January 29: Ilhan Omar Goes Blood-and-Soil
Iran kills Americans; The fake UNRWA funding pause; More bad news at the border
The Big Story
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) doesn’t like Jews. Since Oct. 7, she’s accused Israel of “genocide,” introduced legislation to block weapons sales to the Jewish state, and repeatedly posted and shared inflammatory falsehoods about Israel, including that it was responsible for the explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. But even before the war, she was no stranger to Jew-baiting. In 2012, she posted that “Israel has hypnotized the world,” and in 2019, she insinuated that Congress had been bought by Jews when she claimed that American political support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins, baby.”
So what does the Congresswoman like? Ethnic Somali irredentism, apparently. Here’s an excerpt from a translation of a speech Omar recently gave to a meeting of Somali Americans, which surfaced on social media on Sunday:
We, as Somalians, love each other. There are areas of friction that led us to kill each other, but in reality, we are an organized society, brothers and sisters, people of the same blood.
Is that the “blood-and-soil nationalism” we’re always being warned about? Omar went on to reference “some people who call themselves Somalis”—i.e., the inhabitants of Somaliland, the unrecognized breakaway state in northern Somalia—signing a memorandum of understanding with the government of Ethiopia. To Somalis worried this could turn into a “full bilateral agreement,” Omar offered reassurance:
The U.S. government will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do. They will do what we want and nothing else. They must follow our orders and that is how we will safeguard the interests of Somalia. We Somalians must have the confidence in ourselves that we call the shots in the U.S.
One would hope the U.S. government would act in the interests of all American citizens, or at least of the American state (which does in fact support the territorial integrity of Somalia), but no matter. Here’s more Omar:
Somalia is for Somalis only, as over 45% of Somalia’s population are not even ethnic Somalis. Somalia is one nation, we are all brothers and sisters. Ethiopia and Kenya have stolen and continue to occupy the Somali region state, which belongs to Somalia. We will liberate the occupied territories that belong to Greater Somalia.
“Greater Somalia” is a Somali irredentist concept referring to all territories with ethnic Somali populations, including Somaliland and parts of modern-day Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, which Somali ethno-nationalists hope to reconquer and unite under a single Somali state. (This may explain her sympathy for similar Arab projects to reconquer “Palestine.”) Needless to say, Omar’s rhetoric didn’t go down well with the targets of her territorial expansionism. In a Sunday X post, Rhoda J. Elmi of the Somaliland Ministry of Foreign Affairs decried Omar’s “ethno-racist rhetoric” and “endeavors to revive the once-violent and dangerous ideology of Greater Somalia.”
It’s likely that Omar’s political commitments were inherited from her father. The congresswoman had long claimed that her father’s name was Nur Omar Muhammed Omar and that he’d been an “educator” in Somalia, but when he died in 2020, several dozen people from Minneapolis’ Somali community confirmed that his name was Nur Said Elmi and that he’d been a Soviet-educated colonel in the military of the Islamic-Marxist Somali dictator Siad Barre, who attempted to realize the dream of a Greater Somalia in wars with his neighbors. According to an obituary in Sahan Journal, Nur Said Elmi led a regiment in the 1977-78 Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia, Barre’s ill-advised attempt to conquer and annex Ethiopia’s ethnic Somali regions. Nur Said Elmi also would have been a senior officer during the Isaaq genocide of 1987-89, when Barre’s military killed between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians, though no information is available about his actions during that period.
The apparent name change—from Nur Said Elmi to Nur Omar Muhammed Omar—is significant for another reason. Ilhan Omar has long been dogged by well-supported allegations that her second husband, British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, is in fact her brother. Not that she’s really incestuous: Allegedly, Omar married Elmi—in a private Christian ceremony, despite both being Muslims—so that he could get a green card to come to the United States and apply for federal student loans. Property records show that while attending school in North Dakota, Omar and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, by then legally married, lived together in a house with Omar’s first husband, Ahmed Hirsi. Omar also had her third child with her first husband while still legally married to Elmi, before later divorcing Elmi (who returned to England) and remarrying Hirsi (whom she later left for a campaign consultant). A Minneapolis Somali “community leader” told the Daily Mail in 2020 that it was well known in the Somali community that the “very effeminate” Elmi was in fact Omar’s brother, that the family had wanted to get him out of London to cure him of his suspected homosexuality, and that Omar had told others in her community that she “needed to get papers for her brother to go to school.” Omar’s father being named Nur Said Elmi—rather than Nur Omar Muhammed Omar, as she claimed—further strengthens the theory that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is his son.
