This horrendous thought @tsyum is talking about here is in fact for many MAGA voters the explicit goal of all this immigration cruelty, except for the job market instead of used cars:
“fewer immigrants → smaller labor supply → $$$ for me yay”
1/ thepit.social/@tsyum/114809824…
ts 🚉 (@tsyum@thepit.social)
If you say something like, "ICE raids have been a complete game changer for the used car market. Get on facebook marketplace before the market recorrects," may you fall quickly and die a slow, miserable death.The Pit
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •And the most recent jobs report has many hints that ICE is indeed having that desired effect: in an otherwise stagnant or contracting labor market, there was job group in leisure and hospitality, private health care, and (somewhat less) construction — all job markets with a concentration of immigrant labor.
I am not an economist and this is not a proper analysis — grain of salt, please! — but a quick skim of these stats is at least superficially consistent with a good chunk of current job growth coming from decreased immigrant participation in the labor force.
bls.gov/ces/publications/highl…
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Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •But that’s not the endpoint. Oh no.
In a move alarmingly close to outright chattel slavery, there is talk of ICE capturing immigrants and then •selling them back to their former employers•, presumably under much-worsened employment conditions.
heathercoxrichardson.substack.…
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July 5, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American)Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Here’s the thing: these two goals are in •direct contradiction•.
A bunch of ICE cheerleaders want inhumane treatment of immigrants in order to shrink — and thus strengthen — the remaining (white) labor pool.
A bunch of other ICE cheerleaders want inhumane treatment of immigrants in order to •weaken• the labor pool.
They can’t both get their way.
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Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Leave aside for the moment that both of those plans are morally horrendous. That matters, it’s the thing that matters most, but leave it aside for just long enough to notice:
This is a fracture point in the MAGA coalition.
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Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •People are still not paying nearly enough attention to what @pluralistic wrote here:
pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fra…
“The American right is a brittle coalition.”
The topic above is a prime example. There are two MAGA constituencies here — employers and workers — who think they’re about to get exactly opposite things. Both are going along with the ICE program because they think they’re the ones who will really get what they want in the end. At least one of them is going to get screwed over.
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Pluralistic: The true, tactical significance of Project 2025 (14 Jul 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netPaul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •We need to find these fracture points, stick dynamite in them, and blow them up.
Those people who want exactly different things out of ICE? Pit them against each other. Figure out how. We don’t have to wait to see what happens; tell them now, like a broken records, exactly how they’re going to get screwed over.
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Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •You think ICE is going to “bring the jobs back?” Bullshit. They’re gearing up to sell imprisoned immigrants back to employers as slave prisoners who work for free. You think your wages are going up? You’re a sucker. Your wages are going down.
You think ICE is going to sell you imprisoned immigrants as cheap labor? Bullshit. They’re too beholden to the radical white supremacist extremists. Those people will •never• let those immigrants stay in the country. ICE is going to steal your labor force and you won’t get them back.
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cwicseolfor
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •I fear some of them may have a plan for managing that contradiction; that white labor pool only needs fooled for a few months. They’re buying a bit of consent now to bridge them into the next crunch.
Concentration camps stateside to lease convict labor, concentration camps abroad to traffic people permanently - why both? The white nationalist project. Impoverish & criminalize en masse, exile non-whites to a new worst outcome, remake a frightened, paler, part-convict labor pool.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to cwicseolfor • • •@cwicseolfor
I mean…maybe? It takes an extraordinary amount of squinting to imagine all of that working out.
There’s an almost compulsive urge on the part of the Thoughtful Left in these situations to figure how to resolve the contradiction, how to square the circle, how to say that these people really are all the same — and that’s just doing the right’s work for them! We’ve got to stop that!
Focus on what you said on your subsequent post: the cracks are there, the window of opportunity is short, they’re feeding the base a fantasy, and we need to FUD that fantasy to death.
cwicseolfor
in reply to cwicseolfor • • •