MAGA's weaponized immigrants
An immigrant's view on the conflict
If you’ve been following the news you’ve seen how the Musk-Vivek pro-immigration argument — that USA needs to import skilled immigrants to be competitive against China — has divided the happy MAGA consensus.
As an immigrant myself, I have a couple of thoughts on this.
First of all, it’s funny, exposing a class divide at the heart of the MAGA movement — the rift he globalist plutocrats who back Trump vs the everyday suckers who believe their talk about American First.
But there’s another thing here that interests me more — and it has to do with the general American view of immigration that transcends partisan politics and political views…and how in the end it all boils down to weaponizing immigrants…in one direction or another, or in multiple directions at once.
On a basic level, it’s an imperialistic way of thinking about immigrants and immigration — a mindset that can be inverted from “pro-immigration” to “anti-immigration” and yet magically remain the same. That is, this kind of argument can justify kicking out the wrong kind of immigrant (who is being sent here by America’s enemies to weaken America so it can be conquered by its enemies) or attracting the right kind of immigrant (to make America stronger, more competitive against its enemies). And it’s an argument thats used all the time by both New York Times reading Democrats and or MAGA Republicans…and used in exactly the same way.
So about this Musk-Vivek-MAGA controversy…
On one side is the nationalist/nativist wing that wants to keep foreigners out in order to improve the lives of ordinary. This wing forms the populist base of the MAGA movement and it believes that immigrants are being weaponized by the globalists (and other American enemies) to keep the good hardworking American Man down. On the other side is the usual multi-national overlord corporate wing that’s represented by Musk, Vivek, and almost certainly Trump. Forming the top of the ruling class, this wing has a much more sophisticated and manipulative view of immigration. One the one hand, it agrees with the populist-nativist wing…it agrees that immigrants are being weaponized by the globalists (and foreign enemies) to weaken America and to keep the good hardworking American Family Man down. It deployed this argument, using immigrants as scapegoats, to come to political power. But on the other hand, this wing still wants its pool of exploitable immigrants — people who they can underpay and overwork and who won’t complain. And so they make another kind of weaponized immigrant argument: that the right kind of immigrant should be weaponized in order to make America great and to defeat America’s enemies.
It’s all very predictable. And on all sides it’s about immigrants as a means to an end — a weapon that either makes American stronger or weaker against its enemies. That’s how immigrants like me are looked at in this country. And this kind of thinking is not restricted to the Republican side. Democrats think in exactly the same terms. I wrote about it during the first Trump administration.
I guess there’s something natural about looking this way at immigrants…if you’re looking at it from a state level. But still it is a bit weird to me. Because I’m definitely not making America Great Again or Even Greater, at least not at far as the nativists or the corporate globalists see it. So…I’m…I…I was a mistake? Yeah, it was wrong to let me in.
—Yasha
I saw this earlier today. Not 100% relevant, but somewhat.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1872672262928933312
"The irony of Vivek's post is that his wrong analysis of how American culture is broken illustrates in itself how American culture is broken.
I mean, how out-of-touch must one be to think people will embrace a vision where childhood must be optimized for corporate success, with less sleepovers, hanging out and fun (what he calls "mediocrity") in favor of shareholder-value-maximizing "excellence"?
Especially when addressing Americans who have seen their lives destroyed en-masse by the same corporate priorities that produced this vision of "excellence". The average American family isn't choosing between math tutoring and sleepovers - they're choosing between paying for basic necessities while both parents work multiple jobs.
His examples unwittingly prove the opposite of his point: shows that he describes as corrupting American culture (Friends, Boy Meets World, Family Matters, etc.) celebrate friendship, family, and community values - exactly what the US has lost in their rush to optimize everything for economic output and create an hyperindividualistic and consumerist society. That's probably why they're popular: they reflect a lost world that people aspire to go back to.
He mentions China as the motivating factor here, because apparently the solution to avoid having their "asses handed to us by China" is more capitalism, treating people even more like cogs who must compete in "the global market for technical talent."
That doesn't only betray a misunderstanding of what Americans want but also of China. China themselves largely hate the extreme competitiveness of their system: the people hate it and the government hates it, they all want to move away from it (hence the government banning the tutoring industry). And in any case this isn't what made China rise - China rose with a largely uneducated population, as mass university-level education is a very recent phenomenon there.
No, I'm convinced that China, at a very fundamental level, rose so unprecedentedly fast for the very reason that it is one of the very few countries in the world which culture wasn't completely denaturalized by the sort of neoliberal dystopia that Vivek seems to idealize. In China's socialist system the market doesn't trump all, individualism doesn't reign supreme and, at a broader level, they still stay faithful to many of the ancestral values that have sustained their civilization for thousands of years. That's the culture that underpins it all and makes it work, not the fact that Chinese kids do too much homework.
All in all, this is what makes this debate so revealing: Vivek, in trying to diagnose America's problems, has instead unwittingly illustrated them. The belief that every human activity must be justified by its contribution to GDP, that collective bonds are mere distractions from the pursuit of "excellence," and that the solution to the problems created by predatory capitalism is, somehow, more predatory capitalism."
This nation is built and maintained by incoherency.
Always one group wanting to assimilate with the larger group while shaming others like them. My dad's side (and I've heard this outside family) shame hispanic immigrants, while being hispanic themselves. They're "American" and therefore more pure or something. They want to set the good example not to be sleepy and lazy like immigrant version of hispanic. You see this "house slave" dynamic everywhere. Gays do this when they blend in with straights masking inner Boy George to set the good example.
Immigration is a good way to pull at hearts.