If true, that would mean that Omar has committed multiple felonies over the past decade and a half, including marriage fraud, student loan fraud, tax fraud (for filing joint returns with her first husband while still married to her second), and several instances of perjury.
But to return briefly to Omar’s recent comments, Tablet’s Armin Rosen, who profiled Omar in July 2022, had this to say to The Scroll over email:
Imagine if a member of Congress gave a saber-rattling speech in Hebrew about how Israel should ignore all the fake Jews out there and retake the Sinai and you’ll still only be only a small part of the way toward grasping the full strangeness of an address that Ilhan Omar made in Minneapolis earlier this week.
Rosen speculates that it’s all about the votes, baby:
Omar is facing a primary rematch with former Minneapolis city councilman Don Samuels, who came within 2,400 votes of beating her in 2022. Little wonder she is leaning into Somali regional chauvinism, attempting to garner votes from a sub-group of Minneapolis’s large Somali community.
Whatever else she is, Omar is a canny politician. She seems to have calculated that with blood-and-soil sectarianism, as with perjury and marriage fraud, you can get away with anything as long as you have the right friends.
For more documentation on Omar’s alleged marriage to her brother, read David Steinberg’s roundup at Power Line here: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/07/david-steinberg-tying-up-loose-threads-in-the-curious-case.php
And read Armin’s Tablet profile of Omar here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ilhans-country
IN THE BACK PAGES: Michael Lind on Democrats’ plan to dissolve the American electorate and import another one
The Rest
→Three Americans were killed and at least 34 were injured in Jordan on Sunday in a drone attack by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an Iranian-backed proxy militia. Iranian-backed militias have struck U.S. targets in the Middle East hundreds of times since mid-October, injuring dozens, but this latest attack, on Tower 22, a small base near the Jordanian-Syrian border, marks the first time since the outbreak of the Gaza war that Tehran’s proxies have killed Americans. The White House has vowed to retaliate, but in a replay of the administration’s post-Oct. 7 messaging, a senior U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal Monday that “the U.S. has yet to find evidence thus far that Iran directed the attack”—a meaningless statement, given that the entire point of Iran’s use of proxies is to provide the regime with plausible deniability. Our own feelings were captured by former special envoy for Syria Joel Rayburn, who told the Journal, “This was a mass-casualty attack on a soft target on the territory of an allied country. It crossed all the red lines. The point they are going to have to consider is how to impose costs on the Iranians directly. Attacks will go on until they do that.”
→The U.S. pause on UNRWA funding, mentioned in Friday’s Scroll, applies only to new funding, not to existing obligations, Pluribus News reports. In an email to Pluribus, a State Department spokesperson explained, “We are pausing any new or additional funding. Contributions to UNRWA that were not obligated as of January 24 are suspended, contributions to UNRWA obligated prior to this date remain in effect.” The United States gave the agency more than $371 million in 2023 and had committed another $51 million for fiscal year 2024 as of Jan. 16. The Wall Street Journal, which viewed portions of the intelligence briefing that Israel delivered to the United States last week, reported Monday that about 1,200 of UNRWA’s 12,000 employees in Gaza, or 10%, have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The intelligence also indicated that 23% of UNRWA’s male employees had ties to Hamas, “higher than the average of 15% for all adult males in Gaza.”
→That reminds us: Biden’s senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council is Maher al-Bitar, a Palestinian American former UNRWA intern. According to a 2021 Politico article on Maher’s hiring, Maher served as the NSC’s director for Israeli and Palestinian affairs during the Obama administration and as deputy to former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. During the Trump administration, he worked as general counsel for House Intelligence Committee Democrats, where he served as the “top legal adviser” to Adam Schiff (D-CA) during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. During his time as a student at Georgetown University, Bitar sat on the executive board of the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and later interned at UNRWA. Photos of Bitar from the time show him dancing in a keffiyeh in front of a sign reading “Divest From Israeli Apartheid.”
