Cold Immigration
The Post-Cold War Betrayal of the American Worker
In a scene from Adam Curtis’ docuseries Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, an interviewer asks a young woman: “If you had a wish, what would it be?” The young woman answers, “I don’t have any dreams, and even if I did they wouldn’t come true. I don’t believe in anything or anyone.” This sense of depressive nihilism permeated throughout Soviet society until it had completely eroded its cultural, political, and economic institutions. Yet the collapse of the Soviet system caught Western leaders by surprise. The biggest mistake the West made at the end of the Cold War was believing it had won. In reality, the Soviet Union crumbled from within. The intelligence agencies had no idea how weak the Soviet Union had become until its satellite states began falling like stars. Still, the West patted itself on the back for its brilliant victory.
During the Cold War, nationalists were tolerated, and sometimes even embraced by the West’s governing institutions. Nationalism functioned as a bulwark against the Communist USSR and supplied an ideology that could unify populations against a common enemy. But following the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, nationalism fell out of favor. The ruling consensus shifted toward a post-nationalist ideology that prioritized globalism, technocracy, and supranational governance. In the United States and Western Europe, political, academic, media, and business elites embraced a cosmopolitan worldview. National borders, national cultural traditions, and national sovereign interests began to be viewed with contempt and suspicion. This ideological shift was reinforced through institutional gatekeeping, where individuals who advocated nationalist policies or questioned globalization were ostracized, designated extremists, and excluded from positions of influence.
Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City bombing served as the occasioning causes for the U.S. government which shifted from external enemies to internal threats. Right-wing and anti-government movements were delegitimated and dismantled. Federal actions resulting in heavy civilian casualties were framed as regrettable but necessary measures against dangerous domestic extremists. The Oklahoma City bombing was the centerpiece. By framing the attack as the work of domestic right-wing extremists, the government justified sweeping crackdowns on militia groups, white supremacists, and other factions on the fringes.
New legislation, such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, expanded federal powers to surveil and prosecute domestic extremists, effectively criminalizing ideologies that challenged the emerging post-nationalist order. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which had long positioned themselves as watchdogs against extremism, became de facto federal apparatchiks, providing ideological justification and intelligence support and expanding their influence within government agencies. Meanwhile, the nation-state was weakening as the central unit of geopolitical organization. Transnational institutions like the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization gained influence, to the point of superseding national governments in matters of trade, security, and human rights. Deals rewriting America’s trade laws were marketed as “free trade agreements” to appeal to American respect for laissez-faire capitalism. Nonetheless, they were staunchly opposed by authentic free marketeers like Dr. Ron Paul, who understood that these agreements were not truly ‘free trade’, but rather managed trade, crafted by bureaucrats and special interests to benefit multinational corporations at the expense of small businesses and local economies, and to transfer regulatory authority away from constitutional legislatures to unaccountable supranational bodies.
Free trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the establishment of the WTO were sold to the American public as engines of economic growth and prosperity, but their impact on the U.S. economy has been disastrous. Manufacturing collapsed as corporations moved production to countries with cheaper labor and weaker environmental regulations. Entire communities in the Rust Belt and beyond were left devastated. The U.S. trade deficit ballooned, as imports flooded the market while American exports struggled to compete on an uneven playing field. Wages stagnated for middle- and working-class Americans, as the downward pressure on labor costs created a race to the bottom. Small businesses were crushed under the weight of global competition, while multinational corporations reaped the benefits of deregulated markets and tax havens. Far from delivering gains, these agreements hollowed out the industrial base of the United States, exacerbated income inequality, and eroded the economic sovereignty of the nation, leaving a legacy of deindustrialization, dependency, and decline. The price of “progress” had been paid by the people who could least afford it.
Politicians and corporate elites assured the public that any job losses in manufacturing would be offset by gains in higher-skilled, higher-paying sectors, and that displaced industrial workers would be easily retrained for these new roles. In reality, the job retraining programs were woefully underfunded, mismanaged, and often irrelevant to the local job markets, leaving countless workers stranded without viable employment options. As factories shuttered and communities collapsed, long-term disability through Social Security became the de facto safety net for American workers who could no longer find work, particularly in regions decimated by deindustrialization. While this provided a lifeline for some, it also became a trap, discouraging reentry into the workforce. Adding to the tragedy, the Medicaid card that came with disability benefits made it dirt cheap for people to access oxycontin — $3 copay for a 30-day supply, with the U.S. government paying the other $997. The drug was aggressively marketed by pharmaceutical companies as a symptom-free solution to chronic pain. This created a perfect storm for the opioid epidemic that has killed nearly a million Americans, and has left tens of millions more ravaged by addiction.
