Who benefits from the massive surge of migrants crossing our southern boarder?

 Obviously, more is involved than just compassion for millions of poor Guatemalans and their children. And while adding future Democratic voters is clearly the long-term aim of those tolerating the invasion, there is one group of immediate beneficiaries whose needs have garnered scant attention: affluent Americans whose comfort depends on armies low-wage, happy-to-please foreign-born workers. The awkward truth is that millions of upscale Americans risk transforming the US into a banana republic in pursuit of creature comforts. Like those wretched masses wading across the Rio Grande, they, too, want a better life.

 

Employers prefer these new arrivals for the simple reason that that they are superior workers. They are more
reliable,
punctual,
dutiful and
anxious to please, and
their salaries reflects economic reality, not a wage dictated by government bureaucrats untroubled by economic reality. Employers are not scraping the bottom of the barrel vis-à-vis home-grown workers. That the newcomers often help support their families back home via remittances further encourages them to be well-behaved employees.

https://www.unz.com/article/open-borders-and-affluent-americans/ 

Ron Unz:

Although those immigration benefits to affluent Americans obviously contribute, I think the biggest current factor is just the enormous ideological and political momentum in support of immigration among Democrats, not least because their arch-fiend Donald Trump had made opposition to immigration one of his biggest political issues.

However, I think over the last couple of decades there was an entirely different hidden factor, namely demographic issues in America’s most influential urban centers:

https://www.unz.com/runz/race-and-crime-in-america/#the-hidden-motive-for-heavy-immigration

 “Can the System Save Itself Again?” [Vulgar Marxism]. “From the point of view of the Democratic Party, Biden’s domestic agenda is critical to its

short-term electoral fortunes,
the medium-term stability of the political system that empowers it, and
the long-term health of the biosphere in which the capitalist mode of production is possible.

So how can it be that this party, both as a self-interested actor and the superego of American capital, may fail to pass it?… But it turns out capital remains as shortsighted as ever, and has mobilized to tank Biden’s agenda.

 

Throughout its history, critics and admirers alike have understood that if improperly managed, capitalism will destroy a society’s capacity for social reproduction, and with it the conditions that sustain its own existence. For this reason, much of the political class in the Global North came to recognize the need for their states to ensure a more stable balance between the productive needs of capital and the human needs of labor - for their own citizens anyway. Though capital fiercely resisted this renegotiation of the social contract, it was disciplined through the power of organized labor and a political class willing to accept and enforce a compromise. 

...

 

 

nationwide collapse in social trust and faith in institutions 

 Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was the result of northern non-college whites realigning their politics to match non-college whites in the rest of the country. The high-wire act that saw this cohort defy demographic gravity for sixty years was sustained by a unionized industrial sector loyal to the Democratic Party, an arrangement that has disintegrated. Economic stagnation has also led to a nationwide collapse in social trust and faith in institutions that is fueling disturbing pathologies in our culture and politics.

https://vulgarmarxism.substack.com/p/can-the-system-save-itself-again

 “Kyrsten Sinema must be stopped” [Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring].
"Sinema isn’t blocking popular progressive ideas because she’s getting corporate money; she’s getting corporate money because she’s blocking popular progressive ideas, and businesses want their key ally to succeed and prosper.”

"Because while I don’t believe Kyrsten Sinema will be the future of the Democratic Party, one can at least squint and sort of see it. So far, most of the newly elected Democrats from favored quarter suburbs are pretty solid liberals who still back taxing the rich and expanding the welfare state. But Sinema and a handful of her allies in the House do portend a possible alternate route where Democrats try to turn themselves into a pro-business identity politics movement that mostly just gets creamed by the populist right. It’s a very alarming development, and unless she changes course quickly, it would be very advisable to mount a primary challenge to her…."

 

“Pandemic Bird-Watching Created a Data Boom—and a Conundrum” [Wired]. “

 With the fall migration now in full swing, this army of avid birders is amassing a wealth of data about how
weather,
human movements,
artificial lights, and
city infrastructure
can affect birds as they travel. Farnsworth notes that while both Cornell projects have grown every year since their inception over a decade ago, the increase in users, downloads, and data over the past 18 months was unprecedented.” 

 

apps like Merlin and eBird.