In the current issue of Texas Monthly Jack Herrera has a top notch story about illegal immigration in Texas. After a portrait of a Honduran migrant who's chased away from home by rising gang violence and is desperate to land a construction job in the US, he writes about the main reason for the recent spike in border crossings—one that I've also tried to highlight:
Arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.
Hererra then focuses specifically on worker shortages in Texas's booming construction business:
The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures.... Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.
....The industry also faces a labor-force problem it cannot address quickly simply by raising pay. For two decades, the number of U.S.-born workers entering the construction trade has nosedived.... Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber.
....Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including [Governor Greg] Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.
Herrera's main takeaway is that Texas politicians deliberately do things that get public attention—Project Lone Star, high profile disputes with the feds, busing immigrants to New York—but that won't make a dent in the numbers. That's because the business owners who really control Texas politics won't abide anything that actually works. So the charade continues.
In 2017, after Donald Trump first moved into the White House, his acting ICE chief, Thomas Homan, declared that he intended to increase worksite enforcement by “four hundred percent.” He largely succeeded. By the end of 2018 ICE had quadrupled investigations of undocumented workers, and agents had arrested seven times as many immigrants in workforce raids compared with the year before.
But one metric stayed virtually static: the number of managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants. In 2019 the Associated Press reported that convictions of managers who hired workers without legal status had even declined.
Williams made an argument I heard from Marek and others: that the government doesn’t have an interest in shutting down construction projects, which is what would happen if it required contractors to hire only legal workers. Of all the immigration-related crimes to prosecute, why go after those building the houses the country so badly needs?
It's not just construction, of course. And there's an obvious solution: mandatory E-Verify and real penalties for employers who violate it. But precisely because it would work, Republican business donors oppose it and Republicans, therefore, aren't much interested in it.
The simple truth is that there aren't enough legal residents to fill all the jobs in the US. Everyone knows this. When Donald Trump thunders about deporting every illegal immigrant in the country, it's just empty talk, red meat for the rubes. In reality, our economy would collapse without immigrants, and no one wants to risk that. So we continue appealing to xenophobia with walls and agents and raids, but it's all theater. As Herrera notes, it's just enough to keep illegal immigrants scared and exploitable, but always stops carefully short of making any meaningful dent in their numbers. Quite the coincidence.
Lived in Texas in the 80s and 90s. Our neighbor and close friend was a builder, He talked openly about how all the builders depended on undocumented workers, He would laugh about how all his workers would disappear when the cops would show up. Apparently he now supports Trump for some bizarre reason.
Back then at least the media would acknowledge Republican’s hypocrisy on this issue.
The funny thing I find is the 'depend' on these workers being paid not just less than others - but without safety gear, crazy unscheduled hours, etc.
Sure, maybe there's too few workers, but it doesn't explain why they're so keen on violating the rules.
A thought experiment: If Kamala wins, she could bring Republicans to the table -- even if they control both Houses of Congress -- by ordering sweeps in South Texas, the Imperial Valley and the San Joaquin Valley at harvest time. Offer a deal: DACA for strictly monitored labor & hours immigrant harvesting. Until now the government has turned a blind eye to undocumented farm workers, allowing rampant exploitation. The first part (the sweep) does not require legislation or a court ruling -- just a decision to step up enforcement.
A few items
1. E verify has a 4% error rate. Further, the process to research and repair errors is a mess.
2. The US lacks a biometric ID that would be necessary to make e verify a real solution
3. While its true that the GOP does not support a broad expansion of e verify, I have seen little Democratic support for the concept.
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/E-Verify.pdf
Its error rate is much lower than it was when introduced.
The "deporting illegal immigrants" talk is mainly a pretext for creating a Trump-loyal militia, which he then will use against anybody that "doesn't behave". Something like the way Hitler used the SA and then the SS.
That republicans politicans don't actually oppose immigration and just use it as a political message sounds to me like a dog-barked-at-a-postman news.
It’s my view that the Nazi shit Trump talks about will be one of those things that happens a little at a time and then all at once.
