Slavery As A Service: Immigration Versus Technology
America's economy shouldn't be a Ponzi scheme of low wage workers ad infinitum
One of the reasons I became financially successfully is so that I could write honestly and openly about subjects that would otherwise were impermissible or impenetrable. This is one such topic: slavery, technology, and immigration. Cancel me if you must.
Mass immigration is always and everywhere at war with technology. A tight labor market results in higher wages — or rapid automation which in turn, frees up the most important thing — people — to do other, more creative things.
That’s when the system works. There is another system, though, where slavery is disguised as technology, self employment, or even as liberation itself. What is the “gig economy” anyway but a means to feed people into the technology companies?
Antebellum author George Fitzhugh, whom Abraham Lincoln often quoted so as to refute him, argued that slavery was such a positive good that it should expanded to all races. Lincoln delighted in telling free whites that, should the Confederacy win, they, too, could be enslaved. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains,” Lincoln might have said. (I kid, of course. Only Joe Biden could be so eloquent.)
"It is a libel on white men to say they are unfit for slavery," Fitzhugh wrote. Fitzhugh believes that even Yankees — if caught young — could be turned into good slaves and made into “faithful and valuable servants.”
In Sociology for the South, Fitzhugh directly attacked the very premises of the Declaration of Independence. “Men are not 'born entitled to equal rights!' It would be far nearer the truth to say, 'that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,' – and the riding does them good."; and that the Declaration of Independence “deserves the tumid yet appropriate epithets which Major Lee somewhere applies to the writings of Mr. Jefferson, it is, 'exhuberantly false, and arborescently fallacious.”
And yet try as I might, it’s hard to argue that Fitzhugh wasn’t descriptive about what we might call the conditions of the modern economy:
Every social structure must have its substratum. In free society this substratum, the weak, poor and ignorant, is borne down upon and oppressed with continually increasing weight by all above. We have solved the problem of relieving this substratum from the pressure from above. The slaves are the substratum, and the master's feelings and interests alike prevent him from bearing down upon and oppressing them. With us the pressure on society is like that of air or water, so equally diffused as not any where to be felt. With them it is the pressure of the enormous screw, never yielding, continually increasing. Free laborers are little better than trespassers on this earth given by God to all mankind. The birds of the air have nests, and the foxes have holes, but they have not where to lay their heads. They are driven to cities to dwell in damp and crowded cellars, and thousands are even forced to lie in the open air. This accounts for the rapid growth of Northern cities. The feudal Barons were more generous and hospitable and less tyrannical than the petty land-holders of modern times. Besides, each inhabitant of the barony was considered as having some right of residence, some claim to protection from the Lord of the Manor. A few of them escaped to the municipalities for purposes of trade, and to enjoy a larger liberty. Now penury and the want of a home drive thousands to towns. The slave always has a home, always an interest in the proceeds of the soil.
Fitzhugh’s arguments about how Land Monopoly — really feudalism — leads to the same sort of effects of slavery is hard to dispute. Why is the rent so damn high anyway?
No, I fear slavery is always with us and the migrant caravans drivers who important illegal immigrants across the Rio Grande or through the modern Caribbean are the modern slave ships. Thanks to the Census, they’re counted for purposes of representation — just like slaves were. They keep wages low — just as slaves did.
Lincoln knew that to defeat slavery you needed a frontier. He backed the land grant colleges and the railroads. What is our frontier today? It’s easy to say space but space is far away (or so we have been led to believe).
I suspect the frontier is closer at hand and closer to our grasp.
My policy would be as follows: those jobs which rely on illegal immigration impose a real cost on the rest of us and need to be automated away and that sound policymakers would be wise to provide tax incentives to immigrant reliant industries to automate away those jobs. We might call this policy of directing capital to automate away terrible jobs a new industrial policy. I suspect it would be very popular and wind up employing lots of people in this work.
