Take this, from Bill Clinton:
And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer:
The talking points, as you will note, are virtually identical, which reeks of a large-scale Democrat messaging pivot. And ironically, like so many such pivots, at least recently, it starts by accepting something that conservatives have been warning about for years (and which the Left has been dismissing for years): the crisis in American birthrates. Sounding like Elon Musk, Clinton himself outright admits we have the lowest birth rate we’ve had in well over 100 years. Schumer picks up the same line, with his argument that “we have a population that is not reproducing.” Fair enough, but what’s their solution to this problem?
Are you sitting down? Okay. Their solution is, don’t make it more attractive for the people already here to have children. Just import millions of strangers and call it a day, because at least then, the economy can keep growing, presumably to the benefit of the likes of Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman, since we can’t imagine who else would be better off under this arrangement. In short, stripped of all rhetorical obfuscation, their argument is, “Well, immigrants breed like rabbits and have no memory that life can be better, unlike the pesky people who actually live here (and don’t vote for us), so why not let them?”
Where do we even start? Seriously, where? There’s such an abundance of counterpoints to this that it beggars belief. For instance, we could point out that Clinton, in particular, is offering a solution to a problem which he literally caused. Seriously, Clinton’s use of “free trade” agreements like NAFTA to hollow out America’s industrial base is his biggest economic legacy. Well that, and the Flores settlement agreement (named after the Reno v. Flores Supreme Court case), which the federal government had no reason to agree to, and which opened the floodgates, not just for illegal immigration, but also for child trafficking. Not to mention the fact that all those new arrivals drove up the cost of living just as entry to the middle class became precarious.
We could bring all that up, but the thing is, we’re quite sure Clinton knows it, and so does Schumer. They’re not morons. They know what their policies did. So why are they offering such transparently bad arguments for doubling down on those same policies? We don’t just bring this up to be peevish; generally, when you can see through an argument this easily, it’s a surefire sign that the person making the argument is hiding the ball about what they actually want.
But maybe you say, well, they’re politicians, it’s their job to do that. Fair enough. Except the Left’s writers and thinkers aren’t any better. As just one example, J.D. Vance’s recent interview with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro exposed that.
“About a third of the construction workforce in this country is Hispanic,” Garcia argues. “Of those, a large portion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?”
Now, on the surface, this question sounds reasonable, until you do even a minute of research. Firstly, there’s the fact that her math just doesn’t add up. About a third of the construction workforce is Hispanic, alright, fine. But the percentage of the construction workforce that's undocumented is actually between 10 and 19 percent. In essence, Garcia-Navarro’s question amounts to, “How can we possibly build houses with only 81-90 percent of our current construction workforce?”
We suspect the answer is “quite easily,” considering that this is not, in fact, “all the people who are working in construction.” Not even close. And Garcia-Navarro is not stupid; you don’t get a job at the New York Times by being stupid (okay, unless your name is Taylor Lorenz), so what gives? Why ask a question that anyone and their brother could tell was misleading; that is, in fact, a red herring that would make Benoit Blanc blush? And why, having messed up the math so obviously, would you then resort to an argument literally indistinguishable from the logic which was used to justify slavery until Abraham Lincoln? And why would you be so skeptical of the idea of getting underemployed young men into construction jobs, many of which are unionized, i.e. systemically designed to support liberal interest groups? And why would you insult a voting bloc which you need by implying they’re pretty much only there to be baby-making, cheap labor? Why are the arguments, and the thinking behind them, so unbelievably weak, unless they’re solely designed to cover what the real motive behind these policy proposals are?
Well, hold onto your hats, because that’s exactly what these weak rationalizations are designed to do. Unfortunately for the Democrats, some of us can see through the smokescreen of bad logic. What they’re actually saying is obvious, even more so when you consider the history of those making these bad faith arguments.
Why, exactly, do you think it’s Clinton and Schumer – two of the most donor-friendly Democrats -- making these arguments, for example? Because it’s the only thing that can keep people with their particular ideological profile anywhere near power. Seriously, without millions of undocumented immigrants to turn into loyal Democrat voters, it’s very doubtful that much of the liberal ideological commitments favored by neoliberal woke capital would’ve survived the aftermath of the Reagan presidency, let alone to the present day. This is why, as soon as a neoliberal like Bill Clinton assumed power, he did everything in his power to offshore the economic system that enabled the American middle class to exist, while simultaneously and baselessly allowing floods of illegal immigrants into the country. Because he knew that his party, which had long-since been captured by cultural vandals, could never win again if only legal American citizens were casting ballots as part of a prosperous middle class. So, naturally, he rigged the system to screw over heritage Americans by offshoring their jobs and importing more and more people who’d be loyal to his machine, no matter how culturally anti-American that machine became. Illegal immigration, in their minds, is literally an electoral subsidy for their most left-wing constituency groups.
Now, some undocumented immigrants might like that, because it makes their cause more attractive to left-wing politicians. But they should be a lot more circumspect about that trade, because, as Garcia-Navarro’s borderline insulting question shows, the Democrats don’t actually care about them except as baby-making, cheap labor. Just as they no longer care about unions now that they have the gall to complain when you try to fire their members for refusing to put pronouns in their bio. Just as they don’t actually care about economic growth, except insofar as it can be leveraged into an ersatz Reaganite talking point. Because their actual goal is to create a society of New York Times readers, and an obedient underclass who votes for whichever party lets those people indulge their most bizarre impulses without complaint. They used to think that underclass was the unions. Now they think it’s illegal immigrants. That’s why their arguments sound so desperate, so barely thought through. Because now that Republicans are no longer pretending not to notice the weakness of their arguments, the true motives behind those arguments are closer than ever to the surface.
And knowing that, it’s no accident that they’re losing; that they’re failing to get the numbers they used to, not just among Latinos, but among even black Americans. Contrary to what the likes of Garcia-Navarro, Clinton, and Schumer evidently think, Americans don’t have goldfish memories. They can see that the Democrats will stop caring about their constituencies the instant they demand actual representation in Washington as they are, rather than as the media and the woke elite wish them to be. They can see that the same logic used by bitter HR ladies like Garcia-Navarro, and washed-up neoliberals like Bill Clinton and Chuck Schumer, can be used to treat them as incidental to the woke utopia the instant they put a toe out of line. They can see that any party with Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney in it has one thing in common, and that’s telling them to pound sand if they get in the way of big dollars for woke capital. And most importantly, they can see that Donald Trump takes up the cause of anyone who even looks like they might vote for him, rather than shafting the cause of everyone who has even the smallest doubts. And knowing that, they know where their interests lie.
