One of the remarkable things to happen in the last election cycle was the preference cascade that quietly happened regarding immigration. Five years ago, the best you could hope to hear from normie and the people who prey on him in the political system is that “illegal immigration” is bad. They still clung to “legal immigration” as some sort of magical incantation that put them on the side of angels. Then suddenly, normie was holding up signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”
There is a practical reason for the change. Trump ran on the immigration issue in 2016 and to the surprise of the beautiful people, it was not disqualifying. They were sure they had properly anathematized the issue but there was Trump talking about Mexican rapists and Muslim bans. They responded with violence against Trump supporters and the usual stuff about Hitler. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was using the administrative state to clamp down on immigration.
That created a contradiction. On the one hand, the Cloud People were attacking the Dirt People for being anti-immigrant bigots, even though the Dirt People continued to hold romantic views on immigration. On the other hand, the negative results of immigration were slowly declining as immigration declined. Then like a windstorm, Biden comes in, opens the border and suddenly everyone is now getting to see the results of open borders policy in their neighborhood.
Imagine the government starts doing something about the snake problem, thus reducing the snake problem, but at the same time telling you that you need to stop complaining about the snakes. Since you see fewer snakes, you can go along with the program as it tracks with what you are seeing. Then the government starts dumping snakes in your yard while still calling you an ophiophobe. The scales fall from your eyes and the eyes of others, and you get a ophiophobic preference cascade.
It is far too soon to tell if Trump is serious about immigration, but it was the one thing he did well in his first term. Fighting the Republican Party, the courts and the administrative state, they still managed to reduce illegal crossings to a trickle. They also slowed up the legalization process and the visa process. Now that immigration has a bad odor about it, especially among the economic elites, he should be able to make some lasting changes to the system in his second term.
This tracks with the last crackdown on immigration a century ago. After immigrants started killing rich people, culminating in the Wall Street bombing, rich people suddenly had their own preference cascade experience. It turned out that romantic notions about immigration were no defense against bombs, so they started demanding reform to the immigration system and finally the end of immigration entirely. For most of the 20th century, America suffered little from immigration.
Another aspect is the morality of immigration. For a long time, the nation wreckers kept the debate within economics. Immigration in the general sense was good for the economy, thus it was assumed to be morally good. The sequence was to first sacralize the economy, defined in the interest of the ruling class, then declare things like open borders good for the economy. That meant only a bad person who hates the economy could oppose immigration.
This worked in the abstract until real issues that cannot be addressed economically brought the issue back into the domain of morality. Coeds being murdered by Mexican migrants, Hattians eating your pets and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings cannot be dismissed with economics. The Haitian cat-eaters were a great example of how some people benefit from immigration, while the rest suffer. It showed that immigration privatizes profit and socializes costs.
What we see happening is that immigration is becoming a moral issue. In addition to the cat eating stuff, the name calling has lost its punch. Suddenly, people not only started to realize that everyone else is tired of immigration, but they were also tired of being called Hitler by degenerates and deviants. Those old people waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at Trump rallies were the result of people suddenly free from the old moral constraints on the immigration issue.
The rich people are noticing. Elon Musk was doing the old civic nationalist stuff about legal versus illegal immigration in the summer, only to see his posts buried in negative comments about the morality of immigration. Trump has toned that stuff down as well, which means he no longer feels the need to bend the knee to the plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty. It will not be long before libertarians are writing about the damage done by Emma Lazarus.
In a larger context, this is just the start of a process that will have to reach back to the root causes of the immigration issue. For example, there are millions of able-bodied men in the social welfare system. There are millions of people in pointless cubicle jobs who could be in productive work. The social welfare state was not a solution poverty but a solution to upper-middle-class people feeling sad about poverty. The result is a vast warping of the economy, especially labor markets.
Instead of addressing this colossal mistake, the workaround was to both import millions of low-cost workers into America and export industries to low-cost countries through the fiction of “free trade” policies. De-industrialization and immigration share the same root cause, which is the bourgeoise progressive fantasies about the just society that took over the ruling classes in the last century. It is another reminder that ideology is just another word for morality.
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