The key awakening of the Trump and Bernie movements was that questions of airy-fairy cultural values don't matter -- it is the cold hard material reality that matters.
Democrats didn't win elections because they championed liberal instead of conservative values in social-cultural domains -- voters simply saw them as the party that would impoverish and refuse to protect them in a slightly less callous fashion than the other party, who would throw the American people into poverty and absence of security with abandon.
Trump then turned around the GOP's presidential fortunes by convincing voters that he cared more about their stagnating and eroding material conditions -- on economics, immigration, and jihadism -- and would make those areas the focus of his presidency, not the same ol' culture war BS that we expect of Republican politicians.
An earlier post asked whether amnesty for illegal immigrants, largely Hispanic, would be suicide for the Dems or for the GOP?
We cannot answer that without a focus on institutional analysis, in other words which factions of the elite control the Dems vs. the GOP. The major split is the Democrat factions hailing from economic sectors that easily scale up -- banking / finance, media / entertainment, digital / hi-tech, etc. -- while the GOP factions hail from sectors that are more physical and physically constrained, like the military, agriculture, energy resource extraction, and so on.
For amnesty, it is clear how the GOP factions benefit materially from large-scale immigration, whether legal or illegal. The farms and small businesses, who are loyal Republican sectors, depend on cheap labor to thrive, since their economic activity is so labor-intensive. Importing hordes of servants from the Third World boosts the material standing of these GOP sectors.
On the other hand, Democrat sectors like the media, tech companies, and finance, are not labor-intensive and therefore do not derive a big boost in profits from cheap labor. Not that they don't make use of foreigners, but it's not the main source of their soaring wealth. That comes instead from the higher and broader reach of their company that is not very labor-intensive -- for example, a merger of two media companies, or the entry of a Wall Street bank or Silicon Valley tech company into a "developing nation".
So the Democrat factions do not benefit materially from open borders.
But wait! What about using those hordes of foreigners to vote Democrat and tip the scales irrevocably in the Democrats' favor? One problem: they don't bother voting, not even when they're eligible.
This moronic view crippled the GOP for the longest time, as they saw their electoral weakness tracing back to their lack of support from Hispanics, rather than the white working class who won't vote for the unabashedly elitist party.
Now that moronic view is going to cripple the Democrats, who also see their electoral success as owing to their dominance among ethnic minorities rather than the white working class.
The reality as revealed by the General Social Survey, from that earlier post on amnesty, looking at the 2012 election:
Among immigrants -- those residing outside the US at age 16 -- only 46% voted, vs. 71% of native citizens.
Among Hispanics -- regardless of race or immigrant status -- only 44% voted, vs. 73% of non-Hispanics.
Within the Hispanic population, only 28% of immigrants voted, vs. 51% of native citizens.
And that's among those who were eligible -- obviously the participation of illegals is even lower, since they'd be taking a greater risk in voting, and are more apathetic about America's political outcomes since they just got here and are only interested in stealing jobs, and maybe the occasional rape and murder, rather than steering the government's future.
Now let's turn to Muslims, another demographic group who the moronic Democrat Establishment views as an absolute lynchpin to its (previous) electoral success. They're only 2% of the population, and they're in safe blue states anyway, so right away we know they are the key to nothing. But even assuming they became as large as Hispanics and more broadly distributed...
Going back to the General Social Survey, in 2012 only 49% of those who were raised as Muslims bothered to vote, among those who were eligible. In 2008, it was 38%. In 2004, 53%. In 2000, 55%. Each of these samples is small (less than 50) because Muslims are so small in population, and the GSS is a representative sample of the population. Pooling them all together in a 21st century group, only 49% voted.
That is far smaller than the 70% and above rates of participation by natives and whites. And it's of a tiny slice of the population, sitting at only 2%. So it doesn't matter that they vote 85% Democrat, since that's only 85% of 49% of 2% -- Muslims deliver diddly squat for Democrats.
Of course, insulated tunnel-vision Democrats can't conceive of throwing Muslims under the bus because they're convinced that multiculturalism is what won them elections, contrary to all data. But once they've drunken the kool-aid, it can be hard to undo its effects.
The point remains, though, and at some point the power factions and the party itself will realize that they do not benefit materially from Muslim immigration, and if anything have sinking prospects at the ballot box from apologizing for every radical Islamic terrorist attack on the American people -- "think of the backlash against poor innocent Muslims!" Not the way to win elections with American voters.
Who does benefit from allowing in immigrants from the Muslim world? Why, the same GOP factions who partner with the jihadist nations and militias over in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. Namely the Pentagon brass, who prize the expansion of imperial borders over the safety of the core homeland.
They rely as all empires do on the cooperation of local elites in distant lands, and in the Middle East, they have thrown in with the jihadists like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, the Taliban (when they were fighting the Soviet Union), and so on and so forth. The military elite do not care whether their allies are barbarian jihadists who want to destroy America, as long as they will cooperate in getting the Pentagon and the CIA more pieces on the global chess board.
Of course, that never happens -- it is Iran rather than Uncle Sam who controls Iraq, after 30 years of our interventions in that country, and it is the Pakistani Deep State that controls Afghanistan, not us. But again, once people drink the kool-aid, it's hard to reverse the symptoms. The Pentagon still believes that bending over backwards for jihadists will get them more territory to control and patrol on the great big global chess board.
