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Jan. 24, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
09:30
Does the Left Care About Workers?
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
In elections for the European Parliament last month, nationalists picked up seats almost everywhere.
The big exception was Denmark.
The Danish People's Party, which has campaigned for years to cut immigration, lost more than half its support.
What happened?
Simple. The Social Democrats, a left-wing party.
Reversed course on immigration and took a strongly restrictive position.
Mete Fredriksson, who leads the Social Democrats, could be Prime Minister of Denmark by the time you see this video.
She wants a hard limit on non-Western, meaning non-white immigrants.
And she says the goal of asylum policy should be repatriation, not integration.
She wants Denmark to stay Danish.
Fancy that!
But she also understands something all leftists used to understand.
If you want to help workers and poor people, you don't bring in foreigners to compete for their jobs.
As she puts it, the free movement of labor is paid for by the lower classes.
That is the traditional, progressive, pro-worker position.
Immigrants, especially third-world immigrants, drive down wages for native workers.
Obviously. It was always big business that wanted to import cheap labor, and people who cared about workers who wanted to keep cheap labor out.
Samuel Gompers, an early president of the AFL-CIO, is one of the most famous labor leaders in American history.
In 1921, when the U.S. population was only one-third of what it is today, he wrote that,"Those who favor unrestricted immigration care nothing for the people." That's because, as he said, immigrants will break down the standard of living of our people.
A. Philip Randolph was another famous labor organizer and early civil rights leader.
He is quoted in this book as saying in the 1920s that he wanted a policy of zero immigration.
He added, this country is suffering from immigration indigestion.
Immigration is against the masses of all races and nationalities in this country.
Cesar Chavez became nationally known as the founder of the United Farm Workers.
He has his own postage stamp, and he's the closest thing Hispanics have to a Martin Luther King.
He knew immigrants weren't good for wages.
Here he is talking about a strike he was organizing.
Right now, one of the strikes we have with the Butte Gas and Oil Company, where we've closed them down, they've been unable to get strike breakers, or we've gotten very few.
And then all of a sudden, yesterday morning, they're brought in 220 wetbacks.
These are the illegals.
Yes, he called illegal immigrants wetbacks.
As Miriam Powell explains in this book, Chavez never saw illegals as anything but scabs.
He had volunteers patrol the fields and call Border Patrol if they found illegals.
Chavez's cousin Manuel, here he is on the right at a march in 1975, set up patrols at the Mexican border to beat up and rob illegals who got through.
Manuel's"wetline," as he called it, was so violent that illegals called the Border Patrol for protection.
All labor unions used to oppose immigration.
As Cornell economist Vernon Briggs explained to Congress in 2007, at every juncture, and with no exception prior to the late 1980s, the labor movement either directly instigated or strongly supported every legislative initiative enacted by Congress to restrict immigration and to enforce its policy provisions.
Democrats used to support border control.
Congresswoman Barbara Jordan chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
In 1995, she announced its conclusions.
Stop all illegal immigration and sharply cut legal immigration because they both hurt poor people.
I urge the Congress to adopt tough policies needed to verify employment authorization.
What the Commission is concerned about are the unskilled workers in our society.
In an age in which unskilled workers have far too few opportunities open to them.
When immigrants are less well educated and less skilled, they may pose economic hardships for the most vulnerable of Americans.
Today, Joe Biden backs health care for legal immigrants.
He says we have an obligation to provide it.
But just 13 years ago, He was saying this: Notice
that Senator Biden casually mentions illegals.
Today, that's considered racist.
Nowadays, Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein doesn't care about controlling the border, but she sure did in 1994.
We simply don't enforce our borders adequately.
In my state, you have about 2,000 people a day illegally who cross the border.
Now this adds up to about 2 million people who compete for housing, who compete for classroom space.
We've had a Medicaid situation where in 1988 there were about 3,000 people on Medicaid.
There are well over 300,000 today who are illegal aliens.
That presents obvious problems.
And my position has been we need to enforce our borders.
She didn't want Americans to have to compete with foreigners for social services.
Even socialist Bernie Sanders used to call high levels of immigration a right-wing proposal.
You have an obligation, in my view, to do everything we can to help poor people.
What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy.
Bring in all kinds of people who work for two or three dollars an hour.
That would be great for them.
I don't believe in that.
I think we have to raise wages in this country.
I think we have to do everything that we can to create the millions of jobs.
You know what youth unemployment in the United States of America today?
If you're a white kid, high school graduate, 33 percent.
A Hispanic, 36 percent.
African-American, 51 percent.
You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers?
Well, do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?
He understood that immigration is bad for poor Americans.
For generations, the left's number one priority was lifting up American workers and poor people.
Not anymore.
Now the left's main priority is fighting racism.
A researcher named Zach Goldberg did a search of New York Times articles that used the word racism.
Look at that huge jump.
Beginning in around 2013, racism must have suddenly become the worst problem in the whole country.
While immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, are overwhelmingly non-white, fighting racism is now more important than helping American workers.
So lefties now want to abolish ICE and open the borders, even though they know this drags down American wages.
If you want to help workers, You want a tight labor market that keeps wages high and social programs that are not swamped by foreigners.
The Danish left understands this.
The American left used to understand it, but not anymore.
Today, every policy, even immigration policy, has to fight racism.
And Dianne Feinstein, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, they've all had to backtrack.
Not letting in non-white immigrants would be racist.
So we have to let them in, even if it means lower wages for Americans and even if those Americans are black or Hispanic.
Absurd? It sure is.
But this is the insane world of the American left.
Sacrifice our own poor in the name of the world's poor, so long as they aren't white.
And lefties know that when those immigrants start voting, they'll vote Democrat.
What a deal!
Claim that you're fighting racism, keep your party in power, and let the workers rot.
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