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Ok I swear I don't just get up every morning and ask, "How can I be schizo today?"
But in one day I saw the following two things:
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1731747916568727610
Among the masses of migrants flowing across the southern border each day, a whole line of Chinese nationals, military aged men, automatically standing at "parade rest" as one reply pointed out.
And this:
https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1731808064108372245
Senator Dick Durbin making a speech in favor of allowing illegal immigrants into the military.
My schizo sense is tingling and saying that Nefarious Forces are Intentionally using the Power of Money to plan Bad Things for America.
Or, since this space has norms in favor of speaking plainly and against Darkly Hinting, let me put it more directly:
Is China bribing American politicians to allow Chinese soldiers to become American soldiers to conquer the USA via military coup?
I think the only reason the US doesn't do what it needs to do about the border is because doing what it takes to actually solve the border crisis would make America look bad in international affairs. Russia and China would have tons of propaganda pictures and stories about how horrible the US is, and the left wing press in the US would be happy to help. The empire and securing global markets is what is most important to American elites, and illegal migration just isn't a huge issue to people who can afford to live in nice areas and send their kids to good schools. The only way to stop illegal immigration would be to replace the entire US government with people that don't give a shit if securing the border makes them look bad and hurts the US's standing abroad. They'd just tell other government to fuck off if they tried criticizing them about it and jail leftists who try to stir up shit domestically. But we don't live in that world so nothing can reasonably be done about it.
The best explanation of the illegal immigration topic that I've encountered online is probably this paragraph from 2016
The political/managerial class directly benefits from illegal immigration, they're not going to do anything about it until they're forced to.
The "drive down wages" thing does not make sense, economically. When an illegal immigrant does repair work on your house, sure, he lowers the wages of a native repairman, but he also gives you a cheaper repair. When an illegal immigrant picks berries, he substitutes for a native picker, but the price of berries goes down (because food markets are quite competitive!) In order for this to make sense, 'the elites' would have to be capturing all of the value of illegals, somehow, despite the competitive marketplace. This is theoretically possible, but I don't see much evidence!
Also, to steal a left-wing argument, do you support the workers rights that illegals are supposedly undermining? Like, 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, strong unions (no right to work laws, state-mandated bargaining), etc.
I don't know, man. I used to make these arguments myself, but I don't feel like we're swimming in abundance since we let it rip with the globalism. The only class of goods I feel is more available is electronics, and maybe cars. If the price for that is the absolute gutting of manufacturing and farming jobs in my country, I'm not convinced it has been worth it.
I agree with them in spirit, I'm not convinced about them in practice.
In my experience and also (i think) the statistics, 'durable consumer goods' have gotten significantly cheaper. Definitely more slowly than in the past.
From FRED, "all employees, manufacturing" / "all employees" has been flat at 8.5% since 2000 after a fairly linear decline from 38% since 1940ish. I am very confident goods are cheaper now than they were in 1970 and 1940. This probably is just meaningless because these numbers don't mean what i'm guessing they do but durable consumer goods CPI / total CPI has dropped 43% since 2000 and 20% since 2010. So just intuitively by glancing at the graph (and this isn't a strong argument as a result, you'd want a more detailed understanding of what happened) I don't find 'less manufacturing jobs so higher prices' to be correct
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