How to lose the immigration debate

Mass immigration into the United States is perhaps the single greatest factor at play in the stagnating wages of working-class Americans over the past six decades. It makes sense, of course. The ironclad law of supply and demand suggests that the more you have of something, the cheaper it is, and the less you have of something, the more you have to pay for it.

It’s fashionable among economists to pretend this isn’t the case when it comes to labour, but of course it is. When you import millions and millions of people into a country who will all work in four or five industries, the wages in those industries obviously plummet. We forget that you used to be able to support yourself as a manicurist in the US. Now credentialed elites have become used to illegal migrant labour in the service, janitorial, landscaping and childcare industries. That illegal labour – thanks to the low wages it commands, and the lack of benefits and protections that are afforded to workers – has resulted in an enormous wealth gap between the educated elites and the working class, which includes both the illegal migrants themselves and the Americans they have displaced.

Naturally, educated elites support an open border. They talk about it in moral terms, using words like ‘asylum’ and ‘refugees’, but the truth is somewhat less noble. They are the economic beneficiaries of the fact that the US currently has more foreign-born residents than at any other time in its history. The last time it came this close was the Gilded Age.

At the same time, left-leaning elites excoriate anyone opposed to mass immigration as a racist, a person hoarding their wealth from the desperate and indigent on the grounds that they look different. As those who have benefited economically from mass migration, they cannot imagine any reason not to keep the steady flow of cheap labour coming. So they insist the other side must be full of racists. Why else would anyone object to their good fortune?

These people are cartoon villains, high on the supply of their own vanity morals, a caricature of virtue:

‘Oh, you don’t like that your mother supported the whole family as a manicurist and now you work three minimum-wage jobs and still can’t afford a mortgage when you’re competing against me, a corporate lawyer, and my husband, a New York Times journalist, in the housing market? YOU RACIST!’

Of course, there are other factors driving the downward mobility of working-class Americans. There was NAFTA, a disastrous trade deal that, from 1994 onwards, shipped overseas five-million well-paying, working-class jobs, which once secured a middle-class life. There was the defunding of vocational training, the skilled trades being a sure pathway to upward mobility. There is also automation and declining union membership.

But back in 1971 – the high water mark for working-class wages – the share of the population that was foreign born was just four per cent. Today it’s 15 per cent, the highest it’s ever been. At the same time, the over-credentialed elite, consumers of this imported low-wage labour, now control a much higher percentage of US GDP than they did in the 1970s. We have witnessed an upward transfer of wealth via opening the border.

Now, you might think with this kind of moral rot plaguing the Democrats and the pro-immigration left more broadly, it would be easy for the right to make the case against them. How could the Republican Party, wishing to control immigration, not win against such cartoonish villainy? At a time when the top issues for Americans are the economy and immigration, how could the side that is more in tune with the majority on immigration lose?

Amazingly, it seems that Donald Trump and the right have found a way to do just that. Because instead of talking about wage theft, they’re talking about eating cats.

The right had the easiest of tasks. All it had to do was methodically point out to hard-working Americans why they are living their lives as if they’re stuck on a hamster wheel, working and working and working, while still finding themselves unable to get a foothold in the middle class. All it had to explain was why the rise of illegal migration has made the American Dream an impossibility for many. And it’s all thanks to policies enacted by people whose jobs will never be threatened by a person without a credential and a command of the English language.

Instead, right-wing influencers heard a rumour that pets were being hunted by Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Republican nominee former President Donald Trump mentioned it in his one and only debate against Democratic nominee vice-president Kamala Harris last week.

They have replaced a winning argument with fanciful, untrue tales of migrants eating cats and dogs. Why does the right think it has to shock and horrify the people already suffering the most from mass migration? The wage theft, the unaffordable housing market, the competition for basic services like healthcare and education – these are horrifying enough. You don’t need videos of skinned cats!

There is recent footage from Springfield itself that should horrify us. It features not migrants cooking cats, but a factory owner praising the 30 Haitian migrants he had hired on the grounds that they were more pliant than the local talent pool.

‘I wish I had 30 more’, Jamie McGregor, the CEO of McGregor Metal, told PBS NewsHour. ‘Our Haitian associates come to work every day’, he added. ‘They’ll stay at their machine; they’ll achieve their numbers. They’re here to work. And so, in general, that’s a stark difference from what we’re used to in our community.’

It’s not hard to see why employers would want more migrants. After all, these desperate people have no choice but to work extremely hard without breaks, because they are not as able to fight for better pay and conditions. Why can’t the right see that this is more horrifying than the widely debunked tales of pet-eating?

The 30 migrants employed by McGregor Metal are just a few of the 20,000 settled in Springfield, a town of just 60,000 souls where the median income is a scant $27,000 a year. Much of Springfield is poor. A fifth of residents are black. Springfield residents do not hate migrants, they just reject mass migration. Are African Americans also racist if they object to being forced to compete with a massive influx of people for jobs and resources? What’s more, those 20,000 Springfield Haitians are just one tenth of the number President Biden paroled into the country and gave work permits. They also represent a fraction of the 10million to 15million illegal migrants who crossed the border during Biden’s term.

Many of those migrants are living off social services, getting free healthcare and educational services for their kids and food stamps. Those who are working are doing so in a limited number of industries, in which wages for native-born Americans have plummeted. My book, Second Class, is full of interviews with Americans whose jobs have become unequal to the task of feeding their families because they work in industries now flooded with a glut of illegal migrant labour. It’s just the most obvious equation of supply and demand.

And yet the side opposing this seems to be doing its best to lose – because rather than discuss this reality, it’s focussed on skinned cats.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is a spiked columnist and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.