemployment rate is determined by those seeking employment, those not looking for work will not be recorded as unemployed. This explains the low unemployment rate, not the genius of withered husk currently occupying the White House.
What would it take to bring workers back to work? Higher wages, benefits, better working conditions, and greater job security—all things necessary for an adequate and dignified life. But firms don’t want those things; those things are antithetical to their raison d’etat. So the mass media, i.e., the propaganda apparatus of the corporate state, is spinning the unemployment numbers to obscure the real reason capitalists are importing millions of foreign workers (legal and illegal): to increase competition in labor markers and put downward pressure on wages.
This is the supply and demand effect, where labor is the commodity and wages signal its price, in a market distorted by mass immigration. Instead of allowing the labor market to dictate wages high enough to draw native workers back to work, business firms use cheap foreign labor across sectors to keep the native labor on the sidelines. The corporate state wants to keep the Great Resignation going.
The public needs to grasp the reality that corporations don’t care about the citizens of the country in which they operate. A corporation may fly a US flag over its headquarters, but it’s no patriot. The corporate person is a psychopath. The corporation only cares about maximizing surplus value and delivering for shareholders, which, firm by firm, is achieved by raising the rate of surplus value (the rate of exploitation) by driving down wages deploying the strategy of replacing native labor with foreign labor and displacing labor where it can through rationalization (which explains the rise in productivity over against compensation). But lowering wages via absolute production of surplus value and rationalizing production via relative production of surplus value (altering the organic composition of capital across sectors) leads to a fall in the rate of profit. Why? Constraints on realization by diminishing consumer purchasing power. In other words, rational firm-level activity produces systemic irrationality.
The Fed has been covering this by printing money. The Fed is not stupid; it knows what it’s doing. The smoke and mirrors is designed to raise debt to force austerity down the road. This is a tactic in the managed decline of a republic, while concentrating capital in fewer and fewer hands, disproportionately the pockets of transnational corporations. It’s not that there’s no central planning going on. This is not the result of anarchy. It’s that the central planning at work here has in mind something other than making life better for the citizens of this country. It has in mind the destruction of America. The working man is on the road to serfdom.
Then there is this from Newsweek: “[T]he $150.7 billion spent on illegal immigration last year is more than the total gross domestic product (GDP) of Mississippi ($146.7 billion in 2023), New Mexico ($131.5 billion), Idaho ($119.8 billion), and is more than the GDP’s Wyoming and Vermont combined, at $50.74 billion and $43.38 billion, respectively. With illegal immigration now costing $150.7 billion annually, the burden inevitably trickles down to the taxpayer. Individually, the FAIR study found that each illegal alien or their U.S.-born child costs the U.S. $8,776 annually. Of the $8,776, each American taxpayer is paying roughly $1,156 per year, FAIR found, or about $957 each after factoring in the taxes paid by illegal aliens.” As I have reported in the past, this is in addition to the half a trillion dollars transferred from the native working class to the capitalist class via the latter’s utilization of immigrant labor.
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It’s a shame I had to tell my criminology students Thursday, as we reviewed the official crime statistics, that, beyond the data on homicide (dead bodies are hard to obfuscate), I don’t trust the numbers. Why? Because they’re under the control of an administrative apparatus that systemically deceives users of its services—especially those agencies charged with keeping and monitoring domestic security. They’re lying about crime. Property crime is exploding on our streets and the Crime Data Explorer (CDE), the new dashboard system rolled out by the FBI in 2020, indicates that, with the exception of motor vehicle theft, property crime is declining under Biden. And it shows robbery in decline. That’s not possible.
Part of why the data show a decline is because many high crime areas are not merely failing to record/report numbers to the FBI—the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicates that only 45 percent of criminal victimizations are recorded by law enforcement, and fewer than 12,000 of the 18, 000 reporting authorities are reporting their numbers to the FBI—but that a lot of criminal events don’t meet the thresholds of new laws in high-crime areas that make felony theft a misdemeanor, so they don’t even make it the Index (the FBI’s system of the most serious crime); the stores that are being looted need more than a $1,000 to report a felony and many corporations are instructing their employees to let people steal with impunity. Add to this the perpetrators allowed to walk after arrest and the reality is that we’re in a major crime wave actively dissimulated by the corporate state.
You have to get into the granularity that the CDE dashboard permits to find the agencies that more accurately record and report data. I’m guessing readers probably have some idea which agencies do a better job. Not the progressive cities. The progressives cities have so politicized crime and violence that you cannot trust their numbers—except for homicide. So I guess homicide is now the proxy for crime in America. And homicide is exploding. When you see the demographic profile the CDE provides you will understand why obfuscation is needed. (See How Progressive Criminal Justice Policy Puts Black Lives at Risk; Is It Guns?)
I am hearing the objection that studies show illegal aliens commit less crime than natives. What a braindead way of looking at the problem of immigration and crime. Those who are at risk to commit crime in America are the disemployed and marginalized—made this way by globalization, a capitalist strategy marked not only by off-shoring production, but by displacing native labor through mass immigration. One would expect that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime since they’re gainfully employed.
My point is largely a theoretical one, suggesting that there is a fundamental problem in the approach of studies that compare rates and conclude that native Americans have higher rates compared to illegal immigrants. Those studies (the pro-immigrant Cato think tank is a major source of the reports used by the media) are problematic on their own grounds, since researchers use arrest rates, which underreport immigrant status (immigration status is often determined at a later stage of the criminal justice process), and, moreover, illegals may be more reluctant to report crime for fear of deportation; but accepting the research on their face, researchers ignore the indirect effects of mass immigration.
It is not controversial in criminology to state that street crime is associated with economic deprivation, poor labor force attachment, and social disorganization. To be sure, not everybody experiencing these conditions turns to crime; rather, these conditions are criminogenic, making more likely those living in these conditions will break the law. Workforce participation rates are higher for immigrants than for native workers. Black and brown Americans living in the impoverished inner-city conditions associated with street crime are displaced by immigrant labor. It follows logically that immigration is indirectly associated with crime among native Americans by exacerbating the conditions experienced by these populations. This either makes immigrants appear underrepresented in crime or mediates the much great involvement compared to native Americans.
Connecting the two parts of this blog entry, since immigrants are taking the job of natives—and preventing the development of tight labor markets that would draw the industrial reserve back into the labor force—the infusion of immigrants in the workforce is exacerbating criminogenic conditions. As I have indicated, black and brown Americans are most affected by Biden’s immigration approach. We might go so far as to suggest that the establishment’s open borders policy is a racist policy. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was followed the very next year by the opening of America’s borders. Opening entry to the US to immigrants other than Western and Northern Europeans, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 significantly altered immigration demographics in the country. You can see all around you where this change has brought us.
My advice to readers is to get a gun and get trained on how to use it. I also recommend that folks get out of the city if they can. I fear that with the millions of illegal aliens and all the native Americans displaced by them this is only going to get worse.
freedom and reason 