Here’s Why The Rich Want You to Hate Foreigners
It’s a matter of values, not of culture.
The rich want us to hate people from other countries and other cultures.
We are told that immigrants and refugees are “illegal” and that they bring crime and drugs.
We are told that they take our jobs and drive down our wages.
We are told that they are destroying our culture and way of life.
But it’s not migrants or foreigners who are inflicting these ills on Americans.
It’s the ultra-rich, and it’s a system that’s created the ultra-rich by putting profit quantity for a few over life quality for the many.
The rich have created social situations all over the world where people are so desperate that they are willing to leave their homes and venture to a foreign land with a foreign language in the hopes of finding a less desperate life than the one in their home country, be it Mexico, Somalia, Syria, Myanmar, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Libya, or anywhere else.
If foreigners bring drugs to America, it is because the rich have created such a desperate situation for Americans that drugs are in high demand.
For people who have been forced to the margins of American society from the moment they arrive? Our system has created a lucrative underground way to make money. It’s an enterprise on the outskirts, and it’s booming because people are desperate.
If an immigrant is hired under the table for below-market wages by an American employer – it is because the American employer has chosen not to hire above board at market wages. If it is a small business or a contracting business and that’s the only way that they can turn a profit, it’s because larger monopolists have made the situation untenable for small businesses.
If other cultures are taking root in our communities while “American traditional culture” (whatever that means in particular) seems to be eroding away, it is in no small part because of our insistence that schools cut budgets for Civics, Home Ec, Arts, Music, Shop, and all of the other classes that brought American culture, arts, and crafts into the public education of young Americans.
If we want to reduce the flow of refugees from other countries, we need to sanction corporations that exploit these regions and hold accountable the CEOs who head them. We need to end our support of right-wing militias and paramilitaries that terrorize these regions. We need to seriously re-evaluate what of our military operations are truly for national security, and which exist only to protect multinational corporate interests.
If we want to stem the influx of illegal drugs over our borders, we need to reduce inequality in this country and help people to rejoin society when they have fallen to the margins – with treatment, with a job, with a place to stay – with some sense of stability.
While we are at it, we need to arrest the pharmaceutical CEOs who profited from American pain and desperation, and who lobbied our government to approve drugs that have killed millions of Americans since the onset of the opioid epidemic in the 90s.
If we want to foster a healthy economy where employers do not hire undocumented laborers for below-market prices, we need to break up the monopolists that force razor sharp margins onto small businesses and we need to strengthen unions, which raise wages for all workers and can hold employers to account when they try to evade labor and immigration laws.
If we really want to foster “American culture” in all of its multicultural historical splendor[i] – we need to invest in arts and traditional crafts and folk lore. We need to double down on our public education system, our public library system, our public broadcasting, and our theaters and craft shows.
Yes, we need immigration reform, and I do not have a proposal for that in this essay – but my point is that no amount of immigration reform will stem the problems that are attributed to immigration today.
Because immigration as we see it today is a symptom of a much larger problem: the values we’ve instilled into our global economy.
It’s not that the global capitalist economy is dysfunctional.
It’s that it is ruthlessly efficient in its function: to extract raw resources and cheap labor and to transform them into profits for the richest of the capitalist class (the top 10%, generously, and the top 1%, more realistically).
The problems attributed to immigration are not the problems of one group of working people versus another group of working people. These problems stem from an economic value system that values profits over people.
These problems are just the concrete ways that we experience the externalities of our economic value system that places the sheer quantity of profits for a few over the real quality of life for the many.
And so, immigration reform is toothless until we structure a global economy that places people over profits.
Until then, working people all over the world will always be afflicted by a global economy that values quantity of profit extraction by all its measures, over the quality of human lives by any of its measures.
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[i] As opposed to the right-wing notion of a “Judeo-Christian Heritage” which really just refers to white American culture