Believe it or not, as Ripley used to say, Communist theoretician Karl Marx anticipated a key economic argument against mass immigration that VDARE.com has made since its beginning: Unfettered immigration depresses wages for host-nation workers. That Marx was wrong in his overall critique of capitalism, most notably his prediction that it was doomed, did not make him wrong on everything. On immigration, Marx was on the right side of the debate, if not necessarily for the right reasons. Oddly, America’s resurgent Communists don’t seem to have noticed.
Consider a letter of 1870 to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, German friends in the United States. Citing the effects of large-scale Irish immigration upon England, Marx explained the destabilizing effect of cheap immigrant labor: “Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labor market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class,” the primordial Prussian Communist wrote [Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, Marxists.org, April 9, 1870].
That isn’t all he wrote on the subject, but that little gem suggests that Marx understood at least something about supply and demand, and wages, labor, and immigration. Mass immigration depressed 19th-century British wages j ust as it depresses American wages today.
A little history:
During the second half of the 19th century, the “Irish question” weighed heavily on English minds. Many Irish boarded ships for the short trip to England. Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, which had open borders for all its subjects. Even after 1921, residents of the “Irish Free State” did not need a passport or visa to enter the U.K.
Irish began migrating to England in the Middle Ages, but what began as a trickle became a flood during and after the Great Famine of 1845-52. Nor did they go to England for “a better life,” as the Treason Lobby cliché goes these days. Getting to the Sceptr’d Isle was a matter of life and death. The Irish depended for food almost entirely on the potato, but the blight had struck. Irish farmers couldn’t increase output on their tiny plots of land, and couldn’t do anything about it because of the entrenched system of British absentee ownership. Disaster was inevitable. Of roughly 8.25 million people living in Ireland in 1845, close to a million starved to death and another 2 million emigrated during the next several years. Most emigration occurred within Great Britain, with 1.52 million Irish migrating to England, Scotland and Wales between 1850 and 1888.
The Irish wanted the jobs available in London, Liverpool, Manchester and other cities, and employers wanted something else: cheap labor. More than their English counterparts, Irish laborers accepted minimal wages and brutal workplace conditions. Exploiting that desperation, factory owners had every incentive to treat Irish and English workers as expendable. After all, if the flood of Irish workers would accept a pittance to get a job, English workers would accept a pittance to keep a job.
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