Alien Invasion: The Government Makes it Illegal but Wants to Keep it Happening

Trump is fighting it, but even his Republican Party has long wanted it and turned a blind eye. As a result, the problem has become so embedded throughout our economy that fixing it could be deadly.

I am glad to see Trump working on a plan to end illegal immigration and deport those who have been here for too long already, but that could come with some serious immediate damage that could devastate the US economy, which we have to think our way through.

The negatives of immigration

To lead off, I want to be clear that my interest in deportation are several and have been a concern all my adult life:

1. I think many areas of our nation are already overpopulated with water resources stretched to their limits, roads that already have way too many lanes filled to their limits, etc. We need to deal with reality, which means we don’t need more people. When I was a kid in school we were always reading about the dangers of overpopulation. Yet, we’re adding millions of people per year—no small addition—besides those born here.

2. So many people have entered the US illegally that I have no doubt that—unless terrorists are genuinely incredibly stupid—people with evil intentions have already taken advantage of that open back door. To the extent that Democratic administrations in the past have diminished the significance of that worry, I believe they have foolishly put our nation at risk. You cannot know what you don’t know, so their assurances are absurd when they have no idea who many of the illegals are.

3. Immigrants, especially illegal ones, have long been allowed to live in the US in order to help American corporations keep down their costs in order to help rich shareholders get even richer, including, of course, the corporate executives. Illegal immigrants provide a ready peasant population. (When you are illegal that is what you are — a peasant, paid lower than anyone with no citizen rights and often no land or home that you own. You are the lowest paid, underprivileged, class in America by design. That’s why the government wants them illegal so they have to accept what they get and keep their heads down.)

4. Because corporations are paying as little as possible, these immigrants often burden our welfare systems so that the general public is providing corporate welfare in order to make the rich executives richer by making it so they don’t have to pay for full medical coverage, etc.

5. When you crowd cultures together and crowd people together, you always wind up with more crime and more violence. Establishing a true peasant class so we can all buy cheaper underwear creates the enormous social problem of a more deeply divided society with more unrest. The peasants ultimately revolt in one way or another but so do the misplaced American workers. Sometimes they revolt against their illegal competitors.

6. The reason “Americans don’t want these jobs” is because immigration creates broad wage suppression by design. Even legal aliens are willing to work much cheaper. Naturally, American’s don’t want to compete against dirt-cheap labor. Many farm jobs, for example, involve operating heavy equipment that many Americans enjoy operating, but immigrants can drive tractors and harvesters all day for a lot less money. It’s not all hand-picking. Americans that don’t work the jobs taken by aliens because of low farm pay add to the labor supply for other jobs, helping suppress wages there, too.

Those are just some of my main reasons for having been against rampant legal immigration and all illegal immigration for decades.

The positives of immigration

That said, I want to make one point really clear. I love having immigrant friends. I think people of all races and especially mixed races are often incredibly beautiful, talented, smart, and hard working and often have solid ethics. Many are people of faith, compassionate, kind and fun. Some of the most beautiful and talented people I know are of mixed race. So, there is NOTHING racial or nationalistic in my reasons.

Immigrants can sometimes bring special skills that are in short supply. Trump wants to keep the smart ones. So, that’s good so long as they are not competing against equally smart Americans who want the same jobs as a way of keeping labor costs down in high-paying technical professions. Sometimes those executives in those professions claim they cannot find enough workers. Maybe they just don’t pay enough to attract them.

I was brought up to believe “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” That simple Sunday-School song always made sense to me and took root in my soul. Some times the simple things say it best. I have always believed God chose to create a flower garden with many shapes and colors because variety is beautiful.

If I were a single guy, I’d have no hesitation marrying a legal immigrant. And, I believe, since America loves to (somewhat arrogantly) think of itself as “the leader of the free world,” American citizens should be free to marry any security-vetted immigrant they choose with a fairly SIMPLE path to citizenship (so long as it is within a system that prevents serial marriages as a way around immigration laws and even as form of commerce).

If we are the international leaders we claim to be, then we should be able to fall in love with and marry whomever we choose when we are out on international business or diplomacy. The government should have no say in the romance of our lives or the building of our families, other than watching out for the nation’s security. Marriage is the best way to bring in people of other cultures, if you’re going to have some immigration, because immigrants who marry in have familial ties that makes them want to be a part of our own culture, even as they bring their culture, and want to see their children succeed in this culture. They don’t remain separate.

That list isn’t intended as exhaustive, but just as an example of the goodness that can come from immigration, too.

