The five Democratic presidential candidates in the CNN debate closed ranks around their party’s self-serving demand for more immigration and migrant labor, leaving worried Americans with no Democratic candidates offering to shield them from the inevitable wage-and-salary cuts.
So two GOP candidates took the opportunity to win those worried Americans’ votes.
Gov. Mike Huckabee stepped up with two tweets.
The Democrat plan: Give amnesty AND #ObamaCare to illegal immigrants. #DemDebate
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 14, 2015
I pledge to oppose amnesty & government benefits for illegal immigrants who violated our laws. –> http://t.co/ejrxeXZtjT #DemDebate
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 14, 2015
Gov. Jeb Bush, however, ignored the issue, instead sending out a series of low-emotion tweets.
Partly because of high legal and illegal immigration, Americans’ wages are flat, their workforce participation rate is much lower than in 2007 or 2000, and the wealthy have grown wealthier as the stock market has boomed along with profits.
So far, Trump and Huckabee have complained about the high level of illegal immigration, which brings roughly 350,000 foreign migrants and workers into the country each year. But they’re paying less attention to the much larger inflow of legal workers, which adds roughly 2 million long-term and short-term workers to the economy each year.
That has a huge supply-and-demand impact on Americans, including the 4.4. million young Americans who enter the workforce each year.
Instead of aiding Americans, Democrats competed to offer comfort and aid to illegal immigrants and the business donors who profit from their low-wage work.
“My view right now — and always has been — is that when you have 11 million undocumented people in this country, we need comprehensive immigration reform, we need a path toward citizenship, we need to take people out of the shadows,” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Hillary Clinton said the taxpayers should provide foreign migrants with free college aid and health-care services. “I want to open up the opportunity for [illegal] immigrants to be able to buy in to the exchanges under the Affordable Care Act… [and] they would get the same subsidies [as Americans… My plan would support any state that takes that [subsidized education] position, and would work with those states and encourage more states to do the same thing,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have a problem with that,” said the supposed conservative, former Sen. Jim Webb.
“I have put out a policy for comprehensive immigration reform, that is why I would go further than President Obama,” claimed former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Back in 2013, Sanders feebly opposed the immigration-and-amnesty “comprehensive immigration reform,” but caved under progressive pressure. On Tuesday night, he weakly complained that some foreign workers are treated poorly — but didn’t mention their wage-cutting impact on Americans.
Instead, the Democrats put migrants ahead of their fellow Americans.
“We need to understand that our country is stronger in every generation by the arrival of new American immigrants… It’ll make wages go up in America $250 for every year,” O’Malley claimed.
Republicans “demonize hard-working immigrants who have insulted them… Early May [I] Met with a group of DREAMers, I wish everybody in America could meet with these young people, to hear their stories, to know their incredible talent, their determination,” said Clinton.
Webb was the only candidate who hinted at the nation-transforming impact of low-wage immigration, which has flooded the labor market so much that Americans’ wages have stopped growing, even as productivity slowly rises and the stock market shoots upwards. “No country… is a country without defining its borders. We need to resolve this issue… we need to be able to define our borders, said Webb, whose poll rating is just under 1 percent, according to Real Clear Politics.
Obama knows that’s true, and that’s why he favors large-scale immigration. In November 2014, Obama declared that “There have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.”
“Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently… that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration,” Obama said in the same Chicago speech.
Obama also understands the economic impact. Companies “can say to themselves… ‘If we do hire more workers, we’ll tell them, “This is how much we can afford, and if you want more, then we know that there’s a bunch of other people that we can get,’” Obama told Kai Ryssdal, the radio host of Marketplace, in October.
He’s even changed supply-and-demand himself. In 2013, he increased the flow of foreign labor so that one new foreign worker arrived for every two young Americans who entered the labor market.
But Democrats don’t care about Americans’ wages, unless politicians can get some credit for delivering them.
Hillary, in between cheerleading foreign labor that will drive down wages, lamented the resulting gap in economic opportunity and wealth. “This inequality challenge we face, we have faced it at other points. It’s absolutely right. It hasn’t been this bad [under Obama] since the 1920s… the economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House and that’s why we need to have a Democrat in the White House in January 201,” she said.
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