illegal-immigration

On Immigration

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Yosemite North Country, headwaters of the Tuolumne River

Immigration has turned into one of the most controversial issues of our day. Why? Because we are in the days of what I would call the Great Validity Grounding — where our elites have carried population manipulation through propaganda to such a level, there is no way we can swallow the various fictions and not get hit over the head by reality.

And immigration is far from the only issue. We are told that boys are girls, and there is no harm in pumping teenagers full of cross-sex hormones. We are told that our very agencies responsible for subversive activity around the world are only the positive narcissistic storefronts for saving lives around the globe. That Americans really aren’t owed any reasonable egalitarian trade policies. That we should be involved in endless, historic wars around the world. The list goes on and on.

Most Americans want to retreat from all this — and have. Being hyper-informed (I am the worst when it comes to digesting the constant stream of news out of the Internet and social media) AND being a teacher who actually engages my students — I sit with them and nonjudgmentally ask them what they know — it is stunning how little most of them are aware of what is going on, nor how they are being manipulated 24/7. But the crunch is coming for the population, and certainly no one has championed the re-grounding effort in common-sense reality than Donald Trump. I’ve been very critical of Trump in the past. But as I wrote in a recent piece, maybe we needed an inveterate narcissist to play-act the role of national father to shake us out of our shared cognitive delusion.

When it comes to immigration, I am profoundly against illegal immigration of any sort. What happened during the Biden administration was an appalling betrayal of the national interest. And the accounting of the damage is yet to be reckoned with. And assembling coherent narratives of that damage is nearly impossible – because by and large, the elites in our society have benefited. And our press will simply not report in any coherent manner on the actual effects of the past 20M (or more) illegal immigrants coming into our country in the past four years.

But such a tidal wave of humanity had to have mechanisms that supported it. That led to growth of large-scale Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the gaslighting machinations to hide from and defraud the American people, who paid for all of it. But there is more — if you need more proof of the size of the effort, go to Youtube and search for “migrants – Darien Gap”. You’ll see the encampments set up in Colombia — often nation- or language-specific that shepherded the mass of humanity (mostly 20-30 something males) up through some of the most remote jungle on the planet, and onto buses and trains into the United States. Bret Weinstein on Tucker Carlson gives insights on the darker part of all this — Chinese migration into the US.

The other dark side of all this is that Sinaloan gangs from Mexico form a huge part of the infrastructure for getting illegal migrants from around the globe into the U.S. There are no clear numbers on the money involved with the cartels, but it is clear that it ranges in the tens of billions, to potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. The idea that peasants or lower caste individuals from African countries could figure out how to get to Ecuador or Colombia and then traverse the Darien Gap, purely on their own gumption, is laughably ridiculous. The cartels get the cash, and then provide the services. And any deficits are made up in the sex slave trade.

Further, the travesty of the border then fuels huge monetary reserves for those same cartels to buy politicians on the border, as well as along the route. If you expect these same cartels, with their violent economic morality to suddenly acquiesce to the federal government shutting down a primary revenue stream, you are deluded.

But that is not the main point of this piece. My experience is primarily with the connected consequences of our legal immigration policy — which involves the evolution and development of our technical workforce. That is something we must address as well, because how we approach this already has, and will continue to dictate our own economic composition of our own country.

To start, I think it’s important to remember that there are phases behind any social policy. While social policy is always going to be heavily biased towards elite interests (Peter Turchin in his book, End Times, notes that there’s basically no period in a society’s life where this ISN’T true) that doesn’t mean that every policy propagated will necessarily damage those not high-status. Policies, however, run their course, and inevitably, as they get hacked and manipulated by sophisticated individuals, who have some psychopathic members as part of their cohort, must be revisited before the disparate impact becomes so damaging they threaten the fabric of that same society.

Let’s get to the basics. Folks have been gaslit for so long on this issue they deny basic realities.

1. Increased competition drives down wages at the bottom of the wage scale.

2. Same makes housing more unaffordable for poor folks.

3. Labor surpluses leave little incentive for politicians to fix deficits in training and education for people on the lower part of the wage scale.

4. H1B visas gut the demand drivers for improving technical education for high school and undergraduate students.

5. Lack of a society that generates good jobs mean more “culture of poverty” problems for society, as poverty and single-parent homelessness drive crime rates and violence.

