"They are willing to rend the fabric of this nation in order to protect their privilege and lifestyle. While the vast majority of Americans will ultimately pay the price, the current ruling class and their progeny will have far more to lose." STEVE McCANN
GOP/Dems Consider DACA Amnesty-for-Wall Deal Backed by Billionaire Donors
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
Their banksters and billionaires demand wider open borders to keep
wages depressed
"This is how they will
destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in
Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of
migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must
endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members,
drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt
for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY TO SERVE THE RICH,
BANKSTERS AND EXPAND THE MEX WELFARE STATE IN AMERICA
TO KEEP THEM COMING
Greenspan, Schumer and
their cohorts are determined to create a $15.00 per hour “standard wage” to be
paid to all workers irrespective of education or the nature of their
jobs. This is called Communism!
4:10
A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Democrats such as Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Debbie Dingell (D-MI) have signaled that they are at least open to granting amnesty to at least 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program if it meant receiving a fifth of wall funding.
In an interview with Yahoo News, Meadows said he has had multiple conversations with Graham about a DACA amnesty-for-wall funding deal:
“Compromise and finding common ground are not void from the conversations that he and I have had, as well as some of the conversations I’ve had with some of my Democratic colleagues,” Meadows said. [Emphasis added]Though the Freedom Caucus has previously opposed extending protections from deportation for the children of undocumented immigrants, Meadows suggested he would be open to a deal to preserve such concessions in exchange for wall funding. [Emphasis added]
Graham has touted an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens for months as part of a deal on funding at least a portion of Trump’s proposed wall.
Coincidentally, the DACA amnesty deal is supported by the billionaire donor class that delivers campaign funds every election cycle to Republicans and Democrats who support the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy of importing about 1.5 million mostly low-skilled foreign workers every year to compete against America’s working and middle class.
As Breitbart News most recently reported, the billionaire Koch brothers and their network of organizations have made passing an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens their goal for the new year.
Similarly, billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s cheap labor lobbying group FWD.us is asking Republicans, Democrats, and the Trump administration to reach a deal whereby DACA illegal aliens are allowed to permanently remain in the U.S.
The organization, founded and funded by Silicon Valley’s tech plutocrats, has been demanding an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens since at least 2017.
So here is what @FWDus would like to see happen with the incoming Congress, this harmful shutdown and urgently needed immigration policy changes...
On Fox News, operated by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, a deal wherby DACA illegal aliens are given amnesty in exchange for some border wall funding has been floated repeatedly. Last week, a Fox News host touted such a plan with White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
“But let me ask this, we’re talking about money, $5 billion $1.5 billion, $2.7 billion,” the host said. “Why aren’t there other things on the table? DACA for example, is that being negotiated?”
Mulvaney said that while the money for a border wall is being negotiated, other changes to the country’s immigration system are being discussed as well, though he did not specifically cite the DACA program as one of those changes.
Any form of amnesty coupled with funds to build a wall along the southern border would render the barrier almost useless in stopping illegal immigration, Breitbart News has noted.
While a border wall would take years to build, amnesty for illegal aliens would be nearly immediate, delivering benefits to illegal aliens and foreign nationals first, while Americans only see the hope of a border wall down the road.
In terms of legal immigration, a DACA amnesty would implement a never-ending flow of foreign relatives to the DACA illegal aliens who can be readily sponsored for green cards through the process known as “chain migration” — a flow of potentially more than 8.5 million legal immigrants.
Meanwhile, a DACA amnesty would drag increasing U.S. wages down for the country’s working and middle class, delivering benefits to the business lobby while squashing the intended goals of the Trump administration ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The plan is also likely to hit the black American community the hardest, as they are forced to compete for blue collar jobs against a growing illegal and legal immigrant population from Central America.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Study: Blue-Collar U.S. Wages Continue to be Undercut by Foreign Labor
2:58
The H-2B visa program, whereby businesses are allowed to import foreign workers every year, has dragged down the wages of blue-collar Americans, a new study reveals.
Every year, U.S. companies are allowed to import 66,000 low-skilled H-2B foreign workers to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs. For some time, the H-2B visa program has been used by businesses to bring in cheaper, foreign workers and has contributed to blue-collar Americans having their wages undercut.
The latest study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that throughout Fiscal Year 2018, blue-collar Americans in landscaping, conservation work, the meatpacking industry, construction industry, and fishing jobs have had their wages dragged down by foreign workers imported through the H-2B visa program.
Breitbart TV
When CIS researchers reviewed wage data comparing the wages of H-2B foreign workers to the national wage average for each blue-collar industry, about 21 out of 25 of the industries offered lower wages to foreign workers than Americans.
In the construction industry, wage suppression is significant, with H-2B foreign workers being offered more than 20 percent less than their American counterparts. In the fishing industry, foreign workers were offered more than 30 percent less for their jobs than Americans in the field; and in the meatpacking industry, foreign workers got 23 percent less pay in wages than Americans.
(Center for Immigration Studies)
Despite the H-2B visa program keeping working-class Americans’ wages down, the Democrat and Republican political establishments have joined the business lobby to push a plan that would give U.S. industry an unlimited supply of low-skilled foreign workers through the H-2B visa program.
The plan would cut poorer and working-class Americans completely out of the U.S. labor force by replacing them with foreign workers.
Though President Trump signed his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order in early 2017, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretaries, General John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, have each approved an additional 15,000 foreign workers for business to import in 2017 and 2018.
Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.1 million mostly low-skilled legal immigrants, many of whom immediately become low-wage competition for America’s working and middle class. The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau marks a nearly 108-year record high of immigration to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population boomed to 13.7 percent, encompassing 44.5 million immigrants.
The Washington, DC-imposed policy of mass immigration is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates, as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of each occupation’s labor force reduces those Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
The Left Case Against Open Borders’: Liberal Author Pans ‘Useful
Idiots of Big Business’
22 Nov 20188
5:13
Progressives’
enthusiastic support for mass immigration has converted them into “useful
idiots” for the nation’s business elites, says a left-wing writer.
Today’s
well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With
their adoption of “open borders” advocacy—and a fierce moral
absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an
unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass
migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy. Even solidly leftist
politicians, like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the
United Kingdom, are accused of “nativism” by critics if they recognize the
legitimacy of borders or migration restriction at any point. This open
borders radicalism ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful
countries in the world, further disempowers organized labor, robs the
developing world of desperately needed professionals, and turns workers against
workers.
Nagle
also argues that mass immigration operates extracts human talent from
developing societies for the benefit of wealthy, comfortable U.S. elites:
Advocates
of open borders often overlook the costs of mass migration for developing
countries. Indeed, globalization often creates a vicious cycle: liberalized
trade policies destroy a region’s economy, which in turn leads to mass
emigration from that area, further eroding the potential of the origin country
while depressing wages for the lowest paid workers in the destination country.
One of the major causes of labor migration from Mexico to the United States has
been the economic and social devastation caused by the North American Free
Trade Agreement (nafta). Nafta forced Mexican farmers to compete with
U.S. agriculture, with disastrous consequences for Mexico. Mexican imports
doubled, and Mexico lost thousands of pig farms and corn growers to U.S.
competition. When coffee prices fell below the cost of
production, nafta prohibited state intervention to keep growers
afloat. Additionally, U.S. companies were allowed to buy
infrastructure in Mexico, including, for example, the country’s main north-south
rail line. The railroad then discontinued passenger service, resulting in the
decimation of the rail workforce after a wildcat strike was crushed. By 2002,
Mexican wages had dropped by 22 percent, even though worker productivity
increased by 45 percent.7 In regions like Oaxaca,
emigration devastated local economies and communities, as men emigrated to work
in America’s farm labor force and slaughterhouses, leaving behind women,
children, and the elderly.
Left-wing
servants of business elites spray claims of racism on the public to suppress
their rational and reasonable opposition to immigration exploitation,
Nagle argues:
The
immigration expansionists have two key weapons. One is the big business and
financial interests all working on their side, but an equally
powerful weapon—wielded more expertly by the left-leaning
immigration expansionists—is moral blackmail and public shame. People
are right to see the mistreatment of migrants as morally wrong. Many people are
concerned about the growth of racism and callousness toward minorities that
often accompanies anti-immigration sentiment. But the open borders position
does not even live up to its own professed moral code.
The
tacit alliance of the wealthy against the middle prompt some invective by the
Irish author;
In
the wealthiest nations, open borders advocacy seems to function as a fanatical
cult among true believers—a product of big business and free market
lobbying is carried along by a larger group of the urban creative, tech, media,
and knowledge economy class, who are serving their own objective class
interests by keeping their transient lifestyles cheap and their careers intact
as they parrot the institutional ideology of their industries. The truth is
that mass migration is a tragedy, and upper-middle-class moralizing about it is
a farce. Perhaps the ultra-wealthy can afford to live in the borderless world
they aggressively advocate for, but most
people need—and want—a coherent, sovereign political body to
defend their rights as citizens.
The
establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth
shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market
with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside
labor spikes profits and Wall Street
values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar
and white-collar employees.
The
policy also drives up real estate
prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local tax
burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from
high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans
and their families, including many who are now struggling with
opioid addictions.
Immigration
also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal
investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations
living in the coastal states.
AMERICA UNRAVELS:
Millions of children go hungry as the super- rich gorge themselves
and ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE!
*
"The top 10 percent of Americans now own roughly
three-quarters of all household wealth."
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/america-unravels-millions-of-children.html
*
"While
telling workers there is “not enough money” for wage increases, or to fund
social programs, both parties hailed the recent construction of the U.S.S.
Gerald Ford, a massive aircraft carrier that cost $13 billion to build,
stuffing the pockets of numerous contractors and war profiteers."
Two Americas: De Blasio's
Amazon vs. Trump's Walmart
That the Democrat Party is
now the party of the rich is increasingly seen in its candidates. Forget the
occasional Ocasio-Cortez. A Democrat candidate is more likely to be someone
like Illinois’ new governor, J.B. Pritzer, who promises to complete Illinois’
financial collapse with single-payer insurance and a progressive income tax,
promising to persist until he runs out of other people’s money:
John Edwards once
spoke of “two Americas,” one “for all of those
people who have lived the American dream and don't have to worry, and another
for most Americans, everybody else who struggle to make ends meet every single
day”. One is reminded of this by New York City mayor Bill De Blasio’s
full-throated shouting of “socialism for all” from the rooftops of
buildings whose
height his politburo would determine and whose rents and occupants his
commissars would control.
Mayor
Bill de Blasio cited his "socialistic impulse" in describing an ideal
world where New York City government has control over all land and buildings in
his city.
“I
think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the
city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it
will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be,” de Blasio said in
a wide-ranging
interview with New York Magazine. “I think there’s a socialistic
impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community that they would
like things to be planned in accordance to their needs.”