→The Scroll has previously reported that the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), the group that has fiscal sponsorship from the Tides Center and that organized two port blockades and a bridge-blocking protest on the West Coast, has received taxpayer funding via contracts with the San Francisco Unified School District. Now, River Page reports at Pirate Wires that since 2016, Tides has received $800,000 in grants specifically earmarked for AROC from the San Francisco city government, most of it for “coalition building [with] Arab-serving organizations citywide” and “service connection and short-term case management” for Arab residents. It’s a nice illustration of how the nonprofit scam works across the country: Governments fund (often billionaire-funded) professional activist groups, nominally for vague community services, and then those groups turn around and spend the money on far-left agitation, creating the illusion of organic support for far-left policies, which the governments then promise to provide.
→Chart of the Day:
That’s a handy visualization of the scale of the border crisis under Biden’s presidency, courtesy of The Washington Post. And, in what’s becoming a pattern, the administration released its final border numbers for December late on Friday afternoon—11 days late, after most reporters (and news consumers) had checked out for the weekend, and after news leaked that Senate negotiations on a border-security-for-Ukraine-funding deal had reached an impasse. Those numbers showed 250,000 encounters at the Southwest border, and 371,000 nationwide encounters, making December officially the worst month in history for border crossings.
→Speaking of that deal: Several reports Friday indicated that Senate negotiators had settled on a “new expulsion authority” as part of the border deal, which would “shut down” the border if unauthorized crossings reached 5,000 per day until crossings dipped below 3,750 per day. In other words, the deal would set a limit of a little more than 1.8 million illegal entries per year as the “new normal.” For a sense of just how far we’ve come in the past decade, Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies notes that in the decade between 2008 and 2018, Border Patrol never apprehended more than 550,000 migrants in a single year, or a little more than 1,506 per day. Here’s Byron York of The Washington Examiner:
→For anyone interested in a deeper dive, Robert C. Thornett has an excellent essay in the latest issue of American Affairs on the policy roots of the border crisis. The key passage is here:
The current explosion of migration to the U.S. border was set off in 2021, when the Biden administration created three additional legal loopholes that offered a fast lane to entry into the United States. These loopholes went viral over social media, turning on a migration magnet far stronger than the United States has ever seen before. Specifically, the Biden loopholes guaranteed immunity to Title 42 expulsions, which had been established under the previous administration, to three categories of migrants: (1) families with children under seven who crossed into Texas from the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico; (2) unaccompanied minors; and (3) women in the late stages of pregnancy, usually seven months or more.
The essay also details how U.S. policy changes have abetted the explosion of asylum fraud, turbocharged human smuggling and trafficking networks in Latin America, and encouraged governments in Panama and elsewhere to ease the northward passage of migrants through their territory.
Read the rest here: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/01/the-causes-of-the-latest-border-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/
TODAY IN TABLET:
Meet the Siegels, a Family Struggling Under the Curse of Wokeness, by Maggie Phillips
Courtesy of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, a rare entertainment that addresses the American miasma of loony politics and ungrounded beliefs
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Our Open Border Policy Is Not an Accident
There’s a new strategy in town: If American voters don’t like what you are offering, import better voters.
by Michael Lind
The unprecedented chaos at the U.S. border and in major American cities that has been caused by the Biden administration’s immigration policies finally seems to have moved to the center of national political debate and public awareness.
Over the past three years, the Biden administration has effectively rewritten U.S. immigration law, creating an entirely new stream of quasi-legal immigration under the rubric of “parole.” The discretion of the federal government to grant parole or legal residence and work permits to a small number of refugees and other foreign nationals has been used by the Biden administration to rip a hole in America’s southern border in order to invite millions of foreign nationals, most of them from Latin America and Central America and the Caribbean, to travel to the U.S. border, from which they are dispersed across the country and supported chiefly by state and local governments and government-funded NGOs.
