JD Vance is no slouch as a debater. We’d think even Tim Walz would grant that much after getting shellacked last night by the Donald’s running mate.
We will also grant that both men were civil, even midwestern “nice”. But that just goes to prove that most of the blame for the nastiness that pervades the current political process in America, and which has thereby buried the real issues, lies with the Donald. He’s just an incorrigibly bombastic, ill-mannered lout who substitutes name-calling, slogan-checking and bragging for anything that even remotely sounds like a policy discussion.
Of course, when it comes to silencing the real issues you can add to the mix the fact that the mainstream media faithfully shunts aside anything outside the UniParty’s “Overton Window” of permissible discussion.
Thus, the two network harpies who moderated the debate devoted a preponderant share of the time to secondary or non-issues like abortion, gun control, immigration and J6. At the same time, they did not ask a single question about—
- the nation’s catastrophic public debt and massive structural deficits as far as the eye can see.
- the rogue central bank that has shackled the US economy with bubbles, inflation, debt and mal-distribution of windfall wealth.
- a bloated Warfare State that is bleeding the Treasury dry and pushing the world ever closer to WWIII.
- the newfound eagerness of the Washington ruling class to suppress dissent and literally suspend the bill of rights with respect to speech, assembly, worship, property rights and 4th Amendment’s safeguards against unreasonable search and seizure.
As it happens, however, border apprehensions under Harris-Biden have been quadruple those under Trump on a month-after-month basis, as is made blatantly evident by the blue versus red areas of the chart below. But if you have your magnifying glass handy you can also see that for the month of August 2024 the 58,038 border apprehensions were slightly lower than the 75,316 during Trump’s final month in office.
But talk about cherry-picking! Harris’ running mate compared nearly the highest month under Trump with an aberrantly low month under Harris-Biden and than proclaimed “we won”.
That’s not even school-yard bullshit, but don’t blame the hapless Coach Walz. Harris made the same unfact-checked claim in the presidential debate.
Our real point is far larger, however. The back and forth between the two candidates on the immigration issue is merely illustrative of how the UniParty engages in make-pretend political combat, while ignoring the substance of this and nearly every other serious issue facing the nation.
In the case of the ersatz battle over immigration, it needs be noted that the red area above didn’t happen because the Donald failed to complete his big beautiful Wall or hired too few border patrol agents. And the far greater surge in the blue area wasn’t really owing to Biden’s alleged repeal of 84 Trump Executive Orders, as Vance argued, or due to Trump’s sabotaging of the so-called Bipartisan Immigration Reform bill, as Walz and Harris keep saying.
No, those are just phony partisan debating points that are, as Kamala should say, “unburdened” by the economics which underlie the chart above. Stated differently, there is a big economic “sucking sound to the north” that is pulling desperately poor Latin American workers and families into the structurally labor-short American economy north of the Rio Grande.
But just to remind, the US absorbs more than 4.5 million legal immigrants every year. In 2023 this included 1.17 million permanent green card holders, along with 3.38 million temporary visas recipients for student enrollments, temporary work, cultural exchange etc.
Virtually all of these legal immigrants arrive on Delta, United etc or Greyhound buses and other forms of commercial transportation. They don’t use the services of criminal coyotes, wade through the Rio Grande with suitcases balanced on their heads or sneak along the Arizona desert in the dead of night. Nor do they otherwise cause chaos at the border or engage in anti-social behavior once they are settled inside the country at locations from coast-to-coast.
This massive, smoothly-conducted, trouble-free inflow of 4.6 million immigrants in 2023 was processed through upwards of 200 US embassies and consulates around the world, but especially via the 50 or so State Department locations in Mexico and down through central and South America. The green card holders, in particular, were comprised of family members of US citizens or residents and various categories of skilled workers in science, technology, medical and other professional fields, plus the so-called diversity lottery conducted in nearly every country on the planet.
Needless to say, there were not many criminals, mental patients, drug dealers or other social misfits among these 4.6 million legal immigrants in 2023 because as part of the application process at all the locations indicated by the stars, dots and squares on the map below they were vetted for compatibility with a law-abiding temporary or permanent stay in the United States. The misfits got screened-out in the preponderance of cases.
US Embassies, Consulates and Other State Department Locations Abroad
The problem, of course, is that America needs regular workers and even unskilled factory, warehouse, fast food, construction, housekeeping and lawn-care hands, too, not just Indian and Korean PhD’s. In fact, so few babies were born to native American families during the last 10 to 40 years that the supply of native born workers has just plain flat-lined.
As shown below, since May 2019 there has barely been a single native-born worker (black line) added to the US employment rolls, even as the foreign-born work force (purple line) has grown by nearly 4 million or 14%. So there is no mystery as to why there are throngs of young and middle-aged men, with or without their families, at both the border ports of entry and in the illegal stretches in-between. To wit, owing to sheer demographics, the US has become a giant magnet for unskilled and semi-skilled workers from abroad.