Agree-- it's an excuse for selective enforcement by trump-loyal militia squads who will sooner or later be put on the public payroll. Targets of overt violence can be chosen according to a combination of political expediency and resistance (if any) to protection money payments to various arms of the family/party. The protection rackets can be incredibly efficient because they'll be based on full IRS records available to to the shakedown apparatus. Poverty of imagination and willful blindness to patterns, along with motivated reasoning, leads many smaller business types to prefer the initial steps down this path over just paying taxes.
In the movie, LA Story there's a scene at the ATM where one line has customers waiting to withdraw money and an opposing line of burglars waiting to rob them: "Hi, my name is Bob. I'll be your robber."
That's roughly the imbecilic system Republicans have set up. It's all performative and sometimes there's a rogue undocumented immigrant or law enforcement, but other than the occasional idiot, everyone else knows the routine.
And here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVMTfGQe51g
It's entirely different in Canada.
https://youtu.be/9Dq2Cffks9s
You know, every time someone writes something like this, I think "Doesn't this sort of miss the forest for the trees? Because if all this is true, what it is actually saying is 'we have constructed our economy to only function with an underclass of precarious workers, who can be exploited and abused owing to their irregular legal status, which prevents them from telling employers to go fuck themselves in the same way a native-born American would were they subject to the wages and working conditions on offer.'"
And maybe we shouldn't have done that, and, having done, maybe we should undo it. My great-grandfather was an illiterate Sicilian immigrant who came across an open border to be here... but because his status was beyond a doubt LEGAL, one of the first things he did when employed in coal country was to join a union, with some fear his head would be cracked but very little fear he'd be deported. When the head-cracking did happen and he left coal country to move north and work on the railroads, first thing he did there was also join a union.
And why aren't the managers being prosecuted? How many of them are calling in the raids because the workers wanted clean housing or maybe even wanted to leave?
The sad fact is that we Americans are cheap assholes who don't want to pay for the things we want.
That and we want to diminish others in order to make ourselves feel superior. Immigrants are and always have been low hanging fruit as targets.
I don't get it.
Yes, exactly. Our system also allows us, as a country, to ignore the kinds of people that would be doing these jobs in the absence of illegal immigration. We don't have to care about the most marginal US citizens, because we don't need them -- we've replaced them with illegal immigrant labor.
Also: "The simple truth is that there aren't enough legal residents to fill all the jobs in the US."
This is glorious.
Economists smarm about how those opposed to immigration are engaged in the "lump of labor fallacy": simpletons assuming that there exists a fixed number of jobs in the economy. But Drum is deploying the "lump of labor fallacy" in support of immigration - asserting that there exists a fixed number of jobs in the economy and that this number is greater than the number of domestic workers!
Umm...no. First of all, we haven't replaced US citizens with immigrants. If that were true there would be hoards of US citizens without jobs. Instead, the prime-age employment ratio is at a 20 year high.
Second, Drum is NOT employing the "lump of labor" fallacy. What he's showing is that the demand exceeds the supply, and the shortfall gets filled with immigrant labor.
+1.
"Second, Drum is NOT employing the "lump of labor" fallacy. What he's showing is that the demand exceeds the supply, and the shortfall gets filled with immigrant labor."
Supply and demand are not single numbers but a function of price (wages in this case). In normal markets supply increases with price whereas demand drops. The market clears at the price where the curves intersect and supply and demand match. At lower prices there will be more demand than supply, at higher prices more supply than demand. So there will always be a "shortage" of people willing to work for less than the market wage. This can be "fixed" by importing cheap labor to force the market wage down or by offering workers the market wage. Not sure how forcing wages lower by importing lots of cheap labor became the liberal position.
It did not become the liberal position. Lots of flailing and stumbling around for you here.
Not really. There's always a shortage of product for below the average price.
Same for wages - and labor conditions. More workers who know their rights will walk away from employers that treat them poorly; which is why those employers find themselves with high churn and 'shortages'.
"It did not become the liberal position. ..."
So what is the liberal position?
There aren't enough immigrants for there to be hoards.
But there are. Black men have a labor participation rate 20 points lower than other demographics. And it's not because they're in school or raising kids (or even in jail).