To each according to their
needs -- gee, where have we heard that before? One would be willing to believe
De Blasio’s socialistic impulses arises out of genuine, if wrongheaded, concern
for the working poor and the middle class, the people the Democrat “party of
compassion” is allegedly the champion of, if it were not for De
Blasio’s support for what some would call corporate welfare, welcoming
cash-rich and taxpayer-subsidized Amazon’s new HQ to New York City while
closing its borders to a Walmart invasion.
A listener asked just what
the difference was between the two retail giants during
the mayor’s weekly guest spot on WNYC radio:
“Amazon
is… part of the American economy,” he continued. “I would ask every good
progressive, every listener out there who has a concern about Amazon: How many
are using Amazon as part of their daily lives? Whatever you like or dislike
about Amazon, Walmart is an entirely different universe in terms of the efforts
they’ve undertaken to not only undermine labor, small business, the
environment… and obviously the politics of [Walmart’s owners] the Walton family
to add to it,” referring to the Waltons’ track record of funneling megabucks to
conservative causes.
Funny that De Blasio has no
objection to the likes of billionaires Tom Steyer, Oprah Winfrey, and George
Soros funneling big bucks to liberal candidates and causes. One of the
takeaways from the 2018 midterms was the morphing of the Democrats to the party
of the rich as those stinky Walmart shoppers lined up at Trump rallies. The GOP
is now the party of the working class, or the deplorable bitter-clingers of
Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Hussein Obama’s disdain. As deep state coup architect Peter
Strzok infamously said in a text message to fellow agent Lisa Page:
“Just
went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”
Who wants Walmart greeters
and cashiers moving to New York when you can have the high-rollers who work for
Amazon? Amazon promises to deliver 25,000 jobs with an average salary of
$150,000, which is a lot more than the average Walmart greeter or cashier
makes.
Founded as a single
five-and-dime store in a small Arkansas town, its success story mirrors
America’s. It is a poster child for capitalism and the American dream. It is
ironic that Wal-Mart critics, who have long complained its employees live
paycheck to paycheck, forget that many of its customers also live paycheck to
paycheck, and seek quality merchandise at decent prices. They opposed “low”
wages for Wal-Mart employees while in effect supporting higher prices for
Wal-Mart customers.
That the Democrat Party is
now the party of the rich is increasingly seen in its candidates. Forget the
occasional Ocasio-Cortez. A Democrat candidate is more likely to be someone
like Illinois’ new governor, J.B. Pritzer, who promises to complete Illinois’
financial collapse with single-payer insurance and a progressive income tax,
promising to persist until he runs out of other people’s money:
This
month saw the election of Jay Robert "J.B." Pritzker as governor of
Illinois. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, is worth an estimated
$3.2 billion, and spent $171.5 million to get himself elected, according to Money magazine.
Another
winner was Edward M. "Ned" Lamont Jr., in the Connecticut governor's
race. Lamont, an heir to the J.P. Morgan banking fortune of his
great-grandfather Thomas Lamont, estimated his assets in
2006 at between $90 million and $300 million, and showed reporters tax
returns last month with income totaling $18 million over 5 years.
The
winner of the election for governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, filed
financial disclosure forms
as a member of the House of Representatives indicating estimated wealth of more
than $300 million.
Pritzker,
Lamont, and Polis are all Democrats…
Somehow,
the wealth of Pritzker, Lamont, and Polis has gotten less attention, perhaps
because it doesn't so easily fit the country-club Republican stereotype.
Instead of writing about the limousine liberals who are so rich they make the
Trump cabinet look like a bunch of paupers, the press has been obsessing about
how a newly elected congresswoman from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, can't
afford to rent a place in Washington until she starts collecting her
congressional salary.
The socialism of the coastal
elites of which De Blasio is a leader is akin to the old Soviet politburo who
lived very well as they dictated what could be built and where, what people
would make and where and how they would live. Everyone was equal but some were
more equal than others.
I reject the Democrat Party
of the rich in favor of the GOP party of the working poor and the middle class,
the deplorable bitter clingers. God, how I love the smell of Walmart in the
morning.
Daniel
John Sobieski is a free lance
writer whose pieces have appeared inInvestor’s Business
Daily, Human
Events, Reason Magazine and the ChicagoSun-Times among other
publications.
Report:
‘Impeachment’ Billionaire Tom Steyer Prepares to Launch Presidential Bid
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/19/report-impeachment-billionaire-tom-steyer-prepares-to-launch-presidential-bid/
19 Nov 20184,609
2:17
Left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer, who spent millions in the 2018
midterm elections pushing for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, is
preparing to launch a campaign for president in 2020, according to Politico.
The former billionaire investor, climate activist and
impeachment agitator Tom Steyer will take several steps toward a 2020 presidential
bid Tuesday.
That will include a six-figure web ad buy on Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, and Instagram along with a full-page ad in USA Today and other Gannett
newspapers outlining a political platform, a revamped TomSteyer.com, and the
announcement of five town halls across the country, the first of which will be
in the crucial early primary state of South Carolina, according to copies of
the ad and platform provided to POLITICO.
The first town hall is set for Dec. 4 in Charleston, S.C., and
the next will be in Fresno, Calif., sometime in December, according to Aleigha
Cavalier, senior communications adviser for TomSteyer.com who also works for
Steyer’s climate-focused group NextGen America. There will be one town hall for
each of the “5 rights” on Steyer’s platform: the right to an equal vote, to
clean air and water, to learn with pre-K education through college, to a living
wage, and to health.
Steyer has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on other
Democrats’ campaigns in recent years. He was the party’s top donor in 2014 —
buying few wins but allowing him to force the party to stage an all-night talk
session about climate change on the Senate floor.
