So, watching a rare bit of live football, and a political ad for some wannabe US Senate candidate in Ohio pops up. He is going on about being a Pro-Trump candidate, and that our biggest problem is illegal immigration and we need to build a wall and secure our nation.
And I'm thinking... are they still going on about the damn Wall and illegal immigration?! 1 million dead to Covid, supply chains are struggling and causing inflation, and Omicron is busting up our hospitals... but Central Americans crossing the border illegally is our big issue?
I saw a post on the social media from a die-hard Trump supporter friend - he's currently in lock down with Covid and is spending his time raging - and very high on his list of things he's angry about is "border security."
Build the wall, keep the brown folks out, dey turk our jerbs...the whole nine yards.
And here I am in a border state, with an infamous "papers please" law still mostly on the books, an infamous sheriff (thankfully out of office) who raided businesses on the regular, realizing that my old friend really, really doesn't get it.
He sits there in Michigan worried about the "hordes" of people crossing much closer to where I am, and he still doesn't get it. We don't have an illegal immigrant problem. We have an illegal employment problem. The reason all these people are coming across the border nowhere near Michigan is that
we're paying them to come here. At the risk of going all Mitt Romney...if the jobs were not there, they would not come. Supply and demand is a thing, and businesses that rely upon immigrant labor are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to
reward them for crossing the border.
I mean, if you were working a job in...I dunno...Michigan, and someone offered you ten times your hourly wage to take a boat across the St. Clair River and work there, wouldn't you take it? I'd say that's a pretty good deal. Problem with this deal is that if you get caught, you pay the price. You get deported by very polite Canadian border guards, while the business based in Ontario suffers absolutely no consequences whatsoever and hires someone to fill the job who managed to NOT get caught.
Oh, and here in the dusty southwest? That "papers please" law that caused such a kerfuffle actually had an employer sanctions clause that was supposed to punish businesses who hired illegals. The infamous sheriff had a lot of photo ops where he featured workers sitting on the curb in zip ties and made a big deal of loading them into vans for deportation. The number of store managers or landscaping company owners he rounded up and arrested?
Zero. The number of statewide businesses who were actually sanctioned for hiring illegals? One. Thousands of illegals got zip ties on their wrists and loaded into a van. Companies that hired them? One...exactly one got a slap on the wrist. Not a zip tie to be seen.
This is exactly 100% correct, no argument.
But you still can not blame your die-hard Trump supporter friend....he has to start somewhere and somehow. And the only thing he can conceivably get today is a wall. He really wants the right thing to be done and would prefer the business be sanctioned for their illegal hiring. But you do not fight the likes of "Google", "Facebook", and monopolized mainstream media in our political system. They are the feudal lords of today's American landscape controlling everything. Huge monopoly firms at the top of the pyramid representing the real threat to middle class security. Monopolies of communication....pro illegal hiring, and H1 visa's.....and they are not going to just allow your die-hard Trump supporter friend to be heard.... only unless he is put in the light of racism, sexism, being a Confederate, being stupid, or something else equally bad.
So he just does what he can do in our political system. The Democrats have taken all his money and run him over with their bus. Someone like Trump comes along and at least offers the next best solution, because the other party is also secretly in the hands of Google and Facebook too.
Consider this. We would not even be mentioning illegal immigration here or any other forum board if it was not for Trump. It would just be happening and the middle class would be progressing further into the night.
Wow. So I'm 100% correct and there's no argument.
So you bring an argument. Let's break this down:
And the only thing he can conceivably get today is a wall. He really wants the right thing to be done and would prefer the business be sanctioned for their illegal hiring.
No, he can't, and no he doesn't. Building a "big, beautiful wall" along our southern border was beyond Trump's ability to get done even if he'd had a majority in both houses of Congress to work with. Logistically it was a big ask for even a competent administration, and his was not. In fact his administration was even more corrupt than the "swamp" he claimed to want to "drain." (p.s. he had no intention of draining anything)
And no, my friend and the Trump supporters don't want to punish businesses. They want to punish brown people. For Republicans in general, businesses are "job creators" who must be not only exalted for saving the economy at every turn, but they must be given huge tax breaks and have regulations swept away in order for them to "create jobs." Well guess what? When you remove restrictions, these "titans of industry" are gonna cut corners, and that includes hiring the cheapest labor they can find. That's illegal immigrants.
