There is no “merit” in so-called “merit-based” immigration

When it comes to naming names in this country’s dark side, some names that should be rarely are. Some, like Margaret Sanger—the founder of Planned Parenthood—have reputations largely untainted by their ideology influenced by eugenics and “scientific” racism. But one name that outside a New York Times expose last year remains virtually unknown yet whose sinister influence continues to poison the immigration debate fourteen years after her death: Cordelia Scaife May, a heiress and socialite from a family known for its far-right politics. May apparently had too much free time on her hands—time she eventually used to influence and fund racist and white nationalist anti-immigrant groups, especially those founded by her friend, John Tanton. Her virulent anti-immigrant views have been masked by her portrayal as an “environmentalist,” but those concerns (especially in her later years) focused on the population control of “third world” peoples--hypocritically ignoring the fact that the biggest destructors of the environment are major corporations and those of her own social class, who seem to require far more resources to “survive” than low-income people. 

According to the Times examination of her private papers, May believed that the country was “being invaded on all fronts” by “foreigners” who “breed like hamsters.” Her views of blacks and Hispanics were typical white supremacist fare, and her white nationalist radicalism became so extreme that she felt it was her “mission” in life to establish an anti-immigrant funding organization called Colcom which would continue on after her death to be the principle funding mechanism for hate groups like FAIR, VDare and dozens of lesser known such groups. A former executive director of FAIR admitted that without the hundreds of millions of dollars that May and Colcom poured into these organizations, they likely would have folded into the oblivion they deserved to go long ago.

Another May—former British Prime Minister Theresa May—and former Home Secretary Amber Rudd were in the middle of their own immigration scandal with the Windrush affair a few years ago. “Windrush” referred to a passenger ship that carried then British subjects from the Caribbean to Britain under the 1948 British Nationality Act, which granted citizenship to such subjects in the quest to fill labor shortages following World War II. All immigrants who were born British subjects and arrived before 1973 were technically granted citizenship in the UK without having to produce “papers” to prove they were legal residents, with the assumption that long-time residents and their children were “adequately protected” from mistaken deportation. That assumption did not take into consideration the probability of a backlash by whites in Britain against minority immigrants and the potential for abuses by right-wing governments. A 1999 immigration law included a clause to protect the “Windrush generation” from illegal deportation, but the clause was not included in a 2014 law largely composed by then Home Secretary May, who also instituted the ”hostile environment rule,” whose "aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants." 

Ignoring warnings of the potential for abuse, many of the “Windrush generation”—from the Caribbean in particular—who were unable to provide the “paper trail” to “prove” that they had arrived before 1973 were targeted because of their race, and illegally stripped of their legal rights and in many cases illegally deported. Although May was the “mastermind” behind this sordid business, Rudd took the fall because she was Home Secretary when the scandal broke, and was eventually forced to resign after the discovery of her “memo” in which she called for elevated deportation quotas, which she previously denied. Today, as The Guardian reports, Britain’s conservative government has still learned nothing from the scandal, and continues to look for every excuse to deport dark-skinned immigrants, who allegedly poses a “threat” to British “values.” And has been noted, this anti-immigrant attitude was also the primary “mover” behind Brexit.

Motivations of questionable “merit” permeate anti-immigrant “philosophy.” In the case of Cordelia Scaife May, so-called “environmental” concerns mask the fears of the “elite” classes of the maintenance of their lifestyles, and the lie that the U.S. is facing a population “crisis”; China has the same landmass as the U.S., yet four times the population—and it has supplanted Russia as the U.S.’ biggest challenger for world domination. In the case of Theresa May, nonwhite immigrants were the principle targets of the British version of “white nationalism,” and British immigration policy, like the ICE, often got things “wrong” while behaving like Gestapo agents; when we talk about the abolishment of the ICE, we should remember that the ICE only came into existence after 9-11, and their principle assignment was supposed to be locating and detaining potential foreign “terrorists.” 

Meanwhile, in the U.S. the racial aspect of anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions has been hidden behind the mask of so-called “merit.” In The Hill the other day, anti-Hispanic immigrant fanatic Nolan Rappaport basically said that any migrant crossing the southern border, whether to applying for asylum or not, is automatically a “criminal.” The very idea of “decriminalizing” the simple act of crossing the border, even by children, sets him off into a blind rage; these people have even fewer human rights than mass murderer Patrick Crusius, by his accounting. But perhaps not all of them are “criminals”—if they are not Hispanic, that is. The Trump policy was first to force Hispanic asylum seekers to “wait in Mexico,” before devolving into forcing them to apply for asylum in “safe” third-party countries that are as unsafe as the countries they left, with the Trump administration threatening aid blackmail to force these countries to “comply.” But what about the 20,000 or so non-Hispanic migrants who have been caught crossing the border during both fiscal 2018 and 2019, half of them from India and most of the rest from China? It’s back to the old “catch-and-release” system for them. They are not “criminals”; only Hispanics are “criminals.”