As of September 2023, an estimated 3.8 million immigrants entered the U.S. under the Biden administration. Of these, 2.3 million have been given Notices to Appear (NTAs) before an immigration court—which could allow them to stay in the U.S. in a “twilight status” for years before a court date.
Of the rest, an estimated 1.5 million are illegal immigrants who sneaked across the border or overstayed their visas and remain, with the government having no idea of their whereabouts, and with Democrat-dominated “sanctuary cities” actively thwarting the ability of federal immigration officials to identify and deport them.
Biden’s radical immigration policy represents not only a policy revolution but also a political revolution. A generation ago in the 1980s and 1990s, factions in favor of more or less immigration were found in both parties. Labor unions remained traditionally wary of immigrant competition in the workplace and immigration-driven wage suppression, while Republican business interests wanted the government to turn a blind eye to the employment of illegal immigrants. In 1994, 62% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans told Pew pollsters that “immigrants are a burden on our country because they take jobs, housing, and health care.” Only 32% of Democrats agreed that “immigrants strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” By 2019, however, only 11% of Democrats agreed that immigrants are a burden, while 83% agreed with the statement that immigrants strengthen the country.
What happened to make Democrats change their minds? Between the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993 and that of Joe Biden in 2021, the Democratic Party morphed into a new party of elite, college-educated white professionals, Black Americans, and mostly Hispanic immigrants concentrated in a few big cities in a few populous states like California and New York. Many Democrats have called this new, big-city political machine “the coalition of the ascendant,” confident that the growth in the share of nonwhite voters fed by immigration, combined with increasing social liberalism, will lead to inevitable one-party rule by a hegemonic Democratic Party.
In reality, however, the Democratic Party is an alliance of interests threatened with long-term demographic decline—declining industries, declining states, declining cities, declining churches and nonprofits. These civic downtrodden have united around the hope that they can reverse the unpopularity of their offerings among U.S.-born Americans by importing new citizens en masse.
A politics founded on this idea—namely, that if not enough American voters like what you are offering, you should compensate by importing supportive voters—may seem like something from Alice in Wonderland. But that’s exactly what the leadership of the Democratic Party is doing, by refusing to enforce existing immigration laws and preventing states from securing their borders—while counting on the Democratic bureaucrats and judges to enforce the dubious legality of such moves.
***
The Democratic Party has lost majorities of one domestic electoral constituency after another to the Republicans in the last half century: first, conservative white Southerners, then the moderate non-Hispanic white working class in general, then white Catholics, all of which formed the base of the New Deal Democrats from FDR to LBJ.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has exchanged the country club for country music. In 1992, white college graduates preferred Republicans by 52% to 41%; by 2016 they preferred Democrats narrowly (48%-47%). Among white voters with only a high school education, the Democratic Party led by 50% to 41% in 1992; in 2016, high school-educated whites favored the Republicans, 59%-33%. This was nearly the mirror image of the 59%-36% advantage of college-graduate Democrats among registered voters in 2016. In 1992, voters with high school degrees or less outnumbered college graduates among Democrats, 55%-21%; in 2016, college graduates outnumbered voters with high school or less among Democrats 37%-32%. Among white non-Hispanic Catholics, the parties were evenly split 45%-45% in 1992, but the Republicans won this vote 58%-37% in 2016.
College-educated white Americans have shifted in great numbers from the declining liberal wing of the Republican Party to the Democrats, but their numbers, combined with the static Black share of the electorate, would not have been enough to offset the flight of former New Deal voting blocs from the Democratic Party.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the “New Democrats” like Bill Clinton tried to stave off Democratic decline by moving to the center and winning back some of the voters alienated by the Democratic left. The tilt toward the center included a hard line on illegal immigration. According to the Democratic Party platform of 1996: “We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it … In 1992, our borders might as well have not existed … Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again … We continue to firmly oppose welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.”
