Immigration and Social Justice

Immigration Raises Issues of Social Justice

In a post two weeks ago, I said that a loyal American must favor immigration because it has been and continues to be the basis of our national wealth and power.  Having said that, I think that we must recognize that using immigrants to grow our economy also creates significant social injustice. Immigration has costs, and they are born mainly by working-class people including both the immigrants themselves and native-born, working-class Americans, especially those with less than high-school educations who compete directly with immigrants for jobs. 

The Social Injustices of Immigration Are Important Politically

The social injustices brought about by immigration are important politically as well as morally. The Democratic Party has lost many working-class votes because the party has failed to take working-class concerns about immigration seriously. The MAGA wing of the Republican Party has attracted working-class votes by claiming to be the voice of "real Americans." Immigration is one of the areas where the Democratic Party is most vulnerable. Instead of admitting that immigration can harm some Americans, we have branded people who are anti-immigration as racists. We should not be surprised to learn that we have not attracted many votes that way.

If we are to promote immigration because it is good for our country as a whole, we will have to frame it in a way that recognizes that, while it is good for the country as a whole, it is not always good for everyone. Some people may be harmed by immigration, and we must mitigate that harm. We must also recognize the potential for harm in our framing of the issue of immigration. The framing must address potential harm to two groups of people: immigrants and native-born Americans.

Social Justice for Immigrants

If we are going to rely on immigrants for the growth of our economy, we must include in our framing a path to citizenship for them. Our economy’s need for immigrant workers has attracted a far larger number of people than our legal system can handle. The result is that we now have more than ten million undocumented immigrants living in our country. Some Republican politicians talk loudly about deporting them, but we all know that is unlikely because our economy depends on them. In my home state of Wisconsin, the large dairy farmers who are among the Republican party’s important supporters would go out of business without their undocumented workers.

However, the undocumented status of the workers makes them vulnerable to exploitation by employers. They are paid low wages, and they work under very unsafe conditions. They are afraid to complain because they are afraid of being deported. They are unable to get drivers’ licenses, but in our automobile-dependent society, they must still drive. So, they are vulnerable to harassment by local police.

Some people say that immigrants should enter the United States only in legal ways, but it must be obvious to everyone that our legal system cannot support the level of immigration that our economy demands. Some people ask why the immigrants cannot come in legally as our grandparents and great-grandparents did. The answer is that at the time of the wave of immigration in the early twentieth century, we did not have laws restricting the number of immigrants. Anyone who came was accepted legally. At Ellis Island and other places, the immigrants were sometimes rejected because they carried communicable diseases like tuberculosis but never for lack of proper visas.

It is wrong for us to build an economy on the backs of immigrants while not giving them the right to live in our country and to be treated as native-born workers are treated. It is unjust, and it is un-American. It is un-American because inconsistent with the belief that we are all created equal. We must reform our immigration laws to be consistent with social justice and with our economy's demand for labor, and in addition, we must include a path to citizenship in our framing of the issue. 

Social Justice for Native-Born Workers

While immigration benefits our country as a whole, it has a cost which is born by native-born workers who suffer from competition with immigrants who are willing to work for low wages under unsafe conditions. Workers without high school diplomas are especially vulnerable. The availability of immigrant workers keeps wages low for native-born workers who must compete with the immigrants. The fact that immigrant workers are vulnerable to exploitation weakens the bargaining power of unions and makes jobs unsafe for all workers. Reforms to our immigration system to legalize the status of undocumented workers will help all workers by taking away employers’ opportunities to hire workers who will work for less than native-born workers. In our framing of the issue of immigration, we must talk about preventing native-born workers from suffering.

In addition, we must make sure that our native-born workers are not left behind. To do that, we must provide opportunities for unemployed and underemployed workers to retrain. This means that we should provide free or very cheap post-secondary education and that we should pay generous unemployment benefits and childcare benefits to workers who take advantage of opportunities to retrain. We have a precedent for this in the GI Bill. After WWII, returning veterans were able to obtain education and training at almost no cost, and that contributed to their ability to rise economically during the post-war economic boom. Inequality declined during that period, which saw the height of the American Dream.

