Children of Illegal Immigrants: Saviors of US Unions
From: Economics Table | Discussion TablesBy Arnold Evans | bio
Why is the United States so much more economically conservative than any other industrialized country?

I am concluding that race in the United States has produced an unfortunate equilibrium that accounts for the difference. Black Americans as a group are large enough (and visually distinct enough[?]) to be seen as threatening to White Americans but small enough that a small amount of racial bias in voters can nullify their votes.

The conservative party has presented safety net programs as benefiting Blacks which has turned enough of the white population against them to overcome any advantage the liberal party stands to gain from Blacks by supporting those programs.

A side-effect is that the conservative party has dismantled unions to a degree unmatched in industrialized countries. Race has made the conservative movement unusually powerful in the United States and the conservative movement has targeted its unusual power on the entire progressive movement.

This unfortunate equilibrium can be broken by decreasing the non-White population to a level that does not threaten Whites, or increasing the non-White population to a level that can overcome White racial voting.

To break this equilibrium would be to cause the United States to re-enter the mainstream of industrial countries in terms of economic progressivism. It is the best hope for healthcare, for wage and union laws and to rebalance taxation so that it draws from labor and non-labor income fairly.

Illegal immigrants, your presence is requested in this essay.

My argument is that 20 million voting-age US born children of poor Central Americans would be more than enough to reverse the welfare-queen White backlash and turn the United States back into a regular industrialized country.

As ambivalent as progressives are about their parent's immigration, it is ironic the children of illegal immigrants are the best long-term hope for the progressive movement in the United States.

First, you should note that the availability of large numbers of immigrants, legal or illegal, is a major factor in destroying unions. To have a powerful union, you need to be able to restrict the employers' access to nonunion workers. Cesar Chavez knew this, and opposed illegal immigration for this reason when he was organizing farm workers.

20 million voting-age US born children of poor Central Americans are likely to BE "welfare queens" and kings themselves. Children born into poverty have a hard time getting out of it without massive social assistance. The poor tend not to bother to vote, too. Also, Alejandro Portes has noted a trend among the children of poor immigrants to assimilate to gang culture. The argument is that these kids see how much they haven't got in comparison with other Americans and turn to gangs. Their parents may think they're pretty well off in comparison with what they had in their homelands, but their kids don't. They've got a massive sense of entitlement, and don't think they should have to do the dirty work their parents did. However, many of them also don't think they should have to do well in school, or even bother to attend--the Hispanic drop out rate is extremely high, as is the rate of unwed motherhood, a good predictor of poverty and welfare dependency for both mother and child.