Update (April 7, 2024) at bottom.
Here’s the Democrat Party plan (establishment Republicans are complicit). Open borders accomplishes a number of things that enlarge and entrench the corporate state and weaken the working class economically and politically. First, illegal aliens displace native-born workers, thus providing corporations with a pliable and super exploitable labor source. Second, mass immigration drives down wages for the native born working class by increasing the labor supply. Third, open borders provides housekeepers and groundskeepers for the affluent classes, while perpetuating the ghettoization of black Americans, an arrangement that keeps that population at arms lengths. Fourth, by creating more government dependents, open borders enlarges those segments of the population that vote for a living. Fifth, it exacerbates the antagonistic contradictions that culturally, politically, and socially disorganize the working class.
The corporate state and its media mouthpieces report that GDP is growing. This is expected. Immigration increases the size of the labor force. More workers mean more production output, which contributes to GDP growth. Like everybody else, immigrants are consumers; they contribute to demand for goods and services, thereby stimulating economic activity and GDP growth. Increased consumer spending may also lead to higher production levels. In countries with aging populations or low birth rates, immigration replenishes the workforce, supporting economic growth. Immigrants tend to be younger on average than native populations, which mitigates the economic burden associated with an aging workforce (such as increased dependency ratios).
All that may sound good, but increasing the labor supply puts downward pressure on the price of labor (wages and salaries), which increases the rate of surplus value, realized in the market by the production of private and government debt. Government debt in turn increases inflation. Inflation is a tax on working people. Wage gains are eroded by higher living costs; the slight increases in wage growth of late are offset by persistently high inflation (greater than 3 percent annually), resulting in a decline in real wage growth. Low wages are weak incentive to pull native born labor from the industrial reserve. Unemployment rates are made to appear low because workers aren’t job seeking. Meanwhile, because of the excess hundreds of billions of dollars transferred from the working class to the corporate class, the top 1% increased their wealth from $30 trillion to $45 trillion under Biden. Mass immigration is a big swindle.
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Update (April 7, 2024)! Today I listen to Bari Weiss’ podcast from this past Tuesday and felt the need to share this will readers of Freedom and Reason.
“When your base is the college-educated elites and the dependent poor—neither of whom are competing with working-class people or with illegal aliens for jobs—you then create policy that caters to their economic needs. That’s what the Democrats have effectively done by shifting from an agenda based on labor to an agenda based around the things college-educated people care about, which, by and large, are things like climate change.” —Batya Ungar-Sargon
Over the past eight years, Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon embarked on a quest to unravel the enigma of Trump’s 2016 victory and elite misapprehensions regarding the American working class. Her journey led her to this realization: the most significant division in American society isn’t merely political but more economic—the gaping chasm between the college-educated and the working class. Traditionally, Democrats have been champions of the working class. At least that’s the standard narrative. However, in recent years, support for Democrats in the working class has eroded. Despite predictions of a diverse, working-class coalition shaping the future of the Party, this prophecy failed to materialize. Instead, Democrats have become the party of the affluent credentialed classes and strata, those who enjoy actual privileges.
In the 2016 election, Trump captured significant portions of the working class vote, including 54 percent of those with family incomes of $30,000 to $50,000, 44 percent of those with incomes under $50,000, and nearly 40 percent of union workers—the highest for a Republican since Reagan in 1984. By 2022, Democrats faced a 15-point deficit among working-class voters but enjoyed a 14-point advantage among college-educated voters.
Ungar-Sargon’s new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, conveys the pervasive sense of disillusionment among many working-class individuals, who feel that the American dream had become an unattainable fantasy. The discussion I am sharing below covers the matter in depth. Not unexpectedly, mass immigration and offshoring lie at the core of the economic woes of those Hillary Clinton referred to during the 2016 campaign as a “Basket of deplorables.” These are the dynamics that find popular support for a second Trump term growing.
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