Category: Uncategorized

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes in its preamble: “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” By “members of the human family,” the document means individuals. Human rights adhere in each individual as the birthright of our species ties and therefore demand equality. Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Humans are reasoning and moral beings and should regard each other thusly. Article 2 states that the Declarations enumerated rights are entitlements “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

Crucially, being a member of a group gets you no more or no less of the rights to which everybody is entitled. While the Declaration makes reference to collective entities, such as the nation-state, the associated right, the right to a nationality, resides in the individual. Indeed, there is no logical basis for organic group rights in the Declaration. A group right as distinct from the rights of individuals could abrogate human rights by allowing immunity from the right to not be a slave. To allow the group to control individuals outside of human rights is respect for tribalism, a primitive and oppressive religious construct quite out of line with human rights. Article 6 states: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” This in principle obviates tribalism.

This principle is embraced in the United States tradition. Indeed, more than other countries, the United States aligns its ideals with these principles—indeed it anticipates them in its Bill of Rights!—and the logic of these rights proceeds on the basis of equality. If every individual is in principle a person before the law, then each person has in principle a right to speech, assembly, and all the rest of it. A white teenager from Kentucky standing at the Lincoln Memorial is as equal before the law – a law that regards silence as indicating nothing – as an elderly American Indian activist banging his drum in protest against the presence of white people on what he claims as his sacred lands. In principle, they both have a right to exist in that space and for whatever purpose they decide as long as that purpose is not to physically harm (some would add harass or intimidate) others.

Because each person is endowed with reason (albeit that capacity is still developing in the young of our species because of our long path to maturity), the arguments and claims a person makes—if he is making any—must be reasonable, which means reliance on secular facts and logic. Gender, race, religion, or other identities are no more reasons that arguments are true or false, right or wrong as they are for claiming privileges before the law. Just as an individual in principle should enjoy no special dispensation for the fact that he identifies as an American Indian or is identified as a white person, so his arguments gain no gravity on that basis. He stands as an individual and his reason and conscience shoulder the same burdens as that of every other mature person. The reality that power or identity can make falsehoods and wrongs appear true and right does not change the objective standards for reasoning though arguments and claims made about the world.

What about empathy? Empathy is about understanding what moves a person. It is not a method for determining the truth. Our shared reality is not a matter of perspective or standpoint. To believe otherwise is to do ideological work.

The extent to which postmodern epistemology—in a nutshell, the method that holds that what a person is determines whether she is right or wrong and that how she feels about something determines the truth of a situation or thing—has become accepted by so many people on the left is a testament to the ability of approved cultural managers serving in establishment institutions to shape popular thought, to mislead people from the path to justice. How else would so many persons claiming to speak to justice embrace the irrational and superstitious ethic of intergenerational and collective injury, guilt, and punishment? How else could reasonable and conscientious people assign blame to individuals or excuse their actions with no evidence or justification other than they are members of a group, that they “belong” to an historically imposed or embraced social construction? How else could intelligent people turn the logic of racism into a virtue signaling politics of the left? All this over against the beautiful and obvious logic of human rights.

In a review of Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider in The Guardian, Ben Tarnoff writes, “Collective self-emancipation doesn’t require abandoning one’s identity—if that were even possible—but linking it with those of others in widening circles of solidarity.” Some identities can be left behind. Some can’t. But the widening circles of solidarity is a start. However, one can get there a lot sooner by recognizing the following:

There are two things that either bind all of us or most of together. The first is species-ties. We are all members of the human family. This means that human rights exist in the individual and all individuals simultaneously. The second is our economic position, which for the vast majority of people is proletarian. So while it is true that racism explains why blacks as a group trail whites as a group in every significant social category, the plight of poor black and poor white individuals is an economic system that exploit human labor. This is why lumping by race or some other demographic category and viewing everything through its lens obscures more than it illuminates, something captured well by Valerie Tarico, in an essay published today in AlterNet (“Here’s why Evangelicals and social justice warriors trigger me in the same way”).

As I argued on this blog yesterday: Those of us on the left who still cast our lot with the struggling proletarian masses have to start speaking out against identity politics as its currently manifested (frankly, even if salvageable, I am not convinced of its utility) and that means looking at ourselves. The process of critical self-reflection begins with recognizing this essential and universal truth: If our politics make assumptions about who people are, what they believe, what they do, what they’re responsible for, and what they deserve on the basis of the color of their skin or some other socially constructed category, then our politics aren’t just wrong, they’re antithetical to premise of human rights and the interests of working people.

On January 19, 2019, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, Nathan Phillips, American Indian activist and star of the Skrillex and Jr. Gong Markley’s dub step video “Make it Bum Dem,” accompanied by a small band of protestors, having just finished participating in the Indigenous Peoples March rally, marched into a crowd of teenagers, who were at the Capitol in their capacity as Covington Catholic High School students, singled out one teenager and pressed extremely close to him while chanting loudly and banging a drum in his face. The teenager responded by occasionally smiling and making sure that his friends did not agitate Phillips’ group. Nearby a group of men identifying as Black Hebrew Israelites—a recognized hate group by the Southern Law and Poverty Center—were harassing the students by calling them “crackers,” “peckerwoods,” “faggots,” “niggers” (the students were not monolithically white), and other derogatory names.

Initially, a heavily edited version of the encounter was broadcast on Twitter from an anonymous account subsequently deactivated for violating the rules of that social media platform. The edited version (which left out the role of the Black Hebrew Israelites, as well as the aggressive actions of the Phillips’ group) made the encounter appear as if the teenagers—to be presumed racists because they were white, with some wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, the campaign slogan of current president Donald Trump and past president Ronald Reagan—were harassing and mocking an American Indian Vietnam veteran and “religious leader” (as federal prisoner Leonard Peltier referred to Phillips in an open letter carried in Counterpunch). The audience was told that the teenagers were chanting such things as “Build the wall,” a reference to Trump’s campaign promise to build more security barriers along the United States border with Mexico. In the context of a federal government shutdown, with the problem of illegal immigration the core contention, the edited version served as propaganda for the identitarian left to delegitimate advocates of greater border security and to advance its own agenda of open borders.

The irony that a group claiming injury from the mass immigration of Europeans into North America could be symbolic of open borders appears to have escaped everybody. At any rate, the edited video was anything but representative of the actual event. When the full video came out and revealed that Black Hebrew Israelites had been antagonizing the high school students and that Nathan Phillips and his group had piled on by getting in the teenagers’ face (violating the western cultural sense of personal space), those who had pushed the initial account lost a piece of powerful propaganda, powerful because it did not rest on explicit claims around identity but rather took advantage of implicit assumptions long enculturated in the masses by the postmodern politics of identity. It was a dramatic test of the efficacy of multicultural programming in framing political discourse in America. (Why go home? We’re becoming more European every day.) But the truth of the event did not stop left identitarians from continuing to pound the drum of white privilege and guilt. Purveyors of this species of politics quickly developed and disseminated several positive heuristics to defend the failure of negative core of their argument, which is to say that the heart of the argument—that the boys were to blame because of their racial identity—was not revisable (albeit flipped) and other claims were necessary to sustain the initial narrative. Much of the approach was rhetorical (e.g. the deployment of academic jargon such as “centering whiteness”), but the most impactful was the practice of alleging confirming evidence.

