In an earlier age, American leaders never dismissed the country’s population as lazy and immoral. They might have said so privately, in restaurant booths or on golf courses, and surely they did. But never in public. That would have seemed snobbish and out of touch, even anti-American. Vilifying the middle class in a middle-class country was unpatriotic.
Fifty years ago, elites understood that the point of any major government policy was to help as many Americans as possible. They often fell short of that standard, but they never challenged it. Their political heroes reflected their priorities. Most of the people they revered, even the ideologues on the hard left, were effectively populists, leaders whose main concern was the dignity and prosperity of average people.
In the American West, no populist figure was more revered than Cesar Chavez. Chavez, an itinerant farmworker with a seventh-grade education, founded and led the United Farm Workers union. In the 1960s, Chavez led the legendary Delano grape strike, which lasted for five years and inspired college students across the country to wear “Boycott Grapes” pins.
Chavez’s signature rallying cry, “¡Si, se puede!” (“Yes we can!”), became so famous among well-educated liberals that Barack Obama used it as a campaign slogan when he ran for president. Growing up in California, I can’t remember a year when we didn’t celebrate the life and achievements of Cesar Chavez in class.
Chavez’s name is still everywhere in the state. There are six libraries, eleven parks, half a dozen major roads, and at least twenty-five public schools in California named after him, more than George Washington. That doesn’t include the many Cesar Chavez academic buildings, student centers, and at least one college. Cesar Chavez Day is a California state holiday.
Most enduring is Chavez’s “¡Si, se puede!” Wherever left-wing demonstrators gather, you’ll hear it. It’s most common at pro-immigration rallies. Several times I’ve seen illegal aliens scream it while carrying Mexican flags. Every time, I say a silent prayer of thanks that Cesar Chavez is long dead. It would have been torture for him.
Cesar Chavez didn’t support illegal aliens. Chavez didn’t like immigration at all, generally, especially the low-skilled kind. Chavez understood that new arrivals from poor countries will always work for less than Americans. Immigration hurt the members of his union, undercutting their wages and weakening their leverage in negotiations with management. Cesar Chavez believed in vigilantly defended borders. When government refused to protect them, Chavez did it himself.
In the early 1960s, Chavez fought the federal Bracero Program, which gave farmers permission to import hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers from Mexico to pick crops. Growers loved the program because it lowered their labor costs. Chavez hated it for the same reason.
Congress killed the Bracero Program in 1964, after which Chavez turned his sights on illegal aliens—or as he called them, “wetbacks.” In 1969, Chavez led a march down the agricultural spine of California to protest the hiring of illegal workers by growers. Marching alongside him were future presidential candidate Walter Mondale and Reverend Ralph Abernathy, longtime aide to Martin Luther King.
By 1972, the problem of illegal labor streaming over the border had worsened. In an interview with a San Francisco television station, Chavez railed against the “wetbacks” and “illegal immigrants from Mexico” who were threatening his workers. “As long as we have a poor country bordering California, it’s going to be very difficult to win strikes,” he said.
When the U.S. government failed to secure the border, Chavez’s unionized fruit pickers acted unilaterally. In the winter of 1979, UFW members, almost all of them Hispanic, began intercepting Mexican nationals as they crossed the border and assaulted them in the desert. Their tactics were brutal: Chavez’s men beat immigrants with chains, clubs, and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses bombed and cars burned. The union paid Mexican officials to keep quiet.
In an interview with the New York Times, Yuma County sheriff Travis Yancey recalled watching as the UFW men set up a one-hundred-mile “wet line” of military tents along the Arizona–Mexico border. “Each tent was manned by five or six of their people who were paid $5 to $7 day, plus their grub,” said Yancey. “They’d catch any ‘wet’ coming through and beat the hell out of them.”
Chavez didn’t deny any of this. Yes, there was a union “wet line” along the border, he said. “It cost us a lot of money, and we stopped a lot of illegals.”
At one union meeting, which was tape-recorded, a UFW official confronted Chavez about using the terms “illegals” and “wetback.” Chavez responded angrily. “No, a spade’s a spade,” he said. “You guys get these hang-ups. Goddamn it, how do we build a union? They’re wets, you know. They’re wets, and let’s go after them.”
