This one is super easy: the economy simply does not care where you or your value are from. At all. And it never has. Thanks for coming.
Ok, look. Let’s break down the core components of the economy and see if origin or address matters at all. Spoiler, it doesn’t, it’s all just the racism, nativism, and nationalism. But we know that, so let’s prove it.
Every person in the economy occupies several roles , or combination of roles, simultaneously: primarily labor, capital, and consumer. We create value, we invest/save value, and we spend value. Everyone participates in these three things to some extent, or exists as economic potential for these. Babies don’t participate as labor, or capital, really – we would say they are primarily consumers – but that consumption drives both labor and capital in creating a market for the goods they consume. It’s all connected.
It’s important to note that real demand is driven by consumption. Business and finance folks tend to express “demand” as “people who want the thing”, but in real economics terms, it must be pegged to actual consumption of the thing. Consumer behavior in any serious analysis has to be the actual number of consumers with both the motive and ability to purchase, and who actually do so. Manipulating “demand” through scarcity warps our view of how consumption works, by leaving a remainder of “people who want the thing” over “people who actually buy the thing”. Separating potential market for real market is important to our discussion here.
So. Let’s light this candle.
LABOR: Labor mobility is a key component of any argument for Liberal Economics, be it Classical or Neo. This is one of the fundamentals of the Invisible Hand so beloved by Randian acolytes. As jobs, wages, and standard of living fluctuate, these are supposedly balanced by labor mobility, flowing from less advantageous areas to more advantageous areas, just like capital. Skilled labor moves into new or developing sectors, helping fuel innovation and quality of product. Underutilized labor will retrain to move into sectors with higher labor demand – again, demand being the concrete number of employees, not the hypothetical wishcasting of crypto bros elevator pitching “the bus” in some weird way. All of this is supported within the discipline without question. Learning new skills to get a better job, whether through promotion or new employment, is absolutely seen as a capitalist virtue.
We’ve written here about how H1B visas and other forms of immigration law are used to manipulate and oppress labor, the tl;dr being that what capital really wants is complete control over labor, holding things like the threat of deportation over imported labor, documented and undocumented alike. Which we are seeing in real time, even being now leveraged against citizens. “If you don’t do what we want, we will kick you out” applying to citizens shows that it’s about power, and immigration status is just the excuse. And they will ignore that as soon as they can get the Overton Window to shift far enough. So again, Fascism, not immigration, is the real problem here. They just want slavery, but without the responsibility of clothing and feeding you.
However, mainstream Conservative economic policy has generally favored labor mobility. Reagan and HW Bush were both in favor of paths to citizenship, amnesty for long term residents, and streamlined application processes. While the racist dipshit wing of the Party still howled a little bit, immigration was a key plank in Reagan’s “Compassionate Conservatism” nonsense. W and Romney had similar views as well. It must be understood that this policy was more of a “you mean the slaves will import themselves?? Sweet!” line of thinking that would also serve to undercut Unions and bring wages down, but the main takeaway here is that the Right is pro-immigration when it suits capital.
What this shows is not that labor mobility is good or bad – the capitalist system, itself is inherently anti-labor – it shows that the Right’s intentions when they support immigration is to undercut labor power to lower costs, and when they scream about immigration, it is to center power and fuel the Fascist identity of racism, nativism, and nationalism.
There is no argument against immigration, documented or not, based on a labor argument in the economy.
CAPITAL: Capital is fungible, and a dollar is a dollar, so where it comes from is irrelevant to what mechanics it triggers in the economy. If you buy 10 shares of Apple from Mumbai, Tunisia, or Ohio, it’s irrelevant. While capital mobility has its pitfalls, the actual ownership of the value represented doesn’t matter. An American citizen burying their wealth in the Caymans has the same affect as some Russian kleptocrat doing so. The flow of capital is the flow of capital. The nationality or documentation status of the capital agent is not a factor.
But K dot I, you say, what about immigrant workers sending their money back to their country? Well, is that any different than a citizen investing in a foreign company? Capital leaves and enters the economy at will. Immigration laws or status do not affect capital mobility in any capacity. A foreign investor making profitable moves in the US stock market is functionally extracting wealth as well.
As stated above, capital loves labor mobility when it can exploit it. From a consumer facing position, however, there is no downside to qualified labor producing the goods and services we consume. Each worker has their skills and abilities regardless of country of origin or legal status. Labor generates value, and skilled employment allows development of new products and services. The more skilled labor, the easier time capital has of implementing new businesses or industries. This not only makes the case from capital for labor mobility, but also access to education, health care, housing, transportation, and social services. Production days lost through time off due to lack of access to these things costs capital money.
A positive outcome of legal integration into the workforce as a member in good standing includes integration into our tax and services systems as well. There is zero reason why these systems should be limited – each worker generates both economic value and legitimate tax revenue regardless of country of origin. It’s just a question of whether or not they are allowed access to that system. Any child raised in a safe neighborhood with good schools, and in good health, will contribute far more over their lifetime than they take in services, even in cases of prolonged necessity on those services. So why should this not be the baseline experience for all residents?
The idea that services are a scarcity resource is itself a Fascist lie to allow capital to avoid responsibility for the systems they exploit for profit. Austerity is a moralistic lie told by the apex predators of capitalism to protect their hegemony. Only by denigrating labor can capital maintain its regulatory capture, and only by pitting the working class against each other on these fabricated divisions like racism, nativism, and nationalism can they maintain their deathgrip on our slide into dystopia.
