The Elitism of Empathy

By Scott C. Mallett

Sunday, August 10, 2025

 

It has become a familiar scene: A Democratic strategist sits on a cable news panel, the host mentions illegal immigration, and phrases such as “white privilege,” “doing the jobs Americans won’t do,” and “no human being is illegal” drop so predictably you could play bingo. Throw in “a nation of immigrants” and “separating families,” and you’ll have a full card by the second question.

 

It plays well in the progressives’ echo chamber, but the script often belies their true motives.

 

Hunter Biden didn’t mince words in a tirade with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan. “How do you think your hotel room gets cleaned? . . . Who do you think washes your dishes?” he raged, tossing in a few more clichés. It was framed as a defense of dignity, but the message was clear: Immigrants are here to scrub, serve, and stay in the background. Kelly Osbourne went even further, on The View, challenging Donald Trump directly: “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?”

 

For a party so vocal about immigrants’ rights and so eager to display empathy for their plight, progressives’ comments are wrapped in compassion but rooted in condescension. Democratic apologists dismiss such comments as impulsive outbursts not reflective of mainstream thought, but there’s evidence that challenges that deflection.

 

A 2018 study by the Yale School of Management revealed that white liberals unconsciously simplify their language when speaking to members of racial minorities. Termed “competence downshifting,” the phenomenon that researchers identified involves paring back vocabulary, slowing down speech, and reducing syntax to elementary forms. The intent is to avoid offense, but the subtext is unmistakable: “I don’t think you’re smart enough to understand.” While conservatives in the study didn’t demonstrate this behavior, white liberals repeatedly and consistently did. It wasn’t malicious. It was patronizing. And it might help explain how many progressives view immigrants: not as equals to be empowered but as fragile symbols to be protected. Hence, wealthy liberals frame illegal immigrants as our silent saviors — as long as they remain behind the counter or continue to scrub the floors. The language of dignity is co‑opted to preserve a very old idea: Some people exist to serve, and others exist to speak for them.

 

And they accuse the right of being racist.

 

Things change, however, when the consequences show up on the left’s doorstep. Nowhere is this more apparent than in sanctuary cities. For years, liberal strongholds such as New York and Chicago framed themselves as openhearted sanctuaries for the tired and poor. But once busloads of migrants started arriving from the southern border, that compassion ran out fast.

 

New York Mayor Eric Adams, once a vocal defender of sanctuary policies, has since reversed course. Facing insufficient federal support and overwhelming migrant inflows, he began calling for fewer arrivals, more federal funding, and legal reforms — especially to address violent foreign offenders. Additionally, Adams has urged the city council to amend the city’s laws and allow greater cooperation with ICE.

 

Chicago has faced its own reckoning. After becoming the destination for thousands of migrants bused in from Texas, the strain on wages, shelters, and public services prompted protests, such as that in Brighton Park, where residents mobilized against the opening of city-run shelters in their backyards. This is what happens when virtue-signaling meets reality.

 

While the left might be eager to welcome immigrants to boost Democratic voter rolls — consider incidents such as the Nebraska Democratic Party’s providing refugees with voter registration forms in 2017 — that’s likely not the true motive. Noncitizens can’t legally vote in federal elections. (While the system retains some vulnerabilities, most studies find that instances of noncitizen voting are rare.) However, illegal immigrants are counted in the U.S. census. Those numbers determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state receives. Because millions of undocumented immigrants reside in sanctuary states such as California and New York, these states gain disproportionate political power. That’s the quiet part no one wants to say out loud: A larger population, regardless of citizenship status, means more power in Washington.

 

It’s not about compassion. It’s about leverage.

 

Meanwhile, Democrats love to claim that business and industry support illegal immigration because they want inexpensive labor (even though many undocumented workers are paid prevailing wages). But employers prefer immigrant workers for more important reasons: They show up and they work hard. In sectors like food-processing, agriculture, construction, and hospitality, dependability is everything. A factory doesn’t run without workers. The hard truth is that, fairly or not, some native-born American workers have earned a reputation for being unreliable. Employers aren’t choosing immigrants so they can exploit them. They’re choosing them so they can function.

 

This is why neither political party rushes to fix the immigration system: What benefits business drives political compliance. Few are willing to push reforms that might disrupt the flow of reliable labor to key industries, regardless of whether those industries are in blue or red states. That doesn’t stop Democrats from posturing, or Republicans from talking tough. But real reform would require confronting two uncomfortable truths: Some American workers have become undependable, and the left’s celebration of immigrant labor often masks a deeper condescension of the sort that Hunter Biden and Kelly Osbourne revealed. It’s not that “immigrants do the jobs Americans refuse to do.” It’s that “immigrants do the jobs we think we’re too good for.”

 

This moral construct is the by-product of a broader cultural instinct on the American left: the infantilization of marginalized groups. In progressive circles, oppression is currency. The more disadvantaged your identity, the more moral authority you carry. To qualify for compassion, immigrants must be pitied, not empowered. They are portrayed as voiceless, fragile, and in need of constant defense by their more enlightened liberal protectors. But most immigrants want the same basic things everyone else wants: a good job, a safe community, a stable economy, and respect. The irony is that those who claim to respect them the most seem to believe that immigrants can’t achieve those things without the assistance and protection of progressives. It tempts one to ask what could be more condescending, self-righteous, and vain.

 

When the left stops seeing immigrants as hotel maids and toilet scrubbers and starts recognizing that immigrants don’t need rescuing, then we can have a serious conversation rooted in respect and dignity instead of moral theater.