Paul Krugman is a Princeton economics professor, an avowed liberal, and a New York Times columnist--oh, and most conservatives spit on the ground when you say his name. I say all this to help provide context for something he said in his May 25 column:
>>There's a highly technical controversy going on among economists about the effects of recent immigration on wages. However that dispute turns out, it's clear that the earlier wave of immigration increased inequality and depressed the wages of the less skilled. For example, a recent study by Jeffrey Williamson, a Harvard economic historian, suggests that in 1913 the real wages of unskilled U.S. workers were around 10% lower than they would have been without mass immigration. But the straight economics was the least of it. Much more important was the way immigration diluted democracy.
>>In 1910, almost 14% of voting-age males in the United States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn't get the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter of the population -- in general, the poorest and most in need of help -- denied any political voice.
>>That dilution of democracy helped prevent any effective response to the excesses and injustices of the Gilded Age, because those who might have demanded that politicians support labor rights, progressive taxation and a basic social safety net didn't have the right to vote. Conversely, the restrictions on immigration imposed in the 1920s had the unintended effect of paving the way for the New Deal and sustaining its achievements, by creating a fully enfranchised working class.
I gather from those advocating for illegals that they want to help people--that they want to be, and to be seen as being, generous, kind, loving, welcoming. At least to foreigners who want to live and work here.
But there's the rub. You can't help illegals without harming America's working poor. Helping one group hurts the other. Of course the mechanism is greedy, narcissistic CEOs who ruthlessly exploit the illegals directly, then use their exploited labor to drive down wages and benefits for America's working poor--and bust unions while they're at it. But that means that by supporting illegals you become the dupes of those selfsame CEOs--you help them in their quest to squeeze America's working poor.
This amazes me. The little guy was the core of the Democratic Party's membership and focus for a century. The Republicans stood for the Big Guy--the Demos for the Little Guy. Now the Democratic Party stands for a group of special interests and the Republicans for another (though overlapping) group of special interests. Neither looks out for the little guy.
Of course no one on this forum is a Little Guy. You all probably have college degrees and a fairly safe spot in the middle class--as do I. But my dad had a crappy Georgia education and dropped out in the 7th grade to go work in Florida where he lost a finger in a sawmill. He spent the rest of his life working with his hands. I only remember one comment he made about politics. He said "Government is where the rich and the poor get together and decide what the middle class has to pay to support them."
And as a consequence of being a Little Guy's kid, I grew up in blue collar neighborhoods, surrounded by the kinds of people who are being beaten down by the generosity of liberals towards foreigners.
You'll do anything to avoid facing the fact that your particular kind of generosity is hurting America's working poor, won't you? That you're violating your own humanitarian principles. That rich as America is, we can't give everything to everybody all the time. Somebody has to get the short end of the stick, and without admitting it you've picked American working stiffs to get shafted.
You say that the intense anger boiling out of America's lower and lower middle classes over the immigration comes from their racism/nativism.
That's easy to say--especially since no one can disprove accusations that are based on mindreading. But this accusation fails to account for the fact that one out of four California Latino voters oppose illegal immigration.
It's more reasonable to suppose that this intense anger comes from their feeling--accurately--that they're getting the shaft, and that you're helping them get the shaft. They don't hate the illegals. They know they'd be doing the same thing as the illegals if they were in their situation.
Want to know who they hate? They hate the leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties, who represent every special interest under the sun--but not Joe Lunchbox. They hate the greedy, soulless CEOs who exploit both the illegals and them. And they hate you, for stepping over them to help someone else--as if they didn't even exist.
No comments:
Post a Comment