Labor mobility should be in the interests of capital even without the exploitation. Participating in creating a labor force that is educated, healthy, housed, and safe is factually in the interest of capital. It results in more productivity, fewer missed hours, more dynamic market opportunities, and a more stable economy which invites innovation and investment. Individual investors thrive on volatility, but capital as a whole demands stability. Capital’s interest should be in a stable, safe, healthy workforce with both geographical, industrial, and class mobility. But finbros gotta arbitrage shit, so they meddle. But capital clearly speaks out of whichever side of its mouth it wants to depending on what it needs to defend, stability and growth, or division through racism, nativism, and nationalism.
There is no argument against immigration, documented or not, based on a capital argument in the economy.
CONSUMER: As for those aforementioned services, shit, an undocumented worker who buys a six pack of beer and gas to get home has just paid more in tax than these 55 companies did in 2020. Combined. So let’s talk about that beer and gas purchase. Not only does that purchase pay more in taxes than many corporations or money-shuffling billionaires, it puts those dollars into the hands of the shop owner. Who pays their employees, Who pay their landlords, other shopkeepers, the babysitter, Netflix, etc etc etc.
Every person who lives in this country distributes capital through consumption. Again, babies and children require food, clothing, health care, education, etc, all of which creates real demand which can then be met by the market. Every undocumented person pays for those things as well. They spend money and that money drives the economy, and that money, again, does not care about the legal status of those who spent it. For every person who “terk our jerbs”, those same workers create jobs through consumption.
Consumption drives demand, demand drives production, production is driven by labor, labor drives consumption. Broad aggregate consumer spending is the single biggest economic factor in the universe. Everything else is a specious fabrication, a kind of financial bro astrology, an attempt to arbitrage the system to extract the value created by others. Creating false mismatches to catch the pennies that fall between is the fatal conceit of the exploiter class, who not only add nothing of value to anything, they actively diminish the value of everything through myriad social, political, and economic manipulations and these ideological cults.
Important to note here, corporate dipshits don’t “create jobs”, demand does. Without the real consumer demand for production, no labor is needed. It’s that simple. You just had access to capital, dumbass, you “created” nothing. The demand existed, and you accessed it, and profit from it. Mining gold doesn’t mean you “create gold”, you fucking moron. Sure, you built a mine, but without the gold, it’s just a hole. Settle your tits, John Galt.
Each dollar that enters the real economy through consumption, whether that be for goods or services, generates and facilitates further economic activity, and while studies have tried to peg it down – somewhere between $.50 and $.75 per dollar in general discussion – and this is not the place to dive into the scope of these multipliers, it is important to understand that this mechanic underpins the importance of broad aggregate consumer demand.
And once again, as each dollar travels from hand to hand, it’s not checking for papers. It does not care if it came from the wallet of a True Blue American Patriottm or his undocumented coworker. The US is successful not only because of the long-gone manufacturing base, but because we are the largest, most affluent consumer base on the planet at the moment. It is our purchasing power, the demand we create that drives entire other countries’ economies, and that is an aggregate of literally every single human being that lives within the borders of the United States. Including undocumented folks.
That is the bedrock AND the engine of growth and stability that keeps us afloat despite decades of greedy psychopaths who are so warped by their own wealth that no amount of money or power will ever be enough that they will do anything including KILL US ALL to make big number go up. And that bedrock does not care a single fucking bit about where you are from, or whether you can get a drivers license or SS card.
There is no argument against immigration, documented or not, based on a consumer argument in the economy.
CONCLUSION: Either the economy scales with population, or it doesn’t. That’s the entire crux of this biscuit. There’s no way to argue “we need more babies to replace aging workers” and “we need to keep out these dirty foreigners cuz they’re taking our jobs and services!” at the same time. That baby is going to be a freeloading parasite for at least 18 years, just mooching off the system. Whether a refugee family in CA or a double wide family in a. Kentucky holler, the economics are exactly the same. The economy, like Soylent Green (spoilers), is people. All people.
The only narrative here is one that we see repeatedly from the Conservatives also trying to preserve social services for whites only, with “means testing” or “drug testing” or whatever “we want to make sure only people who deserve it get help” cover they have for their white supremacy bullshit. “Deserving” is code for “only those in the in-group”, in this case, only those who adhere to the Fascist cult identity. Only those who “deserve” America should live here, according to these Nazi fuckbags, and as they widen their net of who they label Untermenschen, or “sub-humans” expands from “Venezuelan gang members” to “anyone darker than a paper bag” to “this literal citizen who just won a primary election for mayor of New York City”, we can see very clearly that the only thing truly at the heart of this immigration narrative is the narcissistic sociopathy that is the hallmark of Fascism.
So there you have it. As we have shown across these three articles, none of the arguments forwarded by the Right have any basis in reality. They are all easily debunkable by the most cursory good faith engagement. Through actual US history, through the philosophical underpinnings of Essentialism, and here through Economics, we can see what stands in stark relief against this attempt to center power by dividing the working class through racism, nativism, and nationalism:
There is no argument against immigration, documented or not, that isn’t based on a Fascist mythos and a desire to increase human suffering.
Kelsoland.Institute 