Providing free or very cheap post-secondary education also means increasing the tax-support for it. Over the last fifty years, we have shifted the cost of post-secondary education from the taxpayers to the students, and the effect has been to increase inequality because working-class people must take on crippling levels of debt to obtain post-secondary education. This was not always true. In the nineteen fifties, post-secondary education was extremely cheap for the students as I can attest. I attended the University of California from 1958 to 1962, and at that time, the tuition was free, and the fees were $140 per semester. Our framing of the immigration issue must stress the connection between growing our economy on the one hand and providing opportunities for our people on the other.

Social Justice in the Framing of the Immigration Issue

If our framing of the immigration issue is to be effective in appealing to working-class voters, we should stress the idea that immigration is one part of an effort to make our economy work for all Americans. Economic growth can enable us to fund the initiatives to make our country more just. We should stress our commitment to increasing opportunities for all Americans, and we should link our ability to do that to our ability to grow our economy. 

WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?

 This piece was written by my friend Lisa Weiner.

As a holocaust survivor I never thought I would see the day that someone like Donald Trump would run as a Republican for the greatest office in the world.

I am terribly afraid of the future-the future of my children and grandchildren.

What has happened our country?

It should have been enough when Donald Trump made fun of the disabled reporter

It should have been enough when he maligned Gold Star Mothers

It should have been enough when he told 30,000 plus lies while in office

It should have been enough when he encouraged the January 5 attack on the Capitol.

It should have been enough when he said there are “good people on both sides”

It should have been enough when he maligned John McCain

It should have been enough when he cozied up to Putin and Kim Jong Un

It should have been enough when he allowed children to be taken away from their illegal immigrant parents.

I am a legal immigrant and a proud and grateful citizen of the United States. By maligning illegal immigrants, he is maligning all immigrants who come to this great country to seek a better life.  Our country was built on the backs of immigrants.

Never forget that 6 million Jews and another 5 million ethnic and minority groups and gays were systematically wiped out by Hitler when he was elected to office by millions of people who believed his lies- some of them similar to the ones that Trump tells every day-people who thought he would cure all their ills and make “Germany great again”.  And the world was never the same after that.  The same hateful, divisive and lying rhetoric that is now common among Trump and other leaders of the Republican party is dangerously close to destroying the greatest democracy in the world.

 When is Enough Enough?   

In This Election, We Do Not Want to Be Like the Lady Who Rode on a Tiger

 Is Trump a Fascist?

We are coming down to the wire in our presidential election, and every voter is going to have to make a choice. In making that choice, we must ask ourselves this question: Is Trump is a fascist, and does the answer to that question matter? 

The "fascist" label fits Trump himself very well. Like other fascist leaders, he believes that he embodies the will of the people, and he thinks that because he embodies the will of the people, he can use military force in civil society to suppress or punish his enemies. Since he embodies the will of the people, anything that he does is by definition democratic. He has contested the results of the election of 2020 for the same reason: if he embodies the will of the people, any election that he does not win must by definition be fraudulent. The fascist label also fits the character of his appeal to his base. His campaign is full of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia. He mirrors Nazi rhetoric directly when he says that immigrants are poisoning the blood our country,

Can The Republican Party Control Trump's Fascist Impulses?

The Republican Party is not a merely fascist party. It is an electoral coalition based on a tacit bargain between Trump's fascists and the traditional, business Republicans whose money funds the party. They put up with Trump's fascistic appeal because he can bring in votes for Republican candidates who - the business Republicans believe - will be able to enact policies that are friendly to business. The business Republicans have accepted this bargain because they believe that they can control Trump and his base, and they were able to control him in his first term. The main achievement of Trump’s first term was a tax cut that benefited mainly business and the very wealthy. However, Trump now appears to have taken over the party. He is now in control, and there is no predicting how far his fascistic predilections will take us.