Index of Foreign-Born And Native-Born Employment Since May 2019
And this gets us to the utterly broken and dysfunctional Federal immigration laws and system. The US needs millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, but the giant legal immigration system described above provides less than 5,000 slots per year for such workers. That’s not even a piddling drop in the bucket relative to need.
But given both the ingenuity of people and markets, what amounts to an economic vacuum gets filled. That is to say, job-seekers come to the border claiming to be refugees and asylum seekers because that’s the only legal path to the millions of unfilled jobs from Seattle to Sarasota.
Needless to say, there is a nasty Catch-22 in this asylum ruse. To get in the cue for legal asylum you first have to break the law by crossing the border. And once you do that you join about 1.1 million other “illegals” waiting for their hearing and asylum claim adjudication in a line that might take years to complete. In the interim, you are put on “parole” in the US with virtually no vetting as to whether you are criminal or law-abiding worker, even as you join the count of 11 million so-called “illegals” about which politicians endlessly bloviate.
Then again, suppose the “unskilled worker” quota was expanded to, say, 400,000 per year, which would equate to just 0.25% of the employed labor force. And applicants were required to apply just like other green card and temporary visa holders at the 200 stars, dots and square locations on the State Department map above and be vetted for background checks just like the 4.6 million visa-holders admitted in 2023.
Alas, the throngs at the border would dry up virtually overnight. Work-seekers would no longer pretend to be refugees and would not need the services of coyotes and the criminal cartels to get to the border crossings. They would go to the nearest US consulate in their own country, instead, and upon the receipt of a unskilled worker quota would spend far less on a Delta ticket from, say, Honduras than they would on the current criminal transit system.
Moreover, with the crowds reduced by upwards of 95% at the ports of entry and illegal crossing points in-between, the Border Patrol would once again be positioned to do its law enforcement job. That is to say, the only migrants left at the border would be drug dealers, criminals and other social misfits who got screened out at the consulates. And these could be arrested, cuffed and sent packing back to their home countries.
In short, a large scale Guest Worker program operated in this manner would at once enable migrant workers to fill the nation’s pressing labor shortage while keeping criminals and drug-dealers out—even as it put the high paid bureaucrats in the State Department’s foreign locations to work doing something productive.
Needless to say, such a rational solution to the border problem is of interest to neither the Dems nor the GOP and therefore never comes up in the endless noisy debates about the so-called border crisis and invasion.
Self-evidently, the Democrats are looking for voters dependent upon government supplied cash and services, and actually don’t even want to accommodate the inflow of genuine workers. That’s because the unions have long said a loud “nyet”.
At the same time, the Trumpified GOP wants a political issue that can be positioned to scare the bejesus out of everyday Americans hard-pressed by the failing, inflationary economy that has been fostered by the spend, borrow and print policies of the UniParty.
We were hoping that the highly intelligent, reasonably informed and independent-minded JD Vance would rise above Trumpian demagoguery when the issue arose repeatedly last night. Alas, he ended up sounding just like the Donald, sans the nasty rhetoric.
Meanwhile, did young Mr. Vance go on the attack against the Washington spenders and soaring public debt? Or the unelected money-printers at the Fed who have become the handmaids of Wall Street speculators and Washington spenders? Or even the new Dem War Party that has now welcomed neocon cretins like Dick Cheney to their campaign?
No, he did not. As the insightful Anton Wahlman penned this AM, Walz’ boast that the Harris campaign now enthusiastically embraces both the Welfare State (Bernie Sanders) and the Warfare State (Dick Cheney), and therefore is heading us balls-to-the walls toward national bankruptcy, provided an opening for a crushing blow to his opponent.
JD Vance should have opened his closing statement by saying “Tim Walz just said that Kamala Harris has built a new coalition consisting of Dick Cheney to Bernie Sanders. That’s war and communism. Ladies and Gentlemen, I rest my case. If you want Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders, war and communism, by all means vote for Harris-Walz. But if you don’t want war and communism, then we are the only alternative. With us, you get peace and capitalism, with them you get war and communism. He said it himself.”
Well, maybe next time. And while he is at it maybe next time he will also stop listening to those Washington-based Republican strategists and consultants who obviously told him to pull his punches on issue after issue that goes to the heart of liberty and prosperity.
So when an in-the-tank moderator asks about Trump’s statement that Climate Change is a Hoax, he would do well to say, “hell, yes, and its going to push your driving expense and energy costs through the roof”.
Likewise, would he please not say Trump rescued ObamaCare and that the Federal government is happy to force you into giant health insurance pools so you can subsidize neighbors who thrive on fast food consumed night after night on their TV room Barcaloungers?
And then there is the maternity leave mandates to all employers. That, JD, is old-fashioned Minnesota Farmer-Labor socialism. You’re agin that, too!
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
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