I’ve been listening to Robert Evans’s podcast series on Adolf Eichmann and one of the things Evans mentions is that throughout the Holocaust, many Nazis had in their lives a “Good Jew.” Some Jewish person whom they liked and wished to save.
Hitler’s Good Jew was Eduard Bloch, the family doctor from his childhood. Hitler granted Bloch special protection, eventually allowed him to emigrate to the United States, and as a result, Bloch and his family were not slaughtered.
One of the things that made Eichmann unusual among his class of Nazi was that he had no Good Jews in his life. He was happy to dispose of all of them.
One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s mass-deportation regime has been the emergence of Good Immigrants from certain MAGA communities. We saw these people in the small Missouri town that rallied to Carol, a beloved member of the community who was arrested by Trump’s secret police because her papers were not in order.
These MAGA diehards whined and complained until the administration relented and let Carol go. It seems to have occurred to precisely none of the townsfolk that America is full of Carols.
On Tuesday, we met another Good Immigrant. Her name is Geleny Allred. She is an illegal immigrant from Ecuador. Two years ago she married a man named Chris Allred. In 2024, Chris Allred voted for the man who promised to deport 20 million illegal immigrants.
I’m not sure if this is a story about garden-variety stupidity or incipient genocide. At the end, I hope you’ll tell me what you think is going on.
Chris Allred, a middle-aged white guy from Middle America, told the New York Times that he’s had a hard life.
Mr. Allred, 48, grew up on a farm in western Arkansas. He watched as his father, a machinist, struggled to navigate a rapidly changing economy. His father lost three factory jobs when the companies that employed him either closed or moved their production abroad, including to Mexico. He tried raising chickens, but ended up losing his investment. . . .
Mr. Allred went to college, something his father hadn’t done, but during his first year, his mother died of breast cancer and he dropped out. His sister had been murdered the year before, and the tragedies knocked his life off course. For years he was depressed. He contemplated suicide. He went from job to job, working in pool maintenance, ad sales at a newspaper, H.I.V. counseling and as a security guard at a nightclub. He wanted a family, but never felt stable enough to provide for one.
But things worked out for him in the end. In 2018, he told the Times, “he got a job he liked, working for a trucking company that was part of the now-booming economy of northwest Arkansas.” His life stabilized. He met a woman he loved. He got married. And then he voted for a guy who promised to arrest and deport his bride.
Whom does Mr. Allred blame for how hard the first part of his life was? Immigrants.
He believes they are “an army of takers,” filling spots in emergency rooms and schools that American citizens have to pay for. . . .
“We don’t have an industrial base anymore,” Mr. Allred told me over dinner at his apartment in Bentonville. “We have trillions in national debt. It’s impossible. We can’t take on millions more people. It’s financially not possible.” . . .
“This is going to be an absolutely horrendous thing I want to say, but if you can’t talk about the truth you really can’t have a real conversation,” he said. “They’re parasites. What do parasites do? Over time they eventually kill the host. And that’s what this country’s headed towards.”
Oh. My.
Let’s connect some dots for Mr. Allred.
First off, the net economic impact of illegal immigrants is positive. Even immigration restrictionists admit that while illegal immigrants consume slightly more in government services than they pay in taxes, those costs are swamped by the economic activity they generate.
Here’s a paper by immigration super-restrictionist Steven Camarota. He claims that undocumented immigrants consume $42 billion in annual welfare spending against $30 billion in annual federal tax payments. You can question his numbers if you like—he’s trying to make the best case for getting rid of undocumented immigrants.
But Camarota then admits, “Illegal immigrants do add perhaps $321 billion to the nation’s GDP, but this is not a measure of their tax contributions or the benefits they create for the U.S.-born. Almost all the increase in economic activity goes to the illegal immigrants themselves in the form of wages.”
You can see him trying to wiggle out at the end, as if the wages these workers earn don’t count, since they accrue to the immigrants themselves. But that $321 billion then gets spent in the economy, consuming goods and services, creating jobs, and generating more taxable activity.
And keep in mind, these numbers are from the guy who is desperate to paint undocumented immigrants as a net negative. If you go to more neutral sources, the economic effects of even illegal immigration look even more positive.
Why is that? Because the illegal population is disproportionately working-age and disproportionately employed.
In other words: the opposite of “takers” and “parasites.”
And by the by, Mr. Allred does not seem to have connected the dots on how he arrived at his current station in life.
Yes, domestic manufacturing dried up beginning in the 1990s. Those jobs moved to low-labor-cost countries. This drove a decrease in the price of consumer goods in America. Which led to the importing of all the cheap goods we see at Walmart.
But how does that stuff get from Mexico and Vietnam and China to Walmart?
It goes by truck. Which is why the Times describes the “now-booming economy of northwest Arkansas,” where Allred lives. Maybe this is coincidence, but in what corner of what state did Walmart start? I’ll let you guess.
Mr. Allred works as a recruiter for a trucking company in a job he says he likes. And I suspect he makes more money now, in a job that uses his intellect, than he would have made if he’d been working in a factory using his hands.