Devastating effects of mass deportation

Now here are the problems that have to be considered because they are math, not emotions. We have industries that have become completely reliant on immigrant labor in order to stay viable. That is because we have wrongly turned a blind eye on immigrant labor for decades, enabling those industries to from around models that now require abundant cheep labor. A sudden change will wipe them out because it is impossible to change something so systemic that quickly. It’s just not in the numbers for that kind of replacement to be possible in all industries.

Nowhere is migrant labor more ingrained into the economic model than agriculture, and no industry has less time flexibility for making sudden changes because crops have to be planted and harvested on a set schedule. You cannot delay a month in order to find or attract replacement labor or to figure out how on earth you will pay the higher wages necessary. And we need our farms to survive in order for all of us to survive.

Farm groups in the United States are warning President-elect Donald Trump that his mass deportation plan could upend the food supply with nearly half of farm workers lacking legal status….

Nearly half of the nation's 2 million farm workers are undocumented migrants, and many others in sectors like meatpacking and dairy also lack legal status according to the Department of Labor and Agriculture.

Sure, we could suddenly import a lot more food, and let the crops in America rot or go unplanted in the first place and let the farms fold and sell off to housing developers, but that will enormously damage our independence and our national security, making ourselves entirely dependent on other nations for our food. It will also create global famine because we are a massive agricultural exporter. It will hugely raise the cost of food by destroying a large supply. I think we all know that cannot happen.

Rep. John Duarte, a Republican who represents the Central Valley in California, said that small towns would "collapse" if Trump's deportation plans were to go into effect, a stark cry from MAGA hardliners who claim immigration hurts American workers.

He suggested that Trump's administration should not target immigrant workers who've been in the country longer than five years and maintained a clean criminal record.

While this dependency on cheap immigrant labor should never have been allowed to develop in the first place. It has. It formed into dependency over the course of decades. The alternative is that farmers all hire local citizens, but that will require a lot of local citizens, as agriculture is very labor intensive—likely more citizens than are even close to being available—and it will require huge labor cost increases in order to attract exactly the Americans who do not want these jobs solely because these jobs don’t pay nearly enough to begin with due to decades of wage suppression. Farms probably could have adjusted to those costs and evolved around them over time, but never in one quick change. Not even close to being possible.

The article quoted in this article states multiple times that Americans don’t want those jobs, but why should Americans want those jobs at that wage when it would require they live as those immigrant workers have to live? I wouldn’t want that. Would you? So, of course, they don’t under present circumstances.

That means the price of food would to have to rise extremely rapidly in order to attract enough legal laborers, and there probably are not even that many unemployed laborers out there even if wages skyrocketed. Therefore, to attract enough people to replace the illegal migrant workers, you have to raise wages enough to pull legal laborers away from other industries, which means those industries, in order to survive, will have to compete with higher wages. That means we will not simply see high inflation in food prices (along with shortages) but will see wage-based inflation in other industries as well.

Those higher costs, of course, are exactly why politicians (Republicans as much as Democrats) turned a blind eye toward illegal immigration for all these decades. Had they not, these industries would have adjusted all along the way and found models that work in order to exist. No doubt the balance would be different than what we have today, and prices would be higher. We might have to eat out less, own a smaller boat or no boat, not have such a large RV and live with a somewhat smaller house as our grandparents likely did with three kids to a bedroom or with less luxurious finishings.

However, all of society would have evolved around that reality with time to adjust, so it would now just be what we are used to. On the other hand, wages would be higher from the literal ground up for many, so maybe it would be a more equitable society as the upper levels seem to benefit the most by having a peasant class.

The problem with mass deportation is that we are looking to correct many decades of economic evolution in just a few years. The adjustments required will be massive, so the economic disruption will be massive and likely chaotic.

The creative destruction to some industries will be more bearable than others. The tourist and hospitality industry relies almost as heavily on migrant labor as agriculture. Hotel cleaning and service staff include a lot of migrant workers. (Maybe many are legal, so won’t be affected, but likely government sweeps will show a lot are not legal.) If those restaurants and hotels close, we will all experience ways in which we miss some of them, especially the restaurants, which we use even when not staying at a hotel, but we’ll live; whereas, with the collapse of farming, it’s not so clear we’ll live.

I don’t want to lose my favorite restaurants or not be able to stay at my favorite hotel or use its restaurant. This is a loss of lifestyle to me; but it is a price we may pay with the kind of large-scale deportations Trump is promising. On the other hand, he’s a businessman, and I imagine many of his own hospitality-based properties have some illegal employees and will be impacted by the wage increases that have to happen in order to replace them with enough local citizen or legal non-citizen workers to fill all the holes. So, maybe he’ll be wise about how quickly we can make these changes without destroying industries.