Chavez was blunter than most, but his views weren’t unusual in the American labor movement. Union leaders had opposed mass immigration since the 1860s. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers, is often cited as an example of race hatred and xenophobia, and it may have been. But fundamentally it was a form of protectionism. The Knights of Labor backed it, and when the law came up for reauthorization in 1901, so did the American Federation of Labor.
Thanks to lobbying from unions, the Chinese Exclusion Act remained the law for more than sixty years.
Many similar laws followed. In 1885, Congress passed a measure that forbade companies from hiring foreign contract workers. Two years later, the government tightened vetting of immigrants at ports of entry. In 1888, Congress mandated fines for companies that hired illegals. All these bills were backed by organized labor.
In 1917, the American Federation of Labor successfully pushed for literacy tests for foreign workers, which had the (fully intended) effect of restricting immigration from eastern and southern European countries. Samuel Gompers, the famed AFL leader who was himself an immigrant, explained that “immigration is working a great injury to the people of our country.”
For most of the twentieth century, organized labor remained skeptical of immigration. In the 1950s, the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, creating the modern AFL-CIO. After the merger, the union adopted a position friendly to modest legal immigration, but remained sharply opposed to illegal immigration, which it rightly saw as a vehicle for both suppressing wages and undermining organized labor.
Throughout this era, organized labor was firmly aligned with the Democratic Party, and Democrats in turn took positions on immigration that at least acknowledged the concerns of American wage earners. Democrats opposed illegal immigration and worried about the consequences of legal immigration. They believed assimilation was important.
In 1975, Governor Jerry Brown of California opposed the admission of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people after the fall of Saigon. Julia Taft ran the resettlement effort for the Ford administration. In an interview with NPR decades later, Taft recalled the pushback she received from Brown, famous at the time as one of America’s most liberal politicians. Brown, Taft said, “didn’t want any of these refugees, because [California] had unemployment. They already had a large number of foreign-born people there. They said they had too many Hispanics, too many people on welfare. They didn’t want these people.”
Jerry Brown said pretty much the same thing himself to the Los Angeles Times: “There is something a little strange about saying, ‘Let’s bring in 500,000 more people’ when we can’t take care of the one million [Californians] out of work.” For Brown, the obligation to citizens already in California came first.
Senator Joe Biden of Delaware agreed; he introduced legislation to curb the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants, accusing the Ford administration of not being honest about how many refugees would be arriving.
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was even more direct. Exactly one week after the last helicopter lifted off from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, Byrd demanded extreme vetting of Vietnamese refugees, in order to cull the “barmaids, prostitutes, and criminals.”
Even George McGovern, the Democratic nominee who lost forty-nine states to Richard Nixon, opposed opening the gates. “I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam,” he said.
This attitude was once conventional in the Democratic Party. Nobody doubted that an influx of refugees would harm American workers. One study, conducted after the Mariel boatlift of 1980, found that Americans with lower education levels in Miami saw their wages fall by 37 percent after the Cuban refugees arrived. Modern Democrats wax enthusiastic about the virtues of economic competition, but that’s an idea they borrowed fairly recently from libertarians. Nobody on the left was saying that at the time.
Here’s how one prominent Democrat described his position on immigration in 1995: “All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by U.S. citizens or immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”
The speaker? President Bill Clinton, addressing Congress in his State of the Union speech.
Pat Buchanan never put it more succinctly.
Clinton went on to boast about hiring more Border Patrol officers, cutting off welfare for illegal immigrants, and cracking down on employers who hired illegal workers. He called for speedier deportations of illegal immigrants. “It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that we’ve seen in recent years,” Clinton said. “We must do more to stop it.” He got a standing ovation.
At one point in his speech, Clinton cited Barbara Jordan, the civil rights figure and former congresswoman from Texas who was then the chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. Jordan was an enthusiastic Democrat. She gave the opening speech at Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearings. Nobody confused Jordan with a right-winger. At the time, a restrictionist position on immigration wasn’t considered incompatible with liberalism.
In 1994, Jordan noted that “it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.” The next year, she launched a broadside against multiculturalism in the pages of the New York Times. “Those who choose to come here must embrace the common core of American civic culture,” she wrote. “We must assist them in learning our common language: American English.”
