Forgetting Middle America

Speaking at a party retreat, House Majority Leader Eric
Cantor
told
his colleagues that the party had spent too much time talking about the
concerns of business owners and entrepreneurs and not enough about the concerns
of that majority who were not (and in many cases did not want to be) business
owners. It is a little embarrassing that a working politician actually had to
say that, but Cantor’s comments represent some progress, for the problem goes
very deep in the Republican political class. At the same retreat, Cantor and
the House Republican leadership demonstrated that, while they are trying to
learn to talk about the concerns of employees, they are practically focused on
doing the bidding of the Washington business lobbies. The same holds true when
they talk about immigration reform.

The House Republican leadership has come out with a set of
immigration
“principles.”
The House Republican leadership statement contains a great deal of verbiage
about enforcement, but both supporters of the statement (like Haley Barbour)
and opponents (like William Kristol) agree that the principles amount to putting
legalization before enforcement. We have already seen what happens when
Congress provides amnesty first and enforcement later. The 1986 amnesty put
legalization first. The enforcement never happens. The House principles also
come out in favor of guest worker programs aimed at the desires of “the
agricultural industry, among others.”

While they use different language, the House principles
amount to another version of the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration
plan. They both order legalization before enforcement structure. The Gang of
Eight deal also includes an
enormous
increase
in low-skill immigration and one can expect that the House Republican
leadership will attempt to do the same thing. The House Republican leadership
has already started the process with their proposal for low-skill guest worker
programs.

America’s current low-skill worker
population (including
both foreign-born and native-born) has a 9.8 percent unemployment rate and a
43.7 percent labor force participation. The Third Way found a long-term
decline
in the earnings of low-skill males and that declining wages coincided with
increased rates of family disruption and worse educational outcomes for boys from
these disrupted families. Economist George Borjas found that increased
low-skill immigration tended to
push
down
the wages in that sector of the labor market.

The House Republican establishment that has just discovered
the majority of America is now provoking a civil war within the party in order
to sharply increase low-skill immigration. Reforming immigration policy is
low
on the list of the public’s policy priorities. There is wide
bipartisan public support for shifting future immigration flows in the
direction of skills and English proficiency. Canada has gone to this type of
naturalization system, and polls indicate that this is what Americans want too.
Why is the Republican political class taking on its own voting base and the
general public in order to increase the labor supply in a sector of the labor
market where the unemployment rate is high and wages are stagnant?

The answer is obvious when we remember that this is the same
party establishment that forgot that most Americans were not business owners. Like
the ghosts in the film
The Sixth Sense,
the Washington Republican political class only sees what they want to see. The
business lobbies want ever-greater labor market competition and reasons can be
manufactured.

A few days ago on his CNBC show, Lawrence Kudlow
interviewed
Haley Barbour. Barbour, a former RNC chairman turned lobbyist for Mark
Zuckerberg’s “conservative” amnesty front group, is a living
embodiment of the intersection of the Washington Republican operative class and
the lobbying industry. And yet it was Kudlow who was most interesting. In the
course of asking Barbour a very friendly question, Kudlow argued that
increasing unemployment and declining labor force participation meant that we
needed increased low-skill immigration. For the Republican Washington political
class, anything seems preferable to paying higher wages to low-skill workers
when the economy improves.

The American low-skill population is complex. It includes
many illegal aliens. Many of these illegal aliens have lived in the US for a
long time and are part of mixed-status families. Any immigration reform should involve
integrating this population fully into American civic life. But any immigration
reform should also give a decent chance to low-skill workers—both the
foreign-born and the native-born. This means limiting future immigration in
that sector—the low-skilled sector—of the economy where unemployment is high
and wages have been stagnant for a generation for the sake of the low-skill
workers themselves.

This should be an easy decision for a party of the
center-right. The problem is the obtuseness of the Republican Washington
political operative and lobbyist classes (to the extent those are even distinct
entities). Those classes spent the 2012 election only listening to their donors
and lobbying clients until the only world they could imagine was the world
their donors described. The members of the Republican Washington establishment
(and those politicians who take their cues from the Washington establishment) hear
what they want to hear. There are enough of them that a consensus of the
Republican lobbyist-industrial complex can seem like a consensus of the party
and of the country. Eric Cantor’s flashes of insight notwithstanding, the
biggest roadblock to a populist limited government politics is the size, wealth,
self-confidence, and insularity of the Republican operative and lobbyist classes.

Pete Spiliakos writes for Postmodern Conservative. His previous columns can be found here.

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