Importing Foreign Labor is Immoral
Elon Musk and his friends from the PayPal Mafia are going to war for the right to import as many employees as they deem necessary. What is a Christian position on mass labor migration?
Incoming President Trump’s coalition has fractured, probably irreparably, after his billionaire tech bro alliance (the “PayPal Mafia”) went to war with the base over unlimited legal immigration. Up to and through the elections, there was complete alignment on ending illegal immigration and commencing mass deportations as soon as possible. Still, even that early resolve is weakening among the assembling Trump bureaucrats. What and how should Christians think about immigration?
Brief Backstory
For transparency, we are immigrants who benefited from a program — the Diversity Visa Lottery — that is harmful to the United States because of its compounding chain migration impact. The DVL should be canceled, and we would accept it if a situation developed where all recipients were required to return to their home countries. Although we have become naturalized citizens, we are ultimately nothing more than long-term guests, and the hosts get to set the rules.1
We brought our income and some meager assets from South Africa, asking for nothing more than the chance. America has been kind and magnanimous, allowing the family to flourish, be called to Lutheranism, establish several businesses, and have excellent jobs. Through all that, we have returned America’s generosity in small measures.2
The World’s Special Economic Zone
The legal immigration spat exploded when the Trump base reacted negatively to Sriram Krishnan's appointment as his AI policy adviser. Krishnan caught flack for his history of advocating unlimited imported labor and being the stereotypical rootless cosmopolitan parasitizing his host countries.
Responding to the backlash, which included racist bile against Indians, Trump advisor Vivek Ramaswamy belittled Americans for not being up to the ambitions and achievements of foreigners. Musk, also an immigrant from South Africa and who is our age cohort, took it further and asserted that American success is defined by imported labor that wins on merit against dumb locals. It certainly brings a weird revisionist history to the Wright Brothers, Model-T Ford, Space Program, and semiconductors!
The Musk camp has inadvertently confirmed that America is just the primary special economic zone (SEZ) to benefit a global elite that has commenced a generational rotation. The elite owes allegiance only to its cohort and its radical reduction of human labor to just another economic input whose costs must be continually ratcheted down.3
Labor Productivity at Any Price
There have been two principal means of driving up labor productivity, which has gone into hyper-drive over the last decade:
Labor substitution: Replacing with machines and enlarging the labor pool.
Mechanization - accelerated by the Industrial Revolution. Mostly Great Britain from 1760. The chief outcome was the British monopoly of the global textile trade fed by American cotton, which was itself the beneficiary of labor substitution thanks to slavery.
Female labor coercion - females have been forced out of family-centric labor into previously male-reserved spaces, even in heavy industry, culminating in the despicable embrace of women in the military, including in combat roles. The chief outcome has been wage depression for men, the collapse of the family, and the disfigurement of femininity.
Robotization and automation - accelerated by the Semiconductor Revolution. Mostly the USA after 1957. The chief outcome was an American monopoly of computing and software.
Artificial intelligence - accelerated by huge gains in GPUs and compute clusters from ~2012. The chief outcome is American dominance of AI, but it is evolving into a multipolar great power contest.
Labor arbitrage: Discounting in-place labor.
Uncontrolled International Mass Migration - accelerated by the great Gold Rushes in California, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. The chief outcome was the monopolization of global mining capital flows by City of London bankers.
Controlled Regional Mass Migration - accelerated by the need for large quantities of unskilled labor for menial tasks that cannot yet be automated. e.g., deep-level mining in South Africa and agricultural workers in America. Chief outcome is elected officials and governments subservient to commercial powers and the destruction of the family.
Outsourcing - gathered pace after the Second World War as American corporations became multinational in concert with the center of global finance shifting to New York from London. Went into hyper-drive after the collapse of the Soviet Union but was already nascent in the 1970s collapse of American iron ore mining and steel making. Now at a full flower with global industrial capacity and knowledge transferred to China, and commercial success fictionalized by financialization sleight-of-hand. Chief outcome is a consumer class addicted to cheap and poorly made products in addition to a monopoly on capital flows by an industrial, trade, and consulting oligarchy. Supply chains have also become incredibly fragile.
Insourcing—Where analog factory jobs are moved from high-cost to low-cost labor centers, digital jobs rely on imports of higher-IQ individuals to centers of intellectual capital. That trade has been facilitated by displacing Americans from its elite universities, with foreigners paying full freight and then staying on to work at a discounted salary package compared with Americans.
It is augmented by strip mining other countries of their best and most needed talent. For example, the UK hoovers up foreign nurses and doctors by the thousands, knowing they will tolerate the appalling National Health Service. It has no qualms about the lives damaged by inferior care from the medics that remain in the periphery. Canada ingests foreign doctors with a citizenship bribe and ships them to remote stations until they are nationalized. The US trawls the world, netting vast numbers of engineers, accountants, programmers, and bankers. The trade is moving down the chain to import all manner of labor that locals can quickly fill if they are only asked.
The chief outcome is the accrual of power by a transnational oligarchy centered in Silicon Valley whose assets are concentrated in mobile intellectual capital and power.
Is Labor a Christian Concern?
All of the Bible is packed with references to labor and has many edicts about treating workers fairly. It also includes examples of labor charity, such as commands to leave gleanings for the poor to collect.4 It includes many references to workers treating their bosses respectfully and not stealing from them. Jesus encounters many of His disciples in their work vocations.
Indeed, Jesus has a fantastic command of economics and business that is unexpected at face value but not surprising! Money is a frequent subject, and His disciples even appointed a treasurer (John 13:29). He opines on taxation (Mark 12:13-17), understands wage exchange (Matthew 20:1-16), illustrates respect for personal property (Mark 12:1-12), loathes fraud (John 2:13-17), discourses on turning a profit (Matthew 25: 14-29), and highlights the simple generosity of the poor (Mark 12:41-44), to name a handful of some examples.
