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Home Amnesty for All, Jobs for None

Amnesty for All, Jobs for None

Like a married man preparing to cheat on his wife, the Republican Party is circling around amnesty while pretending not to, making excuses, professing love for its base and then when it thinks no one is looking, it makes a run for the open border.

Amnesty is a cheap date for Democrats and Republicans. For Democrats, it puts a lot of cheap votes on the table. The Democrats have been using immigrants as cheap votes before the invention of the telephone. And the Republicans justify their betrayal by convincing themselves that they can begin scoring 39 percent of the Hispanic vote in all their elections again without considering what 11 percent of 11 million will do to their margins in even the reddest red states.

Paul Ryan, who can do the math for everything else, loses his calculator when it comes to counting the impact of a population that is already a disproportionate drain on social services and enthusiastically supports big government spending,

But big business has always supported cheap labor, which is why the Republican establishment may spend 5 minutes at home with its base before heading back to D.C. for a lecture on how illegal alien amnesty will turn the economy around. Illegal alien amnesty is even more damaging to the voting base of the Democrats than of the Republicans, but that hasn't stopped the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, organizations whose members will take a severe beating from an illegal alien amnesty, from selling out the people they claim to speak for and joining the amnesty parade.

Democratic and Republican Amnesty supporters, obsessed with feudal dreams of cheap nannies and field hands, despise their base. Democratic feudalists use the language of civil rights and Republican feudalists use the language of the free market, but both are just looking for excuses to cheat on their base with cheap labor and cheap votes.

After a decade, illegal alien amnesty that leads to citizenship and family reunification will kill the ability of the Republican Party to win national elections. But it will also kill the ability of black men under thirty to find a job. Black unemployment is already staggeringly high and throwing in millions of new low-skilled workers will make urban centers more blighted and dangerous than they are now.

But nobody in D.C. cares about that, even though many of the blighted neighborhoods are not all that far away from the gilded centers of power. Blight means cheaper votes for the Democrats and more fear among Republicans translating into political dividends for both parties whose rulers will stay behind their heavily policed islands of mansions and museums while the rest of the country burns.

Big government needs cheap voters. Big business needs cheap labor. Big government wants big business to pick up the tab for their cheap votes through higher taxes. Big business wants cheap labor without having to pay for their social welfare benefits. After the obligatory tug of war, like a man forcing his wife to pay the hotel bill for his mistress, the tab for the cheap votes and cheap labor will be dumped on the middle class which is being forced to fund its own destruction.

Cheap labor can lower the cost of production, but raises the cost of government. Cheap votes raise the cost of government and that raises the cost of production. Cheap labor cannot outrun the cost of cheap votes. Non-voting cheap labor is a social problem. Cheap votes are a political problem. Either way you end up with a welfare state and a police state combining into a nanny state. Either way the economy tanks and big government explodes.

The traditional American way out of this cycle was through the middle class, but that is less of an option now. Big government is still promising that a college degree will turn anyone into a member of the middle class, but that's a myth meant to subsidize the government-academia complex which has dumped a huge burden of debt on the children of the middle class while handing out worthless degrees to all comers.

The debt is real, the jobs aren't.

College degrees don't create a middle class. Neither does the occasional tech boom out of Silicon Valley. The American middle class had three traditional gateways. Small business, manufacturing work and government jobs. Only government jobs ares still booming and big government can't hire everyone. The people it has hired have become a ticking time bomb of unfunded pensions that falls on the rest of the middle class.

The original middle class expanded itself. The new middle class is a government toll road paid for by the shrinking middle class. While the government talks about opportunity, what it is really doing is reducing the middle class to a taxpayer-subsidized bureaucratic caste that it must subsidize. It's a pyramid scheme that becomes unsustainable and hides that fact by talking about taxing the rich

Amnesty creates more "clients" for the government bureaucracy to oversee while making it harder for the lower class to make it up to the middle class outside the government's toll road. It feeds in more cheap labor and cheap votes into the machine with the same old results.

Big government does not need a middle class. It needs a large underclass to exploit for cheap votes. Without the middle class it has no revenue, but like most parasites, it would rather kill the middle class and then die, than stop drinking the middle class dry even for a single decade.

