UNITED NATIONS – One of the axioms of political strategy is to define your opponent before he defines himself – and to do it in the most divisive, unflattering way possible.
Thus, the Democrats, with the help of the corporate media, are framing immigration as a race issue. They say those seeking to limit the number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. are racists and xenophobes who hate non-whites.
The reaction over Trump’s “Put American Workers First” plan shows the New Left has captured the Democratic Party – and has the GOP establishment singing from its hymnbook, too.
Race and identity politics are hallmarks of the New Left of the 1960s. While the Old Left hewed to the Marxist dogma of “class struggle” between workers and capital, the New Left sought to exploit racial divisions to foment socialist revolution.
Now they are taking a page from the old playbook and using immigration to divide America, even Americans who work for a living, along racial lines.
(It’s worth noting that the old leftist Bernie Sanders isn’t buying it. To the horror of progressives and their allies in the immigration lobby, Bernie opposes open borders, saying it’s a tool the corporate elites used to get the cheap labor they crave.)
But GOP leaders have stepped into the leftist race trap and fret that talking about immigration risks “losing the Hispanic vote.”
Who said anything about Hispanics? Or about any racial group for that matter?
The Trump plan from the policy shop of Sen. Jeff Sessions is about defending American workers – of every race.
Specifically, it’s about limiting the number of people entering an already over-saturated U.S. job market, both legally and illegally.
At a time when a record number of Americans are unemployed or underemployed, when millions have given up looking for a job, why is our government issuing a million legal work permits a year to foreigners? Why are we bringing in even more foreign “guest workers” without even asking if there are qualified Americans who can do the job?
Putting American workers first is a nonpartisan, nonracial issue.
A recent poll asked: “If a business has a hard time getting employees, should they import labor from abroad or raise wages and improve working conditions?” The response was clear: 75 percent of all respondents – and 61 percent of Hispanics and 83 percent of African-Americans – said raise wages, not import more workers.
It’s not surprising, since the glut of immigrants in the workforce impacts those African-Americans, Hispanics and others at the low end of the pay scale.
Americans of all races who work for a living understand that unrestricted immigration and so-called free trade are two sides of the same coin, pitting them against cheap foreign labor at home and abroad.
Nevertheless, at a time when there is a global overcapacity of steel, autos, silicon chips and other manufactured and agricultural goods, our government is manically pursuing so-called free trade deals to open the American market to more imports that threaten to bankrupt American producers and workers.
The candidate that wins the confidence of working Americans wins.
Ronald Reagan understood this. When it came time to defend Americans working in semiconductor foundries and on automobile assembly lines, or to sacrifice them to some utopian theory of “free trade,” he told the globalist academics to take a walk.
Then, when the union bosses endorsed his Democratic opponent, the rank and file turned and became Reagan Democrats.
Any candidate who hopes to top Trump needs to speak to the concerns of working Americans and oppose the poisonous trade and immigration policies both parties have pursued.
That’s also a good way to win the White House.
