Oddly enough, it may take a rich man to break the power of finance. Donald Trump, who has moolah aplenty, has truly shaken up the major economic interests who support cheap labor and mass immigration. And though he has paid a financial price, he continues to tell the truth about how ordinary citizens are being exploited by the financial elite. He has the resources to compete in an election at the national level.
Most Americans understand mass immigration will destroy their future. However, the concentrated economic benefits and diffuse costs of immigration occasionally make it difficult to organize. The costs of immigration, what economists would call the “externalities” of the policy, are sometimes hard to identify.
If you bring in cheap labor, the employer reaps the reward. The citizens pay the cost of health care, education, and crime. However, because this is lumped in with all the other costs they pay, taxpayers don’t notice it as much as an employer notices his direct benefit.
Thus, cheap labor employers are especially active in making donations and political contributions to defend the status quo. But Trump can match them dollar for dollar. And as a result, with a major assist from the dynamic Ann Coulter and her spectacular book Adios America!, Trump has been able to push the immigration issue to the forefront of the national debate.
And yet we are supposed to take the objections from the special interests who benefit from mass immigration seriously. From agribusinesses to ethnic lobbies, from La Raza to the Catholic Church, we citizens are supposed to lend an ear to those who put their private profits over the national interest. One might as well mourn for those contributors to the Clinton Foundation who won’t get the expected payback if Hillary doesn’t make it to the White House.
Chief among these special interests is my own Democratic Party, which has sacrificed the well-being of American workers for the expected future payoff of importing a permanent demographic majority. American workers, social moderates, and the disaffected have been utterly abandoned by open borders Democrats and the openly plutocratic Republican Establishment.
Trump offers an alternative. A social moderate, Trump could attract those Republicans who fled from the extreme social conservatism of the present-day Republican Party. He could also pick off a few Democrats skeptical of Bernie Sanders’s socialism and Hillary’s corporatist corruption.
Of course, the GOP may blow this opportunity by rallying behind a candidate who will take an extreme stance on social issues, driving off workers and moderates. Trump may have just signed the RNC pledge to back the GOP, but if he’s deliberately driven off, he may still run as an independent, dooming the Republicans.
Rather than viewing Trump as an interloper, thoughtful Republicans should see this as an opportunity. The GOP now has a rich, independent, and plain-speaking truth-teller on immigration and financial corruption as their front runner. Many of us who aren’t Republicans are still looking for someone who can be an alternative to the bought and paid for puppets of the financial elite. And also many of us are angry about how badly both parties are running the country.
Trump could be our answer. As long as the GOP doesn’t follow its usual strategy of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Donald A. Collins [email him], is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013
