You may not realize this, but we are in a race for control.
Not between the left and the right, but between decent working humans and the billionaires and their domesticated politicians we can collectively call the ruling class.
Nowhere is this better articulated than in immigration policy.
If you don’t think immigration and diversity have anything to do with economics, prepare to have your mind blown. I’m not just talking about workers. I’m talking about the American economic legacy.
First, what we’re seeing in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Aurora, Wilder, and now, Charlotte; this is Trump taking a jackhammer to the foundation of the United States.
This country wasn’t just built by immigrants; its status as the unquestioned global economic superpower is strictly because of immigrants, and the diversity they represent.
In fact, among the eight developed nations (including Russia) with over 50 million people, the United States is the most diverse of all of them.
And our GDP is #1 overall, by far. By really far; out of those eight nations, the United States has a GDP greater than the other 7 nations combined.
These are not correlated realities.
The diversity of background, thought, ideas, food, clothing, art, music, and culture brought by immigrants is the single most important contributor to the economic growth we’ve witnessed.
Armed with these facts, you may find yourself asking: why the fuck are we attacking immigration if diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength?
If so, you’re on the right track.
But what you have to recognize is that through our history, there has always been a tension between the Trumps, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Musks, and the diverse populations of workers that have built their wealth.
We must call this out, because when they billionaires win out, every single time, we end up with things like the Civil War, the Great Depression, the dot com crash, and the Great Recession.
Crashes are inevitable when these people become too powerful, because once those people jump the wealth gap, they evolve to see a powerful, diverse working class not as an ally, but as a threat.
So they begin working against it, in order to control it.
This is why some of the same tech leaders who used to be liberal millionaires are now right-wing billionaires. Money and power corrupts them over time, leading them to reflexively protect it, even against the benevolent values they may have once espoused.
And this phenomenon is the source of every cultural phobia in the United States. Billionaires know wedge issues, steeped in identity politics, are the most effective tools in fracturing economic politics.
And now we’re at the point where our future depends on us going to bat for each other.
Fortunately, we know what this looks like. Look to our own history, then look at this data from New Jersey in the last election:
I love me some data visualization!
This chart shows the density of Hispanic populations on the horizontal axis, and the vote for Mikie Sherrill on the vertical axis.
Sherrill ran on affordability. But she won on both affordability and diversity.
This is what happens when our candidates speak to people, and when the people step up for each other.
This is what happens when we recognize diversity and economic prosperity are not only independently essential traits in a thriving country, but that at the American economic scale we’ve built, they’re mutually inclusive.
One cannot exist without the other.
And I think for the first time in decades, we’re beginning to recognize this all over again.
And If we don’t let them distract us, we will persevere.
Because we have the numbers.
We have the votes.
And if we continue to have each other’s backs, we will once again have control of our future.
