These are not good times for advocates of comprehensive immigration reform, either here or abroad. Cutting the flow of immigrants is a hot button issue in Holland right now. It is in the UK, even in Spain[1]; and it certainly is here in the United States. With unemployment high and public debt widely seen as out of control, conservative forces on both sides of the Atlantic are finding political mileage in once more playing the immigration card. Voters scared about job loss and house foreclosures don’t need much persuading to believe that unwanted foreigners are a major source of their present difficulties. To get back to full employment and rising wages again, so we are regularly told, public policy should tighten the border, repatriate the undocumented, and reserve local jobs for local workers. It all appears to make such perfect sense.

But appearances are deceptive here. Processes that create two sets of losers are not resolved by one set demonizing the other. They are resolved only by understanding and acting on the forces that are eroding the living standards of both.

Immigration by foreign-born workers, and unemployment among native-born ones, may go together in modern America, but the relationship between them is neither simple nor directly causal. On the contrary, three things at least are very clear in the data on contemporary trends in employment and wages – at least very clear to those not subsumed in Arizona-type hysteria. (1) Immigration, legal or otherwise, is not the main cause of the current recession. (2) The overall impact of immigration on employment, productivity and income in the contemporary US economy is broadly positive; and (3) the very forces triggering migration from the global “south” are the same ones creating unemployment and falling wages in the global “north”.

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The Radical Right is at it again, stoking the flames of anger and fear. This time, not just Tea Party folk but major Republican figures and commentators as well. There are books to sell and votes to win by telling America that the end of the world looms – looms, that is, unless stopped by a revitalized conservatism led by the paranoid. Election season is in full swing, and the Right is telling stories – frightening stories, stories that do real damage, stories that need to be challenged, stories like this one.

The “socialism is coming” story.

“America as we know it,” according to Newt Gingrich, “is now facing a mortal threat.” (Gingrich, To Save America, 2010:2) Having won the cold war, we are apparently poised to lose the warm peace. Why? Because America is being taken over by a shadowy elite of academics, media people, union leaders, trial lawyers, state bureaucrats and liberal Democrats – all determined to take America off in a secular-socialist direction. Stopping that is what Gingrich calls his crusade to save America. READ FULL POST