The tragedy of American conservatism is that its only
electoral home is in a party most of whose funds come from those who agree with
the globalist agenda and whose privileged position insulates them from its
disastrous cultural consequences. In short, America’s corporate elite
is making tons of money from globalism -- chiefly, mass immigration and
manufacturing outsourcing -- while they experience no negative effects in their
privileged and insular world.
Oh
sure, they advocate a bit of border protection here, a little improvement in US
trade deals there, but basically they’re on board for free trade, relaxed
borders and mass immigration. They have a wealthy person’s distaste for
excessive government regulation and high taxes -- hence, they are “Republicans”
-- but, stem the flood of cheap labor immigrants? Why on earth would they want
to do that?
The
first economic consequence of mass immigration is lower labor costs across the
economy, from lettuce pickers to computer programmers, and that pushes historic
quantities of money up to America’s corporate owners and executives. The
working and middle classes endure the economic downside in the form of fewer
jobs and much lower wages.
This
has all been discussed ad nauseam before. But it can’t be repeated too often:
Mass immigration has been an economic bonanza for major owners and executives
and an economic disaster for the other 80% of the population.
Looking
away from the economic to the cultural consequences of mass immigration, the
divergence between America’s wealthy decision makers and the other 80% is
even greater. Put bluntly, the American upper classes have yet to see the those
consequences, let alone to feel pressured by them. They are Peggy Noonan’s
“protected classes.”
It
has been said before but cannot be said too often: America’s upper class
hypocrites who have brought the joys of mass third world immigration to middle
and working class America are, as yet, absolutely immune from its baleful
cultural concomitants.
They
live in elegant neighborhoods, behind gates and walls, protected as often as
not by private security; their children attend the finest private schools where
a learning environment still exists and the risk of being beaten up or shaken
down for lunch money is zero; their family members and friends don’t have to
ride BART, or the subway, or the bus in the middle of the night to or from
poorly paid jobs; the members of their swank clubs look like they did in 1980
and all speak English; and their mode of transport is the first class cabin or
private jet.
I begrudge
them none of this. My quarrel is that much of their wealth and ease comes from
a globalism whose detriments are inflicted solely on the bottom 80% of
Americans. But the cultural concomitants of mass third world immigration
are well known to that bottom 80% of Americans.
All
over urban America, parents struggle to scrape together the money to buy a
house in a neighborhood where the public schools have not been destroyed. In
small town America, parents warn their kids about drug pushers from South of the
Border who have discovered and targeted the once-safe American countryside.
Illegal immigrants commit crimes at rates hugely in excess of those legally
present. For 2014 the Sentencing Commission of the US Justice Department
reported that of all crimes for which convictions were obtained and sentences
imposed, illegals made up 13% (if the 11.2 million figure for US illegals is
correct, illegals constitute slightly more than 3% of the population)
And
on and on.
None
of this reaches the neighborhoods of those who brought it to us.
But
It is the decision-making elites of these neighborhoods that fund the
Republican Party. And therein lies the rub for this fall’s election:
The
Democratic Party, in its lunatic, massively unpopular stands on illegal
immigration and border protection, has been leading with its chin as perhaps
never before. Abolishing ICE, opening America’s southern border, and supporting
sanctuary cities that shelter criminals and drug dealers may be the most toxic
brew of Democratic Party electoral poison that party has yet concocted. It begs
for brutal, repeated, brass knuckle exposure. This well could be the issue that
turns an off-year election into a historic Democratic wipeout.
Will
the funders of the Republican party seize one of the most inviting
opportunities in US electoral history to deliver a knock-out blow? Or will they
wuss out?
