Democrats must win back working-class voters from Donald Trump’s blue-and-white-collar coalition — and mere rhetorical support for national unity should do the trick, claims a new article in the Atlantic magazine about the impact of immigration on American politics.
“Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda,” claims Peter Beinart, author of “How the Democrats Lost Their way on Immigration” in the July/August issue of The Atlantic.
Beinart continues:
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…
… What if [Hillary Clinton] 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.
English First would be welcomed by Americans, but Beinart largely ignores the much more important social, economic and political impact of cheap-labor legal immigration, which has greatly helped the high-IQ post-graduate class boost their wealth, political power and status advantage over other Americans in the deliberately fragmented, tribalized, diversified, disunited United States.
Beinart does offer some useful economic ideas, but weakly and without any explanation of how the Democrats’ business allies can be persuaded to sacrifice their profits for his political advantage:
This means opposing the guest-worker [H-1B, H-2B, OPT, etc.] programs … [and immigration] 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.
These two labor-supply policies would help working-class and middle-class Americans raise their wages and political power— but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Beinart and other progressives will actually threaten the top executives at prestigious companies, such as Google, Facebook, Intel, Harvard and Yale, Goldman Sachs or Citibank, whose stock-options spike when the federal government provides them with imported customers and imported white-collar workers.
Instead, there’s much evidence that progressives prefer to ally with business in a joint pursuit of power, wealth and social status.
For example, the two sectors allied in 2013 and 2014 to push the “Gang of Eight” cheap labor/”immigration reform” bill with a back-door deal in which Democratic leaders promised MORE guest-workers providing business lobbied the GOP to win amnesty for at least 11 million illegal aliens, AKA future government-dependent ethnic voters. That cash-for-power bargain was blocked by the voters who later elected Trump in 2016.
In fact, Beinart himself explained why progressives simply will not help the Americans who voted for Trump when he admitted that he wants immigration because it is good for foreigners:
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.
The pro-diversity, anti-America perspective is so central to the progressive movement that it drove Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign into a multicultural bog. A second article in the same issue of the Atlantic described how those views helped wreck her campaign:
By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaign’s own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton … [Clinton] never fully met her most important political challenge: the need to both celebrate multiculturalism and also cushion the backlash against the celebration … Nonetheless, neither Clinton nor her campaign manager, Robby Mook, had any apparent interest in that appeal. They considered Trump’s disreputable [pro-American] character the issue that would carry the election
But Beinart, like his fellow members of the post-graduate class, is smart enough to conjure up a pitch that says cheaper labor makes Americans richer.
… 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.”
Uh-huh. So we’re supposed to believe that the law of supply and demand is subordinate to the Democrats’ desires?
In reality, 4 million Americans turn 18 each year, yet the federal government invites 1 million new immigrants. This policy of mass immigration spikes profits and stock values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees, it drives up real estate prices, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and sidelines marginalized Americans and their families. Mass immigration also imposes the social “diversity” which helps Beinart, his allies, and fellow columnists as they claim a right to fragment, divide and rule Americans without any rude interference by the voters on November 8, 2016.
President Donald Trump won his 2016 campaign on a promise to put Americans first. He told his inauguration listeners that he would hold to a policy of “Buy American, Hire American,” he has started enforcing immigration laws and is pushing for a “merit-based” immigration plan that would welcome promising immigrants who can integrate into American civic society, and also raise the productivity and wealth of Americans.
That is a mainstream, popular, moderate and beneficial proposal which can help reinvigorate America’s working-class and middle-class amid accelerating globalization and automation.
It is also a problem for Beinart and his fellow progressives. Reduced legal immigration would tighten the labor supply, raise wages and allow Americans to earn enough money to get educated, get married, raise kids, gain social status and retire without having to rely on the kindness of self-serving progressive intellectuals and politicians. Who in Washington D.C. wants that?
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com