The Commission on Immigration Reform, appointed by Bill Clinton and headed by former U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan, a pioneering Black liberal from Texas, proposed cracking down on illegal immigrants and their employers and increasing deportations, reducing family-based “chain migration,” boosting skilled immigration and eliminating unskilled immigration to protect American workers and raise their wages in tighter labor markets. According to Jordan and her fellow commissioners, “Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.” President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which increased the number of crimes for which immigrants could be deported.
But the Democratic Party abruptly changed its immigration policy when its leaders began to hope that they could import voters from other countries to compensate for the loss of voters that Democratic policies were alienating. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Democrats generally did better with European immigrants than the Federalist, Whig, and Republican parties, and so it was with the mostly Hispanic and Asian immigration of the 21st century. Among immigrants, 32% say that the Democratic Party best represents their views, compared to only 16% who say the same of the Republican Party.
One 2012 study, following a flood of 30 million mostly Latin American immigrants between 1980 and 2012, showed that 62% of naturalized immigrants able to vote identified as Democrats, compared to 25% who were Republicans and 13% independents. A 2016 study, using data from 1994-2012, confirmed that “immigration to the U.S. has a significant and negative impact on the Republican vote share, consistent with the typical view of political analysts in the U.S.” Latin American immigration flipped former Republican strongholds to the Democratic Party, including California’s San Bernardino County, which in 1980 was 7.7% foreign-born and 59.7% Republican, but which by 2014 was 21.4% immigrant and only 46.2% Republican.
While the Democratic Party has been importing voters from abroad, the party and most large urban governments have become fused to a degree beyond the wildest dreams of Boss Tweed. In 2000, four of the 10 most populous American cities had Republican mayors. Today Democratic mayors account for nine out of 10. In these cities, the Democratic Party’s urban patronage machines of yesteryear have been replaced by new kinds of patronage machines: unionized public sector bureaucracies whose members are overwhelmingly Democratic, and kick back shares of their wages in the form of both money and time to the party. Democrat-dominated nonprofits double as contractors, whose salary lines are funded by the taxpayers. They are joined by nonprofits and businesses that are defined as “nonwhite” under America’s arbitrary and increasingly anachronistic racial classification laws, and are therefore eligible for large government contracts that they would presumably not receive under prior merit-based criteria.
In addition to benefiting indirectly from immigrant voting for urban Democratic politicians, these urban bureaucracies and special interests benefit directly from increased immigration, which swells their constituencies, which leads in turn to more money, more jobs, and more power. Unionized public school bureaucracies gain more students; progressive nonprofits gain more clients; and more funds flow to supposed representatives of “underrepresented communities”—representatives who, in general, are far more affluent and educated than the populations they purport to represent on the basis of shared skin color or other identity politics markers.
Declining American religions, too, have joined the city-centered Democratic "coalition of the declining" in the hopes of shoring up their power base and funding. As Americans become more secular, both mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants have been shrinking as shares of the U.S. population. The Catholic Church, the largest denomination in the U.S., has maintained its numbers only because foreign-born members have replenished U.S.-born Catholics who have left the Church. According to the Population Reference Bureau, “New immigrants arriving in the United States—many Catholics from Latin America—have helped offset the decline in religious affiliation among the U.S.-born population.”
In 2021, 78% of the funding for Catholic Relief Services—which amounts to well over a billion dollars—came from government, with federal grants accounting for a third of the total, making it essentially a secular government contractor disguised as a religious charity. The largest nominally religious NGO providing immigrant services in the United States is the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, while the only nominally Jewish agency certified to work with the U.S. government in the resettlement of migrants, HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), has as its clients immigrants of all backgrounds, not just Jewish refugees or immigrants. More immigration of all kinds means more government grants for nominally religious charities and other services to immigrants, legal and illegal alike.
Other groups that make up the immigration-dependent coalition of the declining are desperate to expand immigration because the Democrat-dominated cities and states in which they are clustered are emptying out, as both U.S.-born and immigrant residents flee to other cities and states as living conditions decline. Of California, Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin write: “The state is in a demographic free fall”—having lost 1.7 million residents between 2016 and 2022 as a result of domestic migration. Noting that domestic migration out of California now includes college graduates, non-college-educated people, and households at all levels of income, the Public Policy Institute of California concludes that “the state is no longer a significant draw for people from other states of any age, education, or income.”