This is where it gets hilarious:
But you do not fight the likes of "Google", "Facebook", and monopolized mainstream media in our political system. They are the feudal lords of today's American landscape controlling everything.
Oh noes! Businesses are in control! How DARE these companies use the fact that their business is lightly regulated to get wealthy and control the market! When we said "free market" we didn't mean THAT! We want coal and oil companies and financial institutions to have access to the sort of unrestricted capitalism that lead to the Gilded Age...not these internet companies! Someone needs to stop them!
(you mean...like...regulation?)
Yes! I mean...no! Regulation bad! We just need to do...something...to stop them from gobbling up market share by being popular and stuff!
So he just does what he can do in our political system. The Democrats have taken all his money and run him over with their bus.
This is where it gets wonky. You're saying that he's justified to be angry at the Democrats for allowing social media companies to have monopolies, but not be mad at Republicans for supporting unregulated business practices to the point where companies can hire cheap labor that makes him unable to find work?
But wait...there's more!
mainstream media in our political system.
This one cracks me up. That pesky mainstream media. Oh what a tangled tables we turn.
Of course my Trump supporting friend and many other like him were glued to Fox News for years....until Trump turned on them for not being sufficiently deferential. It has been recently revealed that the number one host on Fox News was a de facto advisor to the former President. He and at least one other Fox host had the President's Chief of Staff on speed dial. Prime time personalities had - the joke goes - more access to the President than Eric Trump, and the fact that they had such easy access to the White House is pretty fucking scary.
Ah, but you might say Fox is not "mainstream media." They're the plucky upstart. The roguish outsider. They're fighting for market share! Ninja please. Fox is one of the biggest mainstream media companies on the planet. Fox "News" is a ratings juggernaut started by a billionaire media mogul and the hosts (with access to the President) are millionaires. "But the mainstream media!" cries the right! Cry me a fucking river. You'd freak out if scion of wealth Anderson Cooper of CNN (founded by a billionaire) had Obama on speed dial, but scion of wealth Tucker Carlson of Fox (founded by a billionaire) can get Trump on the phone in an instant? That's a bridge too far!
Finally:
and the middle class would be progressing further into the night.
Getting back to the illegal immigration thing...for decades the right wing in this country has been trying to kneecap the middle class. They fucking hate the fact hat the post-war years were a boon to working people...what with strong unions, strong regulation, the GI Bill, social programs born of the New Deal, etc. etc. etc. Since the 80s the mantra has been "just give the rich tax breaks, loosen the regulation, crush the unions, and wealth will 'trickle down' to the middle class."
That was all bullshit. The intent was never to have wealth raining down on the middle class. It was for the wealthy to be able to piss on them. That includes giving their well-paying jobs to illegal immigrants whenever possible, busting unions and hiring slightly more desperate Americans if not, taking away what little political power they had left with "right to work" legislation, and when all that shit started to work really well and your average family - who used to be able to get by on one income - had to struggle to get by on two or three or four jobs...you tell them that illegal immigrants, social media companies, and the party that actually stands for worker's rights are the source of all their ills.
In a final "fuck you" to the American middle class, you tell them that their savior...who will "build a wall" and start his own social media company that caters to them...is a New York billionaire who shits into a golden toilet and they don't even see the cruel irony.
I actually feel sorry for my old friend. He's currently stuck at home suffering with Covid, and all he can do in his relative isolation is rage on Facebook (because there IS NO Trump social media site) about how that Democratic President who told him to get vaccinated and is trying to save his job and middle class life is his mortal enemy, and if the indifferent billionaire were back in office and building the wall he'd be so much better off. It's almost tragic.