One of these alleged pieces of confirming evidence is the reason the boys were there. They were bused to the Capitol to support the March for Life rally held that day. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place, we are told, since the anti-abortion cause is illegitimate (its advocates seek to enslave women—which is true!) and the boys are males who are justly denied an opinion on the subject because they cannot have babies (subtleties and other fights are glossed in warfare). I could spend some time discussing the absurdity of this position (especially the essentialist claptrap), but since the reason they were there is immaterial to the situation, it would be a digression. They could have been there for a myriad of reasons. Only one reason would be relevant, namely had they been there to protest the Indigenous Peoples March rally, and only then if they were the ones who provoked the confrontation.

Another alleged piece of evidence is a brief and shaky video of a group of boys, said to be from Covington Catholic High School and from that same day, yelling at a couple of young women who are walking by. This is held up as proof of malice (and depends to some degree on the fumes of the Kavanaugh outrage). The absurdity of denying common knowledge of the obnoxious reality of teenage boys and girls gathered around park benches to malign the character of the individuals harassed at the Memorial illustrates well the penchant for rationalizing that lies at the heart of the method of identity politics. It would be charitable to say such heuristics are hardly compelling as arguments. But they aren’t arguments at all. 

Those insisting on a racial interpretation of the incident share video footage and images of Covington Catholic students in 2012 (probably on November 27 according to Snopes, which is always on the case) that they insist indicate blackface worn by students at a basketball game. Coventry has a tradition of students painting their entire bodies a solid color. One of the colors used is black. It is associated with what they call “black out” games. Some argue that intent doesn’t matter, and, apparently, that some colors are never to be used by white people as body paint; anybody who is sensitive to the plight of African Americans knows that painting a white body black is offensive and therefore forbidden. Trying to find reason in this argument is difficult. If somebody does or says something that offends you or that you believe is offensive to somebody, but the person intends no offense and has a plausible explanation for/or you can charitably recognize a plausible alternative for why he did/said what he did/said that has nothing to do with offending you or being offense to others, yet you still hold that person accountable for some wrongdoing, then what you’re really saying is that another person should be responsible for your perception of what he did/said, that he should acknowledge your power to define his actions in a particular way (which just happens to serve your agenda) and enlist others in vilifying him.

What authority does a person have to define for somebody else the meaning of an ambiguous action or an action with a contrary intention? It can’t be because that person is black or speaks for black people (pick any race), since an appeals to the authority of identity is not a rational justification for accepting a claim. I hope we all recognize the power of perception and the act of harassing, defaming, and mobbing people who self-appointed authorities think acted wrongly. History has given us dramatic examples. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. And while losing one’s reputation is not as bad as losing one’s life, it is not a negligible injury. In light of the vast history of examples, why should anybody cow to those who are so self-righteous that they think they have moral permission to ruin the reputations of teenagers by insisting on particular (and self-serving) interpretations of at best ambiguous events? Moreover, supposing that students wore blackface back then, how is a teenager today responsible for what other people did when he was nine years old? This makes no rational sense. This is the way religious people think.

Yet another angle is to suggest—by way of some temporal-defying modified deLorian-jujitsu move—that the event was orchestrated by professional conservative operatives the services of which the teenager’s family had retained: RunSwitch, a public relations firm run by Scott Jennings, Steve Bryant, and Gary Gerdemann. Jennings, for example, served in senior positions in Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaigns and was senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. He also worked for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign and was special assistant to former president George W. Bush. This attempt to save the narrative is as absurd as the others and tells us a lot about the politics in play. But there is also a deep moral failing expressed here: This teenager is being tried in the public court of standing his ground while being bullied. His parents are to be his only immediate advocates? They are expected handle this without any help? Who established this rule? Here’s where empathy comes in handy. Imagine you and your family are attacked for something somebody else did. You’re 16 years old. Your whole life is in front of you and it’s possible that you will always be wrongly known as that white supremacist punk who mocked an American Indian war veteran. You’re being defamed. Your parents—who love you very much—contact a PR firm with political savvy to help you get your story out to the public. Sounds like a smart plan. But, no, that makes you guilty of something else. 

How can people find untoward a family seeking expert help in crafting a message to counter the overwhelming press of national and social media forces determined to wreck the reputation of their teenage son? If they sued any of them for defamation, would they not turn to a legal expert? Do people really think that ordinary people are equipped to defend their kids from the modern media assault? The response I get is this is no ordinary family. They are white and therefore privileged. They are already guilty by virtue of being members of the “oppressor race.” Nonsense. I am white and I am neither privileged nor an oppressor. Nor is this teenager. A person cannot possibly be responsible for anything somebody else may have done in the past. Guilt by virtue of demographic designation is a thoroughly immoral doctrine (on par with vicarious redemption). If it were my kid being hammered like this and I did not have the ability to help him craft a response, I would seek out professionals, just like I would a lawyer if he were in legal trouble or a doctor if he were sick. People sometimes need advocates.

The hysterical left is determined to make sure the teenage can’t win for losing. Anything he does to try to get some semblance of his life back short of validating a warped interpretation of his nonaction by admitting wrongdoing and apologizing (the pseudo-left loves confession and apology) is going to be used against him—and even that will help this wretched species of destructive politics to continue thriving. So it’s my job—and hopefully yours—to assert his innocence and to tell the truth: people are either embarrassed or desperate because they judged a situation based not on what happened but on what they wanted to be true, and they will use anything to save face and make this thing fit their political agenda. For many of you that means taking a long hard look at yourself. Why do you hate this kid so much? Have you still not gotten over high school?

And then there’s Nathan Phillips, a man who, according to Vincent Schilling (the associate editor of Indian Country Today), told him in previous interviews about being spat on when he returned home from Vietnam yet was never in Vietnam. That’s doubling up on mythology! Some have it that we’re supposed to agree that Phillips and his drum have something special to offer humanity (the Great Spirit is just like every other religious claim: nonsense). The talk centers on the need to respect him as an elder. A woman with the band said she was raised to treat her elders with respect so it hurt to see them treat Phillips so badly. But assuming that we are supposed to respect elders even when we disagree with them, the fact is that he wasn’t treated badly. Watch the video. Nonetheless, today he is in the press forgiving the teenager. For what? This is wisdom? (I wonder how much the mass display of reflexive faith in the claims of a shaman is rooted in the penchant among progressives to fetishize the exotic. They do the same with the hijab, treating the obligatory modesty rules of the most extreme interpretations of Islam as expressions of authenticity.)

And what about Phillips’ comrade? The man who said to the teenagers, “You white people should go back to where you came from. This is not your land.” When the teenagers note that it is in fact their country, the man says, “Not it’s not. You have been here two or three generations. Compared to us. We’ve been here a million fucking years.” The politics of social justice warp things in such a way that “woke” people are expected to reflexively deny the racism of an individual of one race telling an individual of another race to go back to a continent he likely never resided in as long as the person being told to “go home” is white. When the man refers to “us” being in the US for “a million fucking years,” he enters the realm of mythology. To be sure, it is a matter of historical fact that there were humans in North America before Europeans migrated there (albeit not a “million fucking years”). But it has no bearing on the right of citizenship, a right guaranteed by Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A couple of days ago we might have charitably suggested Phillips didn’t understand what was happening. Self-righteous people are notorious for not bothering to find out what’s going on before they throw down. However, the fact that Phillips agrees with the hateful views of the Black Hebrew Israelites (they speak the truth, according to Phillips), and then today obnoxiously forgives the teenager, gives the game away. Phillips wasn’t trying to calm anything down. He walked into a crowd of boys to confront them because they were white, the same reason the Black Hebrew Israelites were harassing the students. Phillips’ comrade tells us why they were confronting the boys: to blame them for something they didn’t do, a crime no living teenager could be responsible for. The teenagers were being harassed by people who operate on the basis of a confused cosmic and moral paradigm, absurdities the identitarian left enables—absurdities that even find purchase in the halls of the academy.

