Immigration Boosters - Who Are These People

The latest Senate betrayal bill (aka Comrehensive Immigration Reform), an example just how bad our congress can really be when Republicans and Democrats join forces, makes one wonder just who these people are - what kind of people willfully participate in the ruin of a nation? We are dealing with a wide variety of people, who are apparently much more willing to work together than those who oppose this particular route to our nation's destruction. [Note: some updates added 10pm 5/17.]

• Rich Republicans - Nowadays "rich" cuts a much wider swath than it once did. It includes the country club type, who obviously benefit from cheap immigrant labor. Even years ago, if you needed to find someone who spoke Spanish the backrooms of country clubs were the places to look. But we can include others in the broad upper middle class, as well. Lanscapers and general contractors are clear beneficiaries of cheap labor, but middle managers can also join the club. They may see benefits to their companies of the semi-slave labor trade both here and abroad, plus the happy, smiling faces of the toiling immigrants they see cleaning offices and mowing lawns leave them thinking "What's the problem? These people are happy to work for peanuts!"
• Rich Democrats - Again, nowadays this includes more than the classic "limousine liberal" of the 60's. Due to their financial resources, these people are able to insulate themselves from any real-life contact with immigrants outside the well-controlled master-servant environment (except when this insulation tragically breaks down). So for the well-off liberal, immigrants typically pose no immediate threat, and their ability to undercut American workers also assures the liberal that he'll not have to have contact with any white working class Americans, whom the liberal particularly despises, or black Americans, whom they fear.
  
  Another immigrant trait which endears them to up-scale liberals is the tendency not to graduate from high school. This means that Hispanics, while numbering in the tens of millions, do not pose a significant affirmative-action threat to the supply of coveted college admissions slots. Even immigrants' children only graduate high school at a 50% range. The liberal thus need not fear that immigrants will bring down their neighborhoods or disrupt their children's career goals.
• Neoconservatives - Neocons support conservative policies but think like liberals. Thus, the capitalist-theory side of them argues that open borders must be good because the free flow of labor must be good because the free market is good. Meanwhile, the liberal mind set assures them that because all people everywhere are just like everyone else everywhere these new immigrants will be just as productive as the Jews and Italians who preceded them [I'd be happy if they were as productive as the Irish, but I'm afraid even that is way too much to hope for:)]. The reality, which show that our latest immigrants are woefully underproductive even out a few generations, is then blamed on liberal policies such as bi-lingual education, trade-union restrictions, and affirmative action, policies which, even if they could plausibly be argued to be behind their lack of progress, are unlikely to be changed any time soon. But the neocon, ever impervious to reality, persists in his deluded thinking.
• Neoliberals - see Neoconservative, above, just reverse the poles.
• Neomarxists - these include non-rich liberals (though there's a major instersect with rich liberals, as well). Neomarxists, like marxists everywhere, look far ahead (as opposed to the myopia of the Rich Repubs and Rich Dems) and like what they see: a radically changed America, one where white America is finally vanquihed in a sea of brown 'minorities' (vanquished, of course, only in the political sense - economically, they would be merely tamed, as the Euro-male teat must be kept ever filled for the masses to succor). Michael Moore is a classic neo-marxist.
• Partisan Democrats - looking ahead a few years, these people see millions of new Democratic voters, probably enough to swamp the Republican party in another couple decades.
• Free-Market Economists - similar to the Neocons in basing their views on a single-minded devotion to free-market principles, but with an important difference - they only care about economic arguments, and are completely indifferent towards such boarish conceits as national borders and shared cultural identities. Don Boudreaux might be the most extreme of these.
• The Generally Clueless and Deluded - while not an organized group, there are enough of these to constitute a significant bloc of the apathetic when it comes to immigration to give the above conspirators a buffer against electoral punishment. Typical confusions are:
  • We all came from immigrants, so who are we to stop anyone from coming here? - Uh, we are the People and we get to self-govern and make laws about who gets to come here, that's who.
  • We need immigrants to pay for our social security when we retire - sorry, but millions of low earners ain't gonna cut it. Besides, who's to say millions of new immigrants are going to be too crazy about supporting millions of old white folks? I wouldn't count on it, gramps.
  • Immigrants are revitalizing our cities - Many white people find immigrants much less scary than black people, and so see immigrants as being safer. I hate to break it to these people, but immigrants are not pods that convert people of African ancestry into Hispanics - our black fellow citizens are not going away. Immigration is adding to our underclass problem, not replacing it.
• Immigrants themselves - Hispanic activist groups are growing in power - witness their blatant tribal strong-arming of filmmaker Ken Burns. Not every latino believes in unfettered immigration, and Hispanics are obviously not monolithic. Pre-mariel Cubans, for example, assimilated pretty much according to the European model, and consider themselves "white." But our civil-rights regime, by its nature, accords great advantages to being a member of a minority, and so the strength in numbers effect is powerful and in the best interests of most Hispanics to promote. Alas, polarization is bound to increase - forever.

So we're up against a formidable coalition. The majority of Americans want to enforce our immigration laws, period, which is obvious from how politicians running for re-election speak. But those who favor the re-molding of America, whether from short-sighted desires to capitalize on near-term financial or political gains, or from seeking to benefit from a permanent shift in the balance of power in America (and the world) among ethnic constituencies, are generally those whose voices get to be heard. The best we can hope for is stalemate, for now, but as the balance of power continues to slowly tip, time is runing out.