To compensate for massive population losses caused by the flight of U.S.-born residents to other states, California is highly dependent on international migration. In 2022, the foreign-born share (27%) of California’s population was higher than that of any other state and twice the share of the U.S. as a whole. The foreign-born make up roughly a third of the population in San Francisco and Los Angeles counties. Nearly half (46%) of California’s children have at least one foreign-born parent. In 2019, 22% of the foreign-born residents in California were illegal immigrants, and in 2021 only 55% were naturalized U.S. citizens. Similarly, in New York—another state with massive population losses of U.S.-born citizens—most of the population growth since 1980 has been the result of international immigration.
California’s immigrants are far less educated than the U.S. as a whole, with only 71% having graduated from high school, compared to 93% of Californians born in the U.S. According to one 2023 study, state and local taxes paid for illegal immigrants by Californians, excluding their federal tax payments, make up a sixth of the costs of illegal immigration in the U.S. as a whole. In addition to thwarting federal immigration law enforcement through sanctuary laws, California has turned itself into a welfare magnet for illegal immigrants by providing law-breaking foreign nationals and their children with health care coverage under the statewide Medi-Cal system, in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, K-12 schooling, and housing and food assistance.
As the low-wage, welfare-dependent immigrant share of a state’s population grows, more and more taxpayers will be tempted to move to other states with lower taxes and less generous state and urban welfare programs. States like California, which once served as an engine of prosperity for the entire country, will decline into bureaucracy-choked sinkholes. Requiring sky-high taxation and endless federal bailouts to stay afloat will seriously threaten American competitiveness in key fields like computing and biotech. It will also put tremendous pressure on the country’s republican system of government, which is structured to prevent one state or region from gobbling up too much of the national taxpayer pie.
***
Today’s immigration debate is over unskilled immigration, not skilled immigration. While programs like the H-1B visa have been exploited by Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms that prefer easily intimidated foreign guest workers to citizen workers and legal immigrants with greater rights, there is a bipartisan consensus that the U.S. can benefit from highly educated immigrants who are unlikely to be burdens on the welfare state. The controversy is over less-educated immigrants who enter the workforce in the U.S. by various means: family reunification, indentured servant “guest workers” used by agribusiness, illegal immigration and now—under Biden—quasi-legal “parole” status.
The beneficiaries of mass immigration of less-educated workers are low-tech, low-wage industries with firms that are unwilling either to raise wages or invest in labor-saving technology as long as there is a constant influx of cheap labor from abroad. New American Economy, an advocacy group that lobbies for higher immigration, claims that Americans refuse to do jobs with largely immigrant workforces like “plasterers and stucco masons” (72%), “maids and housekeeping cleaners” (50.6 %), and “misc. agricultural workers, including workers who pick crops in the field” (52.2%). But U.S.-born workers and many naturalized immigrant citizens avoid these and other fields because of low wages, which a large and easily exploited immigrant workforce allows employers to pay. For example, U.S. farm worker wages are only slightly more than half of the average wages of nonsupervisory and production workers outside of agriculture.
But don’t most economists agree that mass immigration does not reduce the ability of American workers, native or immigrant, to demand higher wages? Yes and no. After decades in which most academic economists and business lobbies claimed that flooding labor markets with new entrants has no effect on wages, as soon as inflation spiked following the COVID-19 pandemic many of the same authorities declared that immigration should be increased to lower inflation by … guess what: lowering wages.
According to a study issued in 2023 by the corporate- and billionaire-funded mass immigration lobby FWD.us and the libertarian-leaning George Mason University, U.S. workers in many sectors benefited from the temporary restriction of legal and illegal immigration by the COVID pandemic: “[D]ata analysis shows that some of the sharpest wage increases, which reflect worker shortages, occurred in industries typically supported by a large number of immigrants, including construction and hospitality … In other words, inflation rose in part because of a tightening labor market.”
Surely the fact that tight labor markets allowed both native and foreign-born American workers to demand raises is a good thing? Not according to the authors of the study, who complained that “higher wages” can “lead to increasing costs for consumers.” The solution? The study calls for increasing immigration to “stabilize prices for consumers and offer relief to employers”—by making it more difficult for workers to demand raises.
