Donald Trump and His Immigration Policies

Donald Trump as the Emperor Caligula

Last week I’d published an article noting the considerable similarities between the reign of the notorious Roman Emperor Caligula and the second term of our own President Donald Trump.

According to the ancient sources, Caligula had best been known for proclaiming himself a living god and for declaring that he would appoint his horse to the consulship, the highest office of the Roman state. Many of these later historians declared that he was mad.

Given that America’s huge legion of bitter Trump-haters has spent years denouncing our president in every possible way, they would surely endorse this historical analogy. Trump may not have yet appointed a horse to his cabinet, but as one recent commenter suggested, he had certainly done so with a donkey, putting our entire armed forces under the authority of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, an incompetent, unqualified, heavily tattooed drunken rapist.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

But the primary analogy I was actually making was a somewhat more subtle one. For centuries the Romans had always had a deep and abiding hatred of kings. So when Augustus became the first emperor in 27 B.C., he was careful to nominally retain all of Rome’s many republican institutions and treat them with great respect, thereby allowing his subjects to pretend to themselves that they were not living under a monarchy. His successor Tiberius continued that same policy.

But Caligula’s outrageous behavior and the total contempt he expressed for Rome’s traditional political institutions removed all such pretense. He revealed to even the most naive Roman citizens that their republican form of government had been transformed into the sort of absolute monarchy that their political culture had always detested.

In much the same way, Trump’s constant use of emergency executive orders has demonstrated that our American constitutional system no longer exists. On a weekly or even daily basis Trump has drastically changed the tariff tax rates on our three trillion dollars of annual imports, doing so based upon personal whim. Disregarding the civil service regulations enacted in the late nineteenth century, he has claimed the authority to fire government workers at will. He has also seized the right to remove the members of independent boards and commissions, defying a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that has prohibited such action for the last 90 years.

No past president has ever so rapidly arrogated near total governmental power to himself. By doing so without suffering any major political repercussions, Trump has demonstrated that our traditional constitutional system of checks and balances has largely disappeared.

In his numerous interviews throughout this year, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has described how our Congress has completely abdicated all its traditional Constitutional responsibilities. He has also expressed great concerns that the Supreme Court may be on the verge of overturning a century or more of its own previous rulings and blessing much of Trump’s total usurpation of Congressional authority. Just a few days ago, he reiterated these points, describing Congress as “dead.”

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Some elements of this ongoing transformation had already occurred under past presidents from Bill Clinton onwards. But these previous leaders sought to conceal what was happening and with the assistance of the mainstream media, they had generally succeeded in doing so. However, Trump has made no effort to hide the reality of the nearly all-powerful presidency he has established, revealing it to every American who has eyes to see.

Trump has also displayed elements of the megalomania long ascribed to Caligula. Our president swept clean the board of the Kennedy Center, replacing its members with his own loyalists, and the latter then voted to rename their institution “the Trump Kennedy Center.” Wags suggested that our capital might soon become known as the site of “the Trump-Washington Monument” and “the Trump-Lincoln Memorial.”

In that same article, I also noted that one sign of a political system veering towards total collapse is that it may often undergo rapid, dramatic swings from one set of extreme and legally dubious policies to those at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. I suggested that the best example of this has been our immigration policies of the last decade or two.

Although many of the most extreme such measures have recently been implemented by the Trump administration, previous Democratic administrations had sometimes taken similar steps. For example, after President Obama tried but failed to pass Congressional legislation shielding illegal immigrants who had arrived as children from deportation, he issued an executive order establishing the DACA policy that did exactly that. This bold but obviously illegal change in our immigration laws attracted the enthusiastic support of most of our mainstream media.

As a political issue, immigration had been crucial to Trump’s surprising political victories and it has become his signature domestic policy, but I’d only very briefly discussed it in that article. So I think it is now worth focusing upon Trump’s immigration policies in much greater detail as well as the reasons that issue provided such an important political opening for his populist outsider candidacy.

