Disclaimer
Gotta get this out of the way before any SJW reads into this more than what is on the page. I am of immigrant stock. I spoke Italian before I spoke English. Grew up on polenta, gnocchi, and pasta. Christmas was homemade pizzelli and grustelli. Nona and Grandma with mantillas over their heads going to Mass. So I am of the opinion that immigration is not necessarily a bad thing. But I am also of the opinion that it is not necessarily a good thing either. Immigration policy is contingent solely on the needs of the body politic.
Goals and Assumptions
Immigration policy is a political decision that reflects upon and the policies created to implement that decision are to fulfill the needs and plans for the current citizens of a Nation/State. I do not feel that immigration is a right. Rights are assigned to citizens/residents of any particular country by the current citizenry of that country. There are, nor will there ever be, universal human rights. Here in the US, we feel the desperate need to say things are universal, but this is an artifact of the fucked up and arrogant pilgrim heritage that has so deranged our national psyche.
So I want to talk about immigration policy in America. It is a problem that we have painted with fear, anger, and righteousness. None of those things are particularly useful in any political discussion, so lets try to leave those words and concepts behind. I don't really care about race, creed or anything. Just doesn't matter to me. What I want to do is talk about the current socio/politico/economic setting here in the good old USA and what place immigration policy has in that matrix.
It is my opinion that the United States is in the beginning stages of a compressionary/deflationary decline. I choose to use this as a starting point for this discussion. I won’t be looking at the problem in the standard terms of perpetual growth that most folks seem to use. I feel that the obligatory positivism and the need to believe that tomorrow will always be better than today to be a stunted and false mindset. For a long while (lets say the past eighty-some-odd years) this has been the dominant mental paradigm here in the US and the West. I feel that this model does not accurately reflect the current or the future world.
If you use the possibility of decline as a starting point, I think that we can start looking at the current state of the American body politic in a different manner, I think that even using a dialectic-style argument comparing and contrasting the two possibilities (growth-vs-decline) would be more useful than the simpering need for only good outcomes . Actually there is a third possibility that folks seem to abhor even more than that of decline: Stagnation and stasis are repulsive to our society of good/bad and is probably even more repulsive to us than decline.
My take on the current state of political discussion
The Left
The left wing of this body seems to feel that there should be unlimited immigration. I feel that there are several reasons used for this.
The first one is actually the more interesting (albeit the least heartfelt): The idea that there is a universal human right to live where one wishes and to be able to best pursue the possibility of maximizing self-actualization a la Mazlow. This is the most tempting and the hardest to refute. The trouble with this is that it is truly an article of faith. Like believing in the God of Abraham or the direct revelation of the Quran by the Archangel. I can't touch it. If you believe this, then really, at this point, my disbelief becomes apostasy. I won’t attempt to address this save to say that I am a heretic and simply don’t believe it.
Another argument that the left uses to validate their desire to allow immigration on a semi-permanent basis is the idea that "we are a nation of Immigrants". this one is easier to discuss. "Yes we are" is the simple answer. I am proof of that. But, like my experience and my forebears, the truth is more nuanced than that simple statement allows. We have gone through several periods of immigration. You can make a statement to say that, with the exception of full-blood Native American stock (a vanishingly small percentage) we are all immigrants here. But even that “absolute” statement doesn’t take into account the vagaries of the Bering land bridge. When you look at raw numbers, the rate of immigration is “spikey”. People move around the world to try and find a better life, that has always been the case. No problems with that.
We have allowed immigration in the past, we have brought in folks from every continent for our use and our purposes. Each run of immigration increases has met with pushback. This is normal. Truth be told it is probably the right way to approach it. Immigration policy is like a drug or a vitamin pill, it is to be used to solve problems or to maintain health. One uses immigration policy to enhance the situation for the current citizens of this body politic. It is a means of providing labor and brains for the project. What is different this time is the moralization of the process by the left. Oppose us and you are a racist, use these folks for gain and you are an evil capitalist, keep people out from shithole countries (and yes, such things exist) and you are little better than an animal.
It is this assignment of morality that is distressing (BTW: Before you start squealing, read the entire piece). Immigration is a mixed bag. But, almost by definition, it is designed to change the nature of a country. While good things come out of immigrants, bad things come with them as well. The morality of immigration is not defined by only the good brought by these new people, but by the bad brought as well. One simply cannot ignore the ambiguous and complex repercussions of immigration policy by assigning morality and squealing how anyone who opposes you is immoral.
The right
The right side of this equation seems to have a simpler side of it. They want cheap labor and high profits and you just can’t do that with uppity Americans who demand things like moderately fair distribution of money and power. So the right opposes immigration for pretty standard, semi-racist, nativist, and social reasons while hiring the “illegals” as fast as they can get them and paying them as little as they can get away with. The right has every reason to keep the border closed, because if these folks ever received legal status, they would probably demand a fair portion of the proceeds.
