America was right to abolish slavery. It bound men by force and corrupted the manners of those who held them. Jefferson called the traffic between master and slave a perpetual exercise of unremitting despotism on one side and degrading submission on the other. No free people should want that relationship back.

He also understood what emancipation without separation would mean. In Notes on the State of Virginia he asked why the freed population could not simply be folded into the state. His answer was the one our age will not hear: deep-rooted prejudices, ten thousand recollections of injury, “the real distinctions which nature has made,” and the certainty that two races, equally free, could not live under one government without convulsions that would end only in the ruin of one or the other. He proposed gradual emancipation and colonization. In 1820 he told John Holmes the country held “the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

Lincoln stood in the same line. He would not see slavery spread. He also said he was not and never had been in favor of social and political equality of the races, nor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them for office, nor of intermarriage. There was, he thought, a physical difference that would forever forbid the two races living together as equals. While they remained together there must be a superior and an inferior position; he favored assigning the superior one to his own race. He favored colonization. He told Greeley that if he could save the Union without freeing any slave he would do it. The Union came first. The right of a man to eat the bread his own hand earns did not, in Lincoln’s mind, require the fairy tale that the races are interchangeable in capacity or in civic life.

We kept the first half of their program and threw away the second. Ownership of men ended. The appetite for cheap, controllable labor did not. It found new papers.

The visa is one such paper. The worker wants the West – its order, its pay, its streets without the old bribes – and dreads the homeland he left. That dread is the wage. Threaten removal and he will sit eighty hours. He will accept what no native with options would accept. Hours are easy to count; competence is not. The metrics record presence and miss the fact that much of the presence produces noise.

The same logic now sits in the house. The maid, the gardener, and the nanny are not ordinary employees. Their status, language, and alternatives make them pliant. A native woman will not scrub another family’s floors at the wage that draws a recent arrival. A native man will not tend lawns at the rate that keeps a crew whose papers can be pulled. Parents who can pay prefer a nanny whose continued presence depends on a signature to one whose first loyalty is to her own children and her own country. The house that needs foreign hands for its floors and its young is no longer a household. It is a small estate that requires a permanent foreign underclass.

The men who profit from this arrangement deserve a special kind of ridicule. They are the owners who have discovered that the shortest path to a fortune is to arbitrage the difference between what a desperate foreigner will accept and what a citizen with a country will not. Legal or illegal is a detail. An H-1B, a visa overstay, a man who walked across the river – the principle is the same. Import the labor, pocket the margin, and send the bill for schools, emergency rooms, crowding, crime, and broken neighborhoods to the public. Then appear before a chamber of commerce and explain that the country will collapse without still more of the same. They want the worker in the shop and the nanny in the nursery. They do not want the cousin, the gang, the language, or the voting bloc in the next precinct. They live behind a gate, extract the surplus, and lecture the people who live with the consequences about compassion.

The political machine that serves them works by ratchet.

First spring the illegal population. Call it compassion and cheap food. Point to a few industries that suddenly look “competitive.” Ignore the wages that flatten, the classrooms that fill, the hospitals that write off the visits, the towns that no longer feel like themselves. Announce an economic miracle. Demand more.

Then secure the next generation by birth on the soil. The child is a citizen; the parents become much harder to remove. Call this family values and the future workforce. The fiscal and social costs compound, but they are diffuse. The profit remains concentrated. Announce another gain.

Then open the door wider to non-Western inflows that will not become the people who built the country. Call it diversity and dynamism. Each turn is sold as quality of life and growth. The owners clap. The editorial pages explain that only a bigot notices the schools, the parks, the crime statistics, or the fact that the people who pay the taxes are being replaced by the people who consume them.

The reverse experiment would be simpler and more popular than the propaganda allows. Remove the illegal population first. Wages in the affected trades would rise. Classrooms and clinics would breathe. Neighborhoods that had been treated as holding pens would become livable again. That single demonstration would do more to educate the public than decades of argument. Next end the incentive that turns a birth into an anchor. Then reduce the inflows that have already changed the character of whole regions. Each turn would show, in ordinary life, what the cheap-labor coalition has spent fifty years denying: that a country is not a labor camp, that cheap presence is not competence, and that the social costs dumped on the public were never “the price of prosperity.” They were the price of someone else’s margin.

Jefferson and Lincoln wanted an end to slavery and a separation of peoples they did not believe could live as equals under one roof. We congratulated ourselves on the first and treated the second as a sin. The result is a country that no longer owns men, yet imports them under terms that recreate the old bond in offices and nurseries, while a class of owners pockets the difference and invites the rest of us to celebrate the chaos as strength. We were right not to have slaves. We would be wiser not to let a handful of men rebuild the relationship for private gain and then send the wreckage to the public to pay.