Those of us on the left who still cast our lot with the struggling proletarian masses have to start speaking out against the nonsense of identity politics and deep multiculturalism. This process of critical self-reflection begins with recognizing this essential and universal truth: If our politics make assumptions about who people are, what they believe, what they do, what they’re responsible for, and what they deserve on the basis of the color of their skin, then our politics aren’t just shitty, they’re antithetical to premise of human rights and the interests of working people. Perhaps the most disappointing development in my 56 years on this world is watching the left embrace the politics of identity that the capitalist class constructed to perpetuate the core system of exploitation and oppression: the appropriation of the social surplus for private enrichment. The notion that an individual is to be regarded in terms of the group to which he is said to belong should lie on the trash heap of history. Instead, it has been weaponized and taken up by the very people whose interests it undermines. If the left had been pursuing the politics of class this whole time, the right wouldn’t have much of anything to stand on. As it is, it enjoys the attention of tens of millions of disaffected working class people who are tired of being blamed for the sins of others.

For the advocates of identity politics, their “truths” rests on the basis of group membership, not on what is actually happening. Such is the cognitive rot of postmodernism. Everything Phillips’ comrade said to the boys is utter nonsense, but because he is American Indian, and therefore the eternal victim of white western man (a crime in which I am implicated by virtue of my skin color), his words are to be received as wisdom. Denying his wisdom is said to be an expression of white supremacy. Of course, his identity is not what makes him wrong—but by the same token it also cannot make him right. And it is this nonsense that is fracturing the proletariat. Explaining the world through racial categories obscures the class dynamic and frames political solutions around something other than the class struggle. The hegemonic strategy of the capitalist class depends on the proletarian fractions carrying out the plan. Getting the victims of a scheme to herald the virtue of the scheme is the gold standard of Astroturf. The left today has been transformed into a bulwark against socialist ambition. Neoliberalism is crafty indeed.

If the future of the West is to fight things out along left and right identitarian lines, then the West doesn’t have much of a future. I know for some that would be a welcome outcome. But it would be a disaster for humanity. The abuse of the Covington Catholic High School kids is a microcosm of the political error of our times.

There is a lot of ignorance on the left about what drives the pro-immigration agenda. I have had many discussions lately with left-wing folks and supporters of the Democratic Party (whose lines they robotically take up) who are startled when I tell them that a major proponent of pro-immigration is a coalition of right-wing anti-labor individuals and groups. “But right-wingers are anti-immigration,” they object. “They’re fascists.” No, they’re not. Many conservative Republicans are reluctant to openly join pro-immigration Republicans in pushing for open borders because they depend on political support from the rank-and-file workers, workers who have been abandoned by the Democrats and labor unions.

Blue collar workers increasingly make up much of the popular base of the Republican Party because they don’t want to see their standards of living decline any more than they have and they recognize that immigration is one of the causes of why they struggle to make ends meet. This is why Trump waltzed through the primaries and won the election in blue collar states: his stance on immigration appeals to blue collar workers, the same blue collar workers Democrats used to court (and still claim to represent). But Democrats no longer worry about the working class because they have major backing from globalists and enjoy the support of a coalition of identity groups that neoliberal cultural managers have knitted together over the years. Democrats and their supporters now claim to represent the “middle class” while disparaging workers in heartland as “white,” “privileged,” “racist,” “xenophobic,” and “deplorable.” 

Two right-wing individuals pushing hard for immigration are the powerful billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Their LIBRE initiative, which enjoys the backing of conservative mega-donors who stand to profit from the massive transfer of value that comes with immigration, strives to help immigrants (legal and illegal) come and live in America, learn English, and pass their drivers’ license tests. Learning English and being able to drive is critical for getting immigrants into the workforce where they can be pitted against native-born labor. This is a strategy to suppress wages and disrupt political organizing. It’s class warfare Koch brothers style. As is expected, the Koch bothers are supportive of the Democrat’s pro-immigration agenda.

A related Koch strategy is pushing public school vouchers as a strategy to defund the public schools working class kids go to. They’re particularly keen on organizing Hispanics to push for school choice. The goal is clear: the undermining of US national culture, a culture that has been supportive of public education and labor unions. Like today’s Democrats, the Koch brothers are globalists, aggressively pushing for open borders and open trade, pitting native-born workers in the US against cheap labor around the world. They dream of a completely open world in which workers in developed countries have to compete with workers in developing counties. For example, LIBRE refused to back House Republican’s compromise immigration legislation because it lowered immigration.

The Koch brothers have dispatched Daniel Garza, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and son of a migrant farmworkers, to lobby Congress for open borders legislation. Garza complains that immigration restrictions are unacceptable because they “hinder the ability to address market forces and the private sector to hire who they need to hire.” Yes, they are that explicit about their goals. Garza, like the other Republicans pushing for immigration, are opposed to efforts by Donald Trump to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border. Why? Because it reduces surplus population which in turn pushes wages higher.

There is a Time magazine article on this—”Koch Network Mounts Grassroots Effort to Support Immigration”— that is sweet on Koch’s efforts. There is nothing in the Time article about how immigration hurts native-born workers in America. Time’s parent company, Time Inc., was acquired by Meredith Corp. in a deal partially financed by Koch Equity Development, a subsidiary of Koch Industries Inc. However, given the favorable coverage of this across the corporate media, it appears that one does not need to be indebted to the Koch brothers to push for open borders.

The world capitalist system, which can now boast of nearly eight billion humans within its boundaries, is pressing against global ecological limits. Present and expanding rates of economic growth and consumption are environmentally unsustainable, evidenced by the rapid pace of climate change. The world cannot wait to tackle this problem.

I mention the nearly eight billion people who live on this planet because the mass of humanity is a big part of the problem. World population exploded after 1960s, growing from 3 billion to 7.7 billion today (the growth rate began its staggering climb after the world crisis of capitalism in the 1920s), and it is expected to grow to nine or ten million by 2050 (these are median projections). The rate of growth is decreasing, but the problem remains: the impact of billions of people today and in the coming years, almost all of whom will be born in developing countries. The fact that the projected near-zero population growth projected for 2100 comes with more than eleven billion people gives us no space to breathe a sigh of relief. It’s time for alarmism. 

Rather than helping the world’s public grasp the significance of the human population overshooting its planet’s carrying capacity, political and economic elites tell the developed world a different and egoïstic story: rising life expectancy and declining fertility rates are producing rapidly aging societies that will not be able to sustain their progressive structure of human services without some sort of intervention to restore integrity to the system. Life expectancy was 52 years in 1960; many people did not live to see retirement. Today, the population in the developed world has doubled and life expectancy extended to 67 years. By 2050, life expectancy will be 75 years. Many more people are living to see their golden years.

