In Rust Belt, Trump betrays "Hire American" promise, shills for cheap-labor immigrants

At one of his rallies that nobody bothers watching anymore, Trump addressed a Rust Belt audience in Macomb County, Michigan, on the theme of employment and immigration.

Did he say, "We're going to deport immigrants so that the greedy employers will have no choice but to hire struggling American workers and pay them a decent American-level wage"? Of course not. While actually in office, the fake populist has reverted to his cheap-labor instincts as a greedy employer himself.

From Breitbart's write-up:

President Donald Trump told American farmers on Saturday that he would allow guest workers to come into the country, despite his promise to protect American workers.

“For the farmers, OK, it’s going to get good, and we’re going to let your guest workers come in, because we’re going to have strong borders, but we have to have your workers come in,” the president said during his campaign rally in Washington, Michigan on Saturday.

Trump said that the unemployment numbers were so good that it was possible to allow guest workers in the country to work the fields and do seasonal labor.

“We have to let people come in. They’re going to be guest workers, they’re going to come in, they’re going to work on your farms, we’re going to have the H-2Bs come in, we’re going to have a lot of things happening,” Trump said.

The crowd of supporters did not cheer in response to his comments.

“But then they have to go out,” Trump concluded, prompting cheers again.

The president quickly changed the subject to manufacturing, talking about how Foxconn factories were being built in Wisconsin.

The Foxconn plant in Wisconsin -- now there's another beauty. They will only be hiring immigrants, as is their practice at their other plants already in America. Chinese will do the professional jobs, and illegals (probably also Chinese) will do the less skilled jobs.

The president admitted as much in his speech to CPAC (see the first link), that at any factory that comes back to our country, immigrants will be used to keep down labor costs and boost profit margins for the owners, rather than to give good jobs to the bottom 80% of Americans. Foxconn, Chrysler, you name it.

Promising to gut the hell out of NAFTA was the only way he flipped so many Rust Belt states, including the very close race in Michigan. Yet he barely mentioned it during the rally.

And we know the reason why -- his economic team has surrendered on re-industrializing our economy to benefit the working and middle classes, and has inverted the "NAFTA re-negotiation" theme to get even better deals for the large farm-owners who already benefit like crazy from NAFTA, and to get white-collar professionals a larger slice of the Mexican market in their sector (finance, tech, etc.).

The same applies to the fake trade war against China -- that is being used solely to get more benefits for white-collar professionals here who work in intellectual property, as well as moguls in finance, tech, and media, who want to enter the Chinese market in those sectors. None of it is bringing back the industrial commodities and manufacturing sectors to American soil, where they would provide solid employment and incomes for the increasingly precarious American citizenry.

On the one hand, every time Trump shills so shamelessly for cheap-labor immigration, it drives his true supporters up the wall. Aside from the harm it deals to our material standard of living, as those cheap-labor policies get enacted by his administration, it shifts the Overton Window entirely back in the opposite direction from what his campaign accomplished -- toward elitism, toward globalism.

The entire basis for mass immigration is for greedy employers to secure an endless supply of cheap labor, so when he touts the value of it in one sector like agriculture, and then another like manufacturing, he's really making a general argument for unmitigated immigration.

"Gotta keep those labor costs down for the employers, folks -- if it dumps another 50 million immigrants into your communities, just move somewhere else, unless you're OK with being losers for the rest of your lives."

On the other hand, his serving as the ventriloquist dummy for the Koch brothers only helps to accelerate the downfall of the GOP, as voters see how thoroughly incapable it is of undoing -- or even mitigating -- the cheap-labor globalist policies of Reaganism. Even electing the biggest joke of a politician, just because he was promising the right things on the right issues, could not compel the GOP to follow the orders of its own voters.

That will clear the way for the Bernie revolution to sweep into the government and take over where the GOP had failed. After Trump's historical upset victory, the Democrats learned that they have to fight populism with populism, if their shut-out party wants to dethrone their rivals as the dominant, paradigm-setting party, rather than play within the boundaries established by the GOP and occasionally win the White House.

That may have been appropriate when the voters wanted Reaganism, but now that the GOP's own hardcore primary voters have chosen the candidate who campaigned on doing something very different from Reaganism -- something populist and non-interventionist -- the signal has been sent that we want something anti-Reaganite from a Democrat candidate as well.

In the meantime, support for the GOP will continue collapsing, as none of its candidates for the mid-terms are campaigning on restricting immigration in order to ensure that Americans get hired, and at higher wages. The president himself keeps campaigning on exactly the opposite program.

Once the Bernie people take over the government, the populist-nationalist Trump supporters will enjoy some action at last on the issue of employment and immigration. They're all about dramatically raising the floor on the income scale -- "abolish cheap labor" will be their slogan. And once you abolish cheap labor, you abolish immigration de facto as well.

And guess what -- debt-burdened, dead-end-job-having Gen X-ers, Millennials, and Gen Z-ers are not going to give an absolute shit if the same policies that raise their own standard of living have the side effect of ending immigration.

So while the wave of the future will not indulge former-Trumpers' nationalism rhetorically, it will deliver on the issue nevertheless. And that will be totally fine -- results over rhetoric, material issues over cultural concerns. The wrong pitch would be ending immigration as the central issue, with the side effect being higher incomes.

Former Trump supporters should get out in front of this paradigm shift and help it to stay neutral and declare a truce on cultural matters, rather than let the identity politics warriors among the Dems try to hijack the labor issue to benefit immigrants over already-struggling Americans. With Bernie supporters and former Trump supporters teaming together, the moribund identity politics movement doesn't stand a chance.