In 2018, he
spent over $100 million on an effort to push for impeachment, reinforcing that message the day
after the election in a New
York Times op-ed.
Joel
B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the
2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author
of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of
a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
"This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are
extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never
be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the
crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
Democrat Corruption is a Clear and Present Danger to America
On
November 6, it seemed the Republicans might hold their majority in the Senate
and in the House. Sadly, they lost their majority in the House. The
mystery is why so many Democrat candidates who are so obviously ethically
challenged won in races that should not have even been close.
How and why do Democrats continue to vote for unqualified,
dishonest candidates? Elizabeth Warren is a proven liar, a cheat who
claimed Native American heritage in order to get a job at
Harvard. Her baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was her
plan to wield control over all bank and non-bank institutions without
Congressional interference. In short, she is a hard-left socialist who
means to control how Americans earn, spend and borrow money, how they use their
savings. Warren is a blight on the Constitution and the guaranteed
freedoms of US citizens. She is an advance operative for the socialist America
the left envisions.
Andrew
Gillum, the left's choice to be Governor of Florida, is the failed mayor of
Tallahassee. He remains
under FBI investigation for corruption. Given the
information about that investigation that has been released, he appears yet
another greedy and corrupt Democrat pol in the Hillary Clinton mold. The
stability of Tallahassee declined catastrophically under his
leadership; crime
and murder rose drastically.
Gillum
sold out his city for money, and cries racism when confronted with his
crimes. He should never have been the candidate for the Governor of
Florida but the left cares only about race and power, not ethics or
honor. For progressives, race trumps everything else, even
character. If Gillum wins after the cheating Broward County is
infamous for, Florida will suffer the slings and arrows that are inevitable
under politicians like Gillum. Why was this race even
close? Have half the nation's voters scuttled any semblance
of traditional values in order to win? Yes.
Then there is Robert Menendez, the credibly accused pedophile
senator of New Jersey. He should be in prison but was saved by one
juror in his corruption trial with whom he partied after his win on November
6. Who votes for a man like this? There
is plenty of proof that he took bribes from a wealthy client for numerous
favors, trips to the Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls
being one of them. But New Jersey just re-elected this
man. They too have lost all sense of right vs. wrong.
Stacey
Abrams, the still grasping gubernatorial contender in Georgia, is a
hard-left, anti-capitalist, anti-Second Amendment candidate. She
owes about $200K in credit card debt and wants to run Georgia? She
too is corrupt and incompetent. She is also willing to cheat to win.
Are Georgians ignorant of her many, many negatives? If they are, they voted for
her anyway. Again, skin color trumps everything.
The
left ignores fine men like John James, who ran for
the House in Michigan against Debbie Stabenow. The
left ignored Eddie Edwards who ran in
New Hampshire. Both men are conservative African
Americans. The American left today pretends such candidates do not
exist. They have ignored fine people like James and Edwards as they
have always ignored brilliant men like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter
Williams, Jason Riley, and Larry Elder. They revile the brilliant
Clarence Thomas. They don't like to be reminded of men like Frederick
Douglass or Booker T.
Washington. Neither of them, like Sowell, Steele,
Williams and Elder ever promoted the idea that African Americans were or would
be perennial victims. Each of them advocated for quite the opposite,
for self-reliance and independence.
This
notion of personal responsibility is anathema to today's left; they need and
promote subservience and dependency among their flock of reliable but
uninformed voters. This is why they encourage the immigration of so
many millions of illegal migrants. They assume they will be able to win for
them the right to vote. Judging by the number of them who likely
voted in the midterms, their plan is succeeding.
This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are
extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never
be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants,
the crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but
contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities
being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us.
Then
there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thoroughly-ignorant-of-everything
candidate who won her district by 80%! This young woman
knows nothing about how any government works, let alone ours. She is
hopelessly uniformed; she knows even less about US history or the Constitution. She
is clueless about the economy. When asked how she would pay for all
the give-away programs she touts, she replied that that was a
"puzzling question"! "You
just pay for it" she answers. She has no
idea; no idea about anything. She thinks she will be
"inaugurated" to the House! Most fourth graders know more
than she does about US history. And yet she is already
thinking about running for President! This is a
wholesale indictment of our politicized, dumbed-down system of
education. Many of her constituents are immigrants; we are obviously
not educating them at all. They voted for all the free stuff -- college,
medical care, basic income, housing, that Ocasio-Cortez has promised to
deliver. This is what socialist Democrats dream
about: perpetual power over a populace too ignorant to
rebel. American as founded is at grave risk.
In
addition to ODasio-Cortez, Gillum, Ilhan Omar, Abrams, Sinema,
who very likely cheated to
take the Arizona Senate seat, there is Linda
Sanchez. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Hillary clone; she only
cares about her own political power. She speaks like a small child but is also
considering a run for the presidency. She was best pals with Bill
Clinton and Harvey Weinstein until they were politically
inconvenient. Amy Klobuchar, who embraced the vicious and obviously
false allegations against Judge Kavanagh, was re-elected! Like every
other Democrat member of the judiciary committee, she knew those accusations
were false, without a shred of corroboration, but her constituents re-elected
her! Who are these voters? How do they reconcile voting
for people willing to destroy a fine man for political purposes? She
is exactly who every Democrat member of that committee is, who every member of
the Democrat Party is: nothing more than power-hungry political
operatives out to ruin any and all opponents by any means
necessary. They are a clear and present danger to American as
founded.