America’s economic elite agrees that immigrant-driven wage suppression, thanks in part to Biden’s policies, has ameliorated inflation. Federal Reserve Chairman Powell in 2022 attributed inflation in part to lower numbers of immigrants. The chief political economist of Goldman Sachs, Alec Phillips, recently declared that “the labor market has started to loosen up,” reducing the ability of workers to bid up wages: “And there’s clearly been a disproportionate contribution from immigrants.” Although immigrants are only 18% of the workforce, three-quarters of the increase in the labor supply over the last two years has consisted of immigrant workers. The impact of wage-suppressing immigration falls chiefly on Americans, both native and immigrant, who work in low-wage, labor-intensive industries like construction, agriculture, retail, and hospitality. According to America’s bipartisan economic elite, low-wage American workers need to take one for the team by having immigration undermine their power to get raises, so that other Americans, most notably those with large disposable incomes, can enjoy lower prices for goods and services.
In the long run, the only sustainable way to increase the standard of living for all people is to increase technology-enabled productivity growth. But in the short run, population growth, whether driven by mass immigration or high birth rates, by enlarging the workforce as well as increasing the number of consumers can produce economic growth even in the presence of technological stagnation. Improving productivity through technological innovation is difficult, but swelling the population by means of immigration is easy. So it is no surprise that business lobbies in most countries emphasize immigration-driven population growth over productivity.
The demographer Joseph Chamie, former director of the United Nations Population Division, has described what he calls “Ponzi demography,” thanks to which “population growth—through natural increase and immigration—means more people leading to increased demands for goods and services, more material consumption, more borrowing, more credit, and of course more profits.” While this benefits “the advocates of Ponzi demography—notably enterprises in construction, manufacturing, finance, agriculture, and food processing”—the public as a whole must “pick up the tab for the mounting costs from increased population growth (e.g., education, health, housing and public services).” Because low-wage, unskilled immigrants depend more on welfare than highly skilled immigrants or American citizens in general, their employers get to privatize the benefits of their labor while forcing the taxpayers to socialize the costs.
Unfortunately for the Democratic Party’s pro-mass-immigration coalition of the declining, many immigrants and their children are deserting both the party and the cities and states that it rules. Having counted on Hispanic immigrants and their descendants to compensate for the exodus of the white working class, Democrats were shocked in December 2023 by a Reuters/Ipsos poll that showed Hispanics favoring Trump over Biden by 38% to 37%. An even more recent USA Today and Suffolk University poll has Trump leading Biden among Hispanic voters 39%-34%. Trump’s share of the national Hispanic vote rose from 28% in 2016 to 36% in 2020. In Texas, ground zero of America’s immigration crisis, the number of Hispanics who identify as Democrats fell from 63% in 2019 to 54% in 2022.
If partisan divisions among Hispanics thwart the hoped-for immigration-driven hegemony of the Democratic Party, then the Democrats will have to return to the strategy of "third way" New Democrats like Bill Clinton, move to the center, and try to convert Republican voters instead of importing new voters from other countries … No, just kidding! If Latin Americans fail to vote the way that Democratic strategists want, new voters will simply have to be found and imported from other regions of the world like the Middle East and Africa, where Democrats can hope that the combination of race, religion and deep-seated ethnic hatreds will successfully ghettoize new voters and ensure their allegiance to the party.
The mass-immigration Ponzi scheme of the last half century has provided a temporary demographic bailout to the members of the coalition of the declining—low-wage, low-tech industries, the Democratic Party, and mostly Democratic urban governments and nonprofits. It has even helped to refill the pews of some Christian churches. But in the end, all Ponzi schemes are fated to crash. What remains to be seen is whether the immigration Ponzi scheme that has turned California, New York, and other states into dystopias whose low wages, declining social conditions, and failing infrastructure send residents fleeing to other states will crash before it consumes the country as a whole.
Just like Hitler and Danzig...
I'm glad someone is keeping track of the 5th column in the Western world.