NY Times: U.S. ‘Needs More Low-Skilled Immigrants’

As President Donald Trump pushes a plan to cut legal immigration to the United States in half, the corporate media establishment is pushing back every step of the way.

In a new column for the New York Times, Eduardo Porter claims that not only does he oppose cutting legal immigration, but also that the U.S. “needs more low-skilled immigrants” to fill American jobs. Porter and University of California, Berkeley Professor David Card say that the current legal immigration system of admitting more than one million low-skilled immigrants a year is necessary so that baby boomers have caretakers to look after them when they retire:

Let’s just say it plainly: The United States needs more low-skilled immigrants.

You might consider, for starters, the enormous demand for low-skilled workers, which could well go unmet as the baby boom generation ages out of the labor force, eroding the labor supply. Eight of the 15 occupations expected to experience the fastest growth between 2014 and 2024 — personal care and home health aides, food preparation workers, janitors and the like — require no schooling at all.

“Ten years from now, there are going to be lots of older people with relatively few low-skilled workers to change their bedpans,” said David Card, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “That is going to be a huge problem.”

Porter’s argument that the U.S. needs more low-skilled immigration breaks from the growing mainstream media consensus on immigration, where the New York Times and Washington Post editors–as well as TV pundits–argue that a merit-based legal immigration system would be beneficial, but that the current levels of immigration, one million immigrants a year, should remain the same despite its harmful and negative impact on America’s middle and working classes.

The New York Times columnist embraces the flood of cheap, foreign labor that the U.S. has experienced over the last four decades, admitting that by creating a low-skilled immigrant underclass, wages are kept down:

For instance, many servers and hosts in New York restaurants owe their jobs to the lower-paid immigrants washing the dishes and chopping the onions. There are many more restaurants in New York than, say, in Oslo because Norway’s high wages make eating out much more expensive for the average Norwegian.

Similar dynamics operate in other industries. The strawberry crop on the California coast owes its existence to cheap immigrant pickers. They are, in a way, sustaining better-paid American workers in the strawberry patch-to-market chain who would have to find a job somewhere else if the United States imported the strawberries from Mexico instead.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue’s (R-GA) RAISE Act is a disruption to the cheap, foreign worker industry that often dominates immigrant-heavy industries like farming, construction and computer science.

Cotton and Perdue say that under the RAISE Act, middle and working class Americans will no longer have to compete for jobs with a flood of low-skilled immigrants who enter the U.S. every year, calling their plan “pro-American” and “pro-worker.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.