Twisting the good news that developed societies are at or below replacement rates, elites advocate importing from the developing world bodies to sustain the social structures of the developed world. They never mention the capitalist need for more bodies to suppress wages and consume goods and services. They never suggest redistribution of property as a means of securing future living standards for the mass of their citizens. They never appear concerned about the problems of overextending resources, environmental degradation, diminished social services, declining standards of living, the well-being of the native born, or political, cultural, and social disorganization. There is no talk of national strategies for creating a well-functioning societies that serve the interests of their citizens; instead, the best we can do is react to the changing demographic profile by patching it with peoples from other countries.

When the problem of overpopulation is raised in leftwing circles, either the conversation goes nowhere or the person introducing the topic is suspected of eugenics or racism. To be fair, much of the fear on the left of critical discourses concerning the matter is due to its perceived Malthusian implications. Thomas Robert Malthus, the English cleric and political economist, whose book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, and undergoing numerous revisions over the next couple of decades, posits a relationship between population and the social surplus in which greater food production only temporarily improves the welfare of a people because surplus in turn triggers population growth, is rightly viewed as reactionary. 

Malthus insists that the rate of population increase tends to exceed the rate of increase in food production, which ensures a class of impoverished individuals, and can result in what later observers dubbed “Malthusian catastrophe,” where people at the bottom suffer famine and disease. His formula, posited without proof: the arithmetic increase in food production is swallowed up by the geometric increase in population. Crucially, overpopulation is not a future problem for Malthusian theory; overpopulation is an ever-present dynamic that drives human societies.

One implication of the Malthusian argument is that helping poor people through public intervention perpetuates the problem of misery by producing more miserable people. And so his theory was used to justify rolling back government assistance to the poor. A more general implication is the ideologically view that poverty is the inevitable and indeed natural result of progress; thus, the argument provides ideological cover for inequality and neglect. On a positive note, Malthus’s insight—a general law of population across the spectrum of life—was exploited by both Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, co-founders of the principle of natural selection, for their paradigm-shifting theory of natural history. However, human beings build their environments; so the Wallace-Darwin principle does not apply to humans (which did not stop social Darwinists from claiming it did).

But the logic of Malthus does not encompass all possible thinking on the population question. Karl Marx, the great revolutionary communist and radical political economist, also developed a theory of population, one explicitly at odds with Malthus, who Marx regarded as representative of the crude style of the vulgar British economist.

Operating on the basis of a material conception of history, Marx recognizes the inapplicability of natural selection to the human situation and inverts Malthus’ causal order, theorizing political economy as the driver of demographic change, not the other way around. As such, Malthus’ theory applied to humans amounts to a “libel on the human race.” Malthus’s claim is, Marx contends, “an apology for the misery of the working class.” Marx writes in Capital: “Every method of production that arises in the course of history has its own peculiar, historically valid, law of population,” which he distinguishes from the general law of population for plants and animals for which there a law “in the abstract”—“only in so far as man does not interfere with them.” 

The problem of the surplus human population, which is the source of human misery among the ranks of the working class, is tied not to an abstract and general Malthusian principle but is the concrete consequence of the capitalist mode of social production and its conditions. It is the result of capitalist accumulation, specifically the organic composition of capital, a term denoting the ratio of constant capital to variable capital, or the price of labor power. The dynamic proceeds thusly: maximizing surplus value production in pursuit of profit using the method of relative production, i.e. the introduction of labor-saving machinery and organization, systematically generates a surplus population, a redundant mass of labor, workers with no productive function. 

Marx thus proposes a law of progressive decline in the relative size of variable capital. At the same time, the capitalist system promotes population growth to maintain at its disposal a ready supply of labor power and a lever on the price of labor. Surplus population functions to suppresses wages, which is why, Marx argues, the price of labor-power never consumes the surplus. At the system level, this situation creates a contradiction in which capitalists fail to realize the results of expanded surplus value production as commodities as profit in commercial markets, thus triggering periodic realization crises, which lead to other crises until the system either resets and innovates its way out or collapses. 

There are two types of surplus population. The first is the traditional population characterized by a culture of high fertility rates (a bad thing) but for which modernity has reduced the mortality rate (a good thing), with the result a high natural rate of growth (a bad thing). Thus, the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production, or the impact of capitalism on societies peripheral to it, create a situation where extraordinary population pressures mount. China and India represent two examples of this problematic, where the development of productive forces outstripped the development of a culture conducive to optimal fertility rates, leading to a population explosion in those countries; both are the most populous nations in the world (1.4 billion and 1.3 billion respectively). The second type is in part the process described by the problematic of the organic composition of capital: workers have a functional role in capitalist production only to the extent that they can provide capitalists with useful labor power. As labor becomes more productive (more production with fewer workers), it is inevitable that there will be individuals who are no longer useful to capitalism, and thus will fall into the surplus population or, if lucky, suffer marginal engagement with the labor market. 

One suggested method for dealing with the problem is to tolerate a high mortality rate among the surplus population. Even if this were an effective strategy, humanitarian sympathies rightly prevent people from tolerating such a thing. Species ties require those with means find some way of at least ameliorating the conditions caused by overpopulation, which I am defining here as a mismatch between the needs of social productivity and the mass of people in a society. Thus, the standard solution is to compel the population that derives an income from either work or the exploitation of work to pays taxes that can be used to support a system making it possible for those who do not have an income or whose income is meager to continue consuming goods and services, thus subsidizing capitalism by recycling income (earned and unearned) through the system. The welfare system associated with the modern capitalist state, while often successfully ameliorative (more so in some developed European states than in others and in the United States) is not a vehicle for self-actualization for those at the bottom of the class structure, but rather is a functionalized system for managing their predicament. And without progressive taxing systems, there is a real question as to how secure this system is, with neoliberal restructuring by the transnational capitalist establishment shrinking the quantity and equality of the social welfare provisions. 

There is another solution. Recognizing that the capitalist class is less concerned with the problem of the surplus population than it is with economic growth, it falls to the world proletariat to limit the numbers of people in their respective nations by maintaining low fertility rates and restricting immigration from developing countries. Sharply limiting national population growth, ideally reducing the size of the population the long term, produces several benefits. First, it reduces the problems of overextending resources, environmental degradation, diminished social services, declining standards of living, and political, cultural, and social disorganization. Second, it reduces the surplus population which in turn shrinks the class of the unemployment thus pushing wages higher. This means that there is a smaller mass of people to be managed by government, which allows for more generous social provisions for those still or permanently in need of public assistance. Third, as I have written about in other essays on this blog, economic empowerment and cultural homogeneity contribute to social solidarity and strengthen support for the achievements of enlightened society: civil, political, and social rights.

When Marx published Capital, the world’s population stood at around 1.2 billion. Marx did not reflect on the impact of this mass of people on the ecosystem because the problem of surplus population was a political economic question; whatever the size of population, capitalism would see to it that there would always be too many people. Therefore, the solution was the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a socialist society in which all the needs of the people—even the desire to engage in creative work—would be met.

To be sure, socialism is still the solution to the problems of humanity. However, we are facing a problem that a world of 1.2 billion did not face: there are now nearly eight billion humans, and to make a world that allows all of them the comfort they deserve, while observing the principles of sustainable economics, is a daunting task the accomplishing of which is rapidly receding from the realm of possibility. The problem is not solved by redistributing the trillions of dollars currently hoarded by the global bourgeoisie. While they consume more per capita than the average people on the planet, they are small in number; meeting the normal needs of this group does not require very much of the world’s productive output. The real problem is elevating the average Asian or African to the same standard as my family enjoys here in the United States. 