Kevin is showing the opposite of the lump of labor fallacy.
It's all just a show. Everything Republicans do is just a show. Political theater that's as genuine as a Trump promise.
Yup.
"The simple truth is that there aren't enough legal residents to fill all the jobs in the US. Everyone knows this. "
Respectfully, that is wrong.
Likely, domestic wages and work conditions would have to improve, but there is more than a sufficient reserve labor force in the US for most jobs. Are rising US wages and working conditions bad (yes I recognize the impact on inflation) ? As an aside, my statement is consistent with economic theory.
Further, if you want to test the concept, look at Australia: despite almost no undocumented labor, all the fruit gets picked, the houses are built/cleaned and the dishes are washed etc.
Respectfully, that is wrong.
Look at what happened in GA, WA, and (I think) MS when the state legislatures passed laws that put penalties on employers for hiring undocumented immigrants and actually did some enforcement of them. Word got out, employers didn't hire and immigrants fled, and ... the crops rotted. And then what happened? Business owners screamed bloody murder and ... the laws went away! Poof!
And just as another example (in a long list) take a look at seasonal beach-town jobs on the east coast. Who fills them? Not US college students or other Americans. It's typically European immigrants, part- or full-time. Why? Americans turn up their noses at those jobs. (And also, of course, employers want White kids.)
It's all very nice to say "domestic wages and work conditions would have to improve," but that's precisely the issue: employers don't WANT to provide adequate wages or working conditions, consumers don't WANT to pay the increased prices that would entail, and state legislatures are VERY responsive to the concerns of their agricultural business-owners and won't impose them.
Personally, I think it would be GREAT if we had laws that actually required adequate wages and work conditions for agricultural workers. And construction workers and hospitality workers and healthcare workers and meatpackers and landscape workers et al.
BUT WE DON'T. And whom do we have to thank for that? REPUBLICANS. The end.
So your position is that Republicans are going to oppose efforts to restrict domestic jobs to domestic workers ... and therefore the Democrats should just concede the issue?
I presume you take a similar position on abortion? Republicans are always going to oppose abortion rights and therefore the Democrats should just concede the issue?
Also - the "It's all very nice to say ..." paragraph could just as easily have been written in the 1930s in opposition to unionization or the 5-day work week.
No. Who mentioned anything about "conced[ing]" anything? And please note ENTIRE FIFTH PARAGRAPH, which you seem to have ignored, which makes me think your comment is in bad faith.
You want my wish list, it's to have good wages and good working conditions for WHOEVER takes the jobs, AND a properly functioning system for immigration -- including temporary leading to permanent status -- so that there is sufficient supply of labor, including non-citizen labor when necessary, to fill those jobs WITHOUT the kind of coercion of undocumented labor that is the norm these days.
But that's a wish list. And Democrats can and should fight for it -- AND HAVE BEEN. My point is, right now it's politically impossible, and that's thanks to Republicans at both the national and state levels (and to the racism that is rampant among the Republican rank-and-file).
+1
bbleh - it takes time for wages and labor conditions to adjust.
Stated differently, if you rapidly remove any large group from a labor force, for example auto mechanics, there will likely be a near term shortage.
Are Americans so different than say Australians, where there is not combination of wages and benefits that would get them to do jobs currently filled by our undocumented? I sincerely doubt it.
This makes no sense. As Kevin has shown in other posts, immigration, including undocumented workers, has only a small impact on native workers' wages.
immigrants also create additional economic demand, generating more jobs overall.
In 1930s, state and local governments deported 400,000 to 500,000 people of Mexican descent, promising to create jobs for Americans during the Great Depression. What happened? The employment of native-born Americans dropped.
The lower wages of undocumented workers are often a result of exploitation rather than market forces. literally Kevin's 2nd to last sentence
+1
Uh-huh, well even SUPPOSING "wages and labor conditions" would "adjust" -- meaning that business owners would actually pay a LOT more for their labor, and that consumers would pay the increased prices, and demand would not drop materially, and it would ALL happen smoothly and and and -- why do you think US citizens would start to do the kind of backbreaking labor that agricultural work -- and all the other work that undocumented immigrants presently do -- absent anything other than near-depression conditions?