The promises of free trade were not just broken — they were always a deliberate deception. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) went into effect in 2006. Sold as a means of fostering economic growth and stability in the region, it in fact drove mass migration to the United States. By flooding Central American markets with heavily subsidized American agricultural products, CAFTA undercut local farmers who could not compete with the artificially low prices of imported goods like corn and rice. Rural economies were decimated, forcing countless families off their land and into poverty. At the same time, the agreement incentivized the expansion of sweatshops and plantations, which offered low wages and harsh working conditions. The result has been the influx of millions of low-skilled Central Americans into the United States.
Illegal immigrants had largely been a non-factor in American construction and trade work. Carpenters, roofers, painters, masons, concrete finishers, electricians, and plumbers were all trades that once provided stable, middle-class livelihoods where a family could be well provided for with a single income. But in 2008, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the U.S. economy entered into a prolonged recession. It was a devastating time for anyone in construction. Men with decades of experience were taking entry-level odd jobs to scrape by. Anyone who could get into a different line of work, did. Especially damaging was the interruption of the generational transfer of vocational knowledge. There wasn’t enough work for young men entering the job market to consider taking it up.
Even as construction began to pick back up, the weak economy of the Obama years dragged on. Consumers were more price-sensitive than ever, and the relative cost of materials had gone up significantly. Costs had to be suppressed somewhere, and that somewhere was wages. In short order, a new paradigm emerged where existing native tradesmen either left the market or moved up a rung and became overseers rather than workers, who were increasingly immigrant laborers. What had been the real wage of a basic carpenter was the real wage of a foreman or subcontractor. The Obama administration failed to adequately enforce immigration law, and even the red states carved out loopholes to ensure companies with fewer than 25 employees would not be subject to verifying worker immigration status. The signal from the authorities was that nothing would be done to address illegal immigrants in the labor market. As a consequence, small businesses in construction had little option but to adopt the new business model or go under.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the labor market, America was seeing the introduction of so-called “high-skilled” immigrant workers in the professional service and technology sectors. The jobs in these sectors were supposed to offset the manufacturing jobs lost to offshoring and outsourcing. But the H-1B visa program, often touted as a cornerstone of America’s innovation economy, has resulted in a different outcome.
The H-1B visa program was sold to the public as a means of attracting the “best and brightest” from around the world to fill critical skills gaps. But there was already a visa program for the best and brightest, the O-1 visa, which allows top-tier individuals to work in the United States based on demonstrated expertise in their respective fields.
H-1B was always about something else. By flooding the tech and engineering sectors with H-1B workers, often paid below prevailing wages, the program has suppressed salaries, eroded job security, and displaced skilled American professionals. Just as free trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA offshored manufacturing jobs and devastated industrial communities, the H-1B program has outsourced high-skilled positions, undermining the middle class and exacerbating income inequality.
President Trump’s second administration represents a decisive break from the globalism of the post-Cold War period and a return to nationalist policies that prioritize the interests of American workers: industries reshoring jobs, renegotiating trade deals, and restoring economic sovereignty. But for this agenda to be implemented, a rethinking of the H-1B program’s role in the American economy is necessary. No longer can it serve as a loophole for corporations to import cheap indentured servants at the expense of American workers. Either it must be scrapped altogether or stringently reformed to ensure that it benefits the nation as a whole.
How could it be reformed? One possibility could involve replacing the current global lottery system with a reciprocal guest worker program wherein citizens of Europe, Japan, and other close allies would have the opportunity to be guest workers in the United States – so long as those countries also opened up guest worker programs for Americans in turn. It is currently highly difficult for Americans to obtain legal authorization to work in Europe, and vice-versa. Australia’s Working Holiday visa program would be a model to consider.
Other possible reforms are less straightforward. Agriculture and food production have become heavily dependent on immigrant labor. Our food system is in need of a serious overhaul at every level of production. A New York Times investigation in 2023 discovered widespread use of unaccompanied migrant children — including some preteens — in major food processing and meatpacking plants. The food processing and meatpacking industries need serious ICE enforcement action. In agriculture, the H-2A program should be streamlined to reduce bureaucratic hurdles for farmers, while beefing up enforcement of wage and housing standards to protect both foreign and domestic workers, and also making sure employers offer jobs to American workers first. It is an open secret in meat production, particularly pork and poultry, that immigrant workers are often preferred not just because they’re cheaper, but also because they are less likely to expose the dismal conditions and abuses of factory farming.
