Immigration is a weapon

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received enthusiastic applause during a recent appearance on “The Daily Show” after announcing her intention to solve the border crisis, not with some ridiculous solution like building a wall, but by granting documentation to every illegal immigrant in America. At this point, “The Daily Show” audience must consist of 20 people with a median IQ lower than the average temperature in Montana in January, but the New York congresswoman’s solution seems to be conventional wisdom among most liberals now.

Establishment Democrats know they at least need to pay lip service to the idea of border security, but incompetent and entitled climbers like Ocasio-Cortez feel no compulsion to hide the ball. Progressives are using illegal immigration as a political weapon to destroy their opposition and transform the United States. The “border crisis” is not a crisis at all. It is a political offensive unfolding exactly as progressives intended.

Illegal immigration is not a problem for Democrats to solve but a weapon with which they can dismantle the opposition and secure a permanent electoral advantage.

There was a time when the left pretended to care about the working class. It was well understood that immigration was a tool that big business could use to undermine organized labor and drive down wages. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) used to refer to open borders as a “Koch brothers proposal” that would make every American poorer. He was right. Americans who are forced to compete with foreign labor not only see their opportunities dwindle and their earnings fall but must also contend with the flood of new consumers in every other economic market.

Immigration drives up the cost of housing, health care, and education, particularly in the working-class neighborhoods where these new laborers tend to settle. Open borders also encourage drug crime, gang violence, and human trafficking that disproportionately impact the communities Democrats claim to protect. But none of this matters to the modern left because illegal immigration is too valuable as a weapon against its enemies.

The Democrats may be big fans of cultural Marxism, but they have left their pretensions of fighting big business behind. The left is rather pleased with the way that large corporations zealously enforce progressive social dogmas in return for cheap labor and regulatory capture. Woke capital has discovered that using government regulations to eliminate its opposition is far more advantageous than competing in any kind of free market, so it sides with the party that will keep labor costs low and smaller companies buried in red tape.

Democrats also discovered that the tendency of large corporations to erode communities helps to facilitate the growth of government and remove opposition to the progressive domination of social institutions.

When the government attempts to consolidate power, its two major barriers are regional autonomy and loyalty to competing social institutions. People with a strong sense of community and identity tend to rely heavily on their families, friends, churches, and civic organizations — not the government.

For the state to grow, it must take over tasks like education or care for the elderly from these competing social organizations. Communities can stay loyal to their previous traditions and values by relying on their shared institutions, but individuals deprived of these support systems must bend the knee to the state.

A strong middle class population with the ability to own their own businesses and homes can also resist the dictates of politicians who enforce their policies through large employers and the financial instability created by renting and wage labor. These financially secure families also have a nasty habit of building the kind of generational wealth that funds those churches and community organizations that contend with the government for loyalty.

A government that is looking to consolidate power and regularly impose its will on the populace needs to find a way to dismantle its independent middle class while ensuring the support of a more dependent and less established population.

High-low versus middle is a classic political strategy used by rulers who need to remove the resistance that comes from an established population. Victory in politics comes from rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies, and if you can reward your friends by punishing your enemies, so much the better.

By importing a dependent client class of cheap laborers, the left ensures the support of powerful corporations while undermining the stability of established American communities. As the independent retailer gives way to Walmart and Amazon, the competing social organizations that once helped communities resist the advance of government power dry up and fade away.

Taxes and regulations eventually drain the remaining wealth out of the kulaks, which can then be redistributed through government programs to the dependent newcomers, who are now deeply in thrall to a leviathan government they cannot hope to oppose. This effect is only compounded in a democracy, where the generational electoral advantage secured by the side that imported the new dependent class is overwhelming.

The left is more than happy to change its positions on labor, the working class, big business, and open borders if that means securing power and advancing a progressive social agenda forever. Illegal immigration is not a problem for Democrats to solve but a weapon with which they can dismantle the opposition and secure a permanent electoral advantage.

The GOP has consistently proven itself incapable of taking meaningful action to stop this process. One can debate whether to attribute that failure to incompetence or malice, but what cannot be debated is that the right is running out of time to solve a problem that could permanently end its ability to resist the relentless march of the progressive total state.