Given the financial, human, and societal costs that are tearing up our social fabric, surely every American must be on board with fixing our immigration problem. It’s like choosing chocolate cake over cow pies at a birthday party, right?
Wrong. Some people are just fine with the stench. “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration” reveals exactly who.
Once the party of America’s working class, the Democrats seem to have abandoned even the effort to win back blue-collar voters, and given up on loyalty to the America that really exists. As their academic allies tell them constantly, America as founded is hopelessly wicked.
What value America has can be found by taking a few of our founding principles and teasing them out of context to outrageously broad conclusions that would have horrified not only Washington and Madison but also John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and even George McGovern.
Perhaps the turning point was the Obama presidency, which gave us eight long years of globalist, anti-colonialist sermons by a president who apparently wanted to turn the United States into just another member state of the European Union.
It became clear that our internationalist president, who grew up abroad attending Muslim schools, wasn’t the only American to feel more like a citizen of the world than a citizen of the United States. Looking out for American poor people and working-class schmoes seemed suddenly so … parochial.
Or worse. The Democrats have taken to suggesting that being more concerned about the problems of our fellow Americans than about those of foreigners is somehow racist. They’ve worked their way into a tight corner on this issue, as some worried pundits have noticed.
But the party’s leaders aren’t concerned. They look at the huddled masses across the Rio Grande or in the Customs section of JFK Airport and they see … votes.
Byron York, the chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, has reported, “A 2012 study of 2,900 foreign-born, naturalized immigrants … showed that about 62 percent identified themselves as Democrats, while 25 percent identified as Republicans, and 13 percent identified as independents.”
Immigrants provide Democrats easy, reliable votes in their effort to expand government. In 2014, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a study digging into the numbers. Researcher James Gimpel of the University of Maryland found that:
• Immigrants, particularly Hispanics and Asians, have policy preferences when it comes to the size and scope of government that are more closely aligned with progressives than with conservatives. As a result, survey data show a two to one party identification with Democrats over Republicans.
• By increasing income inequality and adding to the low-income population (immigrants and their minor children, for example, account for one-fourth of those in poverty and one-third of the uninsured), immigration likely makes all voters more supportive of redistributive policies Democrats champion to support disadvantaged populations.
• There is evidence that immigration may cause more Republican-oriented voters to move away from areas of high immigrant settlement, leaving behind a more lopsided Democrat majority.
In some cities, Democrats are even pushing to allow illegal immigrants to vote. In 2017, a majority of the city council in College Park, Maryland, approved a measure to allow just that. Thankfully, they needed more than a simple majority to make the measure stick.
More commonly, Democrats are a little more discreet, and simply make it de facto easy for noncitizens to vote by fighting every reasonable effort at voter ID laws, which they equate to the Jim Crow measures that kept freed slaves away from the polls. The Democrats take a condescending attitude toward black and Hispanic American citizens— as if they were shiftless hobos with no capacity to prove their identities.
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Democratic support for illegal immigration surprises even liberal writer Peter Beinart. He wrote in the Atlantic in 2017, “In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants ‘our neighbors.’ But it also warned, ‘We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,’ adding that ‘those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.’ By 2016, such language was gone.”
This embrace of illegal and mass immigration comes at the expense of members of the American working class, who not only pay taxes to provide public services to illegal aliens who work off the books but also lose job opportunities to low-skill migrants flooding the labor markets. And working-class Americans have taken notice.
That’s why so many “blue” states flipped narrowly in 2016 to elect Donald Trump. In fact, Trump won the votes of millions of white blue-collar workers who had voted for Barack Obama. Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote about this phenomenon in the Los Angeles Times:
Surveys show that Obama-Trump blue-collar voters like Trump’s anti-immigration stance. These voters are likely to have felt competition from immigrants legal and illegal, and they want that competition to stop.
Even though many of these voters agree with Democrats on traditional economic issues like taxes and entitlement spending, their primary concern now is to protect their livelihoods and standard of living by reducing competition from foreigners living at home and abroad. Loud opposition to Trump’s immigration policies reminds those voters every day why they no longer feel at home in today’s Democratic Party.
And before Democrats can clear their throats to call those white Obama voters racists, Democratic strategist and pollster Stanley Greenberg warns that many nonwhite Americans feel the same way.
“The Democrats don’t have a white working-class problem. They have a working-class problem,” he said in a 2017 analysis of Democratic party voters. “Do not assume that African-Americans do not share some of those concerns; many in our focus groups raise anxieties about competition from new immigrants.”
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Those blue-collar voters aren’t deluded. They see the situation on the ground, since they can’t move to the gated communities where pumpkin latte liberals view immigration mainly as the source for new exotic takeout. Trump voters know that mass low-skill immigration is damaging to the American economy and American workers.
But here’s the thing that galls us: So do many on the Left. They have just ceased to care. Or else they’ve decided that the benefits of “diversity” are worth the damage to the most vulnerable Americans.
You know, it’s the way the Left in Russia, back in the 1930s chose to collectivize all farms in Ukraine, sure that the short-term pain (mass famine) would be worth the long-term gain (a socialist utopia). Sometimes you have to destroy the working class in order to save it.
As Beinart has explained, in 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.”
In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.”
That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald, a founding editor of The Intercept. The columnist was New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
But that was before the memo went out that the new liberal plan for the American working class was planned obsolescence. Democratic politicians are now disenchanted with the American people, so they have decided to enfranchise a new one.
The above is an excerpt from John Zmirak and Al Perrotta’s latest book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration: An America First Manifesto,” published by Regnery.
(photo credit, homepage image: Nancy Pelosi, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore; Voting Sign, CC BY 2.0, by Erik (HASH) Hersman)
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