My parents’ generation warned the world about the problem of overpopulation. Perhaps Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame was the wrong messenger, but the generation’s instincts were right: there are limits. My home country, the United States, is the third largest county in the world population-wise. Americans consume a lot. We should be this comfortable. I deserve it. Indeed, every American deserves to be as comfortable as I am. But the world is not able to support a world population of ten billion people consuming the West’s average level of consumption. It’s not just meat (the most recent effort to distract the public about the actual problem). It’s population.

We in the West can at least do our part: no more people. Indeed, we need fewer people. In a November blog I shared the thoughts of ecohumanist Karen Shragg’s on this subject. In her essay, she explains how it is not just a matter of radically reducing the consumption levels of the West. Total population numbers matter. So even though the average American adult impacts the environment more than the average Chinese adult, the Chinese people’s impact on the environment is twice as great as the impact of the American people. Imagine matching consumption on a per capita basis. 

The West overall has done a good job reducing fertility. And its people are more free as a result—especially women. But to many other cultures have not done this work and many of them aren’t prepared to. Moreover, some are worse than others. In a November 2017 article, The Atlantic complained that the myth of Muslim overpopulation won’t die. But there’s a reason for that: the world’s Muslim population is growing twice as fast as the non-Muslim population. Muslims have the highest fertility rate in the world. There are 1.8 Muslims worldwide, a population that far exceeds China’s entire population. Because this growth is occurring in developing countries (and they are to a substantial extent still developing because of the overbearing nature of their religion), mass migrations are going to grow in size and frequency. Some folks think Europe and North America represent the cornucopia into which population pressure can be relieved. Our spaces cannot be allowed to serve these ends. We must not willingly suffer on account of other peoples’ recklessness and irresponsibility and backwards cultural sensibilities. And we must not help capitalists in their desire for cheap labor. I see good-hearted people eager to open our space to the world. They should know they are serving the interests of capitalism.

Knowing that nothing is so obvious as to obviate straw man objections to argument, I hasten to clarify that the arguments in this essay have no basis in the net-malthusian and eugenicist theories of Garrett Hardin or Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt before him (which is not to say they were wrong about everything). I do not celebrate death as a means of restraining overpopulation. I abhor population control strategies that select reductions of groups based on race (as I have written about). I am advocating reducing fertility worldwide (which, to be sure, means some population groups require greater levels of intervention) and equitably redistributing resources as means of preventing deprivation. Even those harshly criticizing the neo-Malthusians, for example Marxist environmentalist John Bellamy Foster, recognize that, to quote Foster, “population growth is one of the most serious problems of the contemporary age.” And Bellamy wrote the words in 1988, when the world’s population was 5 billion. Population is tied to historical conditions, conditions driven by what Amartya Sen demonstrated long ago to be the result of differential entitlement radiating from capitalist market dynamics. To grasp the reality of population pressing upon society, one must understand how population is a result of the capitalist dynamic. But this is no reason to forget that “population growth is one of the most serious problems of the contemporary age.”

In these essays, I am advocating for the working class. The national proletariats in the developed world must resist the call for their countries to serve as the pressure valves for global population problem. They should not fall for false rhetoric about the need to import bodies to sustain entitlements, an argument designed to undermine the demand for redistributive policies to shore up the living standards of those who produce the value in society. Nor should the working class fail to recognize that the surplus population problem is a strategy capitalists use to suppress wages and create a culture of uncertainty that pits workers against each other and makes them thankful for the jobs capitalists “create” for them. A million and more immigrants a year keeps wage-killing competition going (as we have achieved low fertility in the West, which promised higher wages and stronger bargaining power). Half a trillion dollars in wages lost annually to the capitalist class because of the wage differential between native and foreign born labor. Should American workers start begging capitalists to pay them less so they can have a job? The national proletariats should not be expected to suffer diminishment in their standard of living because capitalism and overpopulation create crises in the developing world. We have tens of millions at home who need work. Constrain the labor supply and you raise wages and create jobs. There is no proletarian interest in increasing the population of their respective nations, either in the developed or the developing world. 

Fences stop illegal border crossings. Not entirely; some people go over or cut through the fence. But, extraordinary efforts notwithstanding, fencing deters around 90% of illegal border crossings. These reductions are associated with reductions in crimes in those areas where fencing is emplaced. This benefit is typical of security measures, such as padlocking shed doors. To be sure, padlocks can be removed with bolt cutters. But most people who find locked doors go no further than that.

Some have suggested that, since fencing is not maintained where there are few or no people, this security measure drives migrants to where the terrain is most perilous. There, they say, people are at risk to die from the elements. As reported on this blog (“The Border in 2014 … and Now“), illegal border crossings are associated with a high human cost. Ergo, they contend, fencing is immoral. The same argument can be made about watchtowers and watchmen, of course. People who intend to break the law avoid authority and its structures. If people engage in dangerous behavior to avoid being detected while breaking the law, then who is responsible for that?

For most people making the trek to the US on their own, seeing miles of fencing in either direction is an effective deterrent. They only knew to avoid ports of entry (since they have no legitimate reason to cross, they knew to avoid authority); not really knowing what to expect, they could not have expected security fencing. The amalgam of fences, steel barriers, and concrete walls, sometimes with razor wire crowning their tops, is an impressive sight. Fencing and walls are unwelcoming and many migrants turn back. However, many other migrants never encounter these structures because human traffickers lead them to where there are few people in order to avoid detection. That means to the gaps in the fencing and the roughest terrain. Human traffickers are interested in moving bodies, not usually with what happens to people once they feel their job is done. Sometimes human traffickers on the US side of the border—sooner or later—welcome migrants into the network of criminal companies where their labor will be superexploited. Other times traffickers on the US side don’t show and traffickers from the Mexico side abandon the migrants to the elements.

Enter humanitarians who seek to help migrants in this situation. One such group, the faith-based No More Deaths, provides aid and shelter to illegal immigrants on the southwest border. Last years nine members were charged by federal authorities for various offenses. Four of the nine are currently on trial for dropping off food and water for migrants. At least this is the way their crimes have been characterized in media supportive of their actions. Tagged the Cabeza 9 (conjuring civil rights imagery), they have become a cause célèbre on the identitarian left.

It is important to consider what is involved in leaving food and water for migrants. Rationally, there must be knowledge that migrants will be at a certain place at a certain time to receive the assistance, otherwise leaving food and water in the wilderness is like expecting an exhausted, hungry, thirsty individual to find a needle in a haystack. Serious people don’t engage in haphazard action. These are big spaces full of brush. Supposing no coordination, leaving large amounts of plastic and aluminum in a protected wilderness area (those on trial were issued citations in August 2017 by a US Fish and Wildlife Service officer in a protected area west of Ajo) is ecologically irresponsible. Of course, one cannot rule out naiveté even among serious people.

It is also important to consider that the offenses are misdemeanor charges: operating a vehicle in a restricted area, not having a permit for being in the area, and abandoning personal property inside the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. In light of the fact that Cabeza Prieta is one of the deadliest corridors migrants transverse, and that expectations of American assistance risks encouraging migrants to take this route, and, moreover, that the activists are aiding and abetting criminality, the charges may seem rather minor. Moreover, if the past is any indication, they will likely be dismissed. (One of the nine, Scott Warren, is facing a separate felony charge for harboring illegal immigrants. This is a more serious charge.)

