11/27/2006
I’m not a expert on LaRaza. The first time I ever heard about it was from Rodger McAfee, the Socialist Dairy farmer that posted bail for Angela Davis in a conversation when he was recruiting me for a job in the early 90’s.Activist McAffee had some real hesitation about the organization — so I haven’t been inclined to deeply investigate the hesitation my colleagues here at VDARE.com who come from a rather different ideological background have about LaRaza.
However I thought it was interesting when a reader forwarded me this article by R. Cort Kirkwood which suggests that La Raza is the recipient of the lion’s share of recent donations from Wal-Mart:
According to the Capital Research Center, the corporate side of the Walton empire shoveled nearly $750,000 to leftists in 2004, compared with $2,500 to “conservatives.” None of this, of course, shows up on the foundation’s website. Among the recipients were the NAACP ($60,850), AARP ($3,750), the Izaak Walton League ($2,250), LULAC ($12,000), the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation ($10,000), and Planned Parenthood ($2,500). The biggest recipient of Wal-Mart money? The National Council of La Raza, at a cool $630,000.[Wal-Mart Conservatives, Chronicles, November 2006]
Now, the dynamic here is pretty clear: Wal-Mart hires workers at the wage levels at which they are likely to produce the least tax revenue in the existing system — and thus require the maximum of subsidization from other taxpayers. Wal-Mart also has a track record of profiting from illegal immigration both by hiring illegal aliens and markets products in communities in which they are numerous.
Now the Wal-Mart owners are less inclined to support open borders than the other most very wealthy Americans-but the average rating of their political donations is still indicactive of someone inclined to significantly increase overall immigration.
I would argue that the basic problem is concentrated wealth. Property owners can gain from mass immigration because if you pack more folks into a given space you can increase property values even if you lower productivity per worker. That means that the folks dependent on their wages for income pay the cost of immigration-and those that own larger amounts of property are most likely to be net beneficiaries of mass immigration. This will inherently be a problem in any society that permits huge levels of private wealth accumulation.
I would argue this is why those that favor immigration restriction should favor measures to contain the most extreme levels of concentration of private wealth. Why should conservatives stand up for the property rights of the Waltons and Wal-Mart when they are doing everything they can to degrade the citizenship rights of VDARE.COM readers?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.