I’m just saying we have to fully anticipate the economic costs that will be coming and may want to temper our correction of this problem that was decades in the making to a pace that gives industries time to adjust … especially agriculture, which will face a huge amount of adjustment. One of the articles below (quoted above) lays out the burdens this adjustment will create on farming.

How to go about deportation with the least damage

We certainly should stop all new illegal entries and even greatly curb the rate of legal immigration because that provides new labor supply, and that will have an impact on businesses and prices. If we lose a few businesses that cannot go legal because they have been illegitimate for so long, too bad. So long! However, we need to apply a lot of realistic foresight to the broad economic ruin we could create through entire industries if we correct past illegal immigration that has accumulated for so long in one fell swoop.

I say be rapid with limiting new immigration, but be practical and methodical about correcting decades of past illegal immigration, or you’ll create chaotic destruction that may lay waste in ways that are visible across the landscape for more than a decade.

Obviously, get any clear security risks out of the country in a hurry. Launch them across the border with a catapult if you have to. I’m being a bit tongue in cheek, but I don’t care that whatever you do hurts them, if there are no readily affordable quick alternatives to getting rid of them, because they risk hurting us and are criminals just for being here in the manner by which they came. They don’t even need court dates. Reform the law if you have to so they don’t even have the opportunity of court dates: If someone is a potential security risk here without proper papers, they go back! Simple. There is nothing to try in court because they have no right to be here. Period.

Since we can turn them away at the border without a trial, there is no reason we should not be able to throw them out of the country without a trial. It is absurd that some people argue that we owe illegal aliens legal process. What they get is legal processing … being simply turned away at the border being turned away or being transported via the least expensive means possible if they already made it inside—hopefully at their cost (but you can’t get blood out of a turnip) or their nation’s cost. If no one will pick up their transportation tab, maybe catapults as a last resort. We can put them inside inflatable double-walled clear plastic balls so they can bounce on impact ; )

I am not open to any argument that we owe illegal aliens any kind of process. There is no reason US citizens should be burdened with any more cost of processing risky immigrants than necessary.

If, on the other hand, we have nothing indicating known risks, we must be realistic about the destruction we create for ourselves via deportation. Go too slow, and deportation never happens … as has always been the tendency. Go too fast, and we destroy our heavily addicted and dependent economy.

I’m not suggesting we be inhumane and am just kidding about the catapults, but we owe them nothing. So, the fastest humane way out is just fine and at their cost if possible since that is the risk they chose to take.

Several somewhat related articles are included in the highlights below that describe the economic impacts of the Trump Tax & Tariff plan, as I’ll name it, showing how much tariffs particularly impact lower income and middle-class citizens and telling how school districts plan to resist deportations. (Always wonderful to hear that our government institutions believe it is their job to refuse to obey the laws of the land by resisting their own government as it enforces them. Surely, the view of enlightened scholars. Harumph!)

Other articles tell how Denmark is going to make it even harder on farmers by taxing farts and burps, and Republicans are already lining up to battle over what gets cut in Trump’s budget, and how that budget will increase the government deficit, as we talked about yesterday, by $5-trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Republicans, as predicted, are saying the new cuts will pay for themselves. This stuff is so sadly predictable. One positive, in light of that discussion, however, is that Trump is proposing to eliminate taxes on Social Security income, which should never have been taxed in the first place. That taxation policy began under Reagan. It should never have happened because Social Security income is merely a return of your own investment of money you already earned, which was already taxed once.

The argument that you are not getting your own money back so it is not the same money is as lame as saying that, when you take ten bucks out of your bank account, it’s not your money because that particular ten-dollar bill came out of someone else’s wallet when it went into the bank. It’s not the same greenback you took to the bank. (Yet, that is the argument that has been used to say taxing SS income is not double taxation. You’re not getting your money that was stored in a vault, you’re getting repaid with money someone else just put in. What a heap of horse manure that argument is.)

Meanwhile, Biden just gave Intel $8-billion worth of corporate welfare today, covered by taxpayers (as debt we’re on the hook for), to build a chip factory in the US. You would think the fabulously rich could build their own factories. Even Trump pointed that out in a conversation with Joe Rogan, saying it was ridiculous. That kind of government-private co-investment is called Fascist economics.

If we need more open jobs in that region, maybe we should get the deportations going, rather than pay rich people to build factories … so long as we’re careful not to saw off our own feet in the process.

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