Activists protesting the charges characterize No More Deaths’ work as “humanitarian.” Their slogan: “Humanitarian aid is never a crime. Drop the charges.” Subjectively humanitarian, perhaps. I’m sure they feel like they are doing the right thing. I’m sure they feel like they’re part of the second coming of the Underground Railroad. Objectively, however, facilitating the dangerous practice of crossing the Cabeza Prieta is not humanitarian action, but action contrary to federal laws designed to protect persons, the environment, and the integrity of the Mexico-US border. Dropping the charges sends the signal that, if migrants chart a path through the wilderness to avoid detection, humanitarians will be there to assist them, thus giving migrants false hope. With the amount of media attention, a lot of potential migrants will likely hear about the work of No More Deaths. With more caravans on the way, these is a dangerous message to send.

It is revealing that the defendants in the case called upon John Fife to testify on their behalf. Fife is a Presbyterian minister of Tucson, Arizona, who, in defiance of federal law, organized over 500 churches over several decades to help migrants illegally cross the border and find sanctuary in the United States. Fife was convicted in 1986 of violating federal immigration laws and sentenced to five years’ probation. He is retired, but works closely with No More Deaths. It is not uncommon for religious leaders to believe the work their god has called upon them to perform takes priority over the rule of law of a secular nation. It is also not uncommon for them to engage in what they believe is moral action only to endanger people’s lives. Religious ambition isn’t usually governed by reason and facts. I’m sure they believe the Lord guides their actions. What would Jesus do? Probably not this.

This is not to say that I disbelieve in civil disobedience in principle. There are reasons to break the law (albeit no valid reason hails from religious doctrine except accidentally). At the same time, disobedience comes with a cost. If your actions are illegal, then criminal sanctions are the price you pay. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded his followers of this fact: while the law was an obstacle to racial justice, and individuals were therefore right to disobey segregation ordinances, for example, they were nonetheless breaking the law. Responding to civil rights activists failing to wait for the proper permitting, the Supreme Court in Walker v. Birmingham (1967) commented: “This Court cannot hold that the petitioners were constitutionally free to ignore all the procedures of the law and carry their battle to the streets. One may sympathize with the petitioners’ impatient commitment to their cause. But respect for judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law, which alone can give abiding meaning to constitutional freedom.” You cannot expect those who enforce the law to excuse you from any consequences because you feel strongly about what you are doing.

I also believe in the legitimacy of the US federal government—the Supreme Court spoke powerfully to this in its 1967 ruling—and therefore expect that acts of civil disobedience will be clearly justified on legitimate moral grounds. Helping people illegally enter a country that has the most generous immigration laws in the world is not a legitimate reason for violating the law. It is hard for me to feel sympathy for the situation these nine created for themselves by violating the law to these ends. Indeed, it is hard for me to shake the feeling that people who do this harbor contempt for the nation and the will of its people. At the same time, I am feel some pity for them that their religious belief have so confused them about what is in the best interests of both the country and migrants. I would like to believe that people who probably mean well are also harmless. However, either intentionally or functionally, No More Deaths play a role in perpetuating human trafficking.

When I have these conversations with pro-migration folks, I often hear the sympathy claim that all migrants want is a better life. The following things are all true: there are people who seek to come to the United States to work and send money home and then return; there are people who seek to permanently move to the United States to live and work; there are people who are fleeing violence who seek asylum in the United States. However, in all those cases there is a process. The person arrives at a port of entry and requests the US government consider their case. There is a backlog of people who have sought entry into the US in a legal fashion. More than a million people are allowed into the United States every year to live and work or go to school. So while these may be reasons to seek entry to the United States, they are not reasons to illegally enter the country. Nor are they reasons for Americans to help people illegally enter the country. The so-called Cabeza 9 are not being unjustly treated.

One line in this Atlantic story, “The Unique Racial Dynamics of the L.A. Teachers’ Strike” story leapt out to me. Sorry, it’s the sociologist in me. But this: “In Los Angeles, 73 percent of students are Latino and another 15 percent or so are other racial minorities.” Other racial minorities? Has it become a habit in the elite media to treat Latinos as a race? Latino is not a racial designation, but an broad ethnic category.

There are five government-defined racial categories – white, black, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander. To be sure, census categories change over time, but we’re seeing unfolding a project to racialize Latinos. We are seeing a similar thing with Muslims (even ethnicizing Muslims is problematic, to wit: most Muslims aren’t Arab). This is troubling because it conflates culture with race (and religion with ethnicity and race in the Muslim case), which risks granting the profession of culture and even religion immunity from criticism because to criticize would be “racist.” Yes, I know, we are already some ways down that road – that’s my complaint!

To put this another way, the problem of racialization has shifted from being so labeled to justify oppression to, with the hegemony of antiracist ideology, claiming racial status as a new politics and a means of privilege-seeking. And it won’t do to revel in turnabout is fair play because intergenerational flesh-taking is abhorrent. But even if we were to accept the abhorrent in that regard, racializing ethnic categories is a form of deep othering. To separate people in this essentialist way is going backwards. How do we dismantle a system – racism – people want to expand? 

If we want precision in language, words need to have specific meanings – especially when objectivity is the end sought. Race refers to the organization of the human population into subcategories based on alleged biological and constitutional differences that are claimed to predict attitudinal and behavioral dispositions. Race is not an actual thing, but the product of a system of oppression based on identification of biological ancestry. In other words, race is a product of racism. Ethnicity is about culture and language and may include multiple racial identities. Latinos can be of European, Native American, African, or Asian descent. Moreover, Latino culture is derivative of European culture.

We really shouldn’t tolerate casual conflation of these categories.

If Obama sought money to build more fencing along the border, then a majority of Democrats would be for it. In fact, when George W. Bush (the presidential reputation Democrats are so keen on rehabilitating these days) signed the bill establishing hundreds of miles of fencing, at a cost of billions of dollars, the Fence Act passed the House 283–138 and the Senate 80–19. That’s a lot of Democrats. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was for it and now he is lying to America’s face about that. (He is also lying about the border situation being a “manufactured crisis.”) See the video below. It’s refutes the Democratic response to the president’s speech. (By the way, didn’t Schumer and Pelosi look and sound like aliens appearing on the viewscreen of a Star Fleet vehicle?)

The federal government has been continually building a security fence along the border since 1990 across Republican and Democratic administrations. It’s a bipartisan effort. The federal government started the project because a majority of Americans had turned against immigration generally in the late-1980s. The trend in opposition to immigration grew continually after immigration reform in the 1960s, a key piece of the elite war on labor and the old left. By the early 1990s, two-thirds of Americans wanted to see immigration curtailed (opposition spiked again after 9-11). The establishment did not want to see the level of popular opposition to immigration that occurred in the early 20th century that led to sharp immigration restrictions. Such immigration restrictions would interfere with the establishment’s globalist agenda. To knock down opposition to immigration, the government and media shifted the focus to the problem of *illegal* immigration successfully shaping public opinion by allowing the majority to express anti-immigration sentiment in way that strengthened popular support for immigration. The line in the Democratic Party was taken up by neoliberal operative Bill Clinton. This was an element in the broader New Democrat strategy. The strategy has worked quite well, reducing popular opposition to immigration by some 25 percentage points. Democratic opposition to new border fencing is about marginalizing Trump. Under a different president, we will see Democrats return to supporting stricter border control measures. Mark my words on that. 

