the american hunger games
and the math of ending illegal immigration
there has been a sudden and remarkably lockstep move from the talking point of “the illegals flooding america are not so bad” to the talking point of “if you expel all the illegals it’s going to be a calamity!”
i find this fascinating on several levels, not least of which is the desperation to try to convince the working class that “people coming to take your job while staying for free on your dime is actually good for you!”
it’s hunger games level delusion from a media mavens class so dangerously out of touch that they cannot even seem to hide their contempt and their NIMBY level unconcern.
“it’s not happening” failed so now we arrive at:
“it’s some flyover town and just a few apartment complexes, it’s not like it was martha’s vineyard or somehting!”
and cometh the hour, cometh the hillbilly singing elegies for these self-immolating platoons of prevaricating punditry. they have not seen his like in many a long year. and they have no idea what to do with him.
welcome back to “saying the loud part out loud.”
you’re going to like it here.
“unfettered immigration has effects, but not where i live.”
this is really the clincher, no?
martha raddatz’s vineyards (she actually lives in arlington) remain pristine, it’s just the grubby places where irrelevant people reside where complexes get taken over by criminal gangs and held hostage while local police fret and fumble but do precious little.
seriously, how can this have been allowed to persist for hours much less days and weeks? and can anyone seriously argue that if this happened in mcclean or potomac that it would not have been over in a matter of minutes amidst SWAT team smackdown?
not in the “capital city” where the “capital people” live. nosirree bob.
but for the rest of you?
this is fairly predictable. they want nannies and fruit pickers and house cleaners and laborers of many kinds and any collateral damage you may suffer for it is, well, collateral.
hard for you, good for me, too bad, so sad, let’s get some brunch.
vote harder next time! swearsies, change is just around the corner.
not terribly interesting. pedestrian even.
what interests me is the sudden shift to “OMG, if we kick them out it’s going to be economic collapse!”
this is, frankly, bunk, but it’s also fascinating in both what it reveals about the views of this class and of their sudden acceptance that they are probably about to lose control of these choices. the rear-guard fight to normalize (and legalize) illicit immigrant occupation and stir up resistance to the obvious act of “no longer supporting and subsidizing vast cadres of illegal immigrants” and instead “sending them home” has begun.
this is probably because the fear about election outcome is getting acute among those who get to see real polling and know what’s coming.
as many of you know i have been and remain quite pro-immigration.
my great grandparents were immigrants, they and my grandparents struggled through the great depression, and my family is a near perfect arc of the american dream from bootstrap working class on up.
as a matter of morality, i think others should have this chance too, but not without struggle and not on everyone else’s dime. US immigration was hard. it was scary, risky, and fraught. that brought a certain kind of person, a person who had skills and grit and who had already internalized the american ethos.
“here’s a free hotel room, a $30k EBT card, a cell phone, and 3 get out of jail free passes if you happen to rape, rob, or assault someone” brings a very different sort of folks and central and south america are literally emptying their prisons into america. where did you think these venezuelan gangbangers came from?
662,566 imported criminals and these are just the ones we know about and that are actually on the ICE docket. reality is surely many multiples of this.
this is being done because this same precious media and political aristocracy simply cannot imagine life without “cheap menials” and cannot do basic math or economics, which is, of course, to be expected
but get to 1m26s in this interview and the comment is SO telling: “wait, you think americans would do these jobs!?!” it’s outright incredulity.
she does not know anyone like that. she sees “working in construction” as somehow implausible for the US workforce so much of which is now being paid to sit home with imaginary ailments like “long covid.”
wanna see some wild data? take a look at this:
2.7 million people started claiming “disability” from jan 2021 to aug 2023, 1.5% of the US workforce (the bottom graph is just the top graph divided by US labor force). 5% of working age folks are claiming “disability.” this is a staggering number with no historical precedent in the US. standard for making this claim dropped like a rock and the length of benefits soared. cough a bit, say you feel unwell, mumble “long covid” and off you go.
but back to economic illiteracy:
let’s use her facts.
25 million illegals. 1/3 of the construction workforce in the US is hispanic. OK, but that says nothing about their legality. “a large proportion are undocumented.” that means nothing. what’s “a large proportion?” 5%? 10%? half? half seems extreme. i’d bet it’s 25% tops and likely far less for any actual skilled labor. let’s take 5-25% as our plausible range for hispanics in construction that are also illegals.
the US construction workforce is 8.3 million.
1/3 of that is 2.8 million (rounding up). that’s the hispanic count.
so using 5-25%, somewhere between 56,000 and 700,000 workers in US construction might be illegal. i’d guess the number is ~250k or so, but let’s take 700k to steel man this argument.