Young
people are no longer taught the truth of American history. They are
not taught the truth of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism
is acceptable, even promoted, by the Democrats. They
embrace Linda
Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan without
shame. Young people don't know that communism killed over a
hundred million people in the twentieth century. Their
calculated-by-leftists ignorance is destroying our country. They try
to sell the idea that gender is not a factor of biology! They
attempt to convince young people that climate change is man-made (a travesty)
and that global warming causes wild fires (a lie). Having control
over academia, they have willfully brainwashed students for nearly two
generations. Unless your children are a strong-willed, independent
thinkers, do not send them to college!
How
and why the American left has devolved into the kind of party one finds in a
banana republic is a mystery. That our media is so anxious to
promote their corrupt candidates and the low-brow
tactics they employ is a tragedy. Do they do it because they
can no longer win by promulgating their Orwellian vision of a socialist state,
mandated equality of outcome? Perhaps. They will never
sell socialism to enough sentient Americans to win. They need
millions of uninformed voters to succeed.
We must not let them cheat their way to power over the rest of
us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped and the Democrats need
to take a look at themselves and at what they have become. It's not a pretty
picture. What they have become threatens to destroy the greatest
nation on the planet and they are doing it on purpose. They have
nothing but contempt for the US as founded and for those of us who love this
country.
DEMOCRACY
DIES IN A LEFTIST COUP
The best midterms that San Francisco donors
could buy.
November 15, 2018
Daniel Greenfield, a
Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative
journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
After President Trump
took office, the Washington Post announced its new motto,
“Democracy dies in darkness.” But it was the Washington Post, not
Trump, that was guilty of undermining democracy.
President Trump had been
legitimately elected by a majority of states. The Washington Post was
an establishment paper in a government city owned by a dot com robber baron.
There’s nothing more undemocratic than a paper owned by the richest man in the
world working to overturn an election.
There was just as little
democracy to the midterm elections in which wealthy donors from blue states and
districts poured money into local races in red and purple states and
districts. San Francisco and New York billionaires buying elections in
Pennsylvania and Nevada is not democracy. It’s oligarchy.
American elected
officials were meant to be elected by local communities to serve their needs.
Instead the Left has nationalized local races by exploiting its cultural power.
And when that didn’t produce the immediate results that it wanted, began
overwhelming local elections with huge piles of outside cash.
The midterm elections
were the best elections that San Francisco donors could buy.
Senate Democrats picked
up $220 million in out-of-state donations these midterms. That huge pile of
cash also amounted to sixty percent of their haul. The
majority of Dem Senate cash came from donors who weren’t living in the states
they were running in, but who were trying to buy elections for them.
That’s the Washington
Post brand of democracy.
It’s not just Senate
races being bought up by out-of-state donors. 45% of House Dem money came from
out-of-state donors. And when they didn’t succeed in buying a local election
the first time, they just kept on pouring in more money into a district until
they got their way.
Last year, Democrats
poured in $22.5 million into a special election in Georgia’s
6th congressional district. 95% of the donations came from
out-of-state donors. Democrat Jon Ossoff received more donations from California than Georgia. Ossoff still lost to
Rep. Karen Handel, even though her donations amounted to only a fraction of his
ActBlue bucks.
But the same donors just
waited a year and bought the seat for Lucy McBath in the midterms.
In October, Lucy McBath
was appearing at the Writers Guild Theater in Los Angeles hosted by Hollywood
royalty like Katzenberg, Tony Goldwyn and Cameron Crowe for a $500 a head
fundraiser.
A large chunk of outside
money behind McBath came from Michael Bloomberg. McBath touted his gun control
positions and the New York billionaire’s front groups put $4.5 million behind his lackey.
There’s nothing
democratic about Bloomberg buying the 6th the way he once bought Gracie
Mansion.
In Illinois' 13th
Congressional District, Betsy Dirksen Londrigan pulled in $1.7 million to Rep.
Rodney Davis' $700K in a three month period. And then outside groups poured in
nearly as much again in support of Londrigan. $300K of that money came from
California.
In Nevada, out-of-state
donors bought Jacky Rosen a senate seat. 85% of the radical lefty
candidate’s donations came from outside the state. Of her 5 top donor zip
codes, two were in New York, two in California, including Palo Alto, and the
odd zip code out was in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
The media frequently airs
complaints about how little political power New York and California have per
capita compared to a handful of small states. These complaints are not only
cynically specious, they ignore the fact that between the media’s messaging
force multipliers and the bicoastal wealth being used to buy elections,
political power has become as concentrated as economic and cultural power.
And that’s the opposite
of democracy.
The midterms weren’t a
populist wave. They were an angry tantrum by wealthy blue state donors who used
their money to buy local elections as payback for having their views ignored in
2016. Instead of listening to the rest of the country, they set out to buy it,
lock, stock and barrel. They found experts, consultants, strategists,
programmers and organizers who would buy them other people’s elections.
Much of their money was
wasted. Just ask Beto O’Rourke and his $70 million war chest. But their
hysterical frenzy of spending made an undeniable impact. If you throw enough
mud or money at an election, eventually it sticks. The Democrat raised nearly
$1 billion to take the House.
And they took it.
$166.8 million was pumped into 30 House
Democrat candidates. That’s compared to $90.7 million for the Republican candidates
in those races.
The most expensive
midterm elections in history paid off for Democrats. And there’s nothing
democratic about that.
