Frank's Musings

Is there as economically existential a cultural issue in America today as slavery was in the middle of the 19th Century? Certainly, women’s right to choose vs. the right to life of an unborn child is as fundamental a cultural conflict in the 21st Century, but economic self-interest is probably more closely tied up with the issue of immigration.

A national dispute  could arise over this issue owing to the different relationships that certain sectors of the national economy have towards non-native labor.  The intellectual sector earns income primarily from strategic work, whereas the income of the agricultural, extractive, and manufacturing sectors relies mainly on physical implementation.  (Aptly referred to in Grainger advertising as “getting it done.”)  Consequently, welcoming the additional physical labor needed to enable people to devote themselves to lucrative intellectual activities (like planning, design, and finance) in certain parts of the country (mainly urban areas)  contrasts with limiting the supply of guest workers elsewhere to the number needed only for the performance of the most tiring physical tasks so as to protect peoples’ livelihoods where human welfare is identified with producing comfortable living through desirable physical activity.

In one sector of the economy intellectual and artistic activity is recreation; in the other, people recreate by engaging in physical activity. Therefore, liberal immigration regulation is a threat to one lifestyle, while it is necessary for achieving the other style of life.

Women’s liberation was forced by the growing realization of women’s equal qualification to perform the intellectual tasks of the modern economy. However, women are also still tasked with the biological inconveniences of pregnancy; only slowly are they reaching gender equality in performing the tasks of child-rearing. The more equal this division of labor becomes between the sexes, the more critical does the need for immigrant labor become for the intellectual sector to fulfill the demands of household management and the performance of necessary manual labor or clerical tasks.

Therein lies the conflict between sectors of the national economy that differ in their attitudes towards immigrant labor.  In the intellectual sector immigrants are necessary for accomplishing basic household  and other less desirable tasks; in the material sector they are resented as cheap usurpers of well-paid and satisfying jobs held by average native workers.  The two economic sectors are interdependent on a national macroeconomic scale.  But the location of international borders follows geography, and not economics.  

The decisions of Governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, for example,  make sense to  bus newly arrived immigrants north to the national economic sectors where they are theoretically needed to fill employment vacancies.    In fact, the cost of transporting them should probably  be absorbed either by the federal government or the destination states.  Until that equitable allocation of the costs and benefits of  immigration policy is accomplished, the divergence of regional attitudes will continue to allow demagogic exploitation of the issue and  distort the country’s politics.