Voters in Virginia finally had enough with the big lie of illegal immigration: Those who want open borders are largely either ethnic activists and chauvinists who wish open borders on the south, but would never extend such laxity to other ethnic groups (e.g., La Raza activists would oppose 1 million Chinese, Nigerians, or Ukrainian nationals trying to cross illegally into the American Southwest), or want access to cheap labor, with employers pocketing the profits while the state and thus the taxpayer pick up the inevitable social costs of their exploitation of labor.
Eric Cantor’s luck ran out, when his long insistence of pushing immigration-reform legislation finally coincided with a massive and sudden rush of thousands to the U.S. border from Central America. That lining up of the planets explains why a good but obscure candidate beat a supposedly invincible insider.
There are a number of elements to the illegal-immigration debate that really tick off people of all races and classes and drive them to the polls in a way the alliance of the Chamber of Commerce and La Raza activists can never comprehend.
One, the issue really has become an elite/mass split. The left-wing identity-politics crowd knows that such huge numbers of illegal immigrants preclude easy assimilation and integration. They like that, given that they are self-appointed representatives of millions of new in-need constituents. And they don’t care whether illegal immigration is disastrous to the working American poor, among them millions of Hispanics — a fact that once caused an exasperated Cesar Chavez and the UFW to go down to the border to demand an end to unchecked and unlawful immigration (was he a “nativist“?). Likewise, the Republican elite establishment is shielded from the direct effects of illegal immigration, in the sense that their neighborhoods, their schools, and their emergency rooms are quite distant from the ground-zero landscapes where millions have entered the U.S. illegally. So fronting for big corporations to have access to cheap labor is a rather easy thing to do, unethical as it is at a time of serial high unemployment.
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