The Internal Republican Fight Over Immigration Isn’t Really About Racism
Trump must resolve the intra-party conflict over migration to maintain his cross-class coalition
For decades, many progressives, Democrats, and others on the Left have argued that Republicans were racist for criticizing the mass migration of unskilled, non-college-educated workers from foreign countries. Around 2016, Democratic leaders, who had recognized the need for border control a few years earlier, increasingly denounced Republicans and Trump supporters as white supremacists.
But the vast majority of those people weren’t racists at all, and they were rightly concerned about the downward pressure of mass migration on the wages of non-college-educated people, the high economic costs of mass migration, and the societal divisions it creates.
Over the past week, many conservatives, Republicans, and others on the Right have similarly argued that critics of mass migration by skilled, college-educated workers from foreign countries are racists. President Donald J. Trump and other Republican leaders, including those who have criticized mass low-skilled migration for the last decade, defended the expansive use of H-1B visas for skilled, college-educated workers. Some Trump allies demonized Republican critics of high-skilled migration as white supremacists.
Although some online commentators have expressed racist views, the vast majority of the H-1B program’s critics have consistently made economic, not race-based, arguments against the program. Like critics of mass low-skilled migration they are rightly concerned about the downward pressure of the H-1B system on wages, in this case of college-educated Americans in tech, as well as the societal costs of H-1B visa abuse and misuse.