Before I get to the main topic of this essay, which concerns a recent viral video by actor Mark Ruffalo, I must first note a remarkable headline on a related matter. Yesterday, in an article about Border Patrol’s Operation Charlotte’s Web (so named because the site of the action, Charlotte, North Carolina, the city where Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was brutally murdered by Decarlos Brown Jr.), CBS News buried the lede: “One-third of those arrested by Border Patrol in Charlotte were classified as criminals, internal document says.”
In fact, the author, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, writes, “Fewer than one-third of the individuals arrested by Border Patrol during the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement crackdown in Charlotte were classified as criminals, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.” Later in the article, she notes, “Roughly 200 green-uniformed Border Patrol agents recorded more than 270 immigration arrests during the Charlotte campaign” (her word choice makes it sound like war). Of these, “[f]ewer than 90 of those arrested by Border Patrol were categorized as ‘criminal aliens’ in the document.”
Ninety criminal aliens would make it one-third, so fewer than that suggests perhaps 89 or 88 of the 270 arrested by Border Patrol fit that designation, determined mainly by criminal convictions, but also those charged with a crime, or engaged in conduct that makes them removable on criminal grounds. Montoya-Galvez could have written, “almost” or “nearly” one-third, but that would have changed the obvious intent of the story, which was to manufacture the appearance that the Trump Administration was violating a media-manufactured promise that it would only be targeting criminal aliens for arrest and deportation. This “promise” asks the public to expect that, confronted with a detainee who is in the country illegally, Border Control is supposed to release that individual (who may or may not be a danger to society)—as if an illegal alien had not by definition already committed an offense: that of illegally entering a country or overstaying a visa.
What the headline works overtime to obscure is the remarkable fact that almost one-third of those detailed by Border Control have a criminal record or, for some reason, were designated as criminals. We are told, and, as the reader will see, Ruffalo repeats the myth, that the immigrants being detained and deported are much less likely to have a criminal record than citizens. Not that it matters, of course, since removal of illegal aliens would reduce the overall volume of crime, whatever the relative proportions of criminal offenders; but having documented the fact that a large proportion of illegal immigrants detained in Charlotte meet the criteria of criminal aliens, a headline properly phrased would cause the rational observer to question the myth. Moreover, that one-third of those detained in Charlotte (so far) aligns with an equally astonishing statistic that the media attempts to slot into the narrative of systemic racism—that one-third of black men in America have a felony conviction—puts another of Ruffola’s claims, namely that criminals are by and large white, to the test.
Turning now to Ruffalo’s viral video, my first reaction upon watching it was that the man is as dumb as he looks. But he’s not the only one (even if others aren’t so dumb looking). In the clip, Ruffalo begins by telling us that the immigrants are not the criminals. According to the statistics, he says, white people are the criminals. He then goes on to tell the camera that the “gift of our time” is getting to see who the true villains are, who is really making our lives unbearable, who is making us so desperate: the billionaires. It’s time, Ruffalo says, for Americans to take back our country from the extreme wealth that has its hands all over the power of the nation. Keep the immigrant. Send the billionaires packing. Then we can once more be the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Setting aside Ruffalo’s dubious claim about white criminality, how can a man capable of stringing words together to form more or less intelligible sentences fail to see the obvious? What is making life desperate and unbearable for millions of American workers is the billionaires and the weapon they wield against the native labor force: the immigrant. Ruffalo suffers from the same blindness that afflicts the useful idiots protesting outside the migrant detention center in the Florida Everglades (see Protests at Alligator Alcatraz: What Do The Protesters Want?): the failure to see the connection between extreme wealth and mass immigration.
The pattern—both the capitalist-immigrant connection and the failure of individuals to see it—is older than most people realize. The connection hides behind the slogan “a nation of immigrants,” a foundational myth that functions as ideological mystification: a bourgeois narrative that naturalizes exploitative labor relations and obscures the use of superexploited immigrant labor to depress wages among the native born.