The blithe assumption that Everything Would Work Out, and really we just need to get rid of those awful immigrants, suggests to me little more than sheltered, comfortable ignorance.
Those laws also punished documented workers, because jumping through the hoops cost time and money.
apples pineapples
while not at the same scale as the US (it is an island in the middle of nowhere, so not that surprising as it is just harder to get to from say central america), undocumenteds make up from 30 to 80% of workers in ag, depending on the subsector
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-14/australias-farm-industry-seasonal-workers-exploited-labour-short/100687182
https://www.sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/sydney-law-school/research/publications/slrv44n3sep2022dehmvogladvance.pdf
Like the US, there is structural reliance on undocumenteds in ag there
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/SLR/article/download/19555/16432/61209
Australia also has extensive temporary worker programs to address known labor shortages, which have their own issues
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australia-is-creating-an-underclass-of-exploited-farm-workers-unable-to-speak-up/rvxen9uxw
That's certainly an incorrect assertion about Australia.
Fruit might not get picked by undocumented workers, but much of it depends on backpackers from overseas who get paid a pittance:
As for washing dishes:
That's the supply/demand thing again. As the price of getting a job done rises, the number of available jobs falls. If there were no undocumented immigrants willing to work for low wages, the wages for the jobs presently done by those undocumented immigrants would rise quite a bit. In some cases, that would result in employers simply deciding that certain jobs don't need to be done.
A simple example is waiters. In an ordinary restaurant, pay for waiters is a significant part of total costs. In a cafeteria or a fast food restaurant like MacDonald's, there are no waiters; it's a job that the employers have decided simply doesn't have to be done, because it costs too much to get it done.
I suppose it's worth mentioning yet again that Republicans -- very much including business owners but also your average suburban / exurban MAGAt who wants all the services staffed by undocumented immigrants (construction, healthcare, hospitality services, food services, landscaping, etc. etc. etc.) -- DON'T CARE ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION PER SE. They DON'T CARE that people cross the border without proper documentation -- which by the way is a MISDEMEANOR. And they certainly don't like it if/when there is effective government action to keep undocumented immigrants away entirely, because then all those services aren't provided to their satisfaction.
They don't like "illegal immigration" because they don't like NON-WHITE PEOPLE. Period, full stop, the end. The rest -- including the "oh noes but it's ILLEGAL!!11!! stuff -- is just window-dressing. (Note that undocumented non-asylum-seeking immigration is like drunk driving -- first time misdemeanor, next time felony. How many MAGAts are okay with routine drunk driving among their friends or family, or even do it themselves? And of course drunk driving, unlike illegal immigration, puts other people's lives at risk. Just asking...)
It's racism pure and simple. Again.
↑(ﾉﾟ0ﾟ)ﾉ↑
"people cross the border without proper documentation -- which by the way is a MISDEMEANOR".
No. Undocumented immigration isn't a misdemeanor, because it isn't a crime at all. It's a civil issue - a tort. This is why immigration cases are adjudicated in an entirely separate system of courts - immigration courts, not criminal courts.
Sadly no. 8 USC 1325 and 1326.
Then why the separate courts?
My guess would be same as "family courts": administrative efficiency. A persistent, frequent, specialized and local issue means there's going to be a steady stream of cases requiring expertise in a particular area of law and not much else -- and in this case in just a few jurisdictions -- so it makes sense to establish dedicated courts for them.
Just a guess. There may be some other reason. But the code is the code.
+1
"When Donald Trump thunders about deporting every illegal immigrant in the country, it's just empty talk, red meat for the rubes. "
Yeah, keep dreaming, Drum. I feel like screaming because this drivel is so eerily reminiscent of the now notorious NYT article in the '20s that Hitler's anti-Semitism wasn't sincere, it was just a means to stir up his voters, and he would never, ever follow through on it. Unser Drumpfenführer, Stephen Miller and the rest of his wannabe Goebbels, Himmler and Eichmann lickspittles mean it when they promise mass deportations and they will try to do it. They don't give a crap about its effect on the economy; they want to do it because they are despicable and cruel racist Nazi SOBs. And so are the bulk of their voters.
