Leaving aside all this talk of Mexicans, did the core of Mr. Wilkinson’s response to Ross’ remarks on immigration make any sense?  Ross said, in reply to Yglesias:

Of course, one might argue that reducing illegal immigration is something that would “compromise the interests of the global elite” – which is one reason (among many others, some of them quite high-minded) why so many members of that elite are on the “left” on immigration. A slightly better way of putting what Matt is driving at, I think, is this: Large-scale immigration from Mexico to the United States is a form of de facto humanitarianism, and since Americans are generally leery of humanitarian spending (primarily because we overestimate the size of our existing foreign aid budget), liberal humanitarians have a vested interest in preserving the existing immigration system. It’s a rare issue where business interests line up on the side of raising the living standards of Third World peasants, and why mess with a good thing? Better, as Matt suggests, to go after the global elite in other arenas – like tax policy, say – where the business class’s preferred policies don’t have humanitarian externalities.

So here we can see that Ross is clarifying the point that Yglesias was making on why liberals could still support mass immigration even though said immigration has a negative impact on the wages of American workers and thus increases the income inequality that also exercises liberals.  For his exegetical efforts, Ross received the following tongue-lashing from Mr. Wilkinson:

It’s a rather profound error to characterize voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers as equivalent to ”humanitarian spending,” as if money tax revenue had been withdrawn from the Treasury and sent to Mexicans. There is indeed a pecuniary externality of Mexican workers in the American labor market â€“ downward price pressure from competition — and this can indeed have an effect on the pattern of American incomes. But it is a pretty basic and embarrassing mistake to confuse (1) coercive state confiscation and reallocation of income with (2) changing patterns of income from voluntary exchange.

Um, okay, but for this criticism to make any sense it would have to be aimed at someone who actually confuses these things.  If anyone in this debate might have confused them, it would be Ross’ imaginary liberal restating Yglesias’ argument.  At no point in his post did Ross say that he regards these things as equivalent or comparable, but that it seems to him that this is how liberals reconcile the apparent contradiction between their concern over inequality at home and their support for importing ever-greater inequality from abroad.  Ross’ rejoinder to the liberal position is that this justification is “slightly perverse,” since it seems to privilege the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the American poor, which Ross says is a bizarre way to engage in a “humanitarian” politics.  In other words, at the heart of this dispute are Mr. Wilkinson’s profound outrage at the position with which both he and Ross basically disagree and Mr. Wilkinson’s mistaken attribution of that position to Ross and his “populist nationalism,” under the “heel” of which he is “grinding” his Christian universalism.