I just read the recent polls on the current controversy and it is remarkable (yet expected) how public opinion is determined by party loyalty, opinion that would flip if their party took up the position. I am sorry to sound elitist, but Americans who follow the party line of either side of corporate-controlled political apparatus are zombies. Using what Chuck Schumer tells you today to determine how to think about an issue is embarrassingly naive. The reasons why people fall for this are explicable, but I have written enough for now. Just let me add that, while still a minority position, the polls show that support for the Trump’s proposal is gathering. With new reports coming out from partisan outlets like The Washington Post admitting there is a crisis as the border, popular support for more fencing may very well continue to grow.

President Trump has made his Oval Office speech to the nation (his first one) about his strategy to address the problem of illegal immigration. Part of his strategy involves more security fencing. A considerable length of the Mexican-US border already has security fencing, which has proven to be effective. Opponents of Trump’s plans are engaging in a wide range of subterfuge in an attempt to undermine them. One of the tactics has been to claim that illegal immigrants don’t pose a security threat to US citizens. This blog entry examines that claim and finds it to be problematic.

Since the current controversy concerns illegal immigration, either those who illegally cross borders or those who overstay their visas (it is estimated that 30-50% of illegal immigrants in the United States are those who have overstayed their visas), and their association with crime and violence, we might put to one side the association of crime and violence and legal immigration; however, as we will see, we need to include immigrants broadly in at least one respect, namely the problem of criminal aliens. 

I have reviewed numerous studies conducted on the general subject of immigration and crime and find them to be constructed in ways that downplay the problem; sampling is used to exclude crucial evidence and the focus is on crime overall. If we stand back, we find that illegal aliens make up approximately 3.5% of the US population yet account for 13.6% of all offenders sentenced for crime committed in the United States, including 12% of murder sentences and 20% of kidnappings. I chose the crimes of homicide and kidnapping because they are less likely to suffer from biased enforcement and sentencing—very few people get off for these crimes. What this means is that illegal immigrants are more than 3 times more likely to be convicted of murder as members of the general population. Murder is the most serious crime of all.

But it’s not exclusively illegal immigrants who are overrepresented in homicide. According to the GAO in 2011, a study population of criminal aliens contained 25 thousand arrests for homicide over a seven-year period. According to the FBI, there were 115 thousand homicides from 2003 through 2009, the period covered by the GAO report. That means that more than 20% of homicides were committed by criminal aliens. Yet the overall foreign-born population, which includes naturalized citizens, is around 13 percent. One gets an entirely different impression from reporting by major news outlets.

However favorable the rates reported by the media are to immigrants, they do not negate the reality of propensity. Supposing that rates really are lower, if there were fewer illegal immigrants, it follows that there would be fewer crimes committed by them, thus there would be fewer crime victims. In other words, the rates of crime and violence in the United States are bad enough without adding another layer of crime and violence on top of them. Put in human terms, it is not of much importance to the victims of crime committed by an illegal immigrants that rates for this population are lower than the general population. It is an odd argument indeed to claim that illegal immigration is somehow okay or not a concern because illegal immigrants commit crime less frequently and therefore more crime is okay (that is the implication). For example, a study in 2013 admits that, although research shows that immigrants do not commit as many crimes as native-born persons (this is one of the favorable studies to immigrants), if the number of illegal immigrants increases, then there will be numerically more crime committed by this population. Moreover, this study found that when police stepped up enforcement of the law, illegal immigrations became less likely to report victimization for fear of deportation; the decline in crime rate with increased threat of deportation was both because the element was being deterred or removed or because victims were more reticent to report criminal behavior because of their own criminal status. 

There are a myriad of reasons why immigrants are associated with crime and why that association can be elusive. One of the reasons individuals from Central America and Mexico come to the US to escape prosecution by authorities or violence at the hands of those whom they have betrayed, either fellow gang members or other gang members. There is an incentive to lay low or be more careful in crime commission to avoid arrest and deportation. The crimes of illegal aliens are harder to detect because many of them, especially those illegally crossing the border, are unknown to authorities. Foreign-born victims of crime are less likely to report their victimization to authorities because of fears that they will experience negative consequences, such as deportation (there is a massive activist network protecting illegal immigrants from authorities that knows about these crimes). Most criminal violence occurs within population groups, i.e. it is intra-ethnic, intra-racial, etc. As expected, immigrants from Central America and Mexico gravitate toward their ethnic communities, and it is, for the most part, individuals living in those communities whom they victimize. It is not unreasonable to expect that they are more likely to prey on other immigrants knowing their vulnerable circumstances.

What about terrorism? We are told that this, too, is a false concern. The large group of Muslims that killed nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001 entered the United States because of poor border control. (Perhaps it is not the number of terrorists who attempt to enter the United States, but the amount of damage they do if they make it?) In 2011, Mark Metcalf found that, between 1993 and 2004, every one of the 94 foreign-born persons involved in actual attacks on US soil had committed an immigration law violation.

We know about the numbers of possible terrorists trying to enter the country (and they run into the thousands) because border control, which covers a lot more than just activities at the southern border, catches the vast majority of people trying to get in to our country illegally. To be sure, most of those stopped are trying to get in by plane, but that hardly makes it not about border control. I suspect the corporate media don’t want to tell the truth because the legal immigration system and airport security are tight and the success of immigration authorities in deterring and preventing terrorism proves the point that strict restrictions on entry work to protect the public. You have to come through a port of entry when you fly to the US. It bears repeating: given that the number is so high, and that only one-in-ten persons claiming asylum has a legitimate claim, the evidence is solid that tightening immigration is of great benefit to public safety. What we lack is the level of control at the southern border that we do through other ports of entry. This is because people who illegally enter by definition avoid ports of entry.

Whatever facts Sarah Huckabee-Sanders may botch, the fact is that border control has a place in protecting the public, and the tighter that control is, the safer the public will be. It’s not as if the American people are obligated to throw open the borders of their country and let anybody in. The evidence indicates that a tougher border control stance—which started before Trump—has resulted in a significant drop in individuals trying to illegally enter the country. That’s good news. But the government can do better. 

All this should be understood in the context of a one-sided class war being waged against workers. Because of bourgeoisie desire to maintain a continuous flow of immigrants into the United States for optimal economic conditions (high employment and low wage levels) and political advantage (cultural disorganization and social disruption), the corporate media, knowing the public is concerned about crime and violence in their communities, saturates the popular information consumer market with the claim, supported by a handful of studies, that both legal and illegal immigrants have lower rates of crime than native-both populations. It is disappointing to see the left move from defending the standard of living of working class of this country—it is the capitalist class that benefits from immigration, including illegal immigration—to a reckless disregard for public safety with an open-borders stance.

The government shutdown drags on, apparently over Trump’s desire to secure $5 billion for more border security fencing. Democrats are denying Trump his “wall” and it appears to be entirely over their desire to not allow the President to be able to keep his signature promise made during the 2016 presidential campaign. It certainly isn’t understandable as a principled position given past statements on the subject of illegal immigration.

Here’s Bill Clinton in 1995:

“All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”

He continued: “We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”

Here’s Barack Obama in 2013:

“Real reform means strong border security, and we can build on the progress my administration has already made—putting more boots on the Southern border than at any time in our history and reducing illegal crossings to their lowest levels in 40 years. Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship—a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English, and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally.”