Decades of Bipartisan Elite Support for Open Borders

The starting point is to recognize that for decades all our national elites have embraced an “Open Borders” policy of allowing almost unlimited immigration. I explained this in a long 2011 article on that subject.

The political reality is that both major parties are enormously dependent upon the business interests that greatly benefit from the current system and are also dominated by disparate ideologies—libertarian open-borders and multicultural open-borders—whose positions tend to coincide on this issue.

As an extreme example of the bizarre ideological views of our current political elites, consider a less-publicized element of the immigration reform plan that President George W. Bush trumpeted during his 2004 reelection campaign. This provision would have allowed any foreigner anywhere in the world to legally immigrate to America if he accepted a minimum-wage job that no American were willing to fill, an utterly insane proposal which would have effectively transformed America’s minimum wage into its maximum wage. Naturally his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, saw absolutely nothing wrong with this idea, though he did criticize various other aspects of Bush’s immigration plan as being somewhat mean-spirited.

The bizarre immigration views of these elites were further brought home to me a couple of years later when I was invited to NYC to participate in a 2013 Intelligence Squared debate on exactly such a hypothetical “Open Borders” proposal regarding private employment. The event was carried on NPR and rebroadcast on various television outlets around the country, with the sponsoring organization also providing a convenient transcript.

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As I explained at the time:

Under the regular operating rules, the organizers held before and after votes of the large New York City audience, regarding the winning side as being the team that shifted the margin in their direction. Given my two decades of past writing on immigration issues, I found it quite ironic and amusing that I had been selected for the “anti-immigration” side of the debate, together with Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the eminently pro-immigrant Migration Policy Center. This indicates how yesterday’s fringe ideas have now become the accepted mainstream perspective of American elites. The resolution under consideration was certainly as extreme and radical a formulation of the views of economic libertarians as might be imagined: “Let Anyone Take A Job Anywhere.”

Under the literal interpretation of such a proposal, one can easily imagine twenty or thirty million of the world’s desperate poor coming to America within the first few years of enactment, drawn from a global pool numbering in the billions. The resulting social and economic changes would be on a scale unprecedented in human history let alone America’s past, and the potential for an utterly destructive outcome leading to the collapse of our society seems completely obvious.

Nonetheless, at the pre-debate vote the supporters of this proposal outnumbered opponents by a landslide margin of some twenty-five points, 46% to 21%, while one-third of the audience remained undecided. Indeed, during the televised pre-debate discussion between the moderator and the Intelligence Squared chairman, some doubts were expressed that any intelligent person could oppose such a sensible free market policy in labor mobility.

Once the debate began, I focused on the obvious point that the law of supply and demand ensured that a huge increase in the number of willing workers would greatly reduce their economic bargaining power against their employers. Wages for ordinary Americans have been stagnant for forty years and it is probably more than pure coincidence that the last forty years have witnessed one of America’s greatest waves of foreign immigration. Adopt a proposal that immediately increases such immigration levels by a factor of five or ten, and America’s minimum wage would be transformed into its maximum wage, with the natural outcome being economic devastation for most working Americans.

Certainly America’s affluent and highly educated urban elite—the sort of New Yorkers attending the debate—would benefit in the short run from enacting a policy that drastically cut the share of the national income going to shopkeepers, nannies, construction workers, and probably 90% of all other Americans. But the eventual social consequences of the total impoverishment of the American middle and working classes might lead to the sort of extreme political reaction we sometimes read about in the history books.

Such points might seem totally obvious to me, but many of the audience members had seemingly never encountered them before, and the results were striking. After ninety minutes of hearing both sides of the issue, there was a swing of thirty-two points toward our opposed position, and we won handily. As a point of comparison, at the reception prior to the show we had been told that the largest previous swing at any Intelligence Squared debate had been the shift of eighteen points that occurred during a 2006 debate on the nature of Hamas in the Mid East conflict.

