01/09/2020
Many conservatives can be accurately accused of being indifferent to income inequality, class immobility, and the economic difficulty of starting a family. Of course, the same liberals who make these criticisms usually ignore the most regressive, anti-worker policy ever created, mass immigration. Even Bernie Sanders knows this, though he’s sold out since 2016.
It’s baffling and infuriating that with heroic exceptions like Tucker Carlson, almost no one with a mainstream platform points out that you simply can’t be pro-worker without being anti-immigration. Illegal immigrants are scabs. Cheap labor is a feature, not a bug. If you stop immigration, you raise wages without the need for cumbersome regulations.
I fear the SPLC, the various Hispanic lobby groups, and every radical professor in the country far less than I fear Corporate America. The latter is the real force that’s pushing open borders, even if it may destroy them in the end. Vladimir Lenin may not have actually said the quote about the capitalists selling the rope that will be used to hang them, but whoever did was right. I hate that we may have to save these oligarchs, these arrogant rope sellers, from their own stupidity and short-sightedness.
However, there’s a beacon of light. The Congressional Budget Office just reported the truth that VDARE.com readers have known for decades. Yes, mass immigration hurts wages.
Immigration helps the U.S. economy, but it’s not as good for individual workers, particularly those at the low end of the wage scale for whom the increased competition for jobs leaves them worse off, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report this week.
The findings both support and challenge conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers from both parties generally view immigration as a net benefit. The CBO said that’s true for the overall economy, but not for those in low-skilled jobs.
“Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace,” the CBO said.
[Lower-wage workers harmed by immigration, Congressional Budget Office report finds, by Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, January 9, 2020]
Of course, immigration does not provide economic benefits as a whole, as Peter Brimelow explains. Yet at least the essential reason mass immigration exists, to facilitate the transfer of wealth from labor to capital, is finally being discussed. Obviously, the House Democrats on the Budget Committee don’t want to hear this report from the CBO. Perhaps at least some Republicans will start making this argument, and the GOP can turn into the Workers' Party it needs to be in order to survive.
And if they don’t do it, hopefully Tucker Carlson will.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.