We Should Worry

We should worry about this because something very similar happened in Germany in the nineteen thirties. German business leaders supported Hitler because they saw him as a bulwark against Communism.  The German people had been hit hard by the Depression. The German Communist Party was large and strong, and it had strong support from the German labor unions. Moreover, there had been a successful, Communist revolution in Russia only a few years earlier. So, the German business leaders were terrified of communism, and driven by their fear, they supported Hitler in the mistaken belief that he would not really do what he had said he would do. We all know how that turned out.

We now find ourselves in a very similar situation. The business Republicans are supporting a candidate who walks like a fascist and talks like a fascist. They are supporting him because they are betting that he is not really a fascist or that if he is, they can control him. That is a bad bet. It reminds me strongly of a well-known limerick: There was a young lady from Niger/Who smiled as she rode on a tiger/ They came back from the ride/With the lady inside/And the smile on the face of the tiger.

As you vote next week, remember that we don’t want to be that lady. 

Framing Immigration: A Loyal American Must Support Immigration

A Loyal American Must Support Immigration

A loyal American must always support immigration to our country. Anyone who is anti-immigrant is anti-American. If you want to deport our immigrants, you are either very ignorant of the history of our country, or you just hate America. I say this because we became, and we remain the richest and most powerful country in the world because we have always welcomed immigrants.

We Built Our Country With Immigrant Labor

America’s greatness is founded on our hospitality to immigrants. We became a rich and powerful country first by forcing immigration and later by encouraging it. We built our industrial and commercial might using immigrant labor. In 1794, the cotton gin was invented. It made large-scale cotton farming in the American South possible, but we did not have the labor to exploit that possibility. So, through the slave trade, we imported hundreds of thousands of Africans to do the work. We do not usually think of the slaves as immigrants, but they were immigrants who were forced to come here, and a huge share of our country's wealth was created by their labor. Cotton accounted for more than half of American exports before the Civil War, and the wealth created by the cotton trade was later invested in industrial development. We should not be proud of the slavery in our past, but we cannot deny its contribution to our country's wealth.

In the late nineteenth century, the United States was poised to become the world’s greatest industrial and commercial power. We had vast natural resources, endless fertile land and a marvelous water transportation network, but we lacked the labor to develop our industrial capacity. So, we turned again to importing huge numbers of immigrants. Poverty-stricken peasants from all over Europe and China were ready to leave the land that their families had cultivated for centuries to come to the United States.

In the late 1800s, people in many parts of the world decided to leave their homes and immigrate to the United States. Fleeing crop failure, land and job shortages, rising taxes, and famine, many came to the U. S. because it was perceived as the land of economic opportunity. Others came seeking personal freedom or relief from political and religious persecution, and nearly 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1900. 

Research tells us that

The large migration of immigrants to North America allowed for a huge rise in the U.S. economy. Lots of factories started up in large cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. 

Workers Are Needed to Grow an Economy

Why were immigrants necessary for the development of our industrial economy? The answer is that the amount that any economy can produce is limited by the size of its working population. Each worker produces on average a certain amount of goods or services, and the total that is produced in a country must be the sum of all that is produced by its workers. The total amount that is produced in a country is therefore:

The total product produced by an economy = the average product per worker X the number of workers.

We can increase that total in only two ways. First, we can invest to increase the average product per worker, and second, we can bring in more workers. Increasing the average product per worker takes time. So, in the short or medium run, the only way to increase production is to bring in more workers. From 1865 until 1924, we did just that. We encouraged and even promoted immigration, and we became the richest and most powerful country the world had ever seen.