Jordan didn’t oppose all immigration, but she demanded “Americanization,” which she described as uniting “immigrants and their descendants around a commitment to democratic ideals and constitutional principles.” For immigrants who refused to participate, Jordan supported swift deportation. Today, Jordan’s views would be dismissed as racist, but they were unremarkable at the time. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As late as 2006, there were still New York Times columnists willing to concede that immigration came with a downside. “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” economist Paul Krugman wrote that year in the paper. “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, Hillary Clinton voted in support of a fence on the Mexican border. So did Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and twenty-three other Senate Democrats.
But that was the last gasp of a dying elite consensus. Consider two Democratic platforms, written just four years apart. In the 2000 platform, the Democratic Party was broadly pro-immigration but still recognized the many downsides of not adequately controlling its flow.
“Democrats believe in an effective immigration system that balances a strong enforcement of our laws with fair and evenhanded treatment of immigrants and their families,” the platform said. It boasted that the Clinton administration had drastically improved immigration enforcement and cut down on abuses of the asylum process. Illegal immigration was condemned for taxing government services, harming local communities, and hurting American workers.
In places, the 2000 Democratic platform sounded similar to what Donald Trump would advocate just fifteen years later. “We must punish employers who engage in a pattern and practice of recruiting undocumented workers in order to intimidate and exploit them,” it said. “We believe that any increases in H1-B visas must be temporary [and] must address only genuine shortages of highly skilled workers.” The platform vowed to protect American farmworkers, not just foreign pickers imported to replace them.
In a single presidential cycle, everything changed.
In 2004, gone were concerns about protecting U.S. workers, stemming a torrent of illegal border crossings, or punishing employers reliant on illegal workers. Instead, the 2004 Democratic platform called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants and a path to citizenship. Vows to protect the border focused only on keeping out terrorists, drugs, and weapons, not on illegal immigrants themselves.
The 2008 platform went even further. Now, not only did the party demand an amnesty for current illegal immigrants, but it also called for an across-the-board hike in immigration visas for both family members and skilled workers.
The Democratic Party now endorsed unrestrained mass immigration.
Remarkably, after almost 150 years of fighting for tighter labor markets, organized labor went along with most of this. In 2000, the AFL-CIO called for eliminating all sanctions on employers who deliberately hired illegal immigrants. The union also called for a total amnesty on the estimated six million illegals already in the country.
By 2016, when the Democrats faced off against Donald Trump, there were virtually no immigration skeptics remaining on the left. The same politicians and intellectuals who had once acknowledged a need to enforce the border and protect workers now disavowed their old views and suggested those who still held them were racist. The Democratic Party had given up trying to represent the working class, in favor of investors and welfare recipients—and by 2016, illegal immigrants.
In the 2016 Democratic platform, the party reframed immigration from a debate about economics to the next frontier in the struggle for civil rights and social justice. Any references to the effect of immigration on American citizens were deleted. According to the Democratic Party, the goal of immigration policy was to ensure the well-being of immigrants. “The current quota system,” the platform explained, “discriminates against certain immigrants, including immigrants of color.”
It’s hard to think of a claim more at odds with numerical reality. In 2016, only about 18 percent of immigrants to the United States were white. Thanks almost entirely to immigration, the population of the country had gone from 84 percent white in 1965, when Congress stopped favoring European immigrants, to 62 percent white in 2015, and the number was dropping every year. There are a lot of things you could call American immigration law, but the product of white racism isn’t one of them.
Twenty years after Bill Clinton told Americans they had the right to be upset about illegal immigration, his wife scolded the country for enforcing border controls. The 2016 platform demanded that all 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States be “incorporated completely into our society through legal processes that give meaning to our national motto: E Pluribus Unum.”
It was a stunning shift. It was now Democratic Party orthodoxy to give illegal immigrants, all of whom entered the country in defiance of U.S. law, the right to vote. If you had a problem with that, you were betraying the fundamental promise of the country.
The change was purely a product of political calculation. Democrats understood that the overwhelming majority of immigrant voters would vote Democrat. Surveys showed they were right.
Ironically, the more fully Democrats embraced open borders, the closer they came to where the leaders of the Republican Party had long been. Paul Ryan was elected Speaker of the House in the fall of 2015, at about the same time Trump began his run for president. Once Trump won, it was Ryan’s job to translate the new president’s campaign promises into workable legislation. Unfortunately for Trump and the voters who supported him, Ryan had no intention of doing that. On immigration, Ryan agreed with Democrats.
