A left-wing writer who helped create the Obama era of progressive rule in Washington D.C. is urging Democrats to move towards the center on immigration policy.
Author John Judis writes in the left-wing American Prospect site:
Democrats make both a policy mistake and a political one when they become cheerleaders for illegal immigration and for expanded immigration in general, while denying the plain fact that in many cases immigrants do indeed lower the wages of local workers.
The call for moderation was released as President Donald Trump declared his pro-American policies are the mainstream of Americans views, telling GOP politicians that “Americans want an immigration system that works for everybody.” He continued:
The Republican position on immigration is the center, mainstream view of the American people, with some extra strength at the border and security at the border added in. What we’re asking for and what the American people are pleading for is sanity and common sense in our immigration system. We want immigration rules that protect our communities, defend our security, and admit people who will love our country and contribute to our society.
A few days later, Democrats rejected Trump’s offer and instead are asking the GOP’s business-wing to join them in approving another amnesty of low-income workers who would help freeze Americans’ salaries.
Judis is a significant influence in the Democratic Party and helped create President Barack Obama’s progressive strategy with his 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book argued that post-graduate progressives, feminists, and Latinos could create a new Democratic Party that would dominate national politics.
But Judis did not realize how the progressives’ self-interest in diversity, globalism and cheap imported service-class labor would bulldoze the cultural and economic rules helpful to white-collar and blue-collar Americans. The inevitable correction came in 2016 when a populist-minded New York real-estate developer stooped to pick up the golden key to the White House that had been ignored by establishment GOP politicians.
Judis has now – partially — joined the blue-collar pushback, with an article titled “The Two Sides of Immigration Policy: We need to legalize the undocumented already here, but open borders will mean lower wages for American workers.” He writes:
There is … [a] political dimension to the argument about immigration that is voiced by leading Democrats and Republicans. It is that continuing large-scale immigration of unskilled workers will help the Democrats politically and hurt the Republicans. That calculation lies at the bottom of Democratic hopes and Republican fears of immigration. It encourages Democrats to ignore the downside of mass and illegal immigration and Republicans to seek to cut immigration and to do whatever they can do to discourage immigrants already here from voting.
The parties’ complementary calculations may prove correct. Democrats, after all, have historically been the party of immigrants. But I’d contend that on several counts, it could prove short-sighted. If one assumes that Hispanics will, like previous immigration groups, eventually move up the economic ladders and assimilate—becoming “white” in the perverse language of American racial categorization—then Hispanics may not prove to be a dependable Democratic constituency. Outside California, there are indications that may be the case. Republican candidates for governor in Texas and the Senate in North Carolina have almost broken even among Hispanic voters. And Trump, perhaps because he appeared to promise jobs, actually did better with Hispanic voters than 2012 candidate Mitt Romney.
Secondly, the continual surge of low-skilled immigrants into the United States will contribute to an impoverished underclass that holds down wages and creates welfare costs for small towns and states. The existence of that underclass has helped fuel bitter cultural-economic conflicts that have riven America over the last 30 years. It undercuts any promise of an American social democracy or extension of New Deal liberalism, which must be based on a common sense of community. It is already threatening the social solidarity that sustained European social democracy. So in the long run, even if some Democrats benefit at the ballot box, an uncritical stance toward immigration is bad news for the country.
Read the article here.
Wages for blue-collar Americans are now rising under Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” policy. A February 2018 White House chart shows:
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.