Industrial Countries Have Aging Populations

Today, we and all of the world’s rich, industrial countries face a shortage of workers due to aging populations. As countries industrialize, families become smaller. Women bear fewer children. Today, in every industrial country including the United States, the number of children born to each woman is less than the number required to maintain the current level of the population. So, every industrial country today has a population which is aging, and that means that there are fewer people of working age.  Except in the United States. Our working population continues to grow through immigration, and because of our hospitality to immigrants, our economy can continue to grow. Our economic growth rate is the envy of the world. We outstrip Europe, and we will eventually outstrip China, as well. We can do that only because we have so many immigrants.

With Immigrants, We Can Grow Our Economy and Remain Rich and Powerful

Because of our immigration, we can grow our economy more rapidly than other countries. We can continue to be the world’s richest country, and we can continue to be the leader of the free world. Without our immigrants, we could not do those things. So, if you want to see our country continue to be great, you must be in favor of immigration. If you are anti-immigrant, you are anti-American. Every loyal American must support immigration to our country.

Oppenheimer and the Problems of Today's Politics: A Need For New Framing of Issues

 Was Oppenheimer A Communist?

Was J. Robert Oppenheimer a communist or at least a sympathizer? It hardly matters now, but reading the recent New York Times review of this question reminded me of the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 50s. I grew up in that period, and one of my early political memories is of watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV. As I read the article, it dawned on me that in some ways today's political atmosphere is similar to the political atmosphere of that time as I remember it.

Both periods may be characterized by extreme political divisions and by political views that are held with almost religious fervor. In those days, the supporters of the anti-communist crusade thought that their opponents were deluded, and the opponents of the crusade believed the same about the crusade’s supporters. People on both sides felt that their opponents were a danger to the survival of democracy in our country. Then as now, the political right used lies and inuendo to make their case to the public, and the left was ill-prepared to counter that strategy effectively.

People's Views Harden

The anti-communist investigations conducted by HUAC and by Joe McCarthy were political circuses designed mainly to further the political careers of the politicians who conducted them. The investigations ruined the careers of many people who were no danger to the security of the United States. Many people knew that, and the result was that all of the investigations' findings were thrown into doubt. Oppenheimer may have been a communist. I don't know, and it hardly matters now, but at the time, it was easy to dismiss the accusation because so many such accusations were known to be false. Attitudes toward HUAC and Sen. Joseph McCarthy hardened into quasi-religious beliefs that have endured until today. Hardly anyone who is old enough to remember the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 50s is likely to change his/her views based on new evidence.

The Same Thing Has Happened Today

We can see a similar dynamic at play in the current controversy over the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claimed that the elections of 2020 were rigged. Numerous investigations have found no evidence of such rigging, but to the believers, that merely proves that the evidence is being covered up by elites or by the deep state. To the rest of us, Trump’s supporters seem either deluded or dishonest. Attitudes toward the question of whether the elections of 2020 were rigged have hardened into quasi-religious beliefs, and hardly anyone is open to changing his/her views. People who are still alive 60 years from now will probably believe just as they do today.

We Cannot Sove Big Problems Because of Ideological Divisions

None of this would matter if it were not for the fact that today as in the early 1950s, intense, ideological conflict has made it hard for us to deal sensibly with real problems. In the 1950s, the anti-communist hysteria made it impossible for us to deal sensibly with crucial issues in foreign policy like the communists’ victory in China or the defeat of the French in Vietnam. We undertook diplomatic and military commitments that led us ultimately into the war in Vietnam and that may soon lead us into another war in the South China Sea.

Today, the intense ideological conflict makes it impossible for us to deal sensibly with a warming world, with our immigration crisis or with the high and rising cost of health care. What is worse is that both sides have interests in maintaining and intensifying the conflict. On immigration, the right mobilizes its troops with visions of rapists and murderers crossing our border, while the left accuses their opponents of racism. Neither side talks about the elephant in the room, which is the millions of undocumented immigrants who have been here for decades. Our discussion of climate change and healthcare are similarly emotional and unproductive.