Big business is less interested in the middle class these days. It has become comfortable marketing slave labor products to the lower class and higher end products to the upper class. America is just another market to it and it treats it much like it does China or Mexico, focusing on glutting appetites with no concern for the country that it does business in.

Amnesty is a declaration of war by big government and big business against the American middle class. It is a statement that they have no room for the middle class in their vision of the country.

The latest amnesty deal has goodies for everyone. There will be cheap tech labor for Silicon Valley, some of which will eventually try to blow up skyscrapers, bridges and tunnels. But we'll pin a Green Card on them first and worry about the consequences later. There will be the promise of more border patrol officers, in the hopes of shutting up their labor union which has been rather vocal lately. And a guest worker program, which as any European country can tell you, is actually an immigrant program.

Is the United States hard up for cheap labor?  Unemployment rates are staggering and the average legalized illegal alien is here as unskilled labor. Even if the United States had a shortage of unskilled labor, importing unskilled laborers in large numbers has disastrous results during an economic downturn when the jobs dry up.

The American ghetto was created when the northern urban manufacturing jobs imploded, first as the GIs returned from WW2 and then as manufacturing moved overseas. Europe imported cheap labor when times were good and then watched them build No Go Zones when the times became bad. Cheap labor brought back street riots to European capitals and turned burning cars into a national pastime. It also opened the door to a whole new generation of terrorists.

Unskilled labor can go two places. To the legal economy and the illegal economy. Not only does the United States have high unemployment, but Obama's proposal of a minimum wage hike will make the bottom of the labor market even more blighted. If the employers of legalized illegals are exempt from ObamaCare, they will crowd out existing low wage laborers, also mostly minorities, and force them into surviving on government subsidies or working in the illegal economy. Probably both.

Either way unions looking to stem the illegal competition will still be stymied, but that is a problem for union members, not union bosses. The union bosses have decided that their interests lie in helping Democrats get ahead, no matter what. Their members may lose out but unions are dwindling anyway and turning toward a European model where they may not have large memberships, but they will enjoy guaranteed status in government contracts and on contractor boards. The unions will become a shell, but a very profitable shell, and they will continue to give the Democrats their small percentage of the white male non-college graduate vote.

The Democrats screw each part of their electorate separately, but balance it out with cheap goodies that seem like a prize in the short term. The Republicans back the cheap goodie giveaways and screw their own base collectively, and then belatedly wake up and begin asking who is going to pay for all the goodies. The answer is that the taxpayers will go on paying for it, directly and indirectly, as the economy continues being dismantled as a result of the destructive economic policies that have led to short term booms, but long term busts.

Both sides have a plan. The plan is to wait for the other side to collapse. The Democrats are waiting for the free market to collapse. The Republicans are waiting for big government to collapse.

Government overregulation is making life harder for big business, but that just means that manufacturing goes abroad and those same products are made by Chinese workers and exported to the United States. Big business service industries will outsource what they can and weather the rest. Companies that can put down millions in lobbying capital and even more hiring experts who were formerly employed by Federal agencies to help them navigate the new regulations have only so much to worry about. It's small business that finds it nearly impossible to operate under those conditions.

Big government crafts overreaching regulations which big business fills with loopholes leaving behind a cage for small business. That describes ObamaCare and most of the regulatory state.

Big attracts big. Crony capitalism is a lot easier than actual capitalism. Why make bets when you can finance sure things with heaps of government money? America's new elite looks a lot like Russia or China's elite, an oligarchy that blends big government and big business, big bribes and big contracts.

The Chinese system makes up for its abuses by generating manufacturing jobs at a furious rate and expanding the middle class. Once it stops doing that, the whole system will probably crash, and half of China will turn into the rust belt, full of ex-farmers turned factory workers with no farms or factories to work at.

But the American system has become no better, tossing out technocratic gimmicks as meaningless sops to an economic disaster. In a State of the Union address, Obama promised to turn the rust belt into trading hubs full of 3D printers. He might as well have promised to hand out magic beans.