Democracy doesn’t die in
darkness. It dies in the glare of lefty media, lefty money and lefty power
which strip away local issues and local agency in Arizona, Illinois,
Pennsylvania and Florida. Big blue state donors bought the midterm elections to
send a message to President Trump. Many had been convinced by frenzied media
hit pieces in papers like the Washington Post that action
was desperately urgent.
When the Washington
Post, the rest of the media and their long tail of ActBlue donors
intervene in local elections, it doesn’t uphold democracy. It drowns it in the
bright actinic glare of flashes and floodlights.
The media postures as a
defender of democracy, but corporate media is more naturally a defender of
establishments, of the nostrums and platitudes of the elites whom it serves and
coddles. When it interferes in elections, it doesn’t do so for the sake of the
people, but for the sake of its people.
Political elites mistrust
the people and use the media to manipulate popular elections into endorsing
their unpopular agendas. The mainstream media is an inherently undemocratic
institution that amplifies elite voices at the expense of local communities. It
claims to be democratic only because it reinterprets democracy to mean the
political agendas of the Democrats rather than those of the people.
Lefties often misuse
democracy to mean a set of values while actual democracy, the vox populi, is
tarred as populism. But democracy isn’t a set of social issues. It’s the power
shift between the voters and elected officials. Big media and blue state
billionaires have shifted that balance away from local voters by buying local
elections and seeking new voters when the old won’t vote their way.
If a few million in
attack ads won’t influence local voters, you register new ones. If that doesn’t
work, then you legalize felons. And if that won’t do it, there are the illegal
aliens, and voter and ballot fraud. Buy a few secretary of state races. Set up
housing for out-of-state college students. Sign up aliens to vote. And then
even if the local voters don’t vote your way, it won’t matter. They’ll have
been outvoted.
This isn’t democracy. But
it is how Democrats have won some local races.
The shift away from local
voters to a national political infrastructure is undemocratic. But it neatly
fits into the larger leftist cause of centralizing all of politics (and all
other areas of life) in elitist strongholds. The partnerships between elitist
leaders and their local crony stakeholders act as a fig leaf for the
dismantling of local autonomy with performative diversity replacing
representational democracy.
The Democrats have waged
an undemocratic war on democracy in the name of democracy. The midterms were
the latest leftist coup against democracy. And democracy lost to the Left.
THE BILLIONAIRE
CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
"GOP estb. is
using the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-
collar cheap-labor
programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that
salaries are too
damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the
creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html
“Open border advocates, such as
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to
California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has
documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few
skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them
access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals
were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6
million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
AS
WALL STREET PLUNDERS: A Nation of One Million Homeless and Overrun By Mexico’s
Export of “cheap labor”!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/04/wall-street-plunders-ceo-pay-banksters.html
“But
a series of reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over
the past week reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are
wallowing in record levels of wealth.”
MASSIVE TRANSFER OF
WEALTH TO THE RICH: YOUR DEMOCRAT PARTY AT WORK…. for Wall Street, Banksters,
Billionaires and LA RAZA.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-democrat-party-for-billionaires.html
“But
a series of reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over
the past week reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are
wallowing in record levels of wealth.”
"America’s elites, now overwhelmingly represented by the
Democratic Party, have a single overriding interest: their self-indulgent
lifestyle."
Class Conflict within the
Democratic Party
Over many decades, the American Left, the Democratic Party and
their mutual propaganda arm, the self-styled “mainstream media,” have
successfully portrayed conservatives and the Republican Party as a coalition of
the wealthy and intolerant. Further, the Democrats and the left have
claimed that they are the true champions of the working or middle class as they
unceasingly fight to defeat and marginalize this evil menace.
The reality, however, is that this cabal has virtually no interest
in defending or aiding the working class as they are, in fact, the party of a
bifurcated constituency: the wealthy and those dependent on the largess of the
government.
America’s elites, now overwhelmingly represented by the Democratic
Party, have a single overriding interest: their self-indulgent
lifestyle. This
is manifested in their mistaken belief that conservatives (i.e. the “right”)
are hell bent on enforcing their version of morality on the nation, thus
potentially calling into question the lifestyles of the rich and
solipsistic.
The veracity of this claim is immaterial as it would require an
element of deliberation not emotion -- a trait in extremely short supply
among the nation’s privileged class, nearly all of whom have difficulty in
generating an original thought due to the ill-education rampant in America’s
universities. Thus, the mindless accusations of racism, misogyny and
Fascism directed at the conservative rubes in middle America are acceptable,
and in far too many instances believed, particularly as many had the temerity
to vote for Donald Trump – who, although wealthy and Ivy League educated, is
considered the ultimate unsophisticated rube.
As conservatives are the dominant force in the Republican Party
and this nation cannot function politically with more than two major political
parties, the alternative is the Democratic Party. An entity dominated by the
American Left, an assemblage whose core philosophy is antithetical to the
interests of the wealthy and privileged. Yet, determined to protect their
lifestyles and vilify conservatives, they willingly ally with the left and
overwhelmingly support virtually any Democratic candidate. In the recent
2018 mid-terms, Democratic House candidates outspent their Republican opponents
by a two to one margin thanks primarily to this wealthy but myopic
assemblage.
Their colleagues in the Democratic Party, and the preponderance of
the membership, are those dependent on the largess of the federal and state
governments. On the other hand, the growing segment of the citizenry who
are working and self-sufficient are increasingly joining those who believe in
limited government in migrating to the Republican Party-- a process that is
accelerating with the policies and tactics of Donald Trump in combating the
entrenched left and their determination to culturally and economically
transform the nation. The Republican Party will inevitably become the
party of the working or middle class. As such, they could potentially
dominate the political agenda for the foreseeable future.