Ryan spent the early 1990s in Washington working for former Buffalo congressman Jack Kemp, one of the most aggressively pro-immigration Republicans in the House. During his time in Kemp’s office, Ryan watched the voters of California approve Proposition 187, which barred illegal aliens from receiving state welfare benefits. Ryan was appalled. He and Kemp led Republican opposition to the law. When National Review attacked Kemp for this, Ryan authored a four-thousand-word rebuttal.
In 1996, Congress debated a bipartisan proposal to significantly curb immigration. By this point, Ryan was an aide to Representative Sam Brownback of Kansas, and he worked overtime to kill the bill. Ryan authored a series of “Dear Colleague” letters that successfully frightened Republicans into neutering the legislation.
Two years later, Ryan himself was elected to the House. Republican voters became steadily more suspicious of mass immigration during the George W. Bush years, and Ryan at times pretended to agree with them. But it was never a comfortable pose. In 2013, Ryan made an appearance alongside Democrat Luis Gutierrez, probably the most consistent advocate for open borders in Washington, and argued that without high levels of immigration, the rule of law would vanish from America.
“We need to let legal immigrants come here legally,” Ryan said. “We can’t have a system where we pay homage and adherence to the rule of law if we don’t have an open system where people can come here in search of their American dream, where the work that won’t be done by people who are already here can be filled by the people who want to come here and do those jobs.”
In 2015, Ryan said it would be wrong for the United States to take any efforts to curb Muslim immigration into the United States, because “[t]hat’s not who we are.” He did not elaborate.
After the 2016 election, Ryan did his best to portray himself as an immigration hawk aligned with Trump. He publicly committed to funding a border wall. His staff even produced a video backed with techno music that showed Ryan flying over the border. Message: we’re going to secure this thing.
He didn’t mean it. During the first year of the administration, Ryan achieved his primary goal, a massive corporate tax cut. After that, he seemed to lose interest in borders. In March 2018, Ryan produced a $1.3 trillion spending bill designed to keep the federal government funded and open. More clearly than any video Ryan’s staff could shoot, the bill reflected elite Republican views on immigration.
Ryan’s bill actively restricted the hiring of additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for immigration enforcement. It capped the number of illegal aliens ICE could detain at any one time. It ostensibly allocated $1.6 billion for border security, but the money was explicitly prohibited from being spent on any sort of border wall.
The bill did pay for border security, just not in America. Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia all received American tax dollars to deal with their immigration problems. Also included was $10 million to hire female law enforcement officers in Afghanistan, $10 million for disadvantaged students in Egypt, and $12 million to boost the military capacity of Vietnam. China, whose economy is now larger than America’s, received $15 million in development aid, to promote yak herding in Tibet. Also, Congress gave itself a pay raise.
The message couldn’t have been clearer: Republicans in Congress don’t care about the territorial integrity of the country they run. Democratic leaders share this view. Hundreds of U.S. municipalities run by Democrats have declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” barring police from cooperating in any way with federal authorities in enforcing immigration statutes, even against immigrants caught breaking U.S. law. The attorney general of California announced it is now illegal for private citizens in the state to assist federal immigration authorities in any way. Violators will be prosecuted.
In Oregon, a county judge allowed an illegal immigrant caught driving under the influence to leave the courthouse via her personal chambers, so that he could evade ICE agents. An investigation later cleared the judge of wrongdoing, on the grounds that she didn’t know the man was an illegal immigrant, even though she knew he was attempting to avoid immigration authorities.
The changes in elite consensus have been so swift that some longtime politicians have struggled to keep up. In 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders sat for a largely friendly interview with the publication Vox. Vox editor Ezra Klein suggested that, if Sanders wanted to curb global poverty, he should endorse unlimited migration to the United States. Sanders already supported amnesty, sanctuary cities, and continued mass immigration, but this was too much even for him. Sanders responded that open borders would “make everyone in America poorer” by driving down wages and taxing social welfare systems, all in the interest of pleasing business owners.
For this, Sanders was denounced as a bigot who didn’t understand basic economics. “Bernie Sanders’s fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded,” announced a headline on Vox.
