The end of social mobility has been made to seem appealing. It’s been dressed up in subsidies and entitlements, into gateways out of the barrio or the ghetto by becoming a sports star or a pop star, but those are all ways of disgusting poverty.
The unemployment numbers can be massaged, welfare can be disguised as disability, the erosion of real jobs can be hidden in government jobs and debt can be turned into investments, but no matter how you dress up poverty, the rags still peek out from underneath.
While liberal politicians give speeches about the possibilities of the future, they know that the future is out of reach for everyone but their own circle. The future seems bright to them, but dim to everyone else. The big corporations are becoming oversized and interdependent, merging and coalescing into each other and into the government. Every industry is coming to resemble the old defense contractor model with government officials and CEOs trading jobs and making lucrative arrangements. Yesterday it was cars, energy and finance. Now it’s medicine. And tomorrow some other sector of the economy will be consolidated and rebuilt into an arm of the government.
The mass migration of people, the influx of low skilled workers, exist to make money for some and votes for others, but there is no longer any place for them to go except to the welfare office and the quota machine that funnels a percentage of them into colleges and then government jobs and then back to their old neighborhoods to spread the word on behalf of whatever cause the people who set the quotas want them to.
Whether or not amnesty comes, the United States of America is becoming too much like Mexico; a society of limited possibilities and diminished social mobility. A road to nowhere.
Joseph Chamie, the former director of the United Nations Population Division, recently wrote an article proposing that the United States open its borders to become the world’s largest country. All it would have to do is step up immigration from 1.2 million a year to 10 million a year. And then by the end of the century, the country would have 1.6 billion people.
As insane as the Chamie proposal might be, its insanity is just that of extrapolating the existing madness on a grander scale. It’s the sort of madness that asks, why settle for drilling a hole in the boat when you can smash the entire hull? Increasing immigration tenfold is crazy, but so is our current policy. Aiming for 1.6 billion is nuts, but so is aiming for 1 billion. It’s a difference in scale, not in content. The problem is the content and the context.
America’s industrial infrastructure has been dismantled and a welfare state has taken its place. The country is not importing workers, it’s importing voters. And the dismantlers are doing the importing. Territorially the United States may be able to absorb 1.6 billion people, though it will cease to be anything resembling its old self long before 2100, even without the insane U.N. plan, but it can’t do so because the economic ability to absorb immigrants is being destroyed by the politics of immigration.
The 1.6 billion strong America of 2100 will look a lot like the places those immigrants came from. It will have the same oligarchies, the same uncontrollably corrupt politics and religious wars, and the same pervasive sense of hopelessness for the vast majority of the population. It will be a failed state.
Imagine an America in which the middle class has receded to a thumbnail but those at the top behave the same way that they do now. Imagine the massive economic burden on a country of wage slaves, the asalariados who are squeezed to pay for all the latest whims and gimmicks, for the thefts and spendthrift academics.
Imagine an Obama with no restraint on his power and no middle class to drain or credit rating to borrow against and you have a true nation of wage slaves in which democracy is largely useless because the political and economic institutions have been consolidated and the population is too powerless to do more than fight with each other for a piece of the government’s subsidies.