05/07/2006
As significant as is former Oklahoma Democratic Congressman Brad Carson’s forceful column Democrats Must Fight Illegal Immigration RealClearPolitics.com May 02 2006 was the fact that CBS News chose to pick it up on Saturday morning, which was how I became aware of it.Suppression of the Immigration question has been the first line of defense of the MSM managers for many years, and publicizing a Democratic dissident on the issue indicates the war has entered a new phase of mobility.
Carson’s column is remarkable in its candor. He bitterly complains about the class selfishness displayed at glamorous liberal dinner party in Washington “a few years ago” bemoaning growing US income inequality without acknowledging how the guests benefited from illegal immigration.
But then again, I really shouldn’t have been so surprised, as nearly everyone at the party was part of what the writer Michael Lind calls the overclass, educated at the best universities and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Their children attended private schools. Everyone had a fine retirement package and subsidized health care, and each was immune to the vicissitudes of middle-class economic life….For this group of people, immigration is not about inequality in America, but instead all about a cheap nanny, inexpensive lawn care, or proof of multicultural bona fides. Even to bring up the subject of immigration is to seem impolite, if not crass.This is a shame, for the most important domestic policy challenge in the 21st century is found in the labor market. Alone among industrialized nations, the United States has a massive class of unskilled workers. This unskilled workforce is being buffeted by globalization-enabled labor arbitrage, the automation of blue-collar jobs, and, yes, the arrival of millions of low-skilled laborers through illegal immigration. …a greater proportion of American young people are low-skilled dropouts than thirty years ago. Close to 50 percent of these dropouts are immigrants. Now there’s a problem for the overclass to consider.
Carson’s discussion is sophisticated and thoughtful and deserves to be read in full. His political conclusion is dramatic:
For Democrats, fighting illegal immigration would not only be good policy, but would have the welcome effect of being good politics, too….the vast majority of those who oppose illegal immigration do so on sound public policy grounds. Illegal immigration is seen rightly as a threat to their economic livelihood…By recognizing the harmful effects of illegal immigration on low-skilled citizens and by supporting legislation to prohibit untrammeled immigration, Democrats would boost the economic prospects of their core constituencies while driving a wedge into the Republican base. Democrats could even oppose illegal immigration while welcoming legal immigration, especially of the high-skilled variety. Immigration presents Democrats with an unusual opportunity to shake up the coalitions that have guided the political parties for a generation, while proving to the struggling middle and working classes that the Democratic Party is serious about reclaiming its historic role as their champion. The overclass might frown, but I would bet that millions and millions of American workers would reward the Democratic Party with their electoral gratitude.
Brad Carson, it materializes, is an enrolled tribal member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. (VDARE.com hopes their apparent agreement on immigration issues will dissuade our contributing Comanche David Yeagley from reaching for his scalping knife.) Of more immediate political significance, he is a quite recent Rhodes Scholar, a distinction which, no doubt to the outraged disgust of the ghost of its founder, has become the ultimate hallmark of acceptance into the liberal nomenclatura of America. If this type of protégé is deviating, all bets have to be off.
Carson reached too high in trying to take a Republican Senate seat in 2004 (and becoming a 37 year old Senator.) Wikpedia now reports he now works for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in Catoosa, Oklahoma.
Able men, disappointed and frustrated, can become dangerous. Perhaps Carson is someone else to watch
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.