We Need New Framing To Move Ahead

We will be able to break out of this trap only if we do something that the left did not do in the 1950s. We will have to find new ways to frame our discussions. New frames would provide new perspectives on the key issues that we face. Such new perspectives could be important because while it is rarely possible to change people’s views of an issue through direct argument, it is sometimes possible to get them to see the issue in a new way, and that can cause them to change their positions on the issue. New frames can shake up the electorate and cause it to divide in new ways, and if we can accomplish that, we may be able to find a way around our current ideological impasse.  I have suggested that some of our big issues can be framed in terms of equality of opportunity, but that will not do for everything. I invite my readers to think about suitable frames for the big issues that confront us. The only requirement for a frame is that it must draw on a widely shared moral principle that can be used to drive the discussion in a new direction.

What Happens If We Win?

What Will Happen and What Should We Do?

It is looking very likely that Kamala Harris will win the election in November. There is still a lot of work to do to make her victory a reality, but it seems likely enough that we should ask, “What happens then?” What will the long-term result be, and what should we do?

The Republican Party Will Return to Its Business Roots

If Trump loses, he and his MAGA allies will probably lose control of the Republican Party. Their control of the party has always been based on their ability to bring in votes, and if they cannot do that, they will lose control, which will return to the business interests that controlled the party before Mr. Trump arrived. That will change the way the party presents itself to the voters. With Trump in control, the party has been able to present itself as the party of ordinary working Americans, but without Trump, the party will no longer be able to do that. It will be again the party of business.

The Democratic Party Will Have an Opportunity

The working-class votes that have supported Mr. Trump will be up for grabs. That will be an opportunity for the Democratic Party, but it is not clear that the party will be able to take advantage of the opportunity. To see, what kind of an opportunity the Democrats will have, we must first remember that the working-class voters who support Trump have real, legitimate grievances. 

When Mr. Trump says that “elites” despise the working class and ignore its interests, working-class people know in their bones that he speaks the truth. When he says that he will be a voice for voiceless people, those people flock to his banner. His populist rhetoric has always been a fraud, but for people who feel that our politicians have abandoned them, the fact that he appears to speak for them and to feel their pain is attractive, and it draws them in. 

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has gotten out of the habit of talking in terms of class interests. We talk about race; we talk about gender; and we talk about age; but we do not talk about class, and we do not address the concerns of working-class people as such. The lack of concern for working-class interests expresses itself in many ways. For example, we enthusiastically support a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, but we do not bring nearly the same enthusiasm to the support of a national healthcare system. We worry endlessly about the admission policies of elite universities that serve a tiny number of people, but we do not work seriously to provide a way for a working-class person to acquire a college degree or a technical certification without taking on a heavy burden of debt. We debate intensely the morality of Israel’s war in Gaza, but we do not bring the same intensity to the debate over the minimum wage.

Can Democrats Seize the Opportunity?

If we are to win back the allegiance of working-class voters, we will have to change our priorities and the way that we talk. To find our new priorities we will have to listen carefully to what people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left wing of our party are telling us. We will have to focus on issues of real concern to working-class people. If we do that, we may win back the support of working-class voters. Changing our priorities will not be enough. we will also have to figure out how to frame our proposals in a way that can appeal to the working class. Perhaps, we can use Harris's "Opportunity Economy," as I suggested in an earlier post. 

If we do not focus on the interests of working-class people and learn to frame those interests persuasively, our party will be weakened, and the alienation of the working class will remain a problem for our political system. If working-class people continue to feel that their interests have no voice, they will continue to look for leaders who will speak for them. If they feel that democracy does not work for them, they will support demagogues who promise an alternative that will work for them. 

What We Should Do

If we focus on working-class interests and if we learn how to frame them effectively, we can become the party that we should be. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have made a start with their strong support of labor unions  and with their industrial policies, but much more remains to be done. I wrote about some of the things we can do to make the Opportunity Economy real for our people in an earlier post on this blog.  If we fail to build on what Biden and Harris have done, the working-class alienation that has fed Trump’s power will remain, and another populist demagogue will surely emerge to attract the votes of the alienated and to threaten the survival of our democratic, political system.

