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April 30, 2006

Deconstructing the Statist Party’s Take on Immigration

President Bush, the mercantilist classes he represents, the GOP, and some others support de facto open borders. Immigrants take jobs that Americans already here won’t do; or so he says.

“President Bush says”, says Flint Journal columnist Andrew Heller, “there are millions of them. That's why he wants to relabel illegal immigrants as ‘guest workers.’

He must know something we don't. Americans do all sorts of unpleasant jobs. We slaughter hogs, vacuum pit toilets, hold umbrellas to shade Michael Jackson from the sun. We pick up road kill, guard mass murderers, inseminate cows.”

Some very nasty work eh? I suspect what the president means when he says there are all sorts of jobs Americans won't do is that there are jobs that Americans don't want for the pay being offered.

That's the crux of the whole immigration debate. Businesses large and small want immigrants so they don't have to pay people decent wages or benefits. And with a nearly endless supply of abjectly poor potential immigrants that can be imported at will in order to suppress labor shortages for even the most hard to fill positions (and so suppress the natural tendency for “undesirable” or specialized employees to bid up their wages), the natural ebb and flow a free market for labor is distorted in favor of the owners of capital.

“The aim of a guest worker program”, Heller goes on to say, “wouldn't be to fill open jobs. It would be to establish a permanent, low-cost, benefit-free underclass of workers who, through the sweat of their brows, allow business owners to make more money.”

That’s how I see it too.

And so what about the Democrats? Well they think that most immigrants will end up voting for them and so they think the more the merrier.

Posted by Ali Massoud at April 30, 2006 10:39 AM

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