House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to President Donald Trump’s decision to delay the deportations of a few hundred recent illegal migrants by asking for a nationwide amnesty for millions of migrants living in the United States.
“Mr. President, delay is welcome,” she tweeted, adding, “Time is needed for comprehensive immigration reform.”
In recent weeks, Democrats have been stepping up their calls for “comprehensive immigration reform,” usually by praising the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap-labor bill. Democrat’s use of “comprehensive immigration reform” is shorthand for a political deal that would promise better border security for Americans in exchange for an immediate nationwide amnesty that would provide Democrats at least 10 million new voters in a decade.
On June 11, for example, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar touted the 2013 bill to Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, saying, “Do you think that comprehensive immigration reform that we passed in 2013 in the Senate that was supported by President [Barack] Obama and blocked by the Republican leadership in the House, do you think that would have helped to prevent from happening with all the funding that was there for the border and also having a much more orderly process for legal immigration?”
In recent years, Democrats have adopted an increasingly aggressive pro-migration agenda, despite the myriad economic, civic, and political harm to ordinary Americans. Before Trump’s announcement of a delay to the repatriation of illegal migrants, for example, Pelosi issued a statement that characterized the enforcement of judges’ deportation orders on a few hundred recent migrants as terrorism and a “brutal action.” Pelosi said:
Tomorrow is Sunday, and as many people of faith attend religious services, the President has ordered heartless raids. It is my hope that before Sunday, leaders of the faith-based community and other organizations that respect the dignity and worth of people will call upon the President to stop this brutal action which will tear families apart and inject terror into our communities.
Families belong together. These families are hard-working members of our communities and our country. The President’s action makes no distinction between a status violation and committing a serious crime.
Democrats hope to win this decisive “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” political goal by using business groups to lobby the GOP. In any amnesty deal, business groups would gain tens of millions of new workers, consumers, and renters, so suppressing wages, boosting housing prices, and spiking profits.
For example, the 2013 “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill would have provided voting cards to all illegals in the United States and doubled the annual inflow of legal immigrants to 2 million. That annual inflow would have import one new legal immigrant for every two Americans born each year.
The 2013 amnesty would also have allowed companies to hire an unlimited number of foreign graduates for the white-collar professional jobs which are sought by the 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees each year. The flood of foreign workers would have been delivered by giving greencards to foreigners who get masters degrees from American universities.
Overall, the 2013 Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill would have suppressed wages earned by ordinary Americans while boosting Wall Street stocks by flooding the labor market with lower-skilled immigrants, said a June 2013 report by the Congressional Budget Office,
“Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment by a reduction in the ratio of capital to labor, which would make workers less productive,” said the report, titled, “The Economic Impact of S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.”
The 2013 bill was blocked by grassroots GOP opposition, which included the 2014 shock defeat of the House GOP’s second-ranking leader, Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor.
In contrast, Trump’s proposed immigration reform bills would fix many border security problems, and also would shrink or stabilize the inflow of new migrants, so boosting wages for Americans.
Immigration by the Numbers
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
Flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.