Also in The Hill, Bradley Blakeman made a pitch for how "merit-based" immigration “works,” and not just a function of racist attitudes. He talks about a Sudanese immigrant who while moonlighting as a limo driver surprised the white doctors he was driving when he revealed he was a trained doctor too. Unfortunately, Blakeman’s ignorance undercuts his own argument: Sudan and Nigeria are on Trump's latest immigration ban list. Today, this Sudanese doctor would be banned from immigrating to this country because the Trump administration would present him as a “terrorist threat” rather than the truth—that Trump and Stephen Miller just want to keep out another non-white person from a “shithole” country. The question of “merit” doesn’t even enter the equation—just his race or “ethnicity.”

The “merit” argument for immigration has more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese. Is there no "merit" in putting food on Blakeman's table—or that of low-income people who rely on food costs being affordable? Is there no “merit” in construction work? Is there no “merit” in doing any number of jobs for which small businesses and light manufacturing rely on immigrant labor to keep their businesses a going concern in the face of competition from Asia? Yet being employed in the convenience store business requires a high level of “merit”? This must be the case, because that is the occupation that the greater number of immigrants from South Asia are working in; I remember when most convenience stores were occupied by people from the local community. Isn’t hiring discrimination supposed to be illegal? 

It is interesting that there are two attitudes in regard to foreign-born labor—either they are “replacing” native-born workers, or they’re filling positions that there isn’t enough native-born labor to fill. In the former case, Hispanic immigrants are the “villain.” Yet today this country has near record low unemployment, which only proves that those millions of illegal immigrant workers are filling a labor need—as they always have—yet the work they do has no "merit." This only proves that this country’s immigration policy has no basis in reality. To white nationalists—particularly those who hide behind the argument of “the law”—“merit” is in the eye of a racist beholder. “Merit” isn’t just about skill level—I doubt that a Chinese or Indian immigrant has the “skill” to do the work that many Hispanic immigrants do, if for no other reason that it is “beneath” their “station” to do, and for Indians of a certain elevated “caste,” they would never dream of dirtying their hands in any manual labor. 

Many of the so-called “meritorious” immigrants come here for less than “meritorious” reasons. After the World Health Organization in 2013 reported that 60 percent of the people in India—800 million—are so poor that they had no access to indoor toilet facilities and literally answer the “call of nature” in the streets, this “revelation” was apparently embarrassing enough for the government to conduct a crash program of constructing updated versions of outhouses to at least keep the problem as much out of sight as possible. But the poor in India are not the ones immigrating to the U.S.; India is also in crisis because those who are immigrating to the U.S. are more needed at “home.” India has a horrendous problem with providing adequate health care to its vast population of poor, the exact number which government statistics try to conceal by setting completely arbitrary standards for what constitutes poverty. To combat the issue, another “crash program” is underway to expand access to health care for the “lower caste” population, which has been an abject failure. It is failing because there is a shortage of 600,000 doctors and 2 million nurses, according to the American policy organization CDDEP report issued this past year.

According to the WHO, in India there is a shocking one doctor per 10,189 people. Yet in 2005 it was reported that there were over 40,000 doctors of Indian “ethnicity” in this country, most of them immigrants. Since then, immigration to this country from India has skyrocketed, and many of them were medical professional more needed in India than here. There are those who claim that this country has a “shortage” of doctors, but relative to what? In 2016 there were nearly one million doctors in the U.S., a ratio of about one doctor per 330 people—meaning that there are at least 30 times the number of doctors in the U.S. per person as there are in India. 

Obviously, many educated Indian immigrants come here because they want nothing to do with their own country. On informational websites like Quora, you will find Indian doctors advising other Indian doctors to “come on over” because of the greener pastures in the U.S.—but not, as would be expected, on the living standard level. Doctors in India enjoy high status, living in fine houses and have servants and limo drivers.  The reality is that they feel no responsibility to provide care for “lower caste” persons. When people in their country are suffering, what is so “meritorious” about the greed for money, the handwringing about the possibility of treating people of lower castes or even setting foot in their neighborhoods without feeling personally “dirtied”? The Hippocratic Oath means nothing to these people, because that is a Western concept and does not take into consideration the very real and very ongoing reality of caste prejudice and discrimination in India—which unfortunately they import into this country. 

