by Matt Gaetz
But there are few who want to change the game. They play word games instead. The language of immigration itself is designed to obfuscate reality. An “undocumented” immigrant may, the language implies, become documented. They didn’t break in without permission—they’re just missing some paperwork. A “migrant” sounds like someone who can’t be stopped by a border any more than you can stop the migration of birds or the butterflies. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist—and illegal immigrant—Jose Antonio Vargas even wrote a book whose subtitle, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, highlighted the oxymoron.
The Left often talks about the “stakeholders” in a community whenever there’s a project they don’t like, but they seem positively incurious about how unchecked immigration affects the body politic. The research has been extensive. Professor George Borjas of Harvard—we won’t hold that affiliation against him—who is himself an immigrant, has shown that increased legal and illegal immigration has consequences. “Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” he wrote for Politico.
Borjas estimates that the wealth transfer from American employees displaced by illegal immigration to their American employers is enormous, roughly half a trillion a year. It’s not a bad deal for illegal immigrants, either, who earn far more than they ever would have back home. A “drywallero” makes a lot more in Houston than in Honduras. So, we have to build the wall.
Walls are going up all over the world, even if Republican majorities in Congress won’t really fight for them. Democrats tell us walls are racist. As President Trump reminds them, “We don’t build walls because we hate the people on the outside. We do it because we love the people on the inside.”
In the Third World nations the Democrats want to send more of your money to, you see how often walls are going up around homes. Some nations—such as Israel and Hungary—put walls around their borders. But to build a wall you need the will. Americans clearly have it more than their bought-off government does. The success of consumer products like Ring or caller ID prove that Americans want to know who is at their door wanting in, or on their phone seeking access. However high we build the wall, it won’t be high enough to stop someone who overstays a visa, but we can stop new interlopers.
Walls must go up around some of our concepts, too. Citizenship should be one such concept. Birthright citizenship-by-fraud should not be allowed into the legal lexicon in America if we really love and cherish her as much as we should.
Nor is birthright citizenship recognized in many other places. Our left-wing courts often draw inspiration from foreign powers seeking to import foreign concepts into our law. And yet they are quite cautious about drawing lessons from abroad when it comes to birthright citizenship policies. It’s easy to see why. Only thirty countries out of nearly two hundred practice birthright citizenship, Michael Anton notes. Fully 6.8 billion of the world’s people live in regimes that bar birthright citizenship. Are they all racists and nativists too? Or do they cherish what they have more than we do?
All of our enemies want their money here and that’s because we have integrity. You have to have integrity to have a country. You have to know who is coming and going and how often. Banks implemented Know Your Customer laws to stop money laundering by criminals. Employers need better technological tools to help make sure they aren’t unwittingly employing illegal aliens. Do we not have a right to know who is in our home? If a man’s home is his castle, does he not deserve to build a moat around it? Do he and his neighbors on Neighborly or the Neighborhood Watch not have a right to defend their homes? We can’t have white picket fences if we can’t trust our neighbors not to invade by climbing over them.
For most Americans, these issues are obvious, but not for our business elite. Let’s explain the issue in terms that they can understand. If you and I started a company together and I suddenly added another class of shareholders, you’d rightly sue me for breaching our agreement. The elite have an obligation to protect the workers who we already have and are patriotically obligated to serve. To be a public servant, you must actually serve the public. To be a business leader, you have to lead. Maybe Mitt Romney is right, and corporations are in fact people. You should then be asking not what your country can do for your corporation but what your corporation can do for America.
But isn’t America a nation of immigrants?
America is a nation of settlers who have restricted and permitted immigration when it suited our interests. Globalization has reduced the size of our world while simultaneously increasing its complexity. In 2020 and beyond, our immigration policy should not be based on a poem, and nor should it look and feel like a Ponzi scheme. And no, illegal immigration is not an “act of love” as Jeb Bush put it, but of breaking and entering. Unlawful entry is a crime. In the best of scenarios, we hope that the breaking of our laws stops after getting here illegally, but all too often it doesn’t. I’ve looked into the tear-filled eyes of Angel Mothers who lost children to violent illegals. The mere existence of the category Angel Mothers is living evidence of our failure. President Trump was right when he came down that escalator. They aren’t sending their best—but they are taking ours.
There’s been plenty of romanticism about the Ellis Island chapter in American history, but we are a fundamentally different country now, and those years were hardly the most stable in our history. There were anarchist bombings, organized crime, riots, machine bosses, and buying off of politicians and elections. Haven’t you seen Boardwalk Empire? Gangs of New York? The numbers of those still coming are enormous—millions every year, some legally, some illegally. It makes little sense to import a low-skilled labor force before the robots automate our jobs.
Indeed, immigration and technology are always in tension. More immigration logically leads to less innovation. The higher the wage the better the market signal for entrepreneurs to build the next labor-saving robot. We oftentimes hear the phrase “jobs Americans just won’t do” used by immigration boosters, but I’ve yet to hear of a robot who stole research for his overlords in the Communist Robot Empire.
