How the Flip Immigration Flip-Flops Flop

*** Before we dive in, some late-breaking news: President-elect Trump has announced his intention to nominate Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor. She has strong support from the Teamsters and is “a genuinely pro-labor Republican,” per New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber. This is an earthquake in the politics and policy of labor, and something I’ll be covering in much more depth, but for now there’s not much to read beyond the tweets. That said, not a bad time to go back and take a look at where it all started—with the American Compass “statement on a conservative future for the American labor movement,” published in September 2020 and featuring JD Vance and Marco Rubio among the signers.***

For today, our topic is immigration and your one thing to read is this morning’s New York Times feature, “Why Trump Allies Say Immigration Hurts American Workers.”

This is a classic of the genre and provides a great guide to reading the impending tsunami of immigration policy coverage. The immigration issue, more than any other, works like a strange drug on the technocracy. So adept at constructing pretextual win-win rationales for whatever their preferences might be, the experts and commentators become badly disoriented upon encountering the intractable disconnect between the economic reality of welcoming low-wage migrant labor and their ideological commitment to it. 

Much hijinks ensues.

The harm done by high levels of migration into low-wage segments of the labor market, to those Americans already attempting to earn a living in those same segments, used to be well understood and entirely uncontroversial. This was the conclusion of academic research dating back to the 1960s. It was the conclusion of a bipartisan commission convened by President Clinton in the 1990s. It was a point of agreement between Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

But over the past fifteen years, as progressives abandoned their traditional interest in the well-being of low-wage workers for a commitment to radical identity politics and open borders (sorry, “non-enforcement”), a new literature conveniently emerged to make the case that in fact flooding a market with low-wage workers would be good for low-wage workers.