Establishment oracle George Will has reversed himself after a career of praising mass migration, dating back to the Reagan administration.
Will’s sudden renunciation of establishment orthodoxy after 50 years of support for mass migration was signaled with a single adjective in his April 24 column, as he lamented slow population growth under President Donald Trump’s low migration policy:
There is one promising solution. Increasing skilled immigration into our nation [emphasis added].
Not “mass migration,” not even just “migration.” Will is now backing only “skilled migration.”
The shift to “skilled” is a big change for 84-year-old Will, whose carefully written nationwide op-ed columns have shaped Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Generation X since 1974.
His careful word choice of “skilled” implies a smaller-scale inflow of highly productive people who can complement, but not replace or sideline, the native wisdom, diligence, and productivity of America’s vast citizenry.
But Will has spent the last 50 years and eight presidencies praising the elite-engineered mass immigration that has changed the United States’ suburban station-wagon politics into a battleground for myriad counterproductive ethnic rivalries.
Mass migration offered a reckless welcome for tens of millions of ordinary people from South America, Africa, India, and China. That diverse flood of legal and illegal migrants have their own virtues — but they enabled investors to create a profitable consumer economy built on taxpayer-subsidized, low-wage jobs.
Those imported populations are now the foundation of the Democrats’ political machines in New York, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Those modern-day Tammany Hall political machines are the existential ethnic-politics threat to the small-government principles championed by Will, who is likely the last starched-collar WASP in what is left of the establishment media.
The imported migrants celebrated by Will also reduced marketplace pressure on employers to pay decent wages needed by potential parents, invest in the Trump-backed wave of high-tech workplace technology that raises wages, or even to build up export markets.
These elites’ self-serving empathy for grateful migrants also demonstrated their contempt for the insufficiently glamorous children of the nation’s citizenry.
In the days before the Internet and mainstream news, Will supported those policies via his densely written columns written for college graduates across the fruited plain.
In 2014, as the GOP’s base blocked the establishment’s Gang of Eight cheap-labor and amnesty bill, Will lamented that only mass migration could restore the nation’s vigor:
Republicans’ reasons for retreating from immigration reform reflect waning confidence in American culture and in the political mission only Republicans can perform — restoring U.S. economic vigor. Without this, the nation will have a dismal future …
In 2022, when the U.S. population was 333 million, Wall’s prescription for beating no-migration China was to raise the U.S. population to near 587 million “with sensible U.S. immigration policies.”
Two years ago, in June 2024, he was still backing mass migration as a top national priority:
This nation … needs lots of legal immigrants to replenish its workforce. That the government cannot provide for this is a failure second only to the nation’s fiscal shambles.
Will is clearly appalled by the citizens’ endorsement of Trump’s populist style and anti-migration policy. In one 2020 column, Will described Trump as “the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray … [a] low-rent [Shakespearian King] Lear …. [a] malignant buffoon.”
But Will is the King Lear of his own career: He chose the diversity and migration that caused patriotic Americans to reject their establishment leaders, and now he laments the chaos and loss all around him.
Yet Americans get to tell their own tales of woe and triumph, and maybe George Will hopes to return in Act VI as a humbled champion for the common citizen.
If so, his first task is to narrowly define “skilled” to stop the mass displacement of American college graduates that drains the vigor of American youth. Here’s a suggestion for the headline: “America is losing its most valuable resource: Americans.”
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