700k = 8.5% of the construction workforce and almost certainly predominantly the least productive part.
now let’s consider 25 million illegal immigrants. let’s say they live 4 to a dwelling. that’s 6.25 million required dwellings to house this influx.
1.4 million new housing units were built in the US in 2023.
see the problem?
yeah.
incremental demand from illegals who make up less than 10% of the builders in the US is equal to 4.5 years of total new supply.
and the annualized rate is dropping like a rock. it’s now 1.2 million. this purportedly vast influx of new labor is not even keeping housing production at the level of the 1980’s when the US had 100 million fewer people. (230mm vs 330mm now)
but let’s come back to “if we kick them out, homes will become unaffordable.”
the idea that removing any meaningful portion of 6.25 million homes of demand and perhaps 140k of home building capacity (10% of 1.4mm, again a steel manned case) would result in home prices spiking is hallucinatory. it’s made up monkey math.
you can tell it’s getting really bad when you have to tag in the big guns of economic disinformation. and tagged in they have been.
longtime gatopal™ kuppy was kind enough to share this:
imagine trying to use the disruption of a world war to end all wars (not such a great prediction there, huh?) and the devastation of the prime of a nation’s youth on top of its infrastructure and industrial base to try to parallel the unthinkable carnage of “returning the US to its pre-covid population structure.”
it’s not hard to see why prevaricating paul bravely disabled replies on this twitter post. he’s a full on ideological fraud.
any vestiges of "economist" that once may have existed within him have been subsumed by regime worship and pursuit of sinecure.
krugman is merely an apologist for the commissariat to the point where having him weigh in on a claim constitutes a shibboleth for “what follows will be pure bovine excrement if cows ate gas station mexican food and washed it down with mentos and sprite.”
the full court press is on to make any deviation from election invasion look scary.
but it’s not.
it’s just propaganda from the same people who told you that burying bottles with $1 bills in them and making people dig them up or knocking down bridges so we could create jobs rebuilding them would be economic stimulus.
sure, these immigrants are consumers, but they are also consumers of largess and progenitors of inflation and public debt. how much of what they buy is coming out of the public purse? how are they affecting the prices of everything from rent to food to car insurance? (not that they buy it, but the uninsured aspect affects yours) how about the strains on infrastructure, especially schools and hospitals, from their large scale presence? how about the fact that we all but inevitably imported multiples more criminals than construction workers?
we OK with that?
the money for all this comes from somewhere and taxing the most productive to fund lives of torpor and criminality for the least productive and most demanding is not a path to prosperity.
nobody’s “fair share” of taxes ought to include “$10,000/room/month ($128k/year) for housing illegals.
i’m not sure anyone really knows, but some estimates place the housing cost for putting up illegals at $451 billion in 2023. if this is even close to correct (and it could be) that that’s a staggering number, nearly 8% of the federal budget. (though a lot of this was paid by states or localities)
whatever the number, the whole thing has become an epic racket padding the pockets of select interests and donors at the expense of john q public.
it’s grotesque, counter productive grift and appallingly unamerican.
give us your poor and huddled masses yearning to be free? sure. you betcha.
but they better come correct and bring their A game and stand upon their own two feet seeking to make a better life for themselves and their posterity, not arrive as would be fagans picking the pockets of prosperity and thereby ending it.
that is not a game americans should be required to play.
Follow the money on Mayorkas. He used to serve on the board of HIAS, one of the largest human trafficking NGOs. They're all in on it - Democrats get voters, businesses get cheap labor, non-profits get government funding. It's not happening, it's happening a little but it's no big deal, it's happening and it's a good thing, you're racist for complaining.
As Americans work harder to get poorer, is it sound policy to allow, and even incentivize, millions of new illegal workers to compete against American citizens in the job market?
This path is totally unsustainable. In the prior era of low rates and monetary repression from the Fed, large deficits seemed manageable. No longer. The costs now of financing this ballooning debt will quite literally impoverish our children.
Incidentally, it is not only against the law for illegals to come into our country, it is also against the law for them to receive most of the handouts but laws don't seem to matter to Democrats nor to sanctuary cities and states.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking, 59 percent of households headed by immigrants — naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants used one or more major welfare program. This compares to 36 percent for U.S. born households.
It's a shame that Democrats routinely block requirements to work for those who are mentally and physically able. They clearly want more people to be dependent on the government because they think it buys them votes.
This economic train-wreck is on purpose as the coming “fundamental transformation” will completely undo over 250 years of representative democracy and free-market capitalism.
We should learn about how ancient Rome suffered death by mass migration.