There is an interesting Cabinet memo from then Tánaiste and leader of the Progressive Democrats Mary Harney written in 1999. It was during a period when the Irish state was for the first time coming to grips with mass immigration.
That unprecedented phenomenon was a combination of mostly eastern European labour migration drawn by the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom and opportunistic welfare migration from Africa facilitated by the ease of securing citizenship through the birth of children here. The Cabinet discussions and legal deliberations eventually led to the 2004 referendum to stem the flow of “anchor baby” citizenship.
Harney’s memo is noteworthy as it focuses on the economic aspect of mass immigration rather than asylum and its potential abuses. That distinction has become a huge debating point on the American ‘right’ over the Christmas period in the light of the support of Elon Musk and some of Trump’s administration nominees for the unlimited immigration of educated tech workers.
Harney’s note is perhaps especially interesting as she was leader of the notably liberal and pro market PDs. Yet, she at least recognised that there might be a debate over whether there was a “level of economic growth desirable from a societal perspective” if high rates of immigration were an essential requirement for that growth.
It is highly unlikely that such questions ever cross the minds of any of the Leinster House parties of the “right” or “left” these days. Economic growth, measured mainly by GDP and corporate revenue, is regarded as the sine qua non for all of the projects of the entire political establishment. The only contentious issues are marginal tax and social welfare rates, minor housekeeping and personal squabbling.
The most “pro enterprise” among the moneyed “elite” would likely happily allow Microsoft and the meat factories to hire Asian child labourers if it kept rents high and SUVs under their substantial bottoms. In addition, the substantial migrancy/racism NGO sector is thriving,
Even the extremist Irish Greens and “eco-socialists” believe that corporate-driven eternal growth is grand once they can fit that into their fantasy that one day Dell will be a workers-owned Soviet with data centres powered by sun panels and canteens serving pyjamaed techies from every country in the world with cockroach tofu.
Elon Musk has taken to his own platform to defend his view that the American economy, of which he and his companies are not an unimportant part, requires not only the continuance but the expansion of the H1B visa scheme which has facilitated the employment of more than 750,000 people in the United States up to the end of 2024.
The scheme is quite restrictive – much more so than the Irish work permits system – and is both confined to people with “highly specialized knowledge” and time limited. Trump’s apparent favouring of people like Musk, Sriram Krishnan and Vivek Ramaswamy as potential policy drivers of the AI and tech economy and their preference for further expanding such labour migration has disturbed some of those on the ideological right.
Mike Cernovich, who had already abandoned Trump and supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries, has claimed that the big tech corporations have been the real driver of labour-based mass immigration which includes even greater numbers of lower paid illegals and that Trump now appears to be taking their side in their desire to expand H1B so that they can continue to make worse their “self-inflicted wound.”
Musk deleted a previous tweet which apparently referred to American workers as “retarded” but he has doubled down on his position regarding the preference for overseas techies. Some even claim that he has used Twitter not only to promote the pro-migrant labour position, but to effectively censor the opposing view held on the MAGA right.
The debate is of interest from an Irish perspective. It was noticeable during the recent election campaign that even some of those who have publicly criticised the state’s asylum policy and been supportive of local protests against IPAS centres were happy to state that they have “no problem” with people coming here to work.
In any numbers it seems – which makes no sense to me, I have to say. Obviously, it is preferable that a migrant is going to work rather than come here for no other reason but to live off the state and in not an insignificant number of cases to join or to form a criminal anti-social network.
Much opportunistic “asylum” migration is motivated by the desire to get lower paid employment, often it would seem with people from the same countries of origin. Logically that ought to be grand too unless you do not like black people or think that immigrant-owned smaller businesses are less important than non-national owned Google.
That, however, does not make market driven mass immigration, to the scale where the CSO’s projections show the Irish born and native Irish descended population declining to become a minority within less than 50 years, any less destructive. It may be the case that Ireland 2080 will be a prosperous stable society. It will not be Ireland, other than in a geographical sense.
The Harney memo refers to an “economic slowdown” as the “only alternative” as if not allowing overseas Capital to dictate all of the main factors moulding the Irish economy and Irish society was simply beyond the pale. And if it is – and everyone of consequence from left to right in Leinster House and the rest of Irish public life appears to agree that it is something we must accept – then we may simply accept all of what follows.
Which is the nub of the issue in the current debate on the American right. Ought the needs of the economy, as defined by Musk and others come first, or ought there be other criteria defining what is “Good for America.”
I am not that surprised that Trump appears to be tending towards the former view for let’s be honest here: the American Republican Party is the classic party of Capital. There has always been a tension between those interests and the concerns of the party’s electoral base. Read Willliam F. Buckley if you demur from that take.
Or Russell Kirk’s 1953 classic The Conservative Mind in which he worried that the consequence of the global hegemony of American Capital would be a “hell of universal vulgarity.” Kirk also once remarked, apropos of Ayn Rand’s dystopian fantasy, that “one cannot sanely make the accumulation of dollars the whole aim of existence.”
