The last downward jolt to the stock market occurred when Congress was last at work on the immigration bill and it became clear that restrictionists held the upper hand. Now the legislators are tackling the subject again, and the Dow, after nearing an all-time high, is down over 500 points in the space of a few days, 300 in the past two.
Is this a coincidence?
Conceivably, but I find it hard to follow the conventional market watchers in pinning such a sharp decline on a very slightly higher CPI number than expected. There is, I think, a strong likelihood that the financial markets are adjusting to the prospects of, in the short run, American conservatism’s frolic and detour into the byways of nativism, and, in the long run, a substantial decrease in the growth of the country’s labor force, which will lead ineluctably to slower economic growth.
For conservatives to make immigration their Big Issue distracts from the far more urgent matter of prosecuting the war against Islamofascism and has introduced both an unwontedly nasty tone and a strain of anti-capitalist demagogy into right-wing rhetoric. Unless there is a sea change very quickly, the Republican Party will collapse in November, because conservative opinion molders will be urging the rank-and-file to stay home and “punish” George W. Bush. When the normally mild, if rather air-headed, Peggy Noonan opines, “I continue to believe the administration’s problem is not that the [Republican] base lately doesn’t like it, but that the White House has decided it actually doesn’t like the base”, we aren’t far from third party movements and a chest-thumping retreat to the political wilderness. We happy few! And the fewer, the happier!
For me it is a bit disheartening to watch my ideological compatriots gallop off into the sunset of irrelevance. Looking through the blogosphere, I appear to be just about the last believer in applying free market principles to labor. (John Podhoretz, lonely in the NRO Corner, and David Zincavage of NeverYetMelted are among the few exceptions.) Oh, well, there is one other right-winger who didn’t regard “open borders” as an swear word. What would Peggy Noonan think of a man who made statements like these:
It makes one wonder about the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won't do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.
I believe we must resolve the problem at our southern border with full regard to the problems and needs of Mexico. I have suggested legalizing the entry of Mexican labor into this country.
Some months before I declared, I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico. I did not go with a plan. I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas – how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence.
We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.
That man was Ronald Reagan.
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