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Do the people opposing ICE really believe that large scale unregulated immigration from Latin America will actually benefit the US? Mexico is in a state of permanent civil war. The countries that the migrants are coming from are low trust, violent societies with major dysfunction. I am not really seeing the endgame here. Importing labour in an unregulated way from third world countries is going to dump wages.
It seems like they are taking a position which they themselves know is losing in the long term for some other benefit that I can't see.
Yes, the people opposing ice believe the median illegal is good for America. They like someone else doing the lower construction jobs and janitorial work it takes to keep a society running.
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It is precisely because the migrants' home countries are terrible that white progressives support them. After all, we can't blame them for wanting to escape poverty; in fact we have a duty to share our wealth, which we probably stole from them one way or another. White leftists believe that we're already so much better off than everyone else that to advocate for our own interest is disgustingly mercenary; all their other arguments for migration are downstream from this impetus.
The quibble is that if Jose is willing to work on a farm in California for what are shit American wages but still a better deal than staying home, the progressive view is that allowing Jose to stay is not advocating against our own interests or wealth redistribution, it's Jose contributing his labor to the economy and getting paid.
Progressives simply don't care that he had to enter illegally to get to this point because they'd rather immigration be expanded in the first place. I'd personally rather more expansive work visas that allow them to do this while still being vetted, and with better wage/labor controls. The conservative view seems to be that if we got rid of all the illegals farmers would pay more and Americans would do it, of which I am skeptical.
I mean, at some point one of three things is going to happen.
A more complete account of (1) may look like: the price of farm labor will climb high enough, and American living standards will sink low enough, that Americans will do it.
Not everything can be automated, and as farming labour gets more expensive, Americans (who buy things downstream from farms) will need more money and hence higher wages to sustain the same lifestyle.
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Before 3 happens you get "the price of food rises enough that the voters get unhappy, and unhappy voters are bad for reelection chances".
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This is what happens. Western wage demands and a global food market cannot work together, full stop.
America could import a ton more food, every agricultural exporting country would love to sell more avocados to America.
America doesn't want to give up food security, which is the right choice.
So then you can:
tariff food imports until for prices rise such that the wage cost can be met
go full socialism and subsidize farmers even harder than the USA already does to make up the wage cost without impacting food prices which would be hilariously expensive
If the automation existed it would already be in use all over the world
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Open border, a functioning economy, a robust welfare state. Pick two, and the welfare state is functionally non-negotiable. This version of the progressive take is simply a lie. They manifestly don't care if Jose works, and would rather shut down the government than accept a limitation on their ability to give him taxpayer money.
Or that it could just be automated, and that it's insane to import tens of millions of farm workers right as we're looking at an AI/robotics era-defining revolution.
Ah yes, how could I forget all the wonderful government benefits that illegals most definitely qualify for. The rest is quite frankly a parody of how other people think and what motivates them.
A, if they could be easily automated they already would be. B, Honestly the entire farm industry sounds like a mess to me with smaller farmers being pushed out of the market or being beholden to shitty John Deere's locked-down repair practices. I'm not as anti-AI as your average lefty, but I don't think this is coming in the next let's say 10 years and I don't think it'll be all that great when it arrives.
They explicitly do in blue states. I tangentially interact with the process on a daily basis. And deeper than that, there's a thriving market in fraud and fake SSNs. Things like "free healthcare for illegals" are fucking budget items in California. NY and other states spent billions on free housing, free benefits and free money for illegal immigrants. This was widely covered. The relentless playing stupid about this is honestly kind of breathtaking and intellectually damning.
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Forget the US. What benefit do blacks like Johnson specifically get?
They compete with blacks for jobs (or spending in the case of cities with right to shelter) and now there's not even a pretense that they'll be a permanent Democratic client base like them to push for policies African-Americans would want. Clearly the emerging Democratic majority with a bunch of minorities all loyal to one another is not going to happen.
Hell, insofar as they do join up they dilute AA's hold on the party. And, because they're not fully captured there's more of an incentive to pander to them. As Biden said: unlike the black community Latinos are diverse.
the illegals flood cities and protect the Democrat power centers by keeping those who would threaten their power out
they don't need to be loyal to each other, they need to be united in opposition to another group which has worked pretty well for quite a long time
the loyalty to each other is solved through an ethnic spoils system which we already see in cities across the US (and have for quite some time, e.g., Los Angeles)
cities across the US are controlled by people who govern badly, let crime and other scams run rampant and, whether this is intentional or not, the result of this is they keep normal, functional Americans out of those cities which protects the machine politics of those cities
I get the theory. It's clearly just not playing out that way.