What one realizes is that these policies directly fuel the Wealth Pump — the social mechanisms that Turchin describes that moves money from the lower classes into the upper classes. This then exacerbates the income gap problem the country has been experiencing since the early ’70s. Which then drives an empathy gap, as the country moves away from egalitarian, high social contact lifestyles that might lead to emergent levels of compassion, as well as compensatory policies that actually make sense.

But what is NOT discussed is that immigration also serves as a metacognitive drag. I’m an engineering professor, and one of the drumbeats in the background of my entire career has been the need to educate more engineers. Or recruit them. Or whatever.

But around 1996, I noticed a new phenomenon. Engineering students, who a priori had typically received two offers at graduation, suddenly only were receiving one. And salaries had also gotten stuck. Neither of these phenomena indicate a starving job market. In fact, the opposite. And this has not changed. In fact, what HAS happened is there have been an increase required in experience for someone to get a job as an engineer. 30 years ago, maybe 50% of all students had an internship, which then did facilitate them getting a job. Now, my guess is that 90% of students have internships. And jobs are not really available for students who have below a 3.0/4.0 GPA. We in the university have compensated for these pressures as far as facilitating some of these requirements. But the pressure on the universities themselves to improve their own curricula has been non-existent. Instead, universities, contaminated by status-seeking behaviors, have doubled down on “research productivity.” Most research produced by universities is garbage — but then again, most new thought is garbage. You’d never know from watching how universities sell themselves, though. And it’s also true you have to have some area of inquiry for faculty to pursue — especially in rapidly changing fields like engineering. Without it, it is far too easy for faculty to stagnate. But, as with all things, there are limits. And universities, with their meta-linear metrics, fuel nonsensical creep of numbers rather than looking at actual advancement.

Like it or not, one starts to realize the key lever to forcing this society to fix its problems is to radically cut back on the number of H1-B visas currently issued. Then elites will have to start applying pressure to political systems to fix the educational system. Yes — there will be some pressure to offshore some of the work. But that is not without its costs. And I’d argue it would be far easier to just to fix our own educational systems.

And, as Americans, we would all be better off.

The Perfect Racket

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

Toucans – Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

Back when I was a bona-fide environmental activist — a phase/career that lasted close to 14 years (if I had to be honest counting) I wrote a book, called Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater Country (WSU Press, 1998). In it, I documented a series of stories through my various adventures in the social and political landscape, which turned out to be far more interesting than the physical landscape I had spent so much time defending.

Why? The trees were beautiful — the wild rivers clean, and it’s hard to explain the deep awe I had, and still maintain for these wild places. But there was simply no cognitive dissonance in the fact that these places, functionally remnants of a bygone era, should be saved. All the truly economically conflicted places had, at least in the Clearwater Country in Idaho, had been logged. The timber industry was literally running on fumes. And the end was near, at least in that era, of large-scale resource extraction. What WAS left was gorgeous, striking and more than a little anachronistic. But the remaining stands of old-growth might build a couple thousand or so houses, or actually cedar shakes for roofs of houses. Or vineyard bracing. Saving this last, best place was simply a no-brainer.

But the forces persisted. There was no aesthetic swaying, no changing of minds. It was obvious to me that the timber industry was going to keep going until its own, bitter end.

It was then that I turned my attention away from just looking at trees, and working to understand the convergence of forces that allowed the destruction of rare, simplistic beauty. And in the process, often done meditating (or doing whatever it was that I did huffing through the mountains) I came up with the notion of The Perfect Racket.

What is a Perfect Racket? It is when you create a psycho-socio-economic machine that manages to cut across class lines, to achieve an end in spite of overwhelming demographic and other boundary conditions. And what had been set up in the heart of the Clearwater Valley in Idaho was exactly that.

What did that look like? There was a mill in Kooskia specializing in cedar. The mill owner was quite rich, and had sons who had left the area. The profits from the mill funded his sons’ passion — high end NASCAR racing, and there were articles about their success in the local paper. Further down, the blue collar people who worked in the mill were receiving their cut, as well as the ones that sawed down the trees, and drove the logging trucks. The bottom of the socioeconomic ladder was dominated by locals as brush monkeys — people who assisted with the various high-line logging jobs and would pile the logging slash for burning at the end of the season.

And the middle class? It was there as well — the US Forest Service. And then the surrounding small communities had some version of medical clinics, or small hospitals, which then were also fed by traffic by local farmers. Government spending in these communities was enormous. Logging and milling often only made up 5-10% of the workforce, as mills had been increasingly more automated even while I was fighting my own personal jihad. But I also noticed that lots of driveways had a Caterpillar D-8 parked there. Turns out a D-8 is about the right size for punching in roads into the backcountry, and the US Forest Service heavily subsidized road construction with both dollars per mile, as well as the timber cleared from the P-line, the route through the forest, where the road was supposed to be built.

