End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

by Peter Turchin

my colleagues in this endeavor and I have built out a flourishing field known as cliodynamics (from Clio, the name of the Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change).

For example, David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald used the surveys conducted monthly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to measure the level of “extreme distress.”[36] They found that the proportion of Americans in extreme distress nearly doubled—from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019.

one has to wonder when a solution that involves spending billions of dollars on border security and detention of migrants is implemented—with imperfect results, to say the least—but a solution that involves cutting off the money that draws migrants to this country in the first place has never been adopted. Cui bono, as the Romans used to say.

“It is ‘right-wing’ to be ‘against immigration’ and ‘left-wing’ to be ‘for immigration.’ But the economics of migration tell a different story.”

But acting on the correct moral impulse to defend the human dignity of migrants, the Left has ended up pulling the front line too far back, effectively defending the exploitative system of migration itself.

Massive immigration increases the supply of labor, which in turn depresses its cost—in other words, worker wages. Clearly, such development benefits the consumers of labor (employers, or “capitalists”) and disadvantages the workers.

There is a reason why the greatest surge of immigration in American history in the late nineteenth century coincided with the first Gilded Age, the period of extreme income inequality and popular immiseration comparable only to our own.

In his 2016 book, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, the Harvard economist George Borjas (himself an immigrant) explains that the main effect of immigration is not on whether it benefits the economy or is a drag. (It has a slight positive effect.) Rather, it is that it creates winners and losers. A massive influx of unskilled immigrants depresses the wages of less educated native-born workers.

But their lower wages translate into higher profits for those who employ immigrants—business owners and managers.[34]

From the first law restricting immigration in 1882 to Cesar Chavez and the famously multiethnic United Farm Workers protesting against employers’ use and encouragement of illegal migration in 1969, trade unions have often opposed mass migration. They saw the deliberate importation of illegal, low-wage workers as weakening labor’s bargaining power and as a form of exploitation.

Open borders and mass immigration are a victory for the bosses.

Nagle argues: Today’s well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With their adoption of “open borders” advocacy—and a fierce moral absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy.

The extent to which economic elites dominate government in the United States is very unusual compared to other Western democracies.