In the spring of 2017, the New York Times ran a story about a town in northwest Iowa called Storm Lake. Tyson Foods operates slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in Storm Lake, and over the years thousands of workers from Asia and Latin America have moved there to work in them. Not surprisingly, the flood of cheap labor destroyed the local labor union and depressed wages. The Times interviewed one Tyson employee whose hourly wage had remained at $16 an hour for thirty-seven years.
What’s striking is how the Times interpreted all of this. Twenty years before, the story might have been framed as a victory of management over labor. The Times presented it as a win for progress and diversity: “While more than 88 percent of the state’s population is non-Hispanic white, less than half of Storm Lake’s is. Walk through the halls of the public schools and you can hear as many as 18 languages.” Mass immigration, reporter Patricia Cohen concluded, had kept the “Iowa meatpacking town alive and growing.” Third-world immigration saves another American town!
Media coverage has been remarkably consistent in the way it presents the abrupt demographic change wrought by immigration. A 2018 story in National Geographic about Hazleton, Pennsylvania, is typical of the genre. In the year 2000, the story explained, Hazleton was 95 percent white and less than 5 percent Hispanic. Just sixteen years later, 52 percent of Hazleton residents were Hispanic. Less than half spoke English at home. People who grew up there didn’t recognize the city. They didn’t hate immigrants. Most Americans don’t. But they were bewildered.
National Geographic’s verdict: “Hazleton was another former coal mining town slipping into decline until a wave of Latinos arrived.”
In Storm Lake, mass immigration had a dramatic effect on violent crime rates, which are 56 percent higher than in the rest of the state. The New York Times story downplayed that fact, along with the sagging performance of the local schools. The villain of the piece was Storm Lake’s anti-immigration congressman, Steve King, whom the paper dismissed as a racist for opposing “cultural diversity.”
The same story, written using the same set of facts, could have been a PR disaster for Tyson Foods—a multinational corporation brings in cheap labor to undercut collective bargaining. The union fails. Profits soar, while wages fall. Workers don’t make enough to live, so public services take up the slack. Taxpayers wind up involuntarily subsidizing corporate profits. Tyson’s shareholders get richer, while everyone else suffers.
Newspapers used to write stories like that, back before American elites decided that criticizing immigration was worse than hurting workers. Now complaints about demographic change, when they’re even reported, are always dismissed as products of irrational racial fear. White anxiety. Suburban racism.
This is unfair, but it’s also a smokescreen. In fact mass immigration tends to affect black neighborhoods most profoundly. Until fairly recently, Compton, California, was the largest black community west of the Mississippi. Today only a third of Compton’s population is black. The rest is Hispanic. Unless you happen to drive through, you’re unlikely to know that. Demographic change in Compton is the subject of relatively few news stories.
One place notably unaffected by demographic change is any neighborhood policy makers happen to live in. The people making immigration policy tend not to be affected by it. Los Angeles County, for example, is now overwhelmingly Hispanic. Upper-income Malibu, meanwhile, is still 87 percent white. New York is a diverse city, but former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s zip code isn’t. His neighborhood is 82 percent white, and less than 5 percent Hispanic. It’s still 1985 where Bloomberg lives, and will likely always be.
Barack Obama’s new zip code in Washington is less than 8 percent Hispanic. The suburbs across the river in Virginia become more Spanish-speaking every year. Obama approves of that. He sees it as a sign of progress. He doesn’t want to live near it. Diversity for thee, but not for me.
The more abstract our elites’ commitment to diversity becomes, the more deeply it is cherished and defended. Diversity matters more than anything. When the realities of mass immigration conflict with other elite concerns—preserving the environment, for example—elites choose immigration. Consider the case of John Tanton.
Tanton is a retired physician from Michigan and a lifelong progressive. He helped to found local chapters of both the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood, and in general supported the agenda of the Democratic Party. That began to change in 1965, when Congress rewrote immigration law. As millions and then tens of millions of immigrants entered the United States, Tanton started to worry about the effect of all those people on the environment.
Others were concerned about that, too. In 1979, Tanton started the Federation for American Immigration Reform, with the help of investor Warren Buffett and Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy. The group argued that higher population levels would lead to more consumption, more pollution, and more environmental degradation.
Tanton imagined that others like him would join the effort to slow mass immigration. In the words of a New York Times profile, Tanton “hoped to enlist unions concerned about wage erosion, environmentalists concerned about pollution and sprawl, and blacks concerned about competition for housing, jobs and schools.” That’s not what happened.