The left and the Democratic Party, in order to offset this
possibility, must aggressively seek to increase the number of dependents by
promoting the legalization and ultimate citizenship for untold millions of
illegal immigrants and promising all Americans cradle to grave economic
security. In order to enact this strategy to defeat the Republicans, the left
must have the active participation and financial support of the nation’s
wealthy-- which they have.
The Democratic Party has evolved into essentially an incompatible
two-tier class-driven entity encompassing the nation’s wealthiest and the
nation’s poorest. Nonetheless, it is at present a convenient home for the
elites to hold off the imaginary horde of conservatives outside their gilded
doors.
However, the voting numbers within the party are overwhelmingly
with those who generally support the leftist philosophies of redistribution
(e.g. socialized medicine and guaranteed incomes) and curtailing of freedom
(e.g. speech, assembly and religion). While it may not manifest itself to
the affluent who have cast their lot with the Democrats, the redistribution of
wealth must, by necessity, come from the wealthy, as that is where the bulk of
the nation’s wealth resides. It is also this same small-in-numbers
group that benefits the most from freedom of speech and assembly.
Once fully embroiled in this marriage of convenience, a divorce
will be impossible as the co-inhabitant of the Democratic Party, the dependent
class, must continue grow in order to electorally defeat the Republicans and
protect the left’s agenda. Further, the oversold expectations promulgated
by the left will never be satisfied regardless of how many promises are made or
token redistributive programs are enacted by the current ruling class.
Only a complete transformation of this nation into a failed socialist state
will satiate the left, their acolytes and their attendant army of
dependency. A goal more in reach than ever thanks to the inability of the
nation’s elites to give a damn about the future of the country.
There is not a more short-sighted and self-absorbed group of
citizens in this nation than the white, wealthy well-educated urban and
suburban voters. They
are willing to rend the fabric of this nation in order to protect their
privilege and lifestyle. While the vast majority of Americans will
ultimately pay the price, the current ruling class and their progeny will have
far more to lose.
Billionaires Demand Fast-Track Green Cards for 400,000 Visa
Workers
7 Dec 2018384
6:49
Internet
billionaire Marc Benioff is urging the GOP Congress and President Donald
Trump to fast-track 400,000 foreign visa-workers — plus 400,000 family
members — to green cards, the U.S. job market, and the
ballot box.
“This
is good for our economy,” Benioff said in a Tuesday tweet that was
applauded by Silicon Valley lobbyists. “We need to grow our workers to grow our
economy.”
Benioff’s
comment is a tautology: Expanding the population by importing more than 800,000
people would obviously grow the nation’s economy, retail sales, government
taxes, company profits, and Wall Street stock options.
But
Benioff’s cheap-labor importation plan would also shrink the income and careers
sought by millions of American college graduates, many of whom will vote in
2020 for or against Trump.
I strongly support HR392 eliminating the per country visa
cap. This bill must happen. The high skill visa provision has overwhelming
bi-partisan support because this is good for our economy. We need to grow our
workers to grow our economy. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392 …
The planned giveaway is in a
pending House bill, dubbed H.R. 392. It is also hidden in the House version of
the 2019 funding package for the Department of Homeland Security. If Trump
accepts that funding package, he will help companies import more cheap
visa-workers from India and China an inflict more economic and career
damage to the nation’s professional-status workforce of at least 55
million American college-graduates.
The nation’s workforce now
includes roughly 1.5 million foreign college-graduate contract-workers who are
imported via the H-1B, L-1, OPT, O-1, J-1, and other visa programs. These
outsourcing workers are not immigrants, but instead, they are contract workers
hired for one to six years, at lower wages, to take jobs that would otherwise
go to American graduates.
GOP Reps. are still pushing Rep. Yoder's middle-class
outsourcing bill to put 600K Indian visa-workers & families on fast-track
to US jobs/voting. It would help CEOs import more Indians for US college-grad
jobs - w/o any benefit for US workers or even GOP. http://bit.ly/2QzuoDJ
DHS Opposes GOP's Stealth Bill to Outsource College Graduate Jobs
This
massive level of middle-class outsourcing has suppressed the wage growth needed
by many American graduates to repay their college debts, get married, buy
homes, and raise children. For example, the salaries for 21 million
“professional and business services” employees rose by just roughly one
percent after inflation from the second quarter of 2017 to the second quarter
of 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their
after-inflation pay was flat from 2o15 to 2016.
The
Americans’ salary loss, however, would be a gain for the CEOs who see
their profits rise and their stock options spike as middle-class salaries
decline.
The
MyVisaJobs.com site shows that Benioff’s company
asked for 1,063 H-1B visa workers in 2018, up from 880 in 2017. The site also
shows job titles and work locations.
The
company’s stock price has doubled since Trump’s election,
but Benioff and most of his employees have strongly supported Democrats,
including Hillary Clinton in the
2016 election. For example, only 5.2 percent of employee donations to
candidates went to GOP candidates in 2018.
Now Benioff
and his fellow executives as asking Trump to raise their stock portfolios by
fast-tracking green cards to roughly 400,000 foreign contract-workers — plus
400,000 family members — who sidelined hundreds of thousands of American
college graduates.
Benioff’s
support for the visa workers was echoed by Todd Schulte, who is the
director of a pro-migration lobbying group. The Democratic-aligned group, FWD.us,
was formed and funded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates
and numerous other CEOs
and investors who prefer to import visa-workers instead of hiring
Americans.
This from @Benioff is really important. A really important fix to our immigration system that
would help so many people stuck in the green card backlog because of
discriminatory country caps.