I tend to see the right and the Trumpolino as much more cynical in their public persona and their public pronouncements. I will give the noisy faction of the left their due as being more sincere in their pathetically mistaken belief that immigration is a universal right and a universal good. The noisy jeering section of the right has chosen to cynically and deliberately use fear to whip up political support to maintain a crimp on immigration.
When one actually pays attention to the idiocy coming out of the right, they stress the negative aspects of bringing in new people from a different culture. They portray aspects as endemic in the immigrants (read here: rape and murder) yet the same aspects are easily found here in the US and executed by current US citizens . Fear sells in the American Political Marketplace. I don’t doubt for a minute that there are rapists and murderers coming across the border illegally, but the ratio of good/bad in the overall immigrant population is probably not significantly different than in the current native population.
But the fear is just a tactic to keep the current rights-free immigrant population in its current rights-free status. Immigrants have an excellent track record of accepting jobs free of the profit-reducing fripperies such as minimum wage, workplace safety, or any kind of security. This kind a thing reduces corporate profit. If the immigrants currently being ritually abused in this manner were suddenly given rights, they would have the temerity to use them to escape the shithole jobs that the right reserves for them.
The Common Ground of the left/right divide
Where there appears to be a common ground for the immigration question is on the need for workers. This one here is a difficult one to categorize between right and left, liberal or conservative. Simply put, the argument agreed upon is that we want to be able to import servants from abroad. I use the word “Servant” in it’s most pejorative sense. It is a person that you want to do shit work for you for the least amount of money that you can get away with paying them.
The left wants their nannies and au pair’s, their landscape firms and their day labor hanging around down at Home Depot. But mostly they want someone to work the shit jobs in the slaughterhouses and farms and factories for shit wages and shittier working conditions. This desire is based solely on the simple concept that they want lots of shit for cheap so that they can decorate their lives in a manner dictated to them by the gods of style and status. The easiest and the most “out of sight out of mind” method for achieving this lofty goal is to not pay a living wage for the folks who who do the shit work and then half-heartedly blame the evil capitalists for oppressing these imports.
The right is more than happy to acquiesce to this desire of the left. Screwing immigrants has a proven track record of both lowering prices to the consumer and increasing the bottom line of the producer.
The common ground between the “right” arguments for keeping immigration down and the “left” argument for letting people in are both based in a single word. Class.
You see, in his descriptions of the problem, Marx was right. The argument that is in the news over immigration is simply a means of classing up the elite (top 25%) and middle class (25%-75%) desire to have cheap shit and high profits at someone else expense. Since we have created an underclass (<25%) here in the US that has decided that not having nice things isn’t all that bad and being poor in the US ain’t that bad of a gig, we have to import people from elsewhere to screw. This is the common ground of the left/right divide in the US. Where to get the screwees and just how hard to screw them.
The Real Issue We Are Facing
Now we get back to the meat of my argument. I feel that, here in the US we are in the first stages of a compressionary collapse/decline. What this means simply is that we have run into the end of the cycle of expansion that began in 1939 when we made the decision to get into the Second World War.
This cycle of expansion, fueled by the profligate growth of the oil burning machines that gave us non-human slaves to fill our wants, is petering out fast. The decline started around 2005 and had its first crisis in 2008 and we managed to paper that mess over pretty fast. We have managed to paper things over with debt and hocus pocus, but the productivity of the US now appears to be in the business of shuffling around paper and creating ponzi schemes.
I cannot see how we are going to get out of this mess without taking a huge hit. The “economy” so touted by the elite is a chimera. A thing built on lies and public relations and poor price discovery. The stock market doesn’t reflect the fundamentals of the real economy of goods and services, instead it is an economy of rent-seeking and blame shuffling. It really isn’t a healthy, productive economy.
We will have to rebuild our economy. In order to be able to do this, we will have to simply learn to live within our means. As it stands now, the top 75% has wants and expectations that don’t reflect the reality of a changing world. The top 75% has expectations of wealth and leisure that the economy and the environment simply cannot provide. The only way out of this conundrum is for everyone to take less. We will have to drop our energy consumption by 50%. We will have to develop means of transportation that deliver basic goods and transport people at a price that all can afford. This requirement for a compression is built around the simple premise that there just won’t be enough to go around for the current population at current rates of consumption.
But most of all, the current citizens of this nation state will have to change. We will have to get over the sneering elitist class judgment of what makes human worth. The poor are doing this much better than the rich. The top 75% have bought completely into the idea that it is what you own and what you wear and where you are educated that translates into worth. What the immigration problem does is bring in a more tractable, less demanding class of servants for the exceptional Americans to lord it over. It really doesn’t change the nature of a shrinking pie, it just brings in more people to compete for the crumbs left to the lower orders.
I think that the change that needs to be made, and that we will probably fail at making, needs to be the change in heart away from the primitive class structure that we insist on maintaining. Because her in America, it is all about maintaining your status and, to do so, bringing in new “meat” allows that to happen in the most expeditious manner.
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