Instead, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which fraudulently poses as a civil rights group used by the left to smear its opposition, devoted an entire page on its website to suggesting Tanton was a Nazi. “Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene,” the SPLC charged, providing no evidence. Tanton, who lives in a nursing home and is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, could do little to defend himself.
Warren Buffett was gone by this point, reinvented as an advocate for a borderless world. Major environmental groups didn’t say a word to defend Tanton, either. Even executives at the Sierra Club, which Tanton had long supported, refused to speak up on his behalf. They’d changed their views on immigration too.
For years, the Sierra Club had articulated a zero-population-growth position. “Immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.” is how the club put it in 1989.
A few years later, a California investment fund billionaire named David Gelbaum began giving money to the group, ultimately at least $200 million. Gelbaum was a pro-immigration activist who had spent heavily in an effort to defeat Proposition 187 in California. When the initiative passed anyway, Gelbaum funded the court challenge that ultimately struck it down.
Under pressure from Gelbaum, the Sierra Club radically changed its position on immigration. A battle within the organization ensued. Among the board members who objected to the change was the former Democratic governor of Colorado, Richard Lamm, and Frank Morris, the former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2004, the New York Times quoted a Southern Poverty Law Center official who suggested that anyone who opposed the Sierra Club’s new support for open borders was in league with racists and white nationalists.
Morris, who is black, was shocked by the slur. “To have this considered a position as a front for racists and Nazis is beyond the pale,” he wrote. The paper issued a correction of sorts: “Mr. Morris disputes those characterizations, saying his support for limiting immigration reflects concerns among African-Americans and others that unchecked immigration had hurt their economic opportunities.”
But the damage was done. One of America’s most powerful environmental organizations now supported mass immigration. In 2013, the group came out in favor of Barack Obama’s amnesty orders. What did amnesty have to do with the environment?
As a Sierra Club spokesman explained to Politico, illegal immigrants “are the most adversely affected by pollution.” He did not explain what that meant.
The Sierra Club’s position on immigration seems to become more activist every year. In 2016, the Texas chapter of the group refused to participate in an Earth Day festival because it included participants who wanted tighter border controls. The Austin American-Statesman, which first reported the story, dutifully noted that anti-immigration organizations were connected to “white nationalists” through their ties to John Tanton. “We consider them hate groups,” explained Sierra Club state director Reggie James. “It’s Earth Day; it’s not This-Side-of-the-Border Day.”
By redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. That’s helpful for them, since for the affluent, immigration has few costs and many upsides. Low-skilled immigrants don’t compete in upscale job markets. Not many recent arrivals from El Salvador are becoming lawyers or green energy lobbyists. An awful lot of them are becoming housekeepers. Mass immigration makes household help affordable. That’s one of the main reasons elites support it.
From the 1800s through the 1950s, maids, nannies, gardeners, and other domestic help were ubiquitous in upper-middle-class households. Economic prosperity gradually eliminated the huge pool of unskilled labor that filled these jobs, but modern immigration policy has revived America’s servant class. Immigrants now fill countless jobs as nannies, gardeners, cooks, and housekeepers.
For employers, the best part of the new arrangement is that there’s no guilt attached. Let’s say you lived in an affluent household in Boston in 1910. You’ve got help at home; everyone in your neighborhood does. The problem is, your servants are Irish. They may do a fine job making breakfast and ironing the sheets, but you can never quite relax. These are people who speak your language and look like you. At some point you may wonder: why is someone who could be my cousin cleaning my toilet? It’s uncomfortable.
Third-world immigration solves this problem. When your housekeeper is a peasant from Honduras, there’s no reason to feel bad about it. You don’t have to wonder about the details of her life outside of work. You can barely communicate with her. She may be cleaning your floors for minimum wage (or less) while your children travel abroad, but you’re not exploiting her. Just the opposite. You’re giving her a hand up, allowing her to participate in the American dream.
If she’s here illegally, maybe you help her get a green card. Yes, you’ve got an awful lot of power over her, but you’re doing the right thing and you can tell your friends about it at dinner. You’re not like some Saudi prince or nineteenth-century plutocrat, taking advantage of a helpless peon for your own comfort. You’re compassionate. You’re the hero of this story.