From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, the United States absorbed wave after wave of European immigrants at the precise moment industrial capitalism was exploding. Who benefited most? The industrialists, with intellectuals like Horace Kallen selling the scheme to politicians and the public. The mass of cheap labor was the critical input that supercharged capitalist accumulation. Industrialists and their shills lobbied against any restriction on immigration, dispatched recruiters to Europe (facilitated by ethnic middlemen), and worked hand-in-glove with steamship companies to keep the human cargo flowing. The public justification was always the same: “labor shortages.” Translation: wages were too high, and high wages cut into the profits required to build Newport mansions and corner the steel market.
Capitalism’s inner logic explains why they sought cheap foreign labor. Competition compels every capitalist to maximize profit, which means minimizing labor costs. Surplus value is extracted from labor; the lower the wage, the greater the portion of the working day that is unpaid, and the fatter the owner’s margin. Flooding the labor market with immigrants also disciplines workers: when there is always someone hungrier standing behind you, strikes become risky, and unions lose leverage. At the same time, competition forces capitalists to substitute machines for men. The organic composition of capital rises, productivity increases, and fewer workers are needed. The individual capitalist who automates first gains a cost advantage; when everyone follows suit, which they inevitably do, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall intensifies the hunt for still-cheaper labor. The result is a growing reserve army of the unemployed—first immigrants, then natives—driving down wages across the board.
In the 1920s, Congress slammed the door. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924 slashed immigration from Europe to a trickle. Industrialists howled; nativists—and, more importantly, American workers—prevailed (see my December 2018 essay Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class). With the foreign tap turned off, employers suddenly faced real labor shortages (that is, wages they could no longer suppress).
Their response? They turned south. Labor agents fanned out across Dixie, offering train tickets, running ads in The Chicago Defender, and building company housing. The Great Migration was born. Northern industry actively recruited blacks to replace the immigrant labor that restrictive laws had denied them. Black workers, excluded from most unions and fleeing Jim Crow, were seen as docile, desperate, and—crucially—cheap. The parallel is exact. European peasants spent decades being lured across the Atlantic by the same class that later lured sharecroppers’ sons out of Mississippi. Different skin color, same economic function: a disposable labor pool to keep native wages from rising. (See Shorthanding “Black Jobs.”)
Fast-forward a century. The game is the same. Only the costumes and cultures have changed. When immigration restrictions, postwar prosperity, and strong unions finally forced American wages upward, industry needed a new reserve army that couldn’t vote (not legally anyway), couldn’t easily unionize, and could be deported at the first sign of complaint. Enter the H-1B visa: a modern indenture dressed up as “high-skilled immigration.” (See We Need to Close the Borders; The H-1B visa Controversy: The Tech Bros Make Their Move.)
Tech billionaires and their lobbyists insist America faces a catastrophic STEM shortage, yet they rarely raise starting salaries, fund serious domestic training, or recruit from the millions of laid-off American coders already here. Instead, they fly in planeloads of young workers from India, bind them to their employer with the threat of visa revocation, and pay them 20–40 percent below market while pocketing the difference as profit. The Indian outsourcing firms (the new ethnic middleman) that dominate the program force employees to sign contracts agreeing to pay massive “liquidated damages” if they dare leave for a better job. It is debt bondage with stock options and a Silicon Valley postcode. Once again, a restricted labor pool for natives becomes a glut the moment capital is allowed to import replacements; once again, the loudest voices crying “shortage” are the same ones whose yachts keep getting longer.
Like I said, it’s an old pattern. When policy blocks one source of cheap labor, capital finds another. Close the borders to Europeans, and the factory owner reaches into the South. Open them again to the global poor, and the children of the Great Migration find themselves idled in ghettos (The Defenders of Mass Immigration Insult Native-Born Labor). The billionaire class never runs out of “labor shortages”; it only runs out of workers willing to work for little to nothing—until it imports new ones. (See The Mass Immigration Swindle; The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism.)
That is the connection Ruffalo and the rank-and-file progressive cannot (or will not) make. The misery Ruffalo laments is not an accident. It’s the business model he embraces when he defends open borders and condemns ICE operations. On second thought, perhaps Ruffalo isn’t as dumb as he looks. Perhaps he’s doing the dirty work for the wealthy elite who pony up the capital to finance the movies he stars in. Perhaps, like so many other celebrities, he knows who butters his bread. And what of his estate? Does he, like so many of his kind, have groundskeepers and housekeepers? Are the citizens? Probably not.
freedom and reason 