Productivity gains usually come from “eating people” (that is, eliminating their jobs), as tech columnist Andy Kessler puts it, and software is eating the world, as tech investor Marc Andreessen puts it. Let us work to make sure that process doesn’t eat us whole. How can we have an honest conversation about raising minimum wages for workers when we cannot even ensure that we have a legal workforce with an impenetrable E-Verify system?
Conservative immigration restrictionists all too often tell business owners to simply raise wages, but raising wages isn’t the only solution. Who wants to pick lettuce at any price? The federal government is well aware of which industries employ the most illegal aliens. We should use the stick of federal enforcement but also the carrots of research and tax credits to empower employers to automate whatever illegal immigrant jobs they can. Illegal aliens can’t take jobs that robots are already doing. We might even learn from our Japanese and Australian friends, who provide businesses with incentives to do just that.
There are, of course, some jobs that do require seasonal immigrant workers. There, we can follow our friends in South Korea and hold back a portion of their wages, giving them back once they’ve left the country.
ICE spent $3.2 billion to identify, arrest, detain, and remove illegal immigrants in 2016—the latest figures available before the mad rush on the border—while the cost of illegal immigration to our country is more than $100 billion annually, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—more than $6 billion just for the two million illegal aliens in Florida! Californians pay $23 billion for the more than six million illegal immigrants there and their children, while Texans pay more than $11 billion for the four million in the Lone Star State.
It also costs the taxpayers mor
e than $15,000 to deport each illegal alien. The Democrats want to “abolish ICE.” The corporatist Republicans want to ignore ICE. I want to enhance ICE and give it the latest tech—while singing, “ICE, ICE, baby”!
I kid, but I am never more serious than when I am joking. After all, as the Left tries to smear those of us with America First immigration views as grievance racists, we should be joyous about protecting our countrymen. It is a worthy and noble cause. Don’t let anyone tell you different in America.
Reagan wanted to tear down the Berlin Wall, while George H. W. Bush wanted “a thousand points of light,” whatever that means. Bill Clinton wanted to build a bridge to the future, and Barack Obama told us which direction the moral arc of the universe bent (really). Donald Trump wants to build a wall to protect and secure our southern border, and over 200 miles are already complete. And once we have built that wall, I want to man the gates.
There will be times when those gates can swing open, but they must always be closed to those who do not wish to be a part of our experiment in self-government, rooted in self-reliance. Those who do not want to partake of the American spirit ought not to settle in America, and we should never let them set foot here. Give us only those yearning to be free—and willing to fight for that freedom, as hard as those who built the country they have found worthy of joining.
There is no alternative, no country to run to, should America fail.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Big Tech Hates America
January 2018
Capitol Hill Club.
America’s youngest self-made boy billionaire sat across from me wearing flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt—in January. As we sipped diet sodas, I sensed my congressional colleagues were reporting my plus-one to the Capitol Hill Club dress code committee.
I considered myself lucky, though. Time with the strange and brilliant is something I relish. In the world of Big Tech, you don’t fit in if you are not ready to surrender everything you believe to the Woketopia, the paradise of those purportedly more politically aware than the rest of us.
But Woketopia has its dissidents—the real resistance—who seek to warn America before it is too late, even as they build the stuff of miracles. Palmer Luckey is like a free-internet Paul Revere. He was there to tell me the British are coming!
Palmer spoke in headlines—animated, excited about matters great and technical. The community college dropout founded his virtual reality company Oculus in his trailer and sold it to Facebook for a “couple billion dollars” in what was then the fastest acquisition in Silicon Valley history. Palmer dedicates 1 percent of his net worth annually to acquiring some astoundingly nerdy toys: Missile silos? Check. Submarines? Check. Buying ships from the navy? Check. Black Hawk helicopters? Check, check, check. If it’s weird and cool and colorably legal, Palmer’s got it. He’s a legend in Japan—because of course he is.
Palmer had an urgent message: Big Tech seeks to dominate what we say and think and therefore how we act. They must be stopped. Palmer and I both know people who Big Tech has disappeared because of their heretical politics. I’ve seen the tech companies conduct elaborate opposition research projects against their critics. Six eBay executives and employees were even indicted for allegedly sending threats, including a bloody pig mask and books about how to survive the loss of a spouse, to a married couple who criticized them in an e-newsletter. Vicious! The innovators should know that disruption always wins in the end, though. America needs the nerds to keep its edge. What happens when Big Tech deletes its own conservatives? How many of them have been deleted already? Could a reboot to our technical-political thinking bring them back?
