The Rubio staffer’s rationale for mass immigration, quoted by Rich below, that “there are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it” nicely complements Jeb Bush’s comments at the Faith & Freedom Coalition event:
Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans. Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.
Some of this is true (“more fertile,” at least in the sense of a slightly higher Total Fertility Rate), some of it’s false (immigrants, on average, are no more entrepreneurial than the native-born), and some of it’s pernicious objectification (what is “they love families” supposed to mean?). But what Rubio and Bush share is a perspective that a number of Americans are somehow defective and need to be replaced by their betters from abroad. In attacking the Rubio staffer’s comments, Erick Erickson summed up this perspective as “there are Americans who should, for lack of a better term, suffer the fate of natural selection.”
This is not to say that many of our countrymen don’t have real, long-term problems, both socially and with regard to employment. And this is hardly unique to minority groups — as Charles Murray has demonstrated, our society is coming apart across the board, as a stable, multi-ethnic upper class separates from an increasingly dysfunctional multi-ethnic lower class. The question is, how to respond to this growing class polarization?
The globalist Right, as represented by Bush and Rubio (and Norquist and Graham and Cato, etc.), may occasionally pay lip service to the class problem, but mainly just want to sidestep it by importing a better class of underclass from abroad. The Left, having largely given up on national feeling, can only suggest more subsidies; Bernie Sanders, for instance, has rightly expressed outrage at the corporate-welfare guest-worker programs in the Schumer-Rubio bill, but all he offers in response is an amendment “that would provide $1.5 billion for a jobs program for American youth.”
The patriotic Right, by contrast, does not excuse people from the consequences of their bad decisions, but also doesn’t seek to artificially burden our struggling countrymen. There are many elements to such a pro-worker conservatism, but the first has to be not importing low-skilled competiton from abroad.
If the 2016 nominee comes from the high-immigration establishment, I already have a slogan for him:
Survival of the Fittest: Vote GOP!
That ought to help carry Ohio.