The Media’s Newest Scare Tactic: Expelling Illegals Will Crash the Economy!

by el gato malo

there has been a sudden and remarkably lockstep move from the talking point of “the illegals flooding america are not so bad” to the talking point of “if you expel all the illegals it’s going to be a calamity!”

i find this fascinating on several levels, not least of which is the desperation to try to convince the working class that “people coming to take your job while staying for free on your dime is actually good for you!”

it’s hunger games level delusion from a media mavens class so dangerously out of touch that they cannot even seem to hide their contempt and their NIMBY level unconcern.

“it’s not happening” failed so now we arrive at:

“it’s some flyover town and just a few apartment complexes, it’s not like it was martha’s vineyard or somehting!”

and cometh the hour, cometh the hillbilly singing elegies for these self-immolating platoons of prevaricating punditry. they have not seen his like in many a long year. and they have no idea what to do with him.

welcome back to “saying the loud part out loud.”

you’re going to like it here.

martha raddatz’s vineyards (she actually lives in arlington) remain pristine, it’s just the grubby places where irrelevant people reside where complexes get taken over by criminal gangs and held hostage while local police fret and fumble but do precious little.

seriously, how can this have been allowed to persist for hours much less days and weeks? and can anyone seriously argue that if this happened in mcclean or potomac that it would not have been over in a matter of minutes amidst SWAT team smackdown?

not in the “capital city” where the “capital people” live. nosirree bob.

but for the rest of you?

hard for you, good for me, too bad, so sad, let’s get some brunch.

vote harder next time! swearsies, change is just around the corner.

not terribly interesting. pedestrian even.

what interests me is the sudden shift to “OMG, if we kick them out it’s going to be economic collapse!”

this is, frankly, bunk, but it’s also fascinating in both what it reveals about the views of this class and of their sudden acceptance that they are probably about to lose control of these choices. the rear-guard fight to normalize (and legalize) illicit immigrant occupation and stir up resistance to the obvious act of “no longer supporting and subsidizing vast cadres of illegal immigrants” and instead “sending them home” has begun.

this is probably because the fear about election outcome is getting acute among those who get to see real polling and know what’s coming.

 
as many of you know i have been and remain quite pro-immigration.

my great grandparents were immigrants, they and my grandparents struggled through the great depression, and my family is a near perfect arc of the american dream from bootstrap working class on up.

as a matter of morality, i think others should have this chance too, but not without struggle and not on everyone else’s dime. US immigration was hard. it was scary, risky, and fraught. that brought a certain kind of person, a person who had skills and grit and who had already internalized the american ethos.

“here’s a free hotel room, a $30k EBT card, a cell phone, and 3 get out of jail free passes if you happen to rape, rob, or assault someone” brings a very different sort of folks and central and south america are literally emptying their prisons into america. where did you think these venezuelan gangbangers came from?

662,566 imported criminals and these are just the ones we know about and that are actually on the ICE docket. reality is surely many multiples of this.

 
this is being done because this same precious media and political aristocracy simply cannot imagine life without “cheap menials” and cannot do basic math or economics, which is, of course, to be expected

but get to 1m26s in this interview and the comment is SO telling: “wait, you think americans would do these jobs!?!” it’s outright incredulity.

wanna see some wild data? take a look at this:

 
2.7 million people started claiming “disability” from jan 2021 to aug 2023, 1.5% of the US workforce (the bottom graph is just the top graph divided by US labor force). 5% of working age folks are claiming “disability.” this is a staggering number with no historical precedent in the US. standard for making this claim dropped like a rock and the length of benefits soared. cough a bit, say you feel unwell, mumble “long covid” and off you go.

but back to economic illiteracy:

let’s use her facts.

25 million illegals. 1/3 of the construction workforce in the US is hispanic. OK, but that says nothing about their legality. “a large proportion are undocumented.” that means nothing. what’s “a large proportion?” 5%? 10%? half? half seems extreme. i’d bet it’s 25% tops and likely far less for any actual skilled labor. let’s take 5-25% as our plausible range for hispanics in construction that are also illegals.

the US construction workforce is 8.3 million.

1/3 of that is 2.8 million (rounding up). that’s the hispanic count.

so using 5-25%, somewhere between 56,000 and 700,000 workers in US construction might be illegal. i’d guess the number is ~250k or so, but let’s take 700k to steel man this argument.

700k = 8.5% of the construction workforce and almost certainly predominantly the least productive part.

now let’s consider 25 million illegal immigrants. let’s say they live 4 to a dwelling. that’s 6.25 million required dwellings to house this influx.

1.4 million new housing units were built in the US in 2023.

see the problem?

Read more