Now, why do working people relocate themselves from one country to another? For pretty much the same reason. They are seeking opportunity. They are seeking a way to improve their family’s lives. They want to leave a place with fewer jobs and lower wages and move to a place with more jobs and better wages. The process of human immigration is, at its most elementary level, the mirror image of corporate relocation. The difference is the way that these two things are treated. Capital moves freely; labor is tightly restricted. Who does this benefit? It benefits capital, and corporate power, and allows the rich to get richer at the expense of desperate workers. To a global corporation, a pool of poor labor that is locked in by national borders is a convenient thing to exploit. You can move all of your factories into that pool and reap the profits of paying much lower wages and then, if that nation finally develops to the point that workers demand a higher standard of living, you can just leapfrog over to another, more desperate nation and start the process over again. The free movement of capital comes with great benefits, but those benefits go almost exclusively to capital itself.
Here is a little thought experiment: Which of these two scenarios is better for American blue collar workers? A) You allow companies to freely close down their factories and move them right across the Mexican border, where the workers are paid ten percent of what their American counterparts were earning for the same work. Or B), All of the factories that moved to Mexico are magically dropped back on the US side of the border along with their Mexican work forces? Consider the fact that in scenario B, large numbers of Mexican immigrants are entering America. Scary! Bad! Woo woo! But also in scenario B, those factories will immediately see huge wage increases because they would become subject to American wage laws and competition, and American workers would be able to go get jobs at those factories, and the American economy itself would grow, and demand for goods and services would increase, and there would be more jobs created elsewhere, a virtuous cycle. Yet, if you go by the conventional wisdom that flows from the mouths of our political leaders, and if you follow the logic of the policies that both Reagan and Clinton pursued with equal fervor, you would have to say that scenario A, in which your job is gone, is the economically rational move, and scenario B would be evidence of The Problem At the Southern Border [spoken with a grim look of concern and a small shake of the head].
Part of the reason why our immigration debate is so bad is the perception among many people that there is a fixed number of jobs in this country. If someone comes in, they are taking a job that could have gone to you. This is not true. Economies expand and contract. Jobs are created when they expand. (Also, you could have gone down and gotten a day laborer job yesterday, before someone came over from Mexico to do it. But you didn’t, did you?) Apart from racism, the biggest driver of immigration panic among the general public is economic superstition. This panic is particularly ironic when you consider that we are a nation of immigrants. (...)
There is a strain of political thinking that tries to simultaneously occupy the right wing and “pro-worker” lanes by casting immigrants as the villains in the story of American inequality. This is bullshit. Immigrants are not the problem. Capital is the problem. Immigrants are people who want to work, which is to say, they are part of the working class. Immigrants are not inimical to the interests of labor; they are labor. The labor movement should always welcome them in as brothers and sisters. Their interests are the same as ours. I beg any well-intentioned people who are concerned about the very real erosion of the US manufacturing base and the many decades of declining labor power and the hollowing out of middle American factory towns not to be seduced by the semi-plausible idea that this was caused in any meaningful way by immigration, or that sealing the borders will solve the problem. That’s not how it works. Don’t think in terms of Americans and foreigners. Think, instead, in terms of working people and bosses, labor and capital. That is the divide that matters.
by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Pretty basic Econ 101, but a lot of people still don't get it. Or do, and won't admit it. Or don't want to. Example No. 1 - Republicans killing an immigration bill they themselves initially sought, just to keep the situation from improving and on the front burner for this year's elections. Sad.]
