Former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown has written his own 4,300-word political autopsy — but he hides the immediate cause of his career’s sudden death in November 2024.
The cause was President Joe Biden’s support for mass migration, yet Brown’s autopsy does not mention “immigration,” or “border.”
His silence is understandable because the Democrat Party’s leaders, staffers, and activists are in thrall to Wall Street’s insatiable demand for more imported consumers, renters, and workers. That demand is the domestic side of Wall Street’s free-trade export of high-wage jobs to China, India, and elsewhere.
Brown blames President Bill Clinton’s 1990’s support for free trade with Mexico and China. Free trade ensured “good-paying careers [were] replaced by dead-end jobs at big box stores that have few benefits and opportunities for upward mobility,” Brown wrote.
But Brown ignores the flip side of free trade in goods — the free inflow of migrants into the remaining jobs left once the manufacturing moved to China and Mexico.
Since 1990, that flood of migrants has loosened the labor market and left millions of Americans stuck in low-wage jobs as their communities were first abandoned by investors and then diversified by the government.
That inflow of legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants has been vast because Brown’s progressive allies chose to side with Wall Street. That alliance has left moderate Democrats with no ability to resist or even mention the federal policy of Extraction Migration.
The defection of the university-trained progressives was almost inevitable. They were delighted to shift their empathy from alienated and ungrateful Americans over to the wave of optimistic and grateful migrants who said Gracias when they were offered aid, schools for their kids, and steady work in post-industrial jobs that paid far less than Americans expected.
Progressives have been so eager to import more workers, consumers, and renters for Wall Street that they volunteer their emotions and their time to aid the illegal migrants imported by the Chambers of Commerce and Biden’s investor-backed border czar, Alejandro Mayorkas.
In Oakland, California, for example, a city-funded group titled Street Level provides free food for the desperate migrants who inadvertently and unavoidably reduce market wages for Americans:
At day laborer sites [for illegal migrants] in East Oakland, several workers said that they often skip buying groceries or meals for themselves in order to save money for rent or other necessities.
Diego, who like others interviewed for this story asked to not share his full name because of his undocumented status, said he’s lucky if he makes $300 a week. He said that is enough to pay for the small room he and his son rent in the Fruitvale – but not enough to feed them both. Diego said that he will sometimes go days without food.
…
Currently, Street Level has a $100,000 grant from the city of Oakland to provide wrap-around services for day laborers, such as getting jobs for the workers, providing assistance with CalFresh and MediCal applications, and referring people to legal aid or immigration assistance.
The emotional desire of white-collar progressives to cheerlead for blue-collar migration also makes it difficult for ordinary Democrat politicians to reach for a middle ground.
“I’m all for just like, open the f… border,” Ohio Democratic organizer Kevin Oyakawa allegedly told an undercover journalist in October. He continued:
I don’t give a shit about who comes in here — we don’t need Border Patrol. But the issue with even talking about immigration here in Ohio is that it’s a losing issue for Democrats here for no fucking reason other than people’s pure racism.
Ironically, the current wave of white-collar migration is also hammering many of the progressive-minded white-collar Americans who would have been glad to become activists for Brown and other Democrats.
Brown’s inability to oppose Wall Street’s radicalism has put his progressive staff on the same track after his November defeat:
Seventy people in our office were suddenly out of work. [after the election]. My chief of staff and state director and I met with every member of our staff, working to find jobs for the public servants who had served Ohio, many for more than a decade.
Brown must recognize that migration has been a disaster for Ohio Democrats and a boon for the investors. But his voting record earned him an “F” rating on the political scorecard kept by a pro-American migration group, NumbersUSA.
Yet his autopsy also hints at voters’ rational and open opposition to investor-spurred migration, saying:
And we need to trust workers. If they tell us that inflation is killing them, we need to believe them. If they tell us that they don’t like “free trade,” we need to believe them. If they tell us they like tariffs and see them as showing allegiance with American workers, we need to believe them.
Sometimes workers are going to tell us things that make us uncomfortable or that we may not want to hear. But if we are going to be the workers’ party, that can’t apply only when the opinions of working-class voters happen to match up with those of current party leaders and elite donors.
So far, one Democratic Senator is showing that he recognizes the political damage of Biden’spolicy:
Some Democrats in the media also are trying to harness a small share of migration’s damage to help Democrats.
The party’s powerful donors on Wall Street, however, insist the November disaster was a “messaging” screwup.
Brown does describe the political disaster facing the Party:
In large swaths of Ohio, and the country, the Democratic Party’s reputation has become toxic … All along eastern Ohio, it’s the same story—in county after county, places full of union towns that I once considered part of our base are now outrightly hostile.
…
[The cause] is not that complicated. We have an economy today that does not reward work and does not value the work of Americans without four-year college degrees. Over the past 40 years, corporate profits have soared, executive salaries have exploded, and productivity keeps going up. Yet wages are largely flat, and the cost of living keeps getting more expensive.
He says he will fight for a pro-employee party:
Democrats must become the workers’ party again. It is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life. To win the White House and governing majorities again, Democrats must reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal roots, in terms of both our philosophy toward the economy, and the makeup of our coalition.
“We need a generational effort to transform our party, with the dignity of work at the center,” said Brown,
But Trump is ahead of him as he zig-zags his way forward between his competing blue-collar-white-collar, C-Suite, and Wall Street supporters.
“Big gains for native-born Americans …Employment for native-born workers went up by 284,000 while foreign-born workers went down by 87,000,” Trump told the media in the Oval Office on March 7. He added:
For the first time in 15 months, the job gains for native-born Americans — for American people, people born in America — exceeded job gains for migrant and foreign-born workers. This is the first time that’s happened in more than 15 months.