[Peace-discuss] [Peace] Why I won’t be marching in the July 4th parade

[Carl G. Estabrook]

From <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity>>:

...who’s for illegal immigration? As far as I know … the only people who are openly for illegal immigration are neoliberal economists.

First of all, neoliberal economists are completely for open borders, in so far as that’s possible. Friedman said years ago that, “You can’t have a welfare state and open borders,” but of course the point of that was “open the borders, because that’ll kill the welfare state.” There’s a good paper <http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16508148925211743157&hl=en&as_sdt=20005&sciodt=20000> you can get off the web by Gordon Hanson, commissioned by whoever runs Foreign Affairs, and the argument is that illegal immigration is better than legal immigration, because illegal immigration is extremely responsive to market conditions.

So it’s quite striking that you have all this protesting against illegal immigration, and especially at a time when it’s down. So why are people so upset about it? They are upset about it not because it has gotten worse, it hasn’t, but because they somehow recognize that one of the primary sort of marks of the triumph of neoliberalism in the US is a very high tolerance of illegal immigration, and that illegal immigration is the kind of ne plus ultra of the labor mobility that neoliberalism requires. I mean that’s why for years — even though it’s a kind of contradiction in terms — as a policy it’s worked well. The Bush administration did everything it could to talk against illegal immigration but leave it alone and I’m sure the Obama administration would do the same thing except its hand’s being forced by the Tea Party.

...Some argue that limiting immigration could help restore the unions and that’s obviously false and I’m certainly not saying that the Tea Party has the diagnosis right. The Tea Party thinks that immigrants are taking away their money. It’s not immigrants who are taking away their money; it’s neoliberalism that’s taking away their money...



> On Jul 4, 2017, at 2:39 PM, Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> Was there a count of how many people marched with the Immigration Forum? It seemed like a lot of people. 
> 
> 

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