The End of the Republican Party We Know?

A Business Party 

Are we seeing the end of the Republican Party as we know it? I think that is very possible because the level of dissension within the party is tearing the party apart. Dissension within a party is nothing new because American political parties have never been ideologically unified. They are electoral coalitions, and as such, they have always been big tents that sheltered groups with very different beliefs and agendas. That works reasonably well as long as the intraparty differences are not too large.

The differences within the Republican Party used to be manageable.  The party has been the party of business at least since the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. The party has been strongly supported by organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the party supported isolationism and opposed the entry of the United States into World War II. However, that changed after the Japanese attack. During World War II and during the Cold War the party supported America’s role as “the leader of the free world.” In that role, we maintained a very large military establishment (“the military-industrial complex”), and we intervened aggressively in countries as diverse as Guatemala, Congo, Iran and Vietnam. Those interventions were all supported by Republicans. 

 A Party Torn by Internal Dissension

Today, Republicans are deeply divided over both domestic policy and foreign policy. On domestic policy, some Republicans are seeking the support of labor unions. In addition, leading Republicans have claimed that our political system is rigged against ordinary people. Some leading Republicans also claim that our elections are not honest.

A party cannot indefinitely be supported by the National Association of Manufacturers and also by major industrial unions. Moreover, a party supported by business cannot indefinitely claim that our political system is rigged against ordinary people. After all, businesses are among the main beneficiaries of our political system. 

On foreign policy, we have the Trump wing of the party returning to something like the isolationist position that Republicans supported before Pearl Harbor. Trump and his supporters claim that we spend too much on defending our allies, who ought to pay for their own defense. At the same time, we have other Republicans claiming that we need to increase our military spending to counter the threat of China in the Western Pacific. Finally, we have election posters everywhere saying that we should elect Mr. Trump as president, and we have Republicans in counties in swing states who are preparing to file legal challenges to the elections in the event that he does not win. At the same time, we have major Republican leaders who have said that they are going to vote for Ms.Harris because Mr. Trump is a danger to our democracy. 

In 2016, the party managed to live with these contradictions by perpetrating a fraud on the American people. Mr. Trump won the election with his populist rhetoric. He claimed to be the voice of American working people, but the biggest achievement of his administration was an enormous tax cut that benefited mainly business and the very wealthy. He got away with this egregious fraud, but he will not be able to do that indefinitely. The people who have supported him will eventually expect him to produce concrete benefits for them in return. 

The party thought that he could get away with supporting conservative economic policies as long as he made good on his promise to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v Wade, but that approach has backfired badly. In 2022, the party lost several congressional seats because women mobilized against the Republican candidates, and there is a good chance that the party will lose again this November. From the point of view of the business Republicans, Trumpism has become very costly, and from the point of view of Trump's supporters, the business Republicans are preventing the adoption of policies that might really benefit American working people. Here is an example that appeared only two days ago. Mr. Trump is calling for the impeachment of Vice President Kamala Harris while other prominent Republicans have said publicly that they will vote for her for president. 

The immigration issue is also divisive. On the one hand, we have candidates for president and vice president who have proposed a policy of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, the party depends for financial support on the owners of businesses that employ many of those same undocumented immigrants.

What Next?

I do not see how the party's extreme level of internal dissension can be supported indefinitely. Something has to give. If Mr. Trump wins in November, his control of the party will be confirmed, but the party will very likely lose business support because it has ceased to be a party of business. If Mr. Trump loses in November, he will also lose control of the party, but without him, the party will lose much of the working-class support that it now enjoys. Either way, the party will be weakened. I don’t know what will happen after that, but if the Republican Party survives, it will become a very different party.