The Democrats did their part to destroy American industry and their liberal base makes reviving it impossible. Any plans to revive manufacturing in America are limited to Green Energy gimmicks.

Having killed the industries in their states Democratic state governments face hollow economies that are big on big government and empty of a tax base. But the shift of industries to red states is likely to turn them blue as populations fed on gimme rhetoric follow them in search of jobs leaving behind a scorched earth of welfare ghettos only to create new ones in their new location. The future still belongs to the Democrats, but it's a short term future that will see them presiding over rubble and ruin. A hollow victory that makes them the Ozymandias of Detroit.

State governments that experience a boom are pressured to "invest" that money in education and the rest of the social welfare network that will become a sinkhole once the boom ends. And when the boom ends, then Texas is likely to become another California.

The ability to expand and sustain the middle class is what separate a failed state full of cheap labor and cheap votes from a nation. And that requires forward motion. America still has enough technical skill to create technological revolutions, but lacks the infrastructure to take advantage of them. The iPhone may have come out of America, but it's built in China. Until that changes, America will not have a secure middle class.

The American worker has emerged as the collateral damage in the war between big government and big business. Amnesty for illegal aliens is the one area where both sides can agree on destroying the middle class.

Comments

  1. Anonymous10/3/14

    The problem is simply this; pro-hispanic groups are telling politicians that millions of votes are up for grabs but they won't vote for your party unless you give them amnesty. There is no balancing anti-amnesty group to tell the Democrats or Republicans that if they vote for amnesty they will lose millions of votes. So to the politicians this looks like a sure thing. What we need to do is show them convincingly that they will lose votes from their base. This is difficult and made worse by the fact an anti-amnesty position is always labeled racist or "anti-immigrant" which is simly code speak for racist. The politicians have one thing that is most important to them and that is election/re-election. It isn't doing what is right, suporting and defending the constitution, preserving our republic or being honest. They eat, sleep and dream about re-election. THAT is the only leverage we have. As long as we continue to vote for Republicans who will even consider amnesty they will be convinced there is no price to pay for their misdeeds. Don't buy that red herring about a 100% conservative purity that is just to make you look stupid for wanting to save the country and our jobs by demanding stronger borders. They will pull every dirty trick in the books to convince you that yur only hope is whatever Republican the RNC backs but in fact throwing some of these Rinos under the bus EVEN if it means electing a Democrat is the ony way to put the fear of god in them. Screw em! I will not only not vote for a Republican who supports amnesty I will vote for their opponent regardless of his view on amnesty because then my vote counts doublely and I want to hurt the politicians and not simply "send a message".

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  2. Anonymous10/3/14

    Excellent article Daniel.

    Decent hard working, taxpayers in the West are being reduced to little more than life support machines for parasites who will eventually replace them.

    Still, so long as Ukraine's borders are intact that's the main thing.

    Welcome to Fascism - individuals are noting, state is everything.

    Proud Brit.

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  3. The enemy is not at the gates. The enemy is sitting on the thrones of power and authority sucking the blood out of the nation. We are ruled by vampires, bloodlust beasts who seek our vote to sate their lust on the backs of their constituents.

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  4. Anonymous10/3/14

    John Boehner is from Ohio, and supposedly represents that State..In my wildest imagination, I cannot imagine traditional Ohioans supporting amnesty. So who does he really work for ?
    Most productive Americans recognize that like Ocare, amnesty is a bread and butter issue. While the current grifters in Congress are able to run rampant on our rights, if they touch the American pocketbook yet again, they might as well start cleaning out their offices now.
    Marco Rubio's fortunes have taken a big fall since his appearance of supporting amnesty, and that's in a Latino centric state. Don't these people ever talk to each other?

    sophie

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  5. Anonymous10/3/14

    Depressingly accurate read of the situation. These values have percolated through business as well. You don't get ahead by achieving budgets, developing useful product or the like-- you do so through crony methods-- which has led us to the current crop of useless C-suite toads. Atlas shrugged and caught the last train for the coast...

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  6. Without endorsing the CGI-laden movie, "300" or its recent "prequel," we seem to be in the same position as the Spartans at Thermopylae, with the Mexican illegals and Muslim invaders squatting on the country and claiming occupation rights and the government/Obama-assisted right to enslave and loot us. I'm hoping we don’t share the same fate as the Spartans.

