A New York Times columnist is escaping from the establishment’s bubble, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s D.C. lobbyist is trying to scare him back inside.
“What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” columnist David Brooks wrote in an August 2 article published seven years after ordinary Americans put Donald Trump into the White House.
Brooks tried to explain why so many millions of Americans suffer from the elitist-run economy of outsourcing, wage-cutting migration, woke language, urban wealth, chaotic transgenderism, and racial favoritism.
Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets of Manhattan to participate on the Reclaim Pride Coalition’s (RPC) fifth annual Queer Liberation March. (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves,” Brooks wrote:
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
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Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
So the wealthiest elites with Wall Street money are trying to scare Brooks back into the bubble.
“Yeesh,” tweeted Todd Schulte, the president of Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us pro-migration lobbying group for coastal investors:
I dont care to engage much with the rest of this piece, but the implication that that “open immigration” is good for rich people but hurts the wages of middle class Americans is completely false. @nytdavidbrooks if you’re interested in correcting this, please reach out.
Schulte will have a hard time persuading Brooks that immigration does not cut wages because Schulte has repeatedly argued that migration does indeed cut wages.
Central American migrants, part of a caravan hoping to reach the U.S. border. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
For example, in 2023, Schulte’s FWD.us touted an economic study that argued that migration cuts wages, saying:
When labor is in short supply relative to demand, employers offer higher wages, which are in turn passed on to consumers, leading to rising prices. While these worker shortages have occurred for many reasons, a significant driver is the lower number of immigrants who have entered the U.S. in the past several years.
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The presence of an immigrant workforce typically can help local communities mitigate sudden labor shortages, particularly in industries such as construction and hospitality. But, as immigration decreased before and during the pandemic, these jobs remained largely unfilled, leading to extreme labor shortages and rising wages. In other words, inflation rose in part because of a tightening labor market.
But FWD.us is a self-serving advocacy organization, not a disinterested academic center.
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Texas Department of Public SafetyZuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more government-provided cheap labor, consumers, and urban renters. The investor group is backing legislation that would accelerate the inflow of consumers, unskilled workers, and skilled workers into the U.S. economy, where they can help spike the investors’ stock market shares.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website in early 2021. But copies exist at the other sites.
And Schulte’s FWD.us has many friends at the New York Times.
Yet an increasing share of Americans — including some elites — recognize the economic skew imposed by migration.
“This country has prioritized the importation of cheap labor,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote in his book, titled Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speaks at the Heritage Foundation on March 29, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“It began, as many of America’s problems do, with the fundamental shift toward a globalized economy,” Rubio wrote:
But not every business could be exported, which meant Wall Street simply figured out how to import cheap labor, much of it [clarification, not all] coming from illegal immigrants. This was a slower, more subtle process. Sure, some politicians made a big deal about “jobs Americans wouldn’t do,” but otherwise the only outcry came from workers who found their wages stalled, benefits cut, and hours slashed until they could be replaced by someone willing to work more hours for less.
More often than not, it is about jobs Wall Street doesn’t want Americans to do because hiring Americans would require higher wages and better working conditions. To them, it is better to import cheap labor and buy off Americans with cash welfare programs provided by the government.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he wants more productivity, not more migration, in a July 31 economic speech in New Hampshire:
We need a strong and fair labor market. We have to secure our border, we have to stop illegal immigration, we need to end things like chain migration and the diversity visa lottery. We should not have massive amounts of unskilled migration coming into this country. What we want is immigration that benefits the average American. We don’t want to be bringing people in on programs to undercut wages of American citizens.
And so that has got to be our touchstone: what is benefiting the American worker and what is benefiting the wages of the average American.
Watch the video here:
Brooks’s column “is not just a good column, it is a *fantastic* column,” tweeted Seth Mandel, the executive editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine. It is “a column of a quality reached a few times a year by a few writers [and] will be criticized angrily because it shows empathy and elite introspection, which will prove it correct.”
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters.
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
A July 29-August 1 poll of 1,500 adults by YouGov showed that a 35 percent plurality of Americans believe migration makes America “worse off.”
President Joe Biden on June 15, 2023. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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