I don’t often agree with Megan McArdle, but when she’s right, she’s right:

So there's a certain trust gap. Especially because the way we talk about things like immigration and trade is in this universal morality which declares that a US citizen has no more moral weight than someone outside the US.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 27, 2019

Right on. For the past 30 years, much of the left and a large part of the right has told Americans that they are “deplorables” if they don’t want their job replaced with an immigrant willing to work double-shifts at $4 an hour under the table, and that the immigrant due to their lack of privilege has more of a moral claim to this terrible job than an American citizen.

That’s what I mean, partially, when I say that neoliberalism has taken over all of the thought and discourse. It annexes morality claims about human rights and human worth into its domain, conflates them with the needs of the market (which is itself equated with a natural force) and then declares that anyone that doesn’t support this unholy miscreation is a racist cretin.

In a very real sense, then, under the dominant neolib thought structure and societal organization (and everyone will hate me for this), supporting ill-conceived notions like “open borders” is more racist than the opposite as it imbues greater moral worth and more notional rights on those with different-colored skin rather than everyone having the same natural rights by virtue of simply being human.

Of course, it doesn’t work this way in the real world, but I am talking about liberal utopia dream world here — which in reality are just ramifications into dreamspace of current conventional neoliberal thought structures.

After all, Consuela has a right and a duty to wipe your nana’s doody.