You may be thinking that Trump and his Republicans have lost the immigration issue because voters are disgusted by ICE’s indiscriminate roundups, thuggish behavior and their killings of peaceful protesters who happen to be U.S. citizens. Indeed, the polls are clear. Voters have turned against ICE’s methods—but only their methods. Republicans are feeling heat.
Democrats hope they’ll benefit from anti-ICE backlash in the midterm elections. If that pans out, they’ll be winning a battle while losing the war.
Most people still want to deport illegal immigrants. When Democrats were in power, they promoted open borders—and Americans hate that. Both parties are losing the immigration game.
“Why?” my best friend asked me recently. “Why are people so angry at immigrants?”
I tried to explain. I’m white and male and able-bodied and cis and Ivy-educated and well-connected—big pluses—yet if I set out to find a 9-to-5 job, I told him, I probably wouldn’t be able to find one. All my life (I’m 62), finding work has been nearly impossible. Countless, demoralizing rejections, ridiculous hoops, stupid certifications, lengthy interviews, withdrawn job offers. Finding good work? I hardly ever did—and then it felt like winning a lottery. The job market always sucks.
I don’t know anyone—white, Black, rich, poor, male, female—who would dispute that.
Anything that contributes to America’s crappy job-finding landscape—as immigration, legal or illegal, does—is going to piss off workers.
When resources are abundant, human beings are generous. Charitable giving soars along with the stock market. When things are scarce, people are disinclined to share—like the rats in a cage who turn mean when food rations are reduced. In the U.S., jobs are an exceedingly rare resource.
It has always been tough to find a job in the U.S., especially a good one. And it keeps getting tougher. 9.7% of recent college graduates are unemployed. More than half of workers over 55 lose a job that results in a permanent loss of half their income. Many online listings are for “ghost jobs” that employers have no intention of filling. More than 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, meaning that they are jobless, reduced to working part-time or earning poverty-level wages. Another third are overqualified, working jobs that are beneath their education and experience.
60% of Americans say they’re toiling at a low-quality job or aren’t working at all.
They tell us to study STEM. But even going full nerd doesn’t guarantee employment. Between 6.1% and 7.8% of recent computer engineering and physics majors are unemployed; 45% of STEM majors are forced to take non-STEM jobs.
Given how hard it is in our piss-poor excuse for a capitalist economy for a hardworking American to find any job, much less a decent one, the last thing our misérables need is competition from new immigrants. People aren’t as angry at immigrants in particular as they are at immigration in general. Why is the U.S. importing workers from overseas when millions of Americans who were born here can’t find work?
Employers and pro-immigration politicians offer two standard rebuttals: skills mismatches and laziness. Americans, they say, don’t have the skills they need. And they don’t want to work backbreaking jobs like picking fruits and vegetables.
American companies have all but eliminated on-the-job training to the point that half of all workers, of all ages, say they don’t know what their boss expects from them. Expecting every new hire to hit the ground running is insane—yet it’s become standard. Employers have no one but themselves to blame for the “skills gap.” Want skilled workers? Train them. Bring back the corporate educational institutions and apprenticeships that turned promising workers into skilled workers a century ago.
The same goes for companies who whine that they get no takers for hard jobs that offer low wages. Pay more. Americans that a ton of hard, dirty and dangerous jobs—oil rig worker, crime scene cleaner, sanitation, commercial diver/welder, crab fisherman, mortician—because they pay decently. A farmer who can’t find a fruit picker for $15 an hour may have to offer $20. No takers? Offer $25. Repeat as necessary. Go high enough and eventually you will find U.S. citizens happy to work for you.
Can’t afford to pay the market rate—i.e., a salary high enough to find applicants? Raise your prices or close your farm; you can’t afford to stay in business. Will higher wages increase inflation? Yes. So tweak monetary policy.
The H-1B visa program epitomizes how immigration policies have been cynically deployed in order to depress wages. To qualify for the program, tech and other companies certify to the federal government that they can’t find the skilled workers they need here in the United States, so they need to import them, typically from India. Yet, in countless well-documented instances, H-1B workers are hired by well-heeled corporations to displace American workers—who have the right skills—whose final assignment is to train their replacements before they join the ranks of the unemployed. There was no skills gap, only corporate greed. Why wouldn’t victims be angry?
No sane American can begrudge the ambition and desperation of those who leave the land of their birth to seek their fortunes here. Most of us are descended from foreigners who did exactly that. In most of those cases, however, Americans’ ancestors arrived in great waves of immigration who were permitted entry into an economy suffering from labor shortages as the nation was expanding.
I don’t blame immigrants. They just want to survive, even thrive. Like native-born American workers, they’re victims of greedy capitalists who pit us against each other. It’s too bad not everyone can see that.
In the end, however, a government’s first duty is to protect and help its citizens. No one younger than 80 can remember a time when employers needed to turn abroad to fill their employment rosters. So I have a question for corporate America and the government officials it owns: Why, as long as the unemployment rate is higher than 0.0%, are we inviting people from other countries to fill American jobs?
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)