Do I think this likely to happen in the United States of America? I do not. Slavery is a part of the American DNA and though my ancestors fought against it, they won the war but didn’t win the peace. Slavery is always coming in and out of fashion, in different guises and in different forms. Just because we don’t call it slavery doesn’t mean it doesn’t occupy much the same role. There were — and are — many highly paid slaves.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Yankee. (Isn’t it obvious?) Like all good thinking people, I am against slavery, whether it be race slavery or wage slavery. I do suspect that Aristotle was right — that there are natural slaves and natural masters — but that the humane thing to do is to treat every human being with dignity and appreciation. I believe in my Church’s teachings in a just day’s pay for a just day’s work.
Henry Ford was right to pay an efficiency wage and strive to do just that for the businesses I start and run. Indeed among my many indictments of Elon Musk is that the world’s richest man pays the least in wages in the automotive space. The real costs of a Tesla don’t include the child slaves dragooned by local warlords to mine cobalt for the Chinese to turn into Tesla batteries.
Capitalism without regulation is slavery.
The first slaves were conquered peoples. This we know and the word itself comes from the Slavs, a people in Eastern Europe. In a way, slavery was preferable to the alternative which was mass execution. Polygamy led to wars in Africa and those conquered peoples were then sold to the Middle East and the New World with interesting effects which persist to this day.
Mass migration can also be a weapon as we’ve seen historically and as I suspect we are seeing right now throughout the developed world.
It isn’t lost on me that the three countries — Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba — where illegal immigration flows into the United States are the most acute are also those countries where the Chinese are increasingly dominant and where China, beset as it is by internal turmoil, is not able to keep its commitments to the Latin American elites that they bribed. Nor should it be lost on us that those three countries — Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba — are also sanctioned by America. To sanction is to Sinofy. Sometimes we even sanction officials directly though usually those officials figure out ways around the sanctions.
Is there a relationship between our sanctioning of these officials and the sudden trafficking of tens of thousands of illegal aliens into the United States? Of course there is. We punish them with sanctions; they punish us with people, preferably the poorest people they don’t want to take care of. But whereas the Latin American elites would have you believe that these people are natural slaves, the truth is that this is the haves taking advantage of the have nots.
When Governor Ron DeSantis flew Venezuelans to Martha’s Vineyard earlier this month we might well ask, “why are there Venezuelans fleeing into Florida anyway?”
Well, that much is obvious. It’s because oil politics have allowed the Venezuelan elites to govern without concern for their citizens. (If you want to go down the Chavista rabbit hole, look at how the Kochs sued Venezuela to get them to pay up. Astute followers of this site will know that the Kochs have their own ties to Russia)
Reuters mentions the lengths to which China will go to get oil to Venezuela.
China has entrusted a defence-focussed state firm to ship millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil despite U.S. sanctions, part of a deal to offset Caracas' billions of dollars of debt to Beijing, according to three sources and tanker tracking data.
China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) stopped carrying Venezuelan oil in August 2019 after Washington tightened sanctions on the South American exporter. But it continued to find its way to China via traders who rebranded the fuel as Malaysian.
…
Venezuela's debt dates to 2007, the era of then-President Hugo Chavez, when the country borrowed more than $50 billion from Beijing under loan-for-oil deals.
Qui bono from Venezuelan sanctions? Xi bono — and so do his quiet allies in the Sunshine State who like the cheap labor that Venezuelans provide. Naturally they tax the remittances which flow back to Venezuela from Miami. You’re not allowed to ask how much illegal oil winds up in Florida and who profits off of that illegal exchange. And if you think that oil and gas sales can’t be used for covert activity, well, google the Safari Club and poke around in covert alliances at your leisure.
Nicaragua doesn’t have oil but it is the most heavily sanctioned country in Central America in large part thanks to its longstanding opposition to the United States’ foreign policy and its crewing up with the Russians.
During the Trump years Nicaragua went so far as to reestablish diplomatic relations with Israel. Haaretz reports about the secret negotiations in 2017:
Over a year ago, Israel decided to try resuming diplomatic relations with four Latin American countries: Cuba, which severed ties in 1973, Bolivia and Venezuela, which both severed ties after the Gaza war of 2008-2009, and Nicaragua.