Without
irony, Schulte’s website declares that “We believe that when every
person has the opportunity to achieve their full potential, our families,
communities, and economy thrive.”
Amazon
is also urging Trump to approve the green-card giveaway. Amazon’s founder, Jeff
Bezos, also runs the Washington Post and
supported Clinton.
Amazon applauds @KevinYoder on the passage of his amendment to the @DHSgov appropriations bill, H.R. 392, that would remove the per-country limit on
green cards. This is an important step towards green card reform, and
Amazonians thank you for your leadership on this issue.
In
2018, Amazon asked the government for almost
6,000 H-1B visa workers and almost 5,000 green cards. Facebook
asked for almost 2,400 H-1B workers and 1,400 green cards. Those outsourcing
requests add up to 15,000 white-collar jobs sought by U.S. graduates.
Business
lobbyists are trying to minimize publicity about their demand for a green-card
giveaway and they are pressing GOP leaders behind closed doors to keep the
giveaway in the 2019 DHS budget.
But
opposition is rising as Americans graduates have begun organizing to block the
giveaway. For example, Protect
US Workers helped defeat Rep. Kevin Yoder who used his authority as an
appropriations chairman to insert the giveaway into the DHS budget.
Yep, I helped fund these billboards and voted straight
RED in FL. Yoder's love for foreign guestworker/Replacemnts sent him packing.
No American should ever have to train their Foreign Replacements@NeilMunroDC @bseeker @Dawnnewyorker pic.twitter.com/WOnwxr3seY
The American graduates are also
using federal data to show U.S. legislators how many Americans’ middle-class
jobs are being outsourced in their districts to the
foreign workers.
I clean homes for a living. These kind of
policies undercuts my job because of cheap labor. The dems try to make excuses
for their policies against American workers. They don’t care about Americans,
they just care about non citizens. They need to be voted out on 2020.
Yep, been there, trained my foreign Replacements in '02.
Awful experience. Went public with it, told Congress. The worst part was the
disregard we got from our 2 Dem senators
My house testimony:http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa91679.000/hfa91679_0.HTM#104 …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJlesZ9popA …
The managing director of Thiel
Capital, Eric Weinstein, tweeted to Benioff to highlight his report which shows
that the federal officials created the H-1B visa program to lower salaries paid
to American technology experts:
You know why we developed the H-1B visa Marc? It was to
weaken American workers’ bargaining positions so much that they would be
*forced* to mitigate their wage demands at your bargaining table. It’s a wage
tampering program.
You might find this helpful: https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_NSF_SG_Complete_INET.pdf …
The
mass outsourcing also adding pressure to the lives of many American
technology workers, many of whom have already lost jobs to cheaper
contract-workers. An informal survey of tech workers shows that almost four-in-ten
say they are depressed.
One
of the leading advocates for the green-card giveaway is Leon Fresco, an
immigration lawyer who helped Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer pass the disastrous
2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty through the Senate. The bill was so unpopular that
the GOP gained nine Senate seats in 2014, preventing Schumer from becoming
Senate Majority Leader.
On
December 6, Fresco suggested there is only a small chance that the giveaway
will get into the final DHS bill:
Many Indian
contract workers are lobbying to help pass the green-card bill:
Thank you @Benioff for your leadership on ensuring fairness by the removal of national origin
discrimination on Employment Based Green Cards #HR392 #S281
In
the United States, the establishment’s economic policy of using migration to
boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people
by flooding the market
with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside
labor spikes profits and Wall Street
values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees offer.
The
policy also drives up real estate
prices, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local tax
burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from
high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans
and their families, including many who are now struggling with
fentanyl addictions.
Immigration
also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland
states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the
large immigrant populations who prefer to live in the coastal states.
The stakes are high. Once the
treaty is ratified, it will be exponentially harder to roll back internet
censorship. Unless you want the tech giants’ right to censor to persist for
another 20 years (that’s how long NAFTA lasted), now is the time to make your
voice heard.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via
mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it
floods the market with foreign
labor, spikes
profits and Wall Street values by cutting
salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and
white-collar employees. It also drives up real
estate prices, widens
wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state
and local tax burdens, hurts kids’
schools and college
education, pushes Americans away
from high-tech careers, and sidelines at
least 5 million marginalized Americans and
their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid
addictions.
But not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart
News reporting that Silicon Valley has the highest income inequality in the nation and the U.S. News & World Report naming California as the worst state for “quality of
life,” due to the high cost of living.
“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their
media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled
in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would
legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
In the July/August version of the Atlantic,
columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their
Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and
again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or
her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York
Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and
former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for
deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed
“costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals
want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom
immigrants compete.”
llustration by Lincoln Agnew*
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that
only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode
down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of
conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the
right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago,
liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many
progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for
your iPhone to listen to more titles.
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The
first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed,
particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008,
the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population.
Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of
undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after
all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised
a decade ago remain relevant today.
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration.
Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the
family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these
moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because
immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age,
they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like
Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost
productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes
rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent
of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete.
And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a
high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the
least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the
most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups
liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against
each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting
immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the
barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating
America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review,
Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis,
examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants.
Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often
assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal
immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the
U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for
undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from
receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant
to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting
people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding
difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate
those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of
their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors.
Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of
difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words
to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative
America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and
Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous
lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that
liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter
probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding
name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary
Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as
a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled
to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite
universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but
Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of
English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if
she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then
insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what
makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
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