While there are politically progressive Indians in this country  (although we see the other kind in the Trump administration, such as Nikki Haley), most of these people seem to have little knowledge of the fight against racial discrimination in this country, and thus practice it themselves. In the office building where I work, while almost every tenant took the MLK Jr. holiday as an excuse to take the day off,  the only tenant that did not were the GE employees, whose manager is Indian and about 80 percent of the employees are Indian, and they behave and interact as if they are in separate “country.”

People who bedwet over immigrants from Latin American claim that they “depress” wages, which is false, since U.S. businesses in which they are prevalent are more likely to compete with low-cost goods from overseas to stay in business. U.S. tech and IT companies, on the other hand, bring over “temporary” workers from places like India because they are relatively “low cost,” not because of international competition, but because it helps those companies “bottom line,” usually so that there is more to feed the largesse of top executives. Overall, more than 70 percent of all H-1B visas are awarded to people from India, which is discriminatory on its face. Some American companies—particularly those with Indians in prominent management positions—use 98 or 99 percent of their H-1B visas solely for other Indians. Although there is rampant abuse of the H-1B visa program, and the Trump administration technically lowered the cap number of H1-B visas issued per year, this “cap” was rendered moot by the administration’s decision not to “immediately” enforce the deportation of visa holders whose work visa’s had expired.  Employers are now permitted to hold on to these employees while they submit extensions—without following up to see if this is actually legally done. 

The major “rationalization” for using more “tech” immigrants to fill a shortage of such workers is largely a fraud. Customers of companies that outsource “customer service” to India, like Amazon, are well within their rights to complain about inferior “customer care” they receive in regard to lost or late deliveries, because these so-called “tech” providers do nothing but read the same information that you can read; if you are not happy with the “service” provided, you are just cutoff and then wait for the next “customer service representative” to suggest that you are illiterate because you can’t “read.” Most so-called “tech” jobs in this country are not particularly “high-skill”—in fact, the oft-used term “IT” should not be confused with ‘high-tech,” but usually is to fool people into believing that most IT jobs are “merit-based,” and thus muddying up the water about who should or should not be allowed in the country. Most “IT” jobs require little more “education” than the ability to adequately communicate what one can read on a computer screen, even though most of the information provided even an idiot can do him or herself. “Tech” companies just don’t feel they need to pay such workers or provide adequate benefits for them, so they go the H-IB visa route; while many white Americans sitting in an office cubicle have an unjustified high opinion of their relative “merit,” many Indians would prefer to work with other Indians—and if they can “swing it,” they will, legally, or in many cases, of questionable legality.

That begs the question: Is there a real “shortage” of “tech” workers? The “non-partisan” Atlantic Council think tank claims that 70 percent of H-1B visa holders are not “tech” workers, but work in professions like teaching and accounting, but mostly in sales—a not so elevated description of “IT” jobs. “By every objective measure, most H-1B workers have no more than ordinary skills, skills that are abundantly available in the U.S. labor market” despite the fact more than enough native-born students with the proper skills are being produced from American colleges and universities. It seems that it really all about “saving money” and “depressing wages."

A 2018 report by David Deming and Kadeem Noray, “STEM Careers and Technological Change,” revealed a disquieting reality: in the “high-tech” job market, American companies are quick to discard native-born workers with “out-of-date” skills. Instead of retraining them, tech companies just toss them in the remainder bin as an easy cost-cutting measure instead incurring the expense of retraining them, and look for low-cost “alternatives” who have the “latest” skills they claim to need. The report noted that 50 percent of native-born graduates with STEM degrees cannot find employment in their chosen fields, and among those who are “fortunate” to be hired, they can only look to a future where experience and longevity mean nothing, and wages are “flatter” due to competition from the lower cost H-1B workers, most of them from India and most of the rest from China.

Complaints about illegal immigration still dominates the immigration discussion, yet there is very little mention of the ever increasing fact of non-Hispanic illegal immigration. There were an estimated 500,000 Indians in the country illegally in 2014, and likely there are many more today; one out of every six you see is in the country illegally, but that doesn’t seem to bother the nativists. In 2018, there was an estimated 362,000 Chinese in the country illegally, and it is not like they bother to “fit in.”  According to one report, 58 percent of Chinese immigrants in this country have limited or no proficiency in English, lower than the foreign-born population as a whole; there have been reports that Chinese students who speak little or no English have gotten into universities paying “stand-ins” to take English proficiency tests for them. They also participate at a lower rate than other groups in the labor force.

Yet the “caveat” to all of this is the fact that it is white people who are making these decisions about what qualifies as “merit.” On one hand they try to keep people out who are doing the work most of them don’t want to do, yet on the other hand they allowing themselves to be “replaced” by foreign labor who they are willing to imply have more “merit" than they do. Their bigotry against people Trump claims come from “shithole” countries is blinding them to their own deliberate self-destruction.