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  7. Anonymous10/3/14

    For Dems, blacks losing jobs to illegals is win-win. The illegals will vote Dem, and the blacks will continue to vote Dem.

    What is interesting is that beltway Repubs can convince themselves to get on board with this.

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  8. Anonymous10/3/14

    Do you have the nerve to expose Ted Cruz for what he is....??? Ann Coulter tried and they're eating her alive. Cruz is dangerous!

    HIS WORDS! He also calls for legalization and FIVE TIMES the high skilled foreign workers! Ted is using you!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa2FU69HSag
    Look around a bit! He is for Legalization! THAT IS AMNESTY!

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  9. Anonymous10/3/14

    I'm tired of voting for republican traitors. They use conservatives like me then toss us aside first chance they get after election because they KNOW WE DON'T WANT TYRANNY. But you know, maybe America needs it for a bit. Then perhaps revolution. But I can tell you this>>>I won't vote for another Mccain or Romney. Frustration is boiling over.

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  10. I have been saying for a long time that, rather than being compassionate, people who favor amnesty and increased third world immigration are the most vile racists on the planet and they hate Black people. The Black lower middle class, which used to be substantial, have been destroyed by their policies and replaced by the Black underclass. I don't know if they can ever recover.

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  11. I do not buy the idea that politicians are stupid, at least not collectively. The Republicans must surely be bought off by corporate money because it is the only possible explanation for their behavior. They get reelected in the short run so that is what they go for.

    One side thought about this. Along with the considerations already given, big business has an advantage when the product is shipped internationally because they have an easier time being in more than one country. That may be why some of our environmental rules are so extreme. Effectively they shut down the smaller scale domestic producers to the benefit of the international companies.

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  12. Anonymous11/3/14

    Miami's history of immigration needs a second look by the pro amnesty crowd.
    When the Cubans arrived in Miami, the majority of them came with a work ethic second to none. They were willing to live in very cramped quarters and work for low wages. Many of the low end jobs in tourism in Miami Beach had been held by Blacks previous to the Cuban invasion. That changed quickly and unskilled young Blacks were left with fewer options..The degradation of the American Black community in Miami was soon obvious. Crime and drug statistics exploded.
    Granted, the Cubans had legal citizenship thereby creating a whole new pool of taxpayers. Many professional and well educated Cubans contributed to the mix. They also have a decent rate of assimilation, and now own much of Miami and the surrounding area.
    Blacks who think that supporting amnesty shows their compassion for those they perceive as fellow 'victims' are not acting in their own best interests.
    The scenario above is nationwide, I cited Miami because I watched it happen .

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  13. Anonymous11/3/14

    I have often argued, that we we have is NOT an immigrant problem, but a Liberalism problem.

    Our ancestors, to include immigrants came to America, as the land of opportunity, where, if a person put his hands to the wheel, could make a way for himself and his family.

    With the expansion of the welfare state, many (far too many) see the land of opportunity, as a place where they can obtain a vast array of government provided services.

    I would be for "legalization" for anyone who would willingly offer to forego any forms of governmental aid. If you want to come to America to work, you are welcome. Lastly, if there were any way to rid the country of citizens who chose not to work (not those who are truly unable to work, or those that are out of work temporarily), I would be for their expulsion as well.

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  14. George of the Jungle11/3/14

    To those posters who seem to think that only allowing immigrants "who work hard" is the answer, I respond that your thinking is simply another form of regurgitated Marxist analysis, in which every problem on the face of the earth is supposed to be interpreted and/or solved by economics.

    Why can't you people ever get it? Any viable nation, including the USA, is NOT just a "proposition nation" of vague ideals. A true nation is one with a strong culture and traditions, and a populace that understands as much and strives every day to keep those traditions alive, including if need be a minimum of laws that ensure the primary pillars of those traditions are never undercut.

    Start looking at a society through a new set of glasses called culture, and throw away the ones that were handed to you surreptitiously called economics.... If you do, the world and your reactions to it will start to look completely different.