In the military leaders' minds, bending over backwards for its radical Islamic allies requires us to open our borders to immigrants from any Muslim-majority nation, as a costly and honest signal of our shared fates. In the early stage of the Trump administration, before the White House was hijacked in April by the Pentagon boarding party who pushed for further involvement in regime change in Syria, you might remember Iraq initially being on the list of countries barred from sending people across our border.
The Pentagon threw a fit and demanded that Iraq be taken off the list. Why? Because banning Iraqis would threaten the cooperation of Iraqis in Iraq with the American military presence in Iraq. Not that we're getting anything out of that presence, but still, that's what motivates the Pentagon -- keeping a "seat at the table," despite never getting anything. The GOP administration complied with the orders of its primary power faction, and Iraq was removed from the travel ban list.
You can bet that it was also the Pentagon, arms manufacturers and dealers, and defense contractors, who lobbied to keep true terrorist threats off of the list, like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The war machine is in bed too deep with the leaders of those two countries to put their citizens on a travel ban. To do otherwise would risk their cooperation in the attempt to put more territory in the region under Pentagon control (again, not that that has ever worked out favorably for the Pentagon).
The leaders of Muslim countries have a hell of a lot of leverage over the GOP factions like the military-industrial complex. If they want open borders for Muslim immigration, the GOP will have to deliver it or else feel the pain of the screws tightening from their Muslim allies in the imperial project over in the Middle East and Central / South Asia.
The GOP factions of oil and energy companies are also highly materially motivated to get in bed with jihadist nations like Saudi Arabia, or take over non-jihadist nations like Iran. But oil is lower-ranking than the military, and there's little oil and gas in Afghanistan.
What are the leaders of those Muslim countries going to do to hurt the Democrat factions? Refuse to allow Hollywood movies to be shown? Ban the local CNN International station? Kick out American investors from Wall Street? Not bloody likely. Hollywood and the media, social media companies, and Wall Street banks do not rely so crucially on those Muslim nations -- they have their fingers in pies all around the world, unlike the Pentagon which is concentrated so heavily in the Muslim world. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street wouldn't even feel it if Uzbekistan or Saudi Arabia banned them from their country.
The only Muslim nation that the Democrat factions are eager to stay on the good side of is Iran, which is a ripe niche for Western financial investors after being cut off by sanctions for so long. They are a very large population, civilized, and fairly prosperous by regional standards. That was the motivation of the Iran deal -- material interest, not multicultural feel-good-ism.
But Iran is among the most moderate of Muslim countries, being Shia (radical Islam plagues only the Sunni side). They do not proselytize, and are not hell-bent on sending their own people or their co-religionists to infiltrate the US. When they use empty bluster as a negotiating tactic against the Dems, it's based on military strikes, not threatening to unleash hordes of immigrants into our country.
Mexico threatens the opposite, and does the opposite -- never any military bluster, but saying it would be a shame if they were to not police the hordes of other Central Americans pouring through Mexico on their way to El Norte. Mexico is a real threat, Iran is a fake threat.
In the long-term, and even the medium-term, it is cynical material interests that drive behavior, not airy-fairy values-oriented BS. Ideology is a rationalization of material motivations.
On both forms of material interests, whether wealth or power, the Democrat factions stand to gain little from Muslim immigration, whereas the GOP factions stand to gain a lot -- continued cooperation from Muslim countries in the Pentagon's imperial ambitions on the other side of the world, and depending on the country, preferred access for oil and gas companies.
That means the GOP presents more of an obstacle to ending the diversity lottery, banning Muslims from entering the country, and so on. It is in the grip of a power faction -- the Pentagon -- that would rather leave a festering open wound on the nation's honor and security after September 11th, rather than give Saudi Arabia even a rap on the knuckles in retaliation for their attack against us.
We've seen so far that Hispanics and Muslims don't vote, especially if they're immigrants, and this point will generalize to all ethnic minority groups who could be brought in by the diversity lottery.
Take Africa, to end the argument with. Among blacks raised in America, 77% voted in 2012, as opposed to 40% of all African immigrants, or even 52% of eligible African immigrants. (And African immigrants were a mere 6% of the black sample of the GSS respondents about the 2012 election.) Immigrants simply don't give a shit about our government's current or future workings -- as long as they get paid more money than back in their home countries, they don't care what else happens here.
Among the elite factions, the Democrats stand little to gain from such open-borders immigration policies -- not to mention antagonizing one of their key junior partner factions, the labor unions who will get decimated by cheap non-union labor. That's really not going to help Dems with the white working class in Rust Belt states.
The GOP stands to gain immensely, whether it is cheap labor for the labor-intensive sectors that make up the GOP coalition, or the military elite who want the cooperation of the sending nations in far-flung imperial adventures, or the oil and gas sector who want cooperation from oil-rich nations sending their immigrants here.
Now among the base, it is obviously the opposite -- Republican voters are far more opposed to open borders than Democrat voters are. If the citizens were to triumph over the politicians and the power elites of their own party, then the GOP would easily and eagerly ban Muslim immigration, kick out Hispanic illegals, and the rest of it.
But until more power is in the citizens' hands, and while power remains concentrated in the elites, the Democrats pose relatively less of a threat vis-a-vis immigration. They will buckle to pressure from below more easily, since their power factions don't gain nearly as much as GOP elites do. We do have the kool-aid effect to overcome with the Democrat multicultis, but that is an easier task than threatening the cold hard material wealth and power that the GOP elites derive from open borders.
GSS variables: vote12, vote08, vote04, vote00, relig16, reg16, race
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