Then there are the H-2B visas. H-2Bs are used for temporary non-agricultural workers occupying seasonal positions that tend to be harder to fill, not because the work is particularly undesirable or underpaid (H-2B employers must pay the prevailing domestic wage) but because most workers are looking for long-term employment rather than seasonal stints, and because seasonal demand tends to significantly outstrip the local permanent labor force. The traditional workforce for seasonal jobs are students on summer break, and drifters. There are fewer drifters these days, and summer breaks have gotten shorter. Most seasonal positions are still filled domestically, but there are legitimate seasonal labor needs that can be filled by foreign workers.
When I was in college, I worked for a couple of summers on the Outer Banks for a vacation rental company. We did umbrella service, rented out grills and fishing equipment, etc. It was a great summer job, and I got to work with great people from all over the world: Germans, Brazilians, Australians, Danes, and Czechs. Some of us are still friends. The population of the Outer Banks in the off-season is about 37,000. At the peak of summer, the number of people on the island can hit as much as 300,000. The locals by and large have either better-paying seasonal jobs or steady year-round jobs. Our function was to be a battalion of grunts that enabled the annual summer CSA invasion of OBX by keeping the visitors stocked in ice and kept in the shade.
Alaska faces a similar issue. The year-round population in remote Southeast Alaska and Aleutian Island communities is not nearly large enough to support the peak manpower needed for the commercial seafood harvest. With heavy recruiting, Alaska’s seafood producers manage to fill about 2/3 of their workforce domestically, but rely on the H-2B program to fill in the rest. A similar situation exists on the Eastern Shore, where crab season runs from April to November. The watermen can harvest oysters and fish in the offseason, and some of the domestic crab processing workforce can switch to shucking oysters or processing fish. Nonetheless, there remains a window of labor demand in the high season that outstrips local workforce capacity.
This is the sort of constraint President Trump has had to face in his own business, but with the added twist that the high season for Mar-a-Lago and Trump National Golf Course Palm Beach occurs in the winter time, while the main domestic source of seasonal labor, students, are in classes. President Trump recently remarked: “I’ve been a believer in H-1B, I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” I checked the records and it turns out he was referring not to the H-1B visa program, which his business has used very infrequently, but the H-2B visa program, which his businesses do use.
The main advantage of the H-2B program is that it is temporary — the visas only allow guest workers to stay and work in the United States for 9 months or less. The U.S. Department of Labor certifies as a prerequisite that no able or willing American workers can be found before allowing an employer to proceed with the process. The job is closely tied to a U.S. Department of Labor job code — for instance, an employee hired by a hotel to be a bartender cannot also work as a waiter, unless the employer applies to have the employee’s job code changed, which requires demonstrating that the employer tried and failed to find an American worker first. The employee must also be paid the prevailing, mean (average) wage for that job code.
The proportion of guest workers in a given labor code is too small to materially affect the mean wage. In landscaping, they make up about one-half of one percent of the total number of workers. Forestry (planting trees in forests that have been logged) and seafood processing are the only industries where a significant proportion of the total labor force is comprised of H-2Bs. Still, minimizing effects on native workers’ wages could be further safeguarded by ensuring that the Department of Labor does a better job in ensuring that the mean wages to be paid are adjusted upwards based on yearly inflation.
A chunk of the H-2B visas are set aside for Northern Triangle countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) in a policy formulated in the first Trump Administration to discourage illegal immigration by offering an alternative legal path for temporary employment. Of these three countries, El Salvador has set a high standard for ensuring efficient recruitment, processing, and compliance. Officials in Honduras and Guatemala are largely content to send their workers off to generate remittances. El Salvador is much more begrudging about the idea of their people going to work somewhere else. They have teams in the government that maintain contact with their workers abroad to ensure that employers are honoring their contractual obligations. This reduces abuse by identifying U.S. employers who are trying to use this program as a source of cheap labor in substandard conditions. Having competent and active counterparts in countries that we allow to participate in our guest worker programs is key to making these programs work as intended.
The H-1B visa program is emblematic of a system that values profit margins and global competitiveness over the livelihoods of the people it was supposed to serve, and fits into the larger arc of post-Cold War economic policies that dismantled the foundations of American prosperity. The promise of retraining and upward mobility for displaced workers has been proven to be hollow, mirroring the empty assurances of globalization. Instead of fostering opportunity and innovation, it has become a mechanism for entrenching corporate power and perpetuating a system that sacrifices national interests for the sake of global integration. It must end.