INGERSOLL: How’d We Get Back To 3/5ths A Person?

Greetings, Dear Reader,

Back’s up against the wall on my deadline, so let’s get after it.

HOW’D WE GET BACK TO 3/5ths A PERSON?

Perhaps the most unintentionally funny, and subtly vile, clip crossed my desk yesterday.

“Haitian family shares story of finding host home,” reads the chyron of Boston local news channel NBC10.

It’s a short news package from 2024, only two minutes long or so, one section of which went viral again. The story is about a Haitian immigrant couple who braved travel to the US, whose daughter became gravely ill after days of sleeping in transit areas, and the nice, old, upper-middle-class white lady named “Lisa” who saved them.

How nice. I’m certainly not one to look askance at charity. There should be more people like Lisa, frankly, especially among liberals. I can’t count how many man-on-the-street interviews I’ve seen in which pro-open borders liberals immediately fold the moment they’re asked to actually care for immigrants.

Good on Lisa, right? Well, hold on one second, because there’s one bit of copy that raised my eyebrows a bit.

“It’s really fun having them!” says Lisa. “There’s much prejudice against refugees mostly because people don’t know them.”

Then the reporter’s voiceover comes in while video shows “Wadande,” the Haitian mother in the family, pulling food out of the oven.

“Lisa says it’s like she has her own personal chef because Wadande loves cooking!”

Ah, indentured servitude! Really fun!

Perhaps I’m being cynical. It’s only right to try to help as much as possible when people show you charity. It’s the flippancy I can’t really square. It wouldn’t take the wokest among us to look at Lisa’s little housekeeping for room and board setup and call it modern-day servitude.

And that’s what’s so subtly vile about it. Liberal empathy is a mask for the latest iteration of 3/5ths a man.

Figures dating from 2019 track median wages for illegal immigrants around 42% lower than native-born workers. That’s literally 3/5ths.

Obviously this has an effect on the working class, which would explain its recent dogleg right in the MAGA era. How can you compete with people willing to do anything not to get deported, not to lose the roof over their heads, with no legal recourse to challenge work conditions?

The other irony that’s been nagging at me is how often the liberal bourgeoisie, devoid of historical literacy, misinterprets the 3/5ths compromise.

In 2019, the same year those wage numbers came out, Samantha Bee of the doomed show “Full Frontal” went on a screed about institutional white supremacy in which she apparently misunderstood the meaning of the 3/5ths compromise.

This is a frequent mistake on the left. The people who instituted the compromise viewed blacks as 3/5ths a person. You hear it everywhere.

The problem isn’t the compromise, it was the intent that led to it. Southern delegates wanted slaves counted in the census in order to apportion more seats in the House and more votes in the electoral college.

Sound familiar? California is hemorrhaging people. Folks eager to get away from the policy dysfunction have been fleeing east, to Arizona, Nevada, Texas and even as far as Florida. The only people without the means to get away are illegals making 3/5ths what their credentialed coworkers make.

As a result, despite the flight, California’s population has only dipped moderately.

Because of Trump’s mass deportations, apportionment for the House and EC has been much more widely discussed in political circles lately.

If America only counted U.S. citizens in the Census, a net of 22 congressional seats and electoral votes would move from blue states to red states.

California alone would lose six seats in the House if only Americans had a stake in our country’s political future.

Why do they… https://t.co/emnFWqZoqS

— Theo Wold (@RealTheoWold) January 29, 2026

It really is a dire situation for modern Democrats. Losing 22 seats in the House basically means a semi-permanent Republican majority. But it gets worse. The EC count would shift so much that Democrats could win Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and still lose a presidential election.

And here’s the kicker, Dear Reader, I want to apologize to the voter fraud folks.

Not only are Democrats helping to form civilian paramilitary groups to prevent mass deportation, but they’re in an awful hurry to prevent Republicans from instituting policies that would affirmatively prevent illegals from voting.

Unlike the Southern Democrats of the slavery era, who actually did not allow their slaves to vote, modern Democrats definitely want their slaves to vote. They need their slaves to vote.

In recent years, you’ve seen legislation pop up in several liberal jurisdictions explicitly calling for it: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York City. Locales in Vermont, California, Oregon, Illinois, Maryland, and Washington have all expressly considered allowing illegals to vote.

There’s also heavy indication of what they don’t want to happen. Virginia Dems submitted a bill to prevent any immigration actions within 50 feet of polling places. Super weird! There are 20 states in the union that automatically register you to vote when you get ID, all but Utah (and Nevada) vote reliably Democrat. Of those 20, 14 are seeing net “domestic” migration losses. That means citizens leaving.

Still, most, all but six, are growing their populations. Real head-scratcher to figure out how, eh? Maybe take a look at little Mogadishu in Minnesota for a clue. Are we beginning to understand why “empathy” is just a smokescreen to prevent mass deportations?

At the national level, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calls the national voter ID law, the SAVE Act, dead on arrival.

Odd. You give them IDs and register them to vote at the same time, but block identification and citizenship verification at polling places.

According to the Global Slavery Index, the United States is ranked 10 in absolute numbers for “modern-day slavery.” While I’d concede the figure is due in part to a broad definition of slavery, it’s hard not to conclude an explosion of illegal immigration contributed significantly since the turn of the century.

The difference today, in my opinion, is modern-day liberals want their cheap goods and services, but they also want these people to vote.

You’re 3/5ths a person when you’re pulling a roast out of the oven, Wadande, but on Nov. 8, you’re one of us completely.