The fewer white people there are the more various goals conflict because you can't just take it all from them. Asians want meritocracy in education which squeezes out other groups besides whites, attempts to come up with some anti-crime measures that also don't annoy blacks lead to disorder that harm everyone, Latinos simply don't seem to be that interested in being auxiliaries in white progressives' fight against other whites if it comes at the expense of the economy or themselves and the in-group favoritism for random illegals is vastly overstated.
That part might be true but this isn't actually helping the electoral chances of Democrats or blacks as a whole. If anything, emigration to red states because of the disorder weakens their voting power and the most famous and wealthy liberal cities being basket cases just undermines the very idea of government competence.
This is basically what the Abundance turn of the party is about.
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Right, and this is why the cities with the largest foreign-born fraction (Miami, San Jose, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco) are the poorest, most crime-ridden cities in the country, while the cities containing the lowest fraction of foreign-born Americans (Detroit, Louisville, Memphis, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City) are beacons of safety and prosperity.
On the one hand, selection effects are absolutely a thing, and will explain at least some of that trend. On the other hand it sure doesn't look to me like foreigners turn cities into ethnic spoils engines, except to the extent that they make cities wealthy and some of that wealth goes to spoils.
It's called ethnic spoils for a reason. It doesn't matter much whether the different ethnicities have immigrated recently or have been there for generations.
Just purview the list of US cities by crime rate, sort by total crime and check out the highest vs the lowest total violent crime rate cities. It's hard to miss the fact that the demographics are, with only a few exceptions, dramatically different. For example, among the lowest five, 4 have (asians + white) > 75%, while among the highest five, all have (asians + whites) < 50%. The difference for the black population is, of course, especially extreme. Hispanics is also quite noticable.
Top 5 are Memphis TN, Oakland CA, St Louis MO, Little Rock AR, Tacoma WA. Oakland is the only one of those I particularly associate with immigrants. Also I don't really like the methodology of weighting larceny equal to murder. Looking at murder rate alone which is harder to fudge the top 5 are Birmingham AL, St Louis MO, Memphis TN, Baltimore MD, Detroit MI. Larceny theft alone does put Oakland and Portland near the top, which tracks.
Regardless, the "immigrants specifically make cities bad to live in" hypothesis doesn't seem particularly reflective of reality.
I have no objections to looking at only the murder rate - but that doesn't actually change anything, just check out the demographics.
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Historically, it seems fairly clear that this is what happens: Lebanon, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Jerusalem, the spoils machines in places like New York in the 1930s (which used to be carefully split so that the major political positions were held by one Irishman, one Italian, one Jew and one protestant IIRC) and the black machines in places like Chicago.
From the outside, it looks like America is already heavily focused around ethnic spoils - some of your biggest political debates are about to what extent ethnicity is relevant in job and university applications, the appropriate ethnic composition of universities and good jobs (between whites, Jews, blacks, etc.). Where and how children of different races should be educated, and how they should be treated by the law when they grow up. In more integrated countries these questions simply don't come up.
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The motivations of the people opposing ICE are heterogeneous.
Some are not thinking about benefit/harm at all, as in, it literally is not something that comes up in their minds.
Some think that the morality of allowing the immigrants in is more important than considerations of benefit/harm.
Some think that the morality of rejecting what they see as racism is more important than considerations of benefit/harm.
Some believe that immigration should be controlled to some extent, but think that ICE is currently acting in much too authoritarian a way and/or that Trump's camp's use of ICE sets up a dangerous possibility that Trump's camp might start to use ICE as their personal army in attacks on Trump's political opponents.
Some are various kinds of Latino nationalists who want to help their co-ethnics.
Some have mixes of the above motives.
In general, they are not taking a position that they themselves know is losing.
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For blue-collar work, yes.
Why should a white-collar worker (including those with that aspiration) care about that, especially if there are an excess of them on the market?
You can alleviate the problem of having too many chiefs by importing more Indians. It's important to throw chaff about how it's justice for this to happen, so the people smart enough to figure that out don't say anything. What are they going to do, throw their support behind a counter-elite?
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