That aim is the end result of placing the interests of wealth before those of tradition, moral order, and community. Trump has created a mass movement based on the second. Now he appears to have reached out to people who possibly scorn such notions.
However, if you need a consistent example of the duplicity of the GOP, including in its current guise, then look no further than the manner in which it has dealt with the issue of abortion. If spouting inanities (while doing nothing) about the “national question” served to keep electing certain people in the Irish Republic for generations, then mobilising conservative pro-lifers on the basis of unfulfilled promises to even restrict abortion, and worse, has served the same electoral purpose for 50 years for the American Republicans.
Need I take us into some of the things said by Donald Trump regarding abortion during his successful campaign? For example, his electorally motivated pledge not to support a federal ban on abortion. Time will tell how genuine and how effective his Supreme Court appointments before 2020 were. And how resolute Republican governors and Republican state legislatures and national Congressmen and women are in attempting to turn the tide.
What the GOP has always been good at is protecting the interests of the American ruling class, of American Capital – to the extent even of supporting and organising coups and in initiating wars to either protect or in some cases – and the Clinton/Obama Democrats have been no better and arguably worse – initiating and continuing unnecessary wars for the Halliburtons and others of this world.
So, if it ends up that Trump and his new administration come down on the side of the tech companies and their insatiable desire for relatively cheap skilled labour rather than those who believe that there is more to America and American communities than what is good for the corporations then do not be surprised.
Conservatives need to consider what the consequences of the limitless expansion of Capital are in every respect. While it might be fun to mock climate change hysterics I would prefer to take the late Roger Scruton’s observation that as people and as members of communities that part of our duty is to “make provision for those who will one day replace them in their earthly tenancy.”
Rather than blindly accepting that pounding a mountain into atoms to find precious metals, or to suck up millions of fish and discard most of them, or to stack people dozens of stories above the ground is for the best if it turns a bob for someone. Or that this has something to do with freedom much less conservatism/conservation.
That, curiously, in my view is why the far left and the apostles of untrammelled Capital are on the same page when it comes to the impact of the global economy. Anyone who has read Marx will know that there was no greater an admirer of the “destructive forces of capital” than himself.
The Communist Manifesto is a paean to how the bourgeoisie were in the process of sweeping aside all “the old nonsense” of family, nationality and religion in the pursuit of money. Of course, Marx theorised this as all being part of the mystical dialectic of “scientific socialism” which would guarantee that once all the destruction was over and the forces of production revolutionised and refined that the proletariat led by lads like himself would bring about the revolution leading to “full communism.” Not before more mass destruction and misery obviously….
Lenin – another boy who never did a tap of work in his life – was a cynic who in What is to Be Done? mocked the struggles of actual working people for a better life through strikes and self-organisation as a mere distraction from the ultimate goal. The proles were too stupid to see this themselves so they needed lads like himself to show them how – as much a means to an end for the communists as they were for the grinding capitalists of the Satanic Mills.
Which suggests why the serious far left is still on the side of destructive capital. Not on the side of sustainable local enterprise obviously as the small entrepreneur/capitalist or family farmer “peasant” is only an inconvenience, and worse – often a sustainer of tradition because their interests are in maintaining the community that also provides their livelihood, not destroying it
When it comes to a choice between LIDL and your local newsagents; or Amazon or TK Max as opposed to the local craft shop or artisan market the far left is objectively on the side of Big Capital because in their eyes it is the harbinger of systemic doom for the bourgeoisie. That will entail social collapse, anarchy, mass violence – which is their only path to power. They do know their history.
Hence the far Left and what remains of what was once the democratic Left’s celebration of abortion, mass immigration, transgenderism, militant atheism, “social criminality” and all the other forces unleashed by amoral Capital but which the left regards as hastening the day when destruction, anarchy, war and misery for some miraculous and unexplained reason lead “inevitably” to the Promised Land.
In his 1891 encyclical, Pope Leo XIII Rerum Novarum spoke of how the sort of capitalism unleashed in the 19th century had created a situation in which “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”
He also looked askance at a social order in which there was a “class which holds power because it holds wealth” as opposed to a large proportion of the population who struggled to survive and was thus deprived of a dignified life and the right to own private property whether their own home or some other small thing that was theirs and not in the gift of the landlord, boss or state.
The alternative to that was not as the socialists claimed, the transformation of all property into state property and the state into the intrusive arbiter of all aspects of life, but the diffusion of property and the guarantee of human liberty through those factors. Implicit in all of this is that the excesses and abuses of wealth bring about a situation in which all bases of order and tradition are undermined.
Fundamental to that was the distinction, reiterated by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, between the right to private property and its use. The first does not confer the right to do as one pleases with what one owns. Nor the right to insist that the interests of those with wealth take precedence over all others. Which is sort of where we came in.
Elon or Leo? That is the question…