Democratic Senator: Americans Will Lose to China Without Immigrants

Americans and their children will lose to China unless they get help from immigrants, says Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT).

“If you look at our ability to try to keep up with the rise of China, there’s no way to do that — unless you continue to bring to America the smartest, best, hardworking people from all around the world,” Murphy said in an August 1 conversation staged by the establishment influence group, the Bipartisan Policy Center.

“We’ve found common ground tonight,” responded Murphy’s stage partner, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), a Republican senator who is retiring this year:

I think Republicans as a rule, and certainly, I am, [are] very interested in expanding legal immigration. And, in fact, when we try to do that often, we find ourselves unable [to do so]. For example, H-1B visas or high technology visas [were initially added to] this latest legislation we passed … that would help to staple the green card to the Ph.D. for people in the STEM disciplines. And I think that’s all good — but we’ve got to do something about this unlawful, current [border chaos] system that is serving nobody except the traffickers.

The two senators’ support for foreign graduates instead of American graduates is deeply unpopular. The policy is counterproductive for innovation, skews the economy towards consumption, and is the untouchable “Third Rail” in politics because it tilts the economy in favor of investors, CEOs, and other members of the elite.

“I think the populist backlash against elites was the sense among many working people that elites look down on them, that the work they do isn’t valued, not only in terms of economic rewards … [but in] social recognition,” Michael Sandel, a famous progressive professor at Harvard University, said on June 27 at an elite event in Aspen, Colorado.

“Our politics, the neoliberal version of global capitalism that we insisted on, the inequalities it created, and the lack of social esteem for working people that followed — all of this paved the way for [President Donald] Trump,” Sandel said at the event, which was titled “Reimagining the Future of the Democratic Party.”

The elitist dismissal of ordinary Americans “adds insult to the injury of job loss and wage stagnation and inequality,” Sandel lamented, adding:

If politicians tell people –“The [only] solution to your problems is to improve yourself, you can make it if you try.” — that’s inspiring in one way, but it’s insulting in another. Because for those who don’t have a college degree and who are struggling in this economy, the implication is “Your failure is your fault.”

I think that we — I mean, broadly speaking, the Democratic Party, governing elites, Democrats and Republicans, mainstream politics since Reagan, but through Clinton, and Obama — have intoned these slogans, these messages, this rhetoric of [economic] “Rising” and missed the insult implicit in them. And that insult and the grievances and the anger and the resentment gathered, and in 2016 exploded.

Sandel was speaking to Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who acknowledged that his party’s “technocratic” economic policies have not helped ordinary Americans:

What I[‘ve] heard most importantly, over the last 14 years in my town hall, in a state which has one of the most dynamic economies of any state in the country, is that people are killing themselves — that’s the word they use — they’re killing themselves and no matter what they do they can’t afford some combination of housing, health care, higher education or early childhood education. They can’t save.

Bennet, who was a former investor and an original member of the “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap-labor bill in 2013, added:

One of our challenges as a country is that we’ve given up investing in our own economy. We stopped investing in our people. We stopped investing in our plant and equipment here. We don’t make these investments anymore. We pay dividends to shareholders, we buy back stock, we financially engineer — but we don’t do the stuff that actually creates environments …  where people — working next to automated robots, it must be said these days — have the chance to have the dignity of work. That’s something we could change.

Bennet outlined his fix for the cracked economy — but echoed Murphy’s demand for foreign workers to take the jobs, wages, and housing needed by their constituents:

We need to figure out how we create an economy that when it grows, it grows for everybody. fix a broken immigration system, deal with the epidemic of opioids and fentanyl, and methamphetamines that’s happening in the United States of America … We’re going to have to figure out how to reform the way our political system works so that it’s actually responsive to the what the American people need.

Murphy also outlined his preferred political deal, saying that republicans should come “to the table to talk about comprehensive immigration reform — not just building a wall — but figuring out a better way to allow more people to come here legally.”

“Maybe we opened the door for this” populist rejection, said Sandel, who did not mention his elite peers’ top-priority economic policy of Extraction Migration.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants —plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers. The inflationary policy makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.

Business-backed migration advocates hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration is good for migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

The polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration — but they also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment,  multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.