Everyone was cut in. It was The Perfect Racket.

Buttressing the Perfect Racket were also myths, and lots of them. The hardworking logger. Trees as a renewable resource. Thriving local communities. On and on. The problem with living in any remote community, though, was that the culture varied in levels of violence pretty dramatically. Some were reasonable. Others were not. All had elevated levels of child abuse and poverty, because that’s what happens when you build a town in the middle of what we, in the PNW, call BFE (Butt-Fuck Egypt.) Don’t ask me the etymology. I don’t know.

When the trees had mostly been felled, and enviros like myself appeared to be winning the battle to protect these last wild places, the stories kept propagating. Loggers could “sustainably” log and build furniture. Or mobile homes. Or program computers (literally). Whatever. It was all insane, and it was all a myth. The real structure of the economy had been built on enormous government subsidy, and once the metrics involved with that were altered (miles of road into wild places being key) there was no simple replacement. Normal people cannot conceive of the scale of the Clearwater anyway. It’s huge by contemporary standards for Lower 48 wild places. So inevitably, people create smaller abstractions that they can place inside their Overton Window. To say we, the environmental activists, were cast as bad guys, well, yes. But most enviros never got out to the woods either. I was the freak, hiking, paddling and driving all over the vast landscape, and all hidden by those damn trees I was attempting to save.

It’s June 11 today, and it’s been a crazy six months of Trump’s presidency. Donald Trump came in with a mission, and a new cast of characters. Having gotten his ass handed to him during his first Presidency, he brought the appropriate guns to a gun fight – an entirely different set of Cabinet members and advisors, some of whom are true rebels. Donald Trump is far more of a cipher than people give him credit for. For his supporters, he’s MAGA. For his detractors, he’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and the Anti-Christ. What he is doing, however, is intruding across the board on an ensemble of Perfect Rackets. Or rather — the money to fund them.

I happen to think that the Perfect Rackets we’re seeing are more corrupt and convoluted than the ones I fought. They’re staffed with people from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) from the prior administration, all holding up some version of what I’ve named a Narcissistic Shield — some innocent thing hostage, with the threat that if the money goes away, the bunny rabbit gets it. Most of the appropriated money for these NGOs goes into the hands of an increasingly incompetent administrative caste, that’s woven together with corporate interests, in ways that are wildly indeterminate on who’s getting what. The amount of money flowing into these organizations from sources like USAID, to fix things like clean energy appliances, or homelessness, is staggering. But there’s some visual evidence that the money is flowing — namely in communities around Washington, D.C. Or even my hometown of Pullman. Look at the 4000 sq.ft. McMansions. That money came from somewhere.

Most of these people employed in their current niche as bureaucratic activists are just as unemployable in the private sector as the loggers were in writing code. When they lose their sinecure, it’s not obvious what any of them will do. So they’re willing to fight for whatever their piece of the racket is with savage lies, attacking the morality of anyone that says society might be better off without them. And as their numbers of followers and children have grown, it also creates incentives for them to spool up the various rate functions in their problems. No one working on homelessness actually wants to SOLVE it. What the hell would they do? There’s a lot of money in NOT solving homelessness.

In LA, especially when these systems come into contact with divergent interests, like the Mexican drug cartels, more and more convoluted connections are formed. Then, the primary vector of spread becomes actually social intelligence. The cartels master bringing in illegal immigrants from East Africa, or India. But that’s not the end of it. Do you know how to set up a transnational human cargo smuggling operation through Ecuador? I don’t. Yet these people meet aligned interests in L.A., funded by the state government, like CHIRLA. Bureaucratic and economic alignment ensues. And those people need a place to stay — bring in the real estate managers. Once coupled with D.C. politicians, Mike Benz calls this “The Blob”. The more money brought in, the higher up in the system this goes. Elections must be paid for, or bought off. Key pieces, like the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, saying corporate money spent is equivalent to speech. All of the sudden, we are bombarded with nitwits who never wrote an op-ed, nor had a political opinion of any nuance, screaming about “free speech” and “constitutional” rights.

It’s the Perfect Racket. And take it from someone who’s spent a lifetime fighting them, they don’t just go down because you expose them.