And I do mean THINKING.
Last week I posted a diary on Daily Kos asking why leading Democrats such as Ted Kennedy were reversing themselves and now supporting eliminating caps on H1B visas while unemployment in the affected industries was rising.
The diary didn't last long. I was quickly flamed by a fair number of posters as a jingoist, a xenophobe, and a racist, a whiner who should get off his ass and find a job. In fact, I am none of those things, but that isn't my point here.
My point here is that many Democrats aren't thinking at all about the immigration issue but instead substituting a snap moralistic judgment for real analysis. The true situation IS more complicated than that and progressive Democrats ignore it at their peril.
Let's put it this way:
Some political issues ARE moral issues. Nobody's going to sit around and say "Let's discuss slavery from an economic perspective to see if it was really so bad as all that." Holding another human being in bondage just isn't acceptable. It's beyond the pale of politics.
The Daily Kos posters who flamed me evidently have a similar view on immigration. You can't say a single word against allowing any immigrant into the country without being lumped in with the racists and xenophobes.
Is this helpful? Is it viable politics in a democratic nation-state?
Look at it this way. Obviously, it won't work for every person in the world to emigrate to the United States. And while I don't know the numbers, just allowing every person in the world who wants to come to the United States to do so won't work either. So there have to be some rules. In other words, it's a policy issue. You have to have some policy. The trick is get it right. It's not easy, I'll agree. Snap moral judgments are much easier. But inadequate.
George W, Bush has a "policy" of sorts on tax cuts. It is that tax cuts are always a good thing. They are the right remedy when you have a budget surplus (give the money back to the people), the right thing when you have a budget defecit (stimulate the economy), the right thing in boom times, the right thing in bust times, right in times of war, right in times of peace. There's no arguing with such lunacy.
Now there are some awfully distasteful web sites out there which argue an extremely negative policy on immigration, the opposite of those Daily Kossacks who flamed me. They would close American borders to all or only a small number of tightly controlled immigrants. They, like Bush, embrace foolish consistency. Immigration is never a good idea to them. And on their web sites, perfectly reasonable positions on things like the H1B visa and outsourcing coexist with disgustingly racist diatribes on how Mexicans throw litter on our highways, spread disease, etc. Nobody here would want to be associated with such sites. But by turning a deaf ear to the legitimate issues that they exploit, you leave those with legitimate grievances nowhere else to turn.
Unless we ever have some sort of world government, democratic elections must be decided in nation-states. We have the notion of citizenship. Some people are citizens of nation states, some aren't. The former have more rights within the nation-state than the latter. Though this is unsatisfying on some moral level, we who are engaged in electoral politics must come to terms with it every day.
Take the example of the Iraq war. There is obviously a position to the "left" of John Kerry and even of Howard Dean. You can find it in people like Noam Chomsky, and Arundhati Roy, on sites like counterpunch.org. My hunch is that most people on Daily Kos actually have some sympathy with these sorts of positions but don't allow themselves to think about them much anymore because they aren't helpful when the task is winning elections in the United States. The number of American soldiers killed in the war is something you can talk about and use to influence voters. To talk about the much larger number of Iraqis killed is something best rarely mentioned if you want to win the election. You may not like it, Kossacks, but you have internalized it. You have learned to temper the moral side of the issue for use in the political arena.
And so it is, or should be, with the immigration issue. Americans are losing their jobs to offshoring, but worse, for those jobs which can't be offshored, as often as not, they'll be done by H1B immigrants working for less than their American counterparts who are unemployed and could do the work. I've heard it time and again. "Why are all the guys in my company's IT department Indian or Chinese these days?" They aren't really racists but they do notice. Why are American college students leaving the computer field in droves these days, when a few short years ago, this was one of the hottest fields to be in? And yes, weren't these the "good" jobs that were supposed to compensate us for the loss of the "crummy" jobs?
And for those who want to cast this as an issue of uplifting parts of the Third World, I'd have a lot more sympathy for that position if it wasn't being dictated by Wall Street to enrich their coffers. Why are Democrats who under normal conditions take Wall Street propaganda with many grains of salt so quick to buy their spin here?
In some industries, those that are most unionized, it would not be acceptable to bring in large numbers of foreign workers to take the jobs of American workers and accept less pay. The union members would be up in arms and no one would criticize them. Try to pull the equivalent of H1B in Detroit's auto plants and watch what would happen. I've mentioned this many times on the internet and no one has ever contradicted me. You know I'm right.
I'm sure that there are some industries where the talents of certain highly trained H1Bs are needed. Many of them want to come here and eventually become US citizens. And for some, this may be appropriate. But many more of the slots are filled by people who are no more talented than those they are replacing. Sometimes the Americans are forced to train their replacements.
People shouldn't be so quick to cite exceptions to the rule where immigration is justifed as proof that all immigration is justified. These programs are abused by the corporations who are lobbying for their expansion. The immigration is from the point of view of the employers, a way to slash salary levels, pure and simple.
To say this is not to denigrate the immigrants. I work with them every day and get along with them as well as I would any other co-worker. Some are among the most thoughtful and decent people I've ever met. I'm proud to consider some of them my friends, and we've been to each others' homes.
But that is a different question from that of whether they should have been allowed to come here on this basis. Yes, it's quite true that America cannot continue to consume the share of the world's resources that it does. But if shared sacrifice is the order of the day, let Wall Street
participate in the sacrifice, instead of enriching themselves by it without long-term thought for what they are doing to the people of this country.
The high tech industry spreads a lot of wealth to the Democratic party to make sure that their gravy train continues. They spend a lot of money telling their story to the media. There are many suggestions that more training and education will solve the problem. But try telling that to the 50-year old programmer laid off because he is "overqualified" for his job.
And so my point, finally, is this:
The Democrats cannot win a national election when economic issues are off the table. Iraq + Abortion + pro-gay politics are not enough. I advocate compromise on none of these.
Instead, I ask this question: why WASN'T the economy an issue that worked for the Democrats this time? Yes, the "terrorist" threat, and the backlash against abortion and gay rights played a role. But most importantly, the Democrats have ceded the jobs issue. At best, they're slightly better than the Republicans. Kerry admitted he couldn't do more than tinker around the edges with his tax plan. His Benedict Arnold talk was just talk and voters could see it: many made their choices on other issues. If we are serious about winning next time, we have to tackle the jobs issue, the offshoring issue, and yes, even in some cases, the abuses of immigration, if we want the voters to think the economy issue is anything more than a wash.
We have to stop drinking the Kool Aid that says that "the people are too stupid to see they're voting against their own economic interests" - and instead ask oursleves whether we are presenting enough real differences on the economy to matter.
Yes, Daily Kossacks, it's time to THINK about these issues.