Agreed.
This article hits the nail on the head. I lived in Houston from '98-2012. The construction industry (and supply of workers for landscaping and other residential work crews, among other things) would crash without illegal immigrants. That's why it's feral MAGAs in areas of the country that have no or minimal illegal immigrants problems screaming loudest.
E-6 in 1904: We can't get rid of child labor! Think of the cotton mills!
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-1.htm#:~:text=Cotton%20mills,South%20were%20children%20under%2016.
Perpetuating the ability for undocumented workers to work perpetuates the lack of protection and the relegation to second class status. Also adds a jury rigged legal system to cover the gaps.
The main goal should be to increase immigration, properly fund its management, and lock down undocumented work.
So is there some reason to think Trump won’t enforce his anti-immigration policies selectively in states he doesn’t like? For instance, California? Does he really give a shit if California suffers? Would it be good for him amongst his fans for him to stick it to California? Would they enjoy the optics of Trump Special Forces deporting people in California, illegal or not?
Although there's pay involved, there's not much different in the dynamic of the '60's. The 1860's.
Herrera swallows the employers' story and so apparently does Kevin. If there were really an "acute labor shortage", why haven't wages gone up? Real construction wages are barely higher than before the pandemic:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1vUJ3
But on average construction pays well - are white workers really turning down jobs that pay $1400/week? No, they aren't - employers are getting illegal immigrants who will work for much less. Of course they say that they can't get workers, but what they mean is that they can't get non-immmigrant workers at the wages they want to pay.
The economics of immigration are complicated and what politicians and the media present is usually highly biased in one way or another. That there is a desperate shortage of workers is an idea that appeals to the media because it conforms to what industry wants and also to the current liberal attitude, which is that immigration must be good because Trump is opposed to it.
Of course Trump's attitude is 95% racism and not economic, but the counter arguments in favor of mass immigration often involve major distortions of economic data. It's true that deporting millions of illegal immigrants would be an economic disaster, but that doesn't mean that the US economy must be dependent on continual importation of workers to keep wages down. Do liberals want wages at the bottom to rise or not?
I repeat that the situation would be different if we had reasonable minimum wage laws and enforcement and strong unions. But using immigrant labor is a major way of preventing or breaking unions.
You nailed it.
When employers say "there's an acute labor shortage" they mean "I can't hire people who are legally allowed to work, remain and organize in this country without paying them (much) more than I am willing to".
Nothing more, or less.
This, and, yes.
The term 'labor shortage' almost always means 'labor shortage at this given wage'. Nobody was tricked or duped here as nobody ever thought otherwise.
Counterpoint: Stephen Miller.
I have not yet seen anybody making the obvious additional point - an effective legal employee ID would be an effective voter ID. Too many wrong people could then vote with little hindrance.
I don't understand. Wouldn't something like that-- a guest-worker ID, in effect-- be a certificate of NON-eligibility for voting? What am I missing?
You are missing that the federal ID could be issued to various groups and list the appropriate statuses just like modern state licenses/IDs do. In my state of Virginia they use different colors for things like real-id and veteran status. They even print under 21 year old IDs portrait insteads of landscape to make them immediately identifiable. Similar methods could easily be implemented on a federal ID card. While we are at it use the SSN as the ID number for those who have one and add a rider to the law that any business or credit bureau that uses an SSN as an answer to a security question instead of as an ID number is subject to a fine of $1000 per instance.
To provide such cards for free to the entire population of the US would probably cost less than $20 billion given that half of US citizens already have a valid passport and a similar percentage of drivers licences are real ID compatible. Also could we stop pretending that physical pieces of paper matter in this day and age or that facial recognition isn't trivially easy to do using existing data sets.
I have to agree with Kevin on this one its an easily solvable problem that people for various reasons don't want solved. It makes me want to popularize a new term "anti-security theater".
Why on earth do you make this claim? There's no connection whatsoever between the right to work in the USA and the right to vote.