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  15. Anonymous11/3/14

    1) open borders
    2) welfare state
    3) democracy

    pick any two but you can't have all three.

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  16. George of the Jungle11/3/14

    The US was founded as and is still supposed to be a Constitutional Republic, NOT a democracy. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. Knowing all this, the left has over the past 100 years undermined the Republic to the point where we now have devolved into a democracy of victim group against victim group. So regarding Anonymous' three choices, the reason we have (1) and (2) is precisely because we actually DO have (3).

    Doesn't anybody know real political history anymore, or has the entire populace been propagandized to the point of spouting inane leftist memes as a substitute for actual thinking?

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  17. This has to be one of your bravest articles ever. Certainly, real freedom-loving conservatives must not pretend that selfishness is a monopoly of government. On the other hand, big business or any other big private interest has less of a chance of gaining tyrannical control if government is small and zealously restricted.

    "Crony capitalism" is a euphemism. The real term is "government corruption" which makes is more clear that the problem lies with government and the cure is to shackle government.

    To George of the Jungle: I think that Plato and other thinkers have used "democracy" as a generic term which includes all forms of government chosen by the people. This does not detract from Franklin's famous statement about the wolves and sheep when applied to a pure tyranny of the majority, which is what we are experiencing.

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  18. Anonymous12/3/14

    For heaven's sake, how many gardeners do these californians need?

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  19. As usual, great distillation and synthesis of what William Bendix in the old Life of Riley series would oft describe "a revoltin' development!"

    Also loved the "Ozymandias of Detroit" reference. Ever since his "ascension to the throne" (the wooden one, not the porcelain one), I've referred to our Narcissist-in-Chief as Ozymandias on the Potomac." I am looking forward to his legacy soon being nothing more than "two legless legs of stone" amid the blowing sands of history.

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  20. Anonymous12/3/14

    Excellent analysis as usual. The Decline and Fall of the American Empire... sad.

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  21. Anonymous12/3/14

    Best analysis of the situation that I've read! But are there any solutions short of the majority of American voters coming to their senses?

    I can't envision Americans pulling themselves away from watching traitorous news media, reality shows, soap operas, situation comedies and sports long enough to educate themselves or think clearly about the future of the country.

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  22. Anonymous13/3/14

    Daniel, your outlook is gloomy. Not that I blame you, there are many reasons to be gloomy. However, there are also reasons to be hopeful. You say that amnesty for millions of mostly hispanic immigrants will kill the republican party. I agree and say, it's about time. The republican party as presently configured is a huge failure. The only significant difference between it and the dems is what exactly? It's hard to tell. So, I would suggest that some energized and talented cadre of politicians get together and make some changes to the platform of yesteryear. The repubs need a new crop of forward thinking leaders. First, immigrants are not the enemy. Embrace policies that are welcoming to the hard workers already here and not going anywhere. Make no mistake, they are not going anywhere. Concentrate eviction procedures against the criminals among them and establish some real border controls. Most importantly, make citizenship meaningful again. Take a stand against the knee jerk republican tendancy to build super expensive military hardware and bomb and invade anything not nailed down in far away places. That tendancy is just as wasteful and dangerous to our liberty and budget as are many of the knee jerk tendancies of the dems. Stop making jingoistic noises about the imaginary threats posed by the new immigrants. There are 10 to 30 million in this country now and they havn't burned a single city block or barn yet. Moreover, we have in large measure a shared history, culture and religion with Hispanic peoples. We share almost nothing with the millions of Muslims we have foolishly invited in. I picture someone not unlike a Marco Rubio or Rand Paul developing policies that concentrate our efforts closer to home. Organize and support our neighbors in the region to combat the tyranny in Cuba and Venezuela. I would not lift economic sactions against Cuba but would get behnd a major coordinated, diplomatic shaming effort. Liberating Cuba would be the goal. Ring the church bells, the Cuban people are starving and Venezuela is burning because of communism. Trade agreements and worker visas. Small scale joint military excercises. We need to pay attention to the Americas. Mexico can use our help against the cartels. Point is, smart politiciians can turn this losing immigrant issue into a winning plank for a new, optimistic republican platform.

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