It's About Cheap Labor, Stupid!

The deliberate neglect of our border security remains a passive means of continuing the search for cheaper labor. The basic rule of labor supply states that where there are too many workers and too few jobs, the wages are driven down. Now, who does this benefit? It doesn’t benefit the workers, because their sweat and toil doesn’t possess the earning power it used to, irrespective of skill and productivity. When wages are driven down, costs of living are not, and the worker ends up in the hole. Ideally, if labor costs are driven downward, the saving would be passed onto consumers. I’m still waiting for that to happen anywhere in the world.

Now the individual coming to America might have been seeking a new life of freedom and economic opportunity, but that’s not why he was allowed to enter this land. America is sold as the ‘land of freedom’, but it’s never been a land of freedom at all, unless you mean ‘freedom to work’. The Puritans did not come here to establish religious freedom for others. They were forced out of England because their beliefs were do detestable to the Enlightened English mentality that they ended up as ‘convicts’ shipped to the New World in the hope they would either die or at least never come back to British soil. Britain was more than happy to kill both birds with the same stone, ridding itself of unwanted ideas and populating its newly acquired colony in the same fell swoop. Then, as now, it was about moving a labor force into the right position to suit the needs of colonialism and enterprise.

In response to the working man’s loss of earning power, the good capitalist says “So what? Let him go back to school!” Well, our insensitive money-hungry friend is part right. A better education usually demands better pay and benefits. That’s only half the story, however. If that labor problem exists in one sector, then it is possible that the worker can move into another line of work, even reeducate himself, and move on. But what happens if more than just one or even many labor sectors are saturated with available workers? It means that the choices this worker has become strained even further, as the wages and availability of jobs in these other fields are downgraded, either through the import of labor or the export of the job. The business class wins, shifts the blame onto others, and the working class loses out every time.

Think about it. Where would this nation have been without the Chinese rail workers, or without Europeans, dreaming of land and farms, to make the push west? Would the Union have survived without newly arrived German and Irish immigrants filling the ranks of the Union Army? Would our factories and sweatshops have flourished without Eastern Europeans? I tend to think that American industrialists and the war machine (same guys) of the day manipulated immigration policy to meet political and commercial ends. Immigration was about importing labor.

Nothing has changed.