It’s the perfect arrangement. You get to feel virtuous for having a housekeeper; she walks the dog while you’re at SoulCycle. You can see why affluent moms tended to hate Donald Trump and his talk about building a wall. For Americans in the top 20 percent of income distribution, mass immigration is one of the best things that ever happened—cheap help, obedient employees, more interesting restaurants, and all without guilt. There’s no downside, at least none that you personally experience.
You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care or send your kids to overpopulated public schools that have canceled gym and music to pay for ESL because half the kids can’t speak English. The New York Times tells you that immigrants are reviving dying towns all over America. It’s easy to imagine that only bigots would oppose open borders.
Occasionally you’ll read a story about stagnant wages in the Rust Belt, or about high levels of black teen unemployment. As someone who took Econ 101 in college, you might wonder if immigration plays a role in that. You know about supply and demand, so you understand that an overabundance of anything causes its value to fall. That’s why the fracking boom crashed oil prices, and why printing money causes inflation. It’s why sand is cheap. So, does the same hold true for labor markets?
No, your neighbors assure you. Immigration is the one exception to the most basic law of economics. It increases the size of the economic pie, allowing everyone to benefit. It’s like magic. You’re happy to believe that.
Over time, you find your attitudes about the working class changing. You think of yourself as a champion of the little guy, but who’s really the underdog here? The unemployed machinist in Toledo? He’s fat, smokes cigarettes, and gets by on disability payments for a back injury that may or may not be legitimate. He likely voted for Donald Trump. You don’t even want to know his views on gay marriage.
Compare him to your gardener. There’s a guy you can admire. He somehow made it from Oaxaca to your front yard, enduring risks and privations you can only imagine, and yet he never complains, at least not in a language you can speak. He shows up on time, does a fine job, and doesn’t charge much. Every month he sends money back to his family in Mexico. Why is he not more impressive than the reactionary machinist in Ohio?
He is, of course. Once you recognize that, your perspectives change. America’s lower classes look less like fellow citizens, in need of uplift, and more like damaged raw materials, worthy of replacement if they aren’t measuring up. Your support for social improvement efforts, the ones that previous generations of elites devoted their lives to, begins to wane.
Public schools, for example. Sure they’re bad. You know that. That’s why you don’t send your kids. But can we really improve them? You’re starting to wonder. Maybe it’s just simpler to import a new wave of low-skilled workers from abroad. They certainly have better attitudes.
Even at the higher end of the income scale this is true. You love the idea of retraining out-of-work Michigan autoworkers to code software, but let’s be realistic. Are they actually capable of that? It might be easier just to hire coders in Bangalore and bring them here. They’d be grateful for the chance. And isn’t that the point of America anyway, to give opportunity to the world? There’s a poem on the Statue of Liberty that says something like that. It’s basically in the Constitution.
Once you start thinking like this, it doesn’t take long to run out of empathy for your fellow Americans. In 2016, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that the life expectancy of native-born Americans in many parts of the country was in decline. People were dying younger, and for reasons that were largely preventable: cirrhosis, diabetes, drug overdoses. Nothing like this had ever happened in American history. As a matter of social policy, it was a disaster. If your people are dying younger, you are failing.
How did Washington respond? With a shrug. There was a short flurry of concerned op-eds in the first week or two after the CDC report appeared. After that, silence.
It’s impossible to imagine a similar reaction if the same thing were happening to Syrian refugees. They came here for a better life but instead met an early death? That wouldn’t stand. There would be comprehensive news coverage of the tragedy, frothy editorials, a series of emotional speeches from the floor of the House, followed by an armada of congressional task forces that, in the end, would likely blame racism.
Our ruling class would be upset. They’d consider it, correctly, a stain on the conscience of the country.
Immigrants matter to elites. America’s struggling middle class, not so much. As it happens, many employers feel the same way.
It’s hard to blame the Chamber of Commerce for supporting unrestrained immigration. Businesses benefit from it, at least in the short term. Capitalists push for what’s best for markets. But what happens when nobody in power takes the opposing view? We don’t need to speculate.
At a closed-door speech in 2013, Hillary Clinton told a group of Brazilian bankers, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”
Suddenly the liberal position and the conservative position were indistinguishable. It was the beneficiaries of cheap labor against everyone else. Rulers versus serfs.