In Lutheran theology, labor falls under the Estate of the Family (oeconomia). This estate encompasses all domestic life, including marriage, family, business, work, and education. The other two estates, the Church (ecclesia) and Civil Government (politia), play supporting roles to respectively guide and enforce fair labor practices.
Under the Ten Commandments, Seven through Ten are in play for all employer-employee relationships.
Consequently, Christians must be informed, concerned, and activists on labor issues.
Labor Substitution
Labor substitution is inevitable because of technological advances. It can expand employment and create new goods and services. However, we should oppose wholesale disintermediation of workers without a clear path to new opportunities appropriate to their skills and aptitudes. What gleanings are the employers making available? In our current context, there are no gleanings except to push them onto taxpayers as welfare dependents once they have signed the NDA and Cobra separation documents.
For example, Liberals have gloated over American coal miners being laid off to satisfy the climate change scam and mocked them with “learn to code” insults. When journalists were being laid off, and the learn-to-code favor was returned, the same Liberals wet the bed. As artificial intelligence gains traction, we face a future where entire employment categories are at risk, with millions of family incomes possibly being wiped out in a few years.
We must aggressively oppose labor substitution when it is attached to a gross money-changer profit motive without genuine concern for employees and their futures. Attached to those employees are families, churches, towns, and nations.
Labor Arbitrage
Goosing profits by arbitraging labor is catastrophic for any country, but it has America by the throat. Our blue-collar families have been smashed to pieces by outsourcing since the 1970s, and now insourcing is coming for the white-collar middle-class families.
A form of it is even visible in the LCMS, where alternate-track educated pastors are arbitraged against conventionally trained ones. Gresham’s Law does not only apply to money….
The world has entered an unprecedented phase of labor arbitrage, destroying national identities, cultures, and folkways in service to the global mammon leviathan. America has already been devastated by illegal labor arbitrage that lit the fuse and primed the greed pumps of the Chambers of Commerce.
Little wonder Musk’s rage has been so stoked—his loyalty to and love of America is only as deep as his next H-1B visa haul. He has insisted that the visas are only to snag a fraction of the top percentile of the world’s best minds. This is patently untrue with a cursory search of the H-1B database, which reveals many low-skill jobs are going to foreigners.
It is a fact that Americans are being displaced from their careers in the tens of thousands every year on top of gross racial and sex discrimination in hiring. To reinforce the punishment, access to academic advancement is manipulated based on immutable characteristics.
The elite blowup underscores how American education has collapsed. If workers are not functionally literate and numerate, how about taking the schools and universities to task instead of reflexively importing foreigners? Is it too much to ask for investment in a DEI-free educational system that actually rewards merit and provides pathways for white, grey, and blue-collar advancement?
The simple reason for the demand for H-1B visas is that they are a form of indentured labor.5 The foreign employee initially prices his US dollar wage in local purchasing power terms, which looks gargantuan. Little does he know that he is only getting 70 cents on the dollar compared with an American at the same level and education.
By simple observation, America’s outstanding achievements have been an indigenous phenomenon, and many were unselfishly gifted to the rest of the world. Where foreign contributions have mattered, American society made them possible, along with US contract law rooted in its people's unusual guilelessness.6 Consequently, the world harbors its wealth in America, where the most potent capital formation engine in history resides.
The solution is multifold, but we are a long way down the track, and it could be far too late.
Labor importation must end and be reversed. Industrial policy must heavily penalize offshoring. The money we waste on foreign policy adventurism must be invested locally to balance the inevitable rise in wages and prices. And so on; much of it is middle school common sense.
Christianity’s locus is the family and its local community. Clearly, we are obligated to band together to be millions of John the Baptists calling out our Herods about their vile indecency in breaking so many of the Commandments regarding labor policy. The current situation is an expression of hate for our neighbor.
☩TW☩
We left South Africa (SA) for the sake of our children, even though our respective family origins there went back three centuries, close to the arrival of the first Dutch settlers. We were Africans in every sense except for global prejudice about what skin color is permitted to claim any heritage on the continent. South Africa did not end Apartheid in 1994, but rather reordered the privilege totem pole and did away with the most odious visible racial segregation, replacing it with economic racial discrimination. To drive the point home, the leader of a Maoist political party, the fourth largest by representation, is free to make Rwandan-style genocidal threats against white South Africans who remain.
When we left SA in August 2000, Zimbabwe was near the peak of its violent white farm nationalization crisis. As a boy, I witnessed Portuguese refugees fleeing Mozambique in massive convoys. Everything they could take with them was tied to the roofs of cars already bottoming out with multiple generations of families packed in like sardines. The country gained independence from Portugal in 1975 and then fell into a civil war from 1977 to 1992, which war amounted to a cheap way for the Warsaw Pact and NATO to fight each other using someone else’s children and land. Mozambique is currently descending into a new civil war after a contested election. It has also been dealing with a brutal Salafist insurgency in the north.
As DV green card immigrants, we were required to undergo extensive medical testing (especially to prove we did not have HIV and tuberculosis). We had to prove we could support ourselves financially for several years without any welfare. No federal, state, county, or municipal benefits were available to us, and we had to wait four years to afford health insurance.
Especially Ruth 2:8, “Then Boaz said to Ruth, “You will listen, my daughter, will you not? Do not go to glean in another field, nor go from here, but stay close by my young women.” See also Leviticus 19:9, etc. Jeremiah 49:9 and Obadiah 1:5 go a lot further, suggesting that harvesting every inch of a field is tantamount to theft.
If you have spent any time abroad, you understand how different Americans are from any other nation. Merging at the zipper is perhaps the best example. It cannot be done in other countries without inciting deathly road rage.