In 2006, Obama said that “better fences and better security along our borders” would “help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.” The year before he said: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States, undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.” “We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants,” he said. “We are a generous and welcoming people, here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law,” he said.

In 2013, All 54 Democrats voted to pass the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, And Immigration Modernization Act. The bill required the completion of “700 miles of pedestrian fencing along the border” and allocated $45 billion on border security improvements. Not $5 billion. $45 billion. And in November 2015, Hilary Clinton told a crowd: “I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders.”

We can go down the line and identify numerous Democratic leaders saying very similar things. So what has changed? Why are Democrats hanging up Trump over 5 billion dollars in security fencing? Why all the sudden do we see a flurry of analyses claiming security fencing doesn’t work? Why are we now seeing border control depicted as the second-coming of the Holocaust? Why is every migrant portrayed as a refugee? Where was the outcry when Democrats sounded like Trump?

On this business about the efficacy of walls, Jennifer Miller, writing for Scientific America, claims that “Trump’s wall” “would destroy an extraordinary web of biodiversity that evolved over millions of years.” She makes a very powerful case for the efficacy of walls to prevent the migration of all manner of flora and fauna. For those who say walls don’t stop things, the truth is they can stop almost everything, according to Miller. The fact that walls and fences are good at stopping people is why we build them around prisons and forts. It’s why we have locks on doors. The two-story corrugated metal fence erected by George W. Bush’s administration dramatically curtailed both illegal border crossings and crime in El Paso, which borders Juarez, a city shot through with crime and violence. I know there is a great desire to deny that criminals cross the border (they’re all refugees, right?), but the fact is that they do. Mexicans and Central Americans enter the United States to extend the range of their criminal territory or disappear from law enforcement or other criminals looking for them. Not all of them. A lot of them. The Yuma Border Sector on the US/Mexico border in San Luis, Arizona, has also drastically reduced immigration and, as a result, crime. The reductions in immigration in both cases near or exceed 90%. The reduction of crime is a consequence of reducing the flow of those who are most likely to seek to illegally enter a country; as a rule, reputable and stable citizens follow the rules and aren’t running from anything, therefore they are not crossing borders without authorization.

Walls and fences are not as effective when there are gaps in them, but they are nonetheless effective where they stand. Fences designed to allow flora and smaller fauna would address many of the concerns the Scientific America article presents. Whatever gets built there will be called a wall whether it is a wall or a fence. Trump gets what he wants. But it’s what Democrats want, too.

Democrats know that the southern border is a source of crime and violence in the United States, that criminal networks involved in human trafficking are driving people, including children, across dangerous terrain and around ports of entry and security fencing to drop them in the United States where their labor will be super-exploited by capitalists who will not pay US citizens wages commensurate with the job. Crime makes Democrats look bad. For both parties, crime is used as a justification for more police, tougher laws, and more prisons. The public has a compelling interest in crime reduction at the border. I am not happy that fencing is part of the solution to the problem. I wish I could live in a world where I didn’t have to lock my doors.

To be sure, Democrats do not mind the exploitation of immigrant labor or the displacement of native-born labor; what they want is a legal system of imported labor for these purposes. Every year in the US, hundreds of thousands of foreign workers enter the country legally. When in the context of rhetoric concerning illegal immigration Bill Clinton says, “The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants,” he conveniently leaves out the fact that legal immigrants hold jobs that might otherwise be held by citizens. Whatever the motive, the effective control of people across the US-Mexico border is a necessity.

Footnote: Consider the millions of citizens in the criminal justice system, disproportionately black, who are there because there was no real effort to train them and put them in a job that could have kept them out of trouble, or who, despite committing a nonviolence offense, or a not-very-serious violent offense, are left to waste away behind walls financed by the US tax dollars at a cost of tens of billions of dollars annually.  This is a great betrayal on a moral plane. As a nation we need to find or make a job for every man and woman who is able to work. Only after that should we assess labor shortages and consider foreign workers. That will require sharply reducing the flow of legal immigrants into the country, which will have the benefit of providing time for assimilation to proceed and our culture to adapt. I am fully aware, as I have written about on this blog, that the rationale behind the constant flow of immigrants into the United States is to increase supply relative to demand and suppress wages for American workers. It will take a very large popular movement to change the force of capital importing labor to undermine the domestic working class (the left seems completely incapable of putting two and two together on this one). However, restricting illegal immigration can help our most vulnerable citizens.

The problem I have written about on this blog continues. A network of social media platforms censors and deplatforms not just on the basis content, but on the basis of real or perceived political identity. This it the latest example: http://insider.foxnews.com/2019/01/03/jordan-peterson-daughter-mikhaila-censored-youtube-professor-calls-out-big-tech

There are exceptions, but as a general orientation, and it will pain my leftwing friends to hear me say this, the censorship and deplatforming is aimed at extending and deepening the left-identitarian political sensibility (identity politics, multiculturalism) by pandering to marginalized groups (while reducing individuals to them), simultaneously narrowing the diversity of ideas, in order to expand the market and thus increase profits.

This neoliberal corporate strategy focuses mass attention on questions of gender, race, gender identity, etc., at the expense of and dissimulating the overarching structure of social class and heightening the antagonisms between proletarians segmented by identity. The vast range of ideas become coded as left and right by cultural managers and conditioned and reinforced ideological reaction shuts down consideration not only of the full range but recodes things to stand on the other side of the line – in other words, the culture industry redefines what left and right – and right and wrong – are.

To enforce this religious understanding of political thought, the culture industry creates a set of blasphemy rules that can get you expelled from the church of social media based on your utterances and associations. And to take full advantage of its religious-like character, it claims a wall of separation from the state and therefore manufactures its own justifications for excommunication, actions that operate beyond the scope of the Bill of Rights which are conveniently defined (and this is true with religion, as well) to work in one direction and not the other.

I was just alerted to Brad DeLong’s superficial account of the libertarian role in opposing public accommodations (no time for his hackery here), but with social media we can see clearly the neoliberal tack of maintaining a smooth “non-offensive” culture that makes it easy to discriminate against people based on political identity (speech and association) in violation of the spirit of the First Amendment and basic human rights.

Markets under neoliberalism are not neutral facilitators of exchange, but are ideologically-controlled systems of thought control. Corporations cannot (yet) throw you in jail, but they effectively disappear you in a world where everybody is kettled and channeled. Being excommunicated is a terrible thing. Ask Rosanne Barr. She broke the blasphemy rules of the culture industry and paid the price. She’s just one of a long list of causalities of the prevailing PC culture. 

This speaks volumes about Elizabeth Anderson’s point about the oppressions of private government (The Philosopher Redefining Equality). She highlights the unfreedom of being an employee. Here we’re talking about the unfreedom of being a creator of content and a consumer of content. For being allowed to say and here things doesn’t make you free.

Feel good about capitalists telling you what you can hear? Of course, eventually, how would you even know about what you’re not allowed to know about. Yes, that is the idea. When somebody else is deciding for you what you can see, hear, say, and think, you become a child. Tragically, too many people are infantilizing themselves. Part of the jive talk you get about this is that free speech is a ruse the rightwing uses to oppress people. Speech is violence. Etcetera.

It’s like the Devil. He’s trying to beguile and seduce you with his tempting ideas. And because you are weak and fallen, you are susceptible to his charms. So all the better to not listen at all. After all, doubt is the unpardonable sin. You can’t be trusted with your own brain. Leave that to the cultural and political managers.