As is often the case, where Israel goes, China follows. Israel wanted recognition, China wanted diplomatic support for itself, and the Central America countries wanted a way out from Yanqui imperialism. Nicaragua, long one of Russia’s longest allies in Central America, flipped totally to China.
The relations between China and Cuba go way back. Most recently China has called on the U.S. to fully lift the embargo with Cuba.
Of course the real way that a lot of these countries benefit is through the considerable and covert ties of Mexico, the cartels and China. This nexus has elevated people smuggling into an art. How large the slave power is, we don’t really know, but I’ve heard estimates from government sources that it’s $10 billion or so a month. I find that hard to believe but another official told me that I might be under counting. Who knows and that’s kind of the point.
Many of the finances of the slave world rely upon remittances sent back from the free world. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, for example, estimates that remittances from the United States will account for as much as $60 billion in Mexico.
This is real money, to be sure, but not as large a share of the budgets of Central American countries who depend on remittances just to survive. Se hablo español over here at Thoughts and Adventures — my uncle and cousin live in Guatemala — so I once asked the late President Francisco Flores of El Salvador what would happen if the U.S. taxed remittances. “Anarchy,” was how he replied.
I asked a similar question of President Alejandro Toledo of Peru — before he got into some corruption issues with the Israelis — and he told me much the same thing. And so did Alvaro Colom — the former president of Guatemala who was backed in bid for power by the narcos. Try it for yourself next time you run into an elite from Latin America. Of course all of those “leaders” got indicted for corruption.
Maybe the reason so many people come to the United States from these countries is that their economies are so oligarchic. While we’ve focused very hard in holding leaders to account for their corruption, we might try instead to get even the corrupt to “do the right thing” and enact anti-trust behavior in their economy. We could even tie antitrust behavior to remittances taxation.
In the U.S., you might ask a few questions of immigration restrictionists who seem to not want to solve this problem. Could it be that they benefited from illegal immigration continuing? Could it be that they used that issue as a political cudgel with which to beat the Democrats?
True to form, Steve Miller made himself the face of immigration reform in the Trump White House. And yet his family business is arguably a slum lord rental business. (Miller was even an officer in that operation.)
Miller isn’t alone. The Kushners are also slum lords. And at one point, the Kushners even wanted to ban facial recognition nationwide. Why? He never said but I suspect it was to make it harder to find spies, most likely. And for all the talk of building the wall they missed the tunnels which our new satellites are now routinely identifying.
As I see it there are several paths to go down.
Biden’s environmentally responsible Wall.
Mass biotagging of immigrants — and therefore ultimately of everyone.
Matt Yglesias suggests that we might consider allowing immigration into the areas where the immigration rates are low — Burlington, Rochester, Portsmouth-NH, Logan, Utah, Sioux Falls, and so on.
Yglesias seems to miss that part of the joy of living in these places is that they are relatively homogeneous. Don’t the people living in these areas have a right to organize their local labor markets as they see fit?
Of course left unexplored is the larger question of whether or not our Latin American arrivals are simply meeting the demand of America’s own migration. After all, lots of Americans are moving to the Sun Belt.
How long any of this can continue is anyone’s guess. When it comes to climate change we may well see internal migration within the United States in the not too distant future. Perhaps immigration rules should account for the environmental impact of new people moving in…
When it comes to Mexico my father — who did business for many years in Latin America — once suggested that there ought to be the doctrine of absolute reciprocity.
Whatever Mexico is allowed to do in our country we ought to be allowed to do in theirs. But aside from a few tech workers who are making themselves very unwelcome in Mexico City and a few retirees who can’t afford Florida, no one really wants to live in Mexico.
No, I think the best strategy is to use facial recognition to identify the drug dealers and genetics, to find the drug addicts.
What would Latin America look like if everyone had facial recognition software? I suspect it would be nothing short of revolutionary.
Our policy should be to increase visibility and therefore accountability of the Mexican and Central American elites.
I actually think there could be a good market for facial recognition tech across Latin America, even at the municipal level. And of course at borders and waypoints for the caravans.