This movement [immigration control] . . . has powerful lobbyists and lawyers. . . . This movement disgracefully poses as a champion for the rights of African American and Black workers. Nativist leaders purport that immigrants are directly responsible for the high unemployment rates in . . . Black communities. Several anti-immigrant leaders are connected to organized white nationalism. . . . the organized anti-immigrant movement seeks to pit working people against one another. – Imagine 2050, Aaron Flanagan, 8/29/14
Fact Check: Imagine 2050 is a mouthpiece for radical leftists, who like to pretend that they are brave and embattled underdogs against a powerful conservative Establishment. Such posing borders on the hilarious, most particularly with respect to the issue of immigration. In point of fact the immigration control movement has virtually no influential lobbyists or legal advocates. Most of its members are average patriotic citizens of average means.
Immigration advocacy, in contrast, is an Establishment cause, one uniting powerful business interests and the political left. On the business side is the lobbying power of the Chamber of Commerce, leading corporations, and array of billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheldon Adelson, and Bill Gates. On the left are lavishly endowed foundations (including Ford, Carnegie, and Tides), the big bucks of leftist multi-billionaire George Soros and the organizations he bankrolls, organized labor, liberal religious groups, and various well-funded Latino-first organizations, such as the National Council of La Raza (The Race). As for legal resources, control advocates have nothing to match the power and influence of the left-wing ACLU.
The right and left establishmentarians have many disagreements, but one cause they do share in common is keeping down wages for American workers. The unscrupulous business interests want low wages from cheap immigrant labor to enhance profits. But why would leftists want lower wages, when they claim to be the champions of working people? The truth is that this claim is a “disgraceful pose” of the left.
Try as they will, they cannot honestly maintain that mass immigration does not harm the job prospects and wages of poor Americans, most particularly poor blacks—as the extensive research of Harvard economist George Borjas has clearly shown. By the economic law of supply and demand, more workers competing for jobs will lower the wages of those jobs.
The left benefits from lower wages because lower income people are more likely to vote for left-wing policies than people of higher income. As the goal of the right Establishment is profit, the goal of the left Establishment, through low wages, is power. For radical leftists inciting class and racial conflict is a means of solidifying their power base. Even as they accuse their opponents of “white nationalism,” they work closely with the Latino supremacists of La Raza and similar groups. “Pitting people against one another” is indeed their political strategy.
No doubt the radical leftists one day would like to eliminate the cheap labor business elites, and become the Establishment all by themselves. But for now the cause of mass immigration—to impoverish the people—unites them as allies.