The Capitol Hill Club is the sort of stodgy place where lobbyists and politicians, dressed in their best, did their worst, often at America’s expense. The “Club” is where you imagine conversations in smoke-filled rooms that determine America’s fate take place—just without the smoking because, as you know, Washington kicked the smoking habit once Speaker John Boehner got run out of town. They’re addicted to something far more dangerous now—power and money.
Neither Palmer nor I, the third-youngest elected congressman, belonged here among the dad ties and old man cologne. I avoid the place as much as I can.
Palmer positively bounced with the energy of his middle twenties as if everything were possible because for him, everything was. He had just founded another company—Anduril, “Flame of the West”—aimed squarely at building the (digital) wall that President Trump had campaigned on, using a surveillance array and AI instead of just concrete and steel. Early results from the digital wall experiment have been encouraging. Nerds like Palmer seem to summon the future and bring it forth. I dig it.
And yet when it came to the circumstances surrounding his untimely departure from Facebook, Palmer grew quiet before growing intense, urgent, and triggered.
Palmer’s NDA barred him from talking to anyone but a government officer about it. Good thing he was in luck. I ask questions for a living, often of people who don’t want to answer them. And Palmer had a story to tell.
“Mark Zuckerberg fired me from the company I created, for supporting Trump.”
At first, it sounded disgruntled and impossible to prove. It turns out Palmer kept the receipts, and my jaw damn near hit the ’70s-style carpet when he showed me the messages. Facebook absolutely fired one of America’s great geniuses for backing Donald Trump. They even forced Palmer to issue a statement that they drafted and pretended was his own. There was no grey area in this fight. Zuckerberg was freaking out that an inventor and major shareholder had the audacity to back the ultimate winner. When he was brought before Congress, the android-like Zuckerberg was prepared for every question save one: “Why was Palmer Luckey fired?” His answer was perjury. He would be prosecuted if Palmer gave his evidence to the Senate or the Department of Justice.
Palmer also showed me a Facebook post he had written in 2012 encouraging Donald Trump to run for president. Palmer had even used the lessons he’d learned from The Art of the Deal to build his companies. (Palmer’s whole story was later recounted in a best-selling book, The History of the Future, and in the Wall Street Journal.)
It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is extremely, almost monomaniacally left-wing. Palmer had been forced by one of the most powerful companies in the world to vote the way they wanted. He has since become a major donor to the Republican Party, including, in the spirit of full disclosure, to me.
But regardless, what happened to Palmer struck me as totally wrong. Worse yet, I was to learn that Palmer wasn’t alone. Silicon Valley won’t stop until we all think the same way—or else.
If Silicon Valley would do this to billionaires and their own colleagues, what would they do to the rest of us? If they could disappear the wunderkind who let us see a virtual reality, how easy is it to erase you and me?
More importantly, who would stop them?
The sometimes less-than-social network of Big Tech conservatives includes some of America’s brightest minds and most-needed voices. It is truly a secret society, but I had been inducted. They had waited in vain for a politician who understands what we are up against. Believing I could be helpful in the fight against Silicon Valley, I was soon introduced to its most famous architect-turned-dissident: Peter Thiel.
I have become friendly with this PayPal cofounder and Facebook first investor. We have had breakfast at his home in L.A., lunch on Capitol Hill, and cocktails in the Big Apple. Peter once rolled out of bed in his home, high up in the West Hollywood hills, to greet me wearing nothing but his underwear and a nightshirt. Weird, but OK! I have never met Peter in the Bay Area. There’s a reason: he travels.
“Wherever there’s a major shift in the American landscape in the past half-decade—be it political or cultural—there, somewhere on the donor list of the political campaign, or among the investors in the controversial technology, is Peter Thiel,” writes City Journal. P
eter’s so involved that they call his clique the “PayPal Mafia.” His investments include Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Indeed, Thiel is the don of the PayPal Mafia—there’s scarcely a major tech company that Peter hasn’t founded or backed—and yet he left it all behind.
Why?
One of the least contrarian things Peter has ever done by normal American standards is back candidate Trump, but for that he has been made to pay a steep social price—I call it the Trump Tax, and it is especially steep in the tech world. Protestors chanted outside his home. Entrepreneurs refused to take his venture firm’s money (or at least made a show of doing it reluctantly). He was a pariah and yet it turned out he was a prophet. The brilliant among us often are. And Peter is the most brilliant man I’ve ever met. We need him back on the Trump team ASAP.
Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO and then Thiel’s fellow Facebook board member, had written him an email telling him that he was going to give him a bad performance review—not because Peter was bad on the board but for backing Trump and “showing seriously poor judgment.” Naughty, naughty, Peter!
Peter didn’t back down. He gave an electric Republican Convention speech in 2016 and received a standing ovation when he declared, “I’m proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I’m proud to be an American!” When Donald Trump got in trouble over his old “locker room talk” tape for his bawdy comments, many fair-weather Republicans deserted him. Not so Peter. He doubled down with a donation and gave a great speech making the unafraid case for Trumpism and America First when it was most needed.