Durka Durrr!

  There is no question that the issue of immigration brings out the racists, the xenophobes, and the culture warriors. These people can be written off for what they are.

  However, behind the issue of racism there is a real, substantial, rational fear.
It is a fear most of us share these days: the fear of losing our job.

  Or as South Park put it:

  Writing off these Americans as racists without addressing their real fear will accomplish nothing but harden them against you and make them resentful.
  The immigration debate will never be resolved without also confronting the fear of job loss.

  The immigration versus jobs debate is a false paradigm, as the SEIU explains.

 The problem with today's economy is not immigrants; the problem is our broken immigration laws that allow big business to exploit workers who lack legal status, driving down wages for all workers. If every immigrant were required to get into the system, pay their dues, and become U.S. citizens, we could block big business' upper hand, eliminate the two-tiered workforce, and build a united labor movement that raises wages and living standards for all workers.

 That may be an oversimplification, but it doesn't make it any less true.

Luddites of Immigration

  The dictionary definition of Luddite is:  one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly :  one who is opposed to especially technological change

  Calling someone a Luddite is an insult, and it often means someone is foolish. It often implies someone hopelessly fighting against progress.
  In fact the reality is that the Luddites have been slandered.

 As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

 Luddites were primarily worried about jobs, but they also worried about how the industrial age was "changing the head and heart" of man. The Luddites often marched in women's clothing in a world-turned-upside-down method in order to show they had a sense of humor.
    In the end, the Luddite marchers were brutally shot down or hung by soldiers.

   The Luddite concerns were real, logical, and tangible. The problem for the Luddites was their tactics, not their objectives. They had no hope of accomplishing their goals given the way they went about it.

  The exact same thing can be said of the anti-immigration crowd. Their tactics will only cause suffering, without any hope of success. They won't save their jobs by victimizing poor immigrants. Not in these days of globalization.
  It's human nature to worry about foreign cultures, but its also pointless as being afraid of the dark.

  And as for the Nativism Movement, history mocks them. The first Nativists in the United States were Native Americans who believed that white people were "morally inferior" and "children of the Evil Spirit."

The Lesson of the Luddites

   In Das Kapital Karl Marx writes: "It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."

  Eventually people realized that machines were not the enemy of the Luddites. The capitalists that exploited their children for 60 hours a week were the enemies.
  The anti-immigration crowd needs to wake up to this simple fact as well.

  We've lost over 2.7 million good jobs just in the last decade, just to China. Nearly 700,000 of them were high-tech jobs.
 Since 2001, 42,400 factories have left along with 5.5 million good-paying jobs.
  And the trend continues.

   Those jobs are gone because of trade agreements that multinational corporations pushed through, not because of immigration. Factories don't leave our shores because Latinos want to work there.

  To put this into perspective, consider that there are officially 3.1 million long-term unemployed in this country.
  Forget immigration! If we simply reformed our trade policy 15 years ago the decline of the middle class, our trade deficit, and the unemployment problem would never have happened.

   The United States created the largest manufacturing base, with the biggest middle class and the highest standard of living in the entire world, behind the the highest tariffs in the world.
  Now we have almost no tariffs and almost no middle class.

  So why are we debating immigration, which is not the problem, from a standpoint that has no hope at arriving with all parties agreeing?
  Meanwhile there is almost no debate about our trade policies, which are the real problem of the economy?
  Who could possibly gain from pitting one group of the working class against another group of the working class in pointless confrontation that distracts from the real issue?