By John Ganz, Unpopular Front, The Great MAGA Immigration Meltdown, December 28, 2024
This is not a debate about policy as such—in fact, many of the people doing the argument seem to have a very vague idea about how the program works—but, as the antagonists realize, about the ideological content of MAGA. Some liberals have pointed out the irony tech-lords’ views on immigration align with their own and they should’ve remained Democrats. But I’m not sure I agree that the tech-bosses are just cosmopolitan liberals who disguised their views in order to get one over on the MAGA dupes. I thought I had to revise my view that the tech oligarchs would be closer to the MAGA core on immigration because they ultimately had a program to replace mid-level work with AI. This is not practical in the short-term However, on reflection, I think their position on immigration still reveals a highly illiberal and authoritarian conception of capitalism, something that even dimwitted critics like Steve Bannon have noticed in their references to “techno-feudalism.” There are three illiberal sources of pro-immigrant Trumpism so far as I can see:
- H1-B is not exactly a liberal model of employment, in the classical sense of an economic regime where workers can leave their employment at will and seek jobs elsewhere. Of course, as critics of liberal capitalism have long pointed out, that’s a bit of a myth—the imperatives of hunger make freedom of contract a false freedom—but H1-B workers are particularly chained to their jobs: they cannot simply quit, and look for employment elsewhere without losing their legal status in the country. Some right-wing critics have labeled this a form of indentured servitude. And, indeed, because of this precarious status, these workers are particularly liable to discipline and exploitation, which is the point.
- The vision of immigration they are propounding is not one of free movement of people and free trade in goods and services but a jingoistic and mercantilist one. You grab “the best people” from foreign countries to ensure productivity, export-led growth, and autarchy. This obviously appeals to Trump: it’s exactly how he views the world. And some centrist liberals are tempted by this because of their investment in a new Cold War with China.
- Related to this “grab the best guys”-type mercantilism is the tech-lord’s highly racialized conceptions of labor and capital. The fight here is not between, on the one hand, colorblind cosmopolitan liberal meritocracy and, on the other, a backward ethnonationalism, but between fundamentally racist worldviews. The élite side of the debate advocates race science that organizes productive workers by intrinsic qualities, a kind of caste capitalism that purports to use “objective” measures to discover the highest IQ individuals and put them in the right spots. The “sophisticated” race science humpers are ready to gamely admit that sometimes whites, especially working-class and poor ones, are not as genetically fit as other race—particularly Asians and Jews—and therefore their subordination is justified in some way. Conveniently, this serves capital’s need for a disciplined and divided labor force. I called this once Lord of the Rings or Star Wars-type racism that puts different workers into species-containers and thereby tries to solve issues of labor unrest and the competitive marketplace. It usually provides a shared anti-blackness that glues together a coalition that might otherwise be torn asunder. (Antisemitism can also be of use here by attacking liberal cosmopolitan and “globalized” conceptions of capital as secret racial insider trading or national betrayal.)
- Capital as such is notoriously free-floating and mobile—it cannot be pinned down—but this particular iteration of fetishized capital is static and implies a world of permanent hierarchies of value in terms of race, national interests, and, with cryptocurrency, deflationary notions of hard currency. It implies not a world of trade and exchange, but one of plunder, a kind of primary accumulation of human capital.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Correct. Elon Musk and Donald Trump both believe in eugenics nonsense and imagine themselves “supermen.” Their delusional thinking is the sort the Nazis had, and neither fits their physical ideal. Trump is flabby, obese, and has fake tan makeup slathered on himself. It also explains why Musk has had 12 children with several different women, and he used IVF. He had 5 children with his first ex-wife Justine, but none with his second ex-wife.
The “tech bro” eugenics talk is particularly disturbing, combining racism with exploitation of workers. It feels like we’re cycling through these scenarios repeatedly – wealthy, powerful people are intent on exploiting the masses for their personal gain, and the masses rise up in protest. Things quiet down fir awhile after the masses are granted some concessions, then the cycle starts anew as the wealthy and powerful ramp up exploitation again.
The issue of the lack of ability in the workforce to be able to make meaningful changes in employment has long been recognised, yet is still touted as the basis for a ‘free market’. It’s one of the gross untruths that underscores everything that right wing politics and philosophy uses to justify itself. From illegal and undocumented immigrants (I’m not sure if there’s a difference) to US workers tied to just one kind of employment (it’s not easy to retrain unemployed car mechanics to become software engineers), combined with the realities of families, children, and mortgages tying people financially and geographically, the free movement of labour has always been a myth. It had never occurred to me previously that employing illegal immigrants could be a form of indentured servitude but it’s a point that makes a lot of sense. There are no easy answers but one thing is certain: Trump and Musk certainly don’t provide them!