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Welcome to Economic Update Extra, a continuation of the discussion that we had in the regular program and available to our friends and supporters on Patreon as part of our recognition and acknowledgement of the invaluable support you provide we've been discussing on this program immigration and I want to continue with that discussion. It has served as a rallying cry for the right wing. Extreme right wing politicians who have been unable to get much support in most Western countries for decades, now are suddenly able to get 10, 20% of the vote around one issue and one issue only. Nothing else has served them this way as beating up on immigrants, telling a story that the economic suffering of these societies has somehow the fault of or linked to or caused by letting immigrants into their societies. I want to comment on the economics here because they are stark. First, a large portion, not all, but a large portion of immigration is driven by economic inequality. There's nothing mysterious about a situation in which, for example, the United States is very wealthy as a society, or Western Europe is very wealthy and is surrounded by nearby societies, let's say Central or Southern America relative to the United States or East Europe or North Africa or Asia relative to Western Europe. If you create poverty at one end and wealth at the other, here comes some surprising People in the poor parts of the world like to move to the areas where what they can earn a living, get a job, take care of their families, give their kids a leg up in life. They want to do the same things you and I do, and they can't do it where they are for reasons that have nothing to do with them individually, not their family, not their brother or mother or sister. So they move. It's the last thing people do. Let's remember that to leave the country where you were born, where your friends are, your family is, where your schools are, where your church is, where you feel comfortable, where you speak the language. And to uproot all of that, and go to a place where you don't know the language, where you don't know the customs, where people think and dress and eat differently from you, that's frightening. People don't do that easily. They do it under extreme duress. And the question is the places to which they go, United States and Europe, they are not innocent. Here we are not passively observing something we had no role in creating. It's exactly the opposite. Capitalism is more than ever a global economic system. Wealth has been concentrated by capitalism in a very few places. Those places used the rest of the world as a place to get raw materials and food Shipped into the wealthy areas, but without allowing development to happen. There are local people to blame for part of this. Of course they are. The fault does not all lie in the United States and Western Europe. I'm not saying that. But the idea that Western Europe and American corporations had no role to play in the unequally developed world, well, that's silly. Of course they did. And they're often proud of the profits they made. So the migration of people is a result of the way this system works. By the way, we've seen that inside these countries as well. The history of the United States is a migration of people off of the countryside to the city. That's why the vast majority of Americans today live in the city or the suburbs, around the city and not in the. Whereas 100 or 150 years ago, it was the opposite. Migration is part of how capitalism works. And the way we treated people coming into the cities from the countryside has a lot of parallels with how we're treating today's migrants as they come from poor countries, often agricultural, to the cities of the wealthy part of the world. We are not innocent bystanders. And because we bear part of the responsibility for the inequalities and unevenness of capitalism's development of the world, we bear some responsibility in dealing with the results. Expelling immigrants, treating them badly, herding them into camps, making them live in the worst parts of town. That's not an acceptance of responsibility, and it's not consistent with any modern religious commitment or whatsoever. And it isn't necessary. Let me give you just one dimension of how it's not necessary. The Federal Reserve System of the United States maintains a statistic carefully. It's called capacity utilization. A funny name, but here's what it means. It's a measure of. Of what portion of the machines, tools, equipment, factory space, office space, store space is being used to produce goods and services, and what portion of it is sitting idle, not being used. Okay, I looked it up. As of August 2018, the most recent data I could find, the capacity utilization of the United States is 78%. What does that mean? It means that 22% of the capacity to produce is sitting idle. So if you're wondering, do we have the tools and equipment, the factory office and store space to allow human beings to. To use their brains and muscles and to produce wealth? The answer? Yep, we do. 22%. We have a labor force of about 150 million in America. If 22% more people could be accommodated in our wealth producing, that's way more people than the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Of course they could be given jobs, of course they could be paid properly. There's no problem at all. But there is a difficulty. Private capitalists who have to make a profit to employ someone, they're not doing it. They're not giving those jobs, neither to Americans who are unemployed, Native Americans, nor to immigrants, because it isn't profitable. But the problem of immigration isn't, therefore the immigrant. It's the inability of a profit driven system to use the industrial capacity it has to provide the jobs which is all most adult Americans native and as well as immigrants ask. We could solve the problem. It's our system that prevents us from doing it. And blaming the immigrant is an ignorant as well as cynical and unkind way of getting out of the difficulty. This has to be said. It has to be said loudly or. Or else we will continue to have a society that blames the poorest, the most desperate, the refugee, the immigrant from poverty for the problems of a mature capitalism which can't handle today the kind of immigration which made the United States the society it is. This is an extraordinary historical moment and it would be a great tragedy if instead of coming through it with real pride in an accomplishment, we come through it by degenerating into a civil war between the factions who are trying to avoid dealing with capitalism's problems by blaming immigrants and those who won't go along. Steve Bannon, the extreme right wing advisor to Donald Trump, is going around the world organizing nationalist political parties that are anti immigrant into an international alliance of such parties. He foresees a future of this kind of split in the world. And believe me, if we respond to this kind of invitation, the polarization of rich and poor will deepen in the world and we will have a level of conflict and a horror show when we didn't need to. That's why it's so important. And I hope you have found this conversation and discussion of immigration one way to respond that does not allow an abuse of things we ought to hold dear to continue as if it were some kind of economic necessity. It never was, it isn't now, and it's long past time to get up and say so. Thank you very much for participating in this economic update Extra. Once again, our appreciation to the Patreon audience that makes all this possible. And we will once again do this a week from today.