I had the legal right to work and reside in the USA from 1989 until 2017 (when I became a citizen). I had documents to prove that. None of those documents would have allowed me to vote (had I tried to do so).
Dude, clearly you have never been poor and trying to scrape together an ID.
This is nonsense.
There is no link between the two.
You could make the same claim about giving kids a SSN, a student ID or anyone a drivers license or metro/bus card.
Currently, legal immigrants have the right to work and have an identifier number, but this does not vote give them the ability to vote.
Lots of government identifiers currently exist that do not grant the right to vote.
You're not reading it right.
The reason ID to vote sucks, is because it's so hard to get or replace an ID!
An ID for working that wasn't a cobbled together mess would clearly identify who was eligible to vote or not.
Jimmy Vance has the solution! In typical MAGA fashion, it's childishly simple "common sense" that avoids any explanation of how it could actually be implemented. Perhaps Trump, like Mandrake the Magician, can gesture hypnotically?
No need for hypnotic gestures-- there's always conscription. Given that they're willing to conscript uteri in peacetime, why not draft "prime-age American men" into an emergency home-building corps?
All that code-learning wasted!
Presumably, deporting a large number of people would free up the housing they presently occupy, which would ameliorate the housing shortage just as effectively as building a bunch of new houses.
That assumes undocumented immigrants are the sole occupants of dwellings which would then come on the market if they were deported. The extent to which this is correct is unknown. However many are members of families which include legal residents, who will presumably continue to occupy their homes - see https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
Given the apparently large number of illegal immigrants presently in the United States, I would presume that some are staying with relatives, some are staying in worker accommodation provided by farmers and other employers, some are just homeless, and some are renting. The number of deportations required to produce one vacant housing unit is uncertain, but I am certain that deporting a lot of people would produce vacant housing units.
Yes yes, if we deported the undocumented, then millions of True Americans would be able to hot bunk in now-unoccupied meatpacking barracks and agfield hostels, thereby solving the "housing crisis" whereby there isn't enough housing for young people in coastal cities.
Of course, then they won't be able to get to their jobs in the suburban big box stores and warehouses...
"...In reality, our economy would collapse without immigrants, and no one wants to risk that. ..."
This is nonsense.
The anti-immigrant crowd often hides behind or excuses their actions with economic arguments. But they always give themselves away.
Job seekers from Mexico are bad because they steal our jobs, but job seekers from California or New York are a sign of victory and strength for the local economy.
Low wage workers from Mexico drag down wages and destroy the economy, we need more government intervention because WAGES! But low wage white workers are a free market miracle of capitalism any any government regulation that impacts wages will destroy our economy!
The inconsistency can be a head scratcher if you take them at their word.
"countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally."
So? It's funny that this is given as the excuse for "illegal" immigration. Would it really be the end of the world if these countless new projects were simply cancelled? No, it would not. No one would notice. The money sloshing around would simply find other "projects" to fund which didn't require these workers. These unmentioned projects are not benefitting anyone but the super rich and the finance class who apparently cannot afford to pay even a penny in more taxes. Screw them.
Did you see the news?
"Can the Stock Market Keep Going Up? Market Watchers Think So.
The bullishness on Wall Street is largely based on confidence that the Federal Reserve will tame inflation, the economy will remain solid and corporate earnings will continue to grow."
Let them cancel their silly projects.
Spectacular, Kevin. Thank you so much for breaking through the smoke and mirrors to provide a clear-eyed picture of this.
If Trump does get back in we’ll see a massive power struggle between cynical Abbott-style corrupt business interests and their political enablers, on the one hand, and the Stephen Miller-type true believer fascists on the other. Trump himself will have relatively little to do with it, he’s too medically compromised and will probably die before the term is over. He’ll be a figurehead and grift. The outcome will determine whether we look more like Abbott’s TX (business in charge, with vulnerable populations suffering performative fascist gestures) or Nazi Germany (full-blown fascism). As Kevin points out, the business interests only want the performance: they need workers, but like them powerless and terrified. The true believers actually want immigrants gone, women and Blacks in their place, and LGBTQ invisible. Obviously either one would be a terrible situation for both the US and the world.
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