Politics has never been about consistency.
The essence of President Donald Trump’s middle class white base stems from economic anxiety, this much is obvious. A common refrain heard amid gleeful chants of “Build the wall” or “Lock her up” at Trump rallies usually fell along the lines of “Immigrants are stealing our jobs” or “America First”.
It makes sense why Americans with stagnant wages and rising costs of living would seek out a boogeymen to blame for their distress, but Trump’s base and conservatives across the country are burning the candle at both ends. If you fear immigrants stealing your job, you cannot logically believe in the ineffectiveness of minimum wage legislation.
The (flawed) economic bedrock that the Trump administration lays its argument upon can be boiled down to the idea that an immigrant from a country like Mexico will be willing to work for less than an American citizen and therefore will take the job from the American, undercutting their wage and supposedly displacing the white working force.
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If the federal minimum wage is raised to, say $12 an hour, an immigrant would clearly be unable to undercut an American worker by working for $8 an hour. This overlap between progressive minimum wage arguments and limited immigration occurred to enough voters that 12 percent of Sanders voters went with Trump in the election.
Conservatives preach pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and making yourself more appealing to potential employers through education and marketable skills. These are excellent ideals, if only they were applied to their own base.
If an immigrant from Mexico, where in 2014 only 6 percent of immigrants to the U.S. had a bachelor’s degree, is as qualified for your job as you, there aren’t too many possibilities for upward mobility in your career search.
This is tough talk. The same that got Trump elected. The president said things on the campaign trail that other politicians were unwilling to say, which appealed to many who were sick of the same talking points politicians have been spewing for years. Suddenly the straight-talking paradigm of truth and political incorrectness does not have the spine to tell his base about the obstacles that really ail them.
Like most issues, you can find Trump flip flopping from support to utter contempt for raising the minimum wage, but it is certainly not a priority of his administration. For the Republican party, they are decidedly against minimum wage being discussed at the federal level at all.
So why is the Republican party oblivious to their lapse in logic?
Republicans do not fight for the minimum wage because Democrats are already fighting for it. Politics isn’t about advocating for your constituents, it’s about representing the opposition’s positions as contrary to their well-being, even if it is at the expense of their own well-being.
The debate over the minimum wage is ongoing and legitimate, but the duplicitous nature of a party that holds two incompatible beliefs is emblematic of the true impetus of American politics.
Will Stern ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in journalism.