And he probably makes more money—and is probably more fulfilled—doing this high-skill labor than he would be if he were doing the manual labor that many undocumented immigrants perform in the American economy today.
This is how economics works. Chris Allred is a beneficiary of both globalism and immigration.
But not only does he not understand this reality, he sees himself as a victim and demonizes the very forces that have helped him.
2. Stupidity or Bigotry?
Later in the Times piece the reporter has dinner with the Allreds and the following exchange takes place:
“Baby, baby, I have a question,” she said to him after she’d put away the soup. “Before me, you didn’t like illegal immigrants?”
“I still don’t,” he said.
She laughed and turned to me to explain.
“He doesn’t like bad immigrants, he doesn’t like lazy immigrants, who take all that’s free in the country,” she said. “Maybe he likes good immigrants—smart, hardworking immigrants.”
Mr. Allred dipped into dessert, a slice of tiramisù. He acknowledged that there was an inconsistency between his views and his experience with his wife.
“I’m a walking contradiction,” he said, smiling.
I’m so glad he’s able to smile about it.
Meanwhile, in California the bishop of San Bernardino, Alberto Rojas, yesterday lifted the obligation for Catholics to attend Sunday Mass. In the nearby Diocese of Orange, priests are now celebrating Mass in people’s homes in order to protect them from ICE.
We are now a country that is driving religious practice underground. Ask yourself where you have seen this sort of thing before.
Alligator Alcatraz is not a death camp and Trump’s mass deportations are not a Holocaust. But the parallels to the early stages ought to have our attention.
A masked secret police force snatching people off of the street.
Churches going underground to protect a targeted community.
Undocumented immigrants stripped of their property and rendered stateless.
The Volk railing against “parasites” while maintaining that they like “good illegal immigrants.”
Not every slide into illiberalism ends in genocide. But every genocide starts with a slide into illiberalism. And we won’t arrest this slide by pretending it can’t possibly happen here.
3. The Fighter
David Epstein has a beautiful piece about his friend, Jill Dopf Viles. David was a famous author; Jill sent him an email after seeing him on TV. She had a genetic disorder and a theory about its origins.
The two of them embarked on a years-long friendship, with a side of collaboration.
After my first book, The Sports Gene, came out in 2013, I was on Good Morning America talking about genetics, and Jill happened to be within earshot of her TV. “I thought, oh, this is divine providence,” Jill later told me. So she sent me that email with the provocative subject line. She followed up by sending me a batch of family photos and a bound packet outlining her theory: that she and Canadian sprinter Priscilla Lopes-Schliep — bronze medalist in the 100-meter hurdles at the 2008 Olympics — shared a genetic mutation.
On the face of it, this seemed ridiculous. One could hardly find a picture of two more different women. . . .
The packet outlined in granular detail why Jill thought, just from looking at pictures of Priscilla, that the two women shared a genetic mutation that caused the same fat wasting, but because Priscilla didn’t also have muscle wasting — quite the contrary — her body had found some way to “go around” muscular dystrophy.
If Jill was right, she thought, perhaps scientists could study both of them and figure out how to help people with muscles like Jill’s develop muscles a little closer to Priscilla’s end of the human physique spectrum. Jill was sharing all this with me because she wasn’t sure how best to contact Priscilla, and hoped I would facilitate an introduction.
Jill’s hypothesis struck me as unlikely, to say the least. But her presentation in the packet was so interesting, and her knowledge of the underlying genetics and physiology so thorough, that I felt her idea deserved a hearing. I reached out to Priscilla; she agreed to meet Jill, and after comparing body parts in a hotel lobby, Jill convinced her to get a genetic test. Long story short, Jill turned out to be right. She and Priscilla had a mutation in the same gene, albeit at neighboring locations.
The discovery led Priscilla to get urgent care for a serious health condition that had previously been overlooked because of her obvious fitness. Jill and I shared this story in an episode of This American Life in 2016 — which will rerun this week in her honor.
After that story ran, Jill’s genome became the subject of research, exactly as she’d hoped. Today, in a lab in Iowa, there are fruit flies known as “Jill” flies, because they have been engineered to carry her same mutation. As expected, Jill flies have severely limited mobility. But just recently, a scientist conducted a genetic experiment in which she increased the production of a particular protein in the Jill flies. Suddenly, they began to move like normal fruit flies.
Jill passed away last month. Read the whole thing.
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People like Mr Allred often forget who sent all of those jobs overseas that his dad kept losing: rich company owners, not immigrants. His own fellow Americans fucked his family over so that the shareholders could get a better taste every quarter.
Now, given the choice between sending the jobs overseas or bringing the labor here in the form of immigration, the latter is undoubtedly the winning choice. When the jobs go overseas so do the paychecks and tax revenue. That's paychecks that would have been spent in the American economy going to the Chinese or Vietnamese economy. That's payroll revenue that would have gone to the USG going to the PRC instead. When we bring the labor here we still get cheaper goods but the paychecks and payroll taxes go into American businesses and into USG revenue coffers. We also get a population growth bump in a country where we're below replacement rate on population shrinkage. Pretty fucking obvious which one is the better choice between the two.