I have little doubt that those many hundreds of earnest New Yorkers who decided to spend their time and money to attend an evening policy debate rather than see a Broadway show or watch Gravity in 3-D, consider themselves well-informed people, who regularly read The New York Times and many of the leading liberal opinion magazines. But such purportedly “liberal” outlets studiously avoid mentioning that a massive influx of foreign workers would be an economic catastrophe for the bulk of the American population. Hence the apparent surprise of so much of the audience at the notion that a huge increase in the supply of workers might produce a sharp decline in the market value of their labor and the income they receive.

• Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words

Our bipartisan political elites stubbornly continued their support for this lunatic open borders policy, thereby eventually providing a huge political opportunity for a rank outsider such as Donald Trump who was willing to challenge it. Trump very effectively used that issue to seize the Republican nomination in 2016 and then against all odds won the White House in November of that same year. A few weeks before that shocking victory, I explained the demographic and ideological roots of his tremendous success:

In the year 1915 America was over 85% white, and a half-century later in 1965, that same 85% ratio still nearly applied. But partly due to the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of that year, America’s demographics changed very rapidly over the following five decades. By 2015 there had been a 700% increase in the total number of Hispanics and Asians and the black population was nearly 100% larger, while the number of (non-Hispanic) whites had grown less than 25%, with much of even that small increase due to the huge influx of Middle Easterners, North Africans, and other non-European Caucasians officially classified by our U.S. Census as “white.” As a consequence of these sharply divergent demographic trends, American whites have fallen to little more than 60% of the total, and are now projected to become a minority within just another generation or two, already reduced to representing barely half of all children under the age of 10.

Demographic changes so enormous and rapid on a continental scale are probably unprecedented in all human history, and our political establishment was remarkably blind for having failed to anticipate the possible popular reaction. Over the last twelve months, Donald Trump, a socially liberal New Yorker, has utilized the immigration issue to seize the GOP presidential nomination against the vehement opposition of nearly the entire Republican establishment, conservative and moderate alike, and at times his campaign has enjoyed a lead in the national polls, placing him within possible reach of the White House. Instead of wondering how a candidate came to take advantage of that particular issue, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves why it hadn’t happened sooner.

The answer is that for various pragmatic and ideological reasons the ruling elites of both our major parties have largely either ignored or publicly welcomed the demographic changes transforming the nation they jointly control. Continuous heavy immigration has long been seen as an unabashed positive both by open borders libertarians of the economically focused Right and also by open borders multiculturalists of the socially focused Left, and these ideological positions permeate the community of policy experts, staffers, donors, and media pundits who constitute our political ecosphere.

Earlier this year, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an elderly individual with unabashed socialistic views, was interviewed by Vox‘s Ezra Klein, and explained that “of course” heavy foreign immigration—let alone “open borders”—represented the economic dream of extreme free market libertarians such as the Koch brothers, since that policy would obviously drive down the wages of workers and greatly advantage Capital at the expense of Labor. These notions scandalized his neoliberal interlocutor, and the following day another Vox colleague joined in the attack, harshly denouncing the candidate’s views as “ugly” and “wrongheaded,” while instead pointing to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal as the proper font of progressive economic doctrine. Faced with such sharp attacks by young and influential Democratic pundits less than half his age, Sanders soon retreated from his simple statement of fact, and henceforth avoided raising the immigration issue during the remainder of his campaign.

Only a brash, self-funded billionaire contemptuous of establishment wisdom would challenge this bipartisan immigration consensus among our political elites, and only a prominent celebrity could launch his campaign with sufficient visibility to achieve a media breakthrough. This seemed an unlikely combination of traits to find in one individual, but the unlikely occurred, and our national politics has been upended.

There had already been strong previous indications of this smoldering political volcano among voters, though these signs were repeatedly ignored or discounted by the DC Republican apparatchiks who spent their time attending each others’ receptions and fundraisers. During the 2014 election cycle, immigration was a key issue behind the stunning defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who lost to an unknown primary challenger whom he outspent 40-to-1, constituting one of the greatest upsets in Congressional history. Prior to that, anti-immigration Tea Party insurgents had ended the long careers of incumbent Republican senators Bob Bennett of Utah in 2010 and Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2012.

• A “Grand Bargain” on Immigration Reform?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2016 • 4,700 Words

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