Former Vice President Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says Americans’ wages will rise amid a huge inflow of amnestied migrants and new immigrants.
“Creating a new immigration system will help create jobs, raise wages, and grow our economy, not just for immigrant communities, but for all our families across this great, great country,” Alejandro Mayorkas told a pro-amnesty group, the American Business Immigration Council, on December 3.
In reality, the overwhelming flood of studies and anecdotal reports show that the government’s support for legal and illegal migration is a wealth redistribution process that moves Americans’ wages to migrants, employers, and investors — even as the migrants also expand the economy, raise real estate values, boost investors, grow government, and supercharge coastal states.
President Donald Trump’s lower-migration policies put Mayorkas’ wage claims to a real-world test from 2017 to 2020.
The results show Trump’s slowdown of lower-skilled migration helped generate a massive income gain for lower-skilled Americans and their adult children. In 2020, for example, the Census Bureau reported that median household wages rose by 7 percent during 2019, following decades of minimal gains.
But Trump did not curb higher-skilled migration until mid-2020 — and so allowed wages for U.S. college grads to fall. A September 2020 report by the Federal Reserve concluded that the family median income level of high school graduates rose by six percent in 2019, while the median or midpoint income of college graduates fell by two percent.
In the 2020 election, Trump’s support remained strong among blue-collar Americans but fell among white-collar graduates.
Trump’s wage gains were predicted or acknowledged by many pro-migration authors and reports.
For example, on page 171 of its September 2016 report, a pro-migration panel picked by the government-backed National Academies acknowledged that “immigration imposes a tax on Americans” wages: “Immigrant labor accounts for 16.5 percent of the total number of hours worked in the United States, which … implies that the current stock of immigrants lowered [Americans’] wages by 5.2 percent.”
The admissions come from independent academics, the National Academies of Science, the Congressional Budget Office, executives, The Economist, more academics, the New York Times, the New York Times again, state officials, unions, more business executives, lobbyists, the Wall Street Journal, federal economists, Goldman Sachs, oil drillers, the Bank of Ireland, Wall Street analysts, fired professionals, legislators, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2015 Bernie Sanders, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, construction workers, New York Times subscribers, a former Treasury secretary, a New York Times columnist, a Bloomberg columnist, author Barack Obama, President Barack Obama, and the Business Roundtable.
Even the Wall Street Journal admitted in 2016:
Congress has failed to reach a compromise policy on immigration to address employer needs for a steady, legal workforce.
On the ground in the U.S., many employers report the worker shortage is driving up wages, which is good news for low-skilled workers. It is also driving up costs, however, which could hamper investment and fuel inflation.
Immigration also raises housing and commuting costs for Americans. A recent academic paper says a sudden migration by Americans can boost housing prices by eight percent for every one percent increase in a city’s population.
Moreover, the arrival of cheap migrants and refugees also reduces corporate investment in labor-saving machinery that allows Americans to do more — and earn more — each workday.
The federal policy of inflating the new labor supply also delivers millions of foreign workers to the coasts, so shifting new investment, jobs, and real-estate wealth away from the central states and towards coastal investors.
Legal and illegal migration also import populations of government-dependent poor people, many of whom create urban poverty in Boston and New York.
Business groups favor immigration because it reduces Americans’ wages — but also because it stimulates consumer demand and raises housing prices.
Immigrant advocates say skilled migrants are also needed to develop new products and novel technology. But federal evidence shows that the vast majority of supposedly high-skilled migrants and visa workers are modestly skilled, rarely develop new products, and are mostly used to replace Americans in mid-skilled and starter jobs.
The replacement policies help investors corral the nation’s technology sector by excluding the innovative Americans who might leave to create rival companies, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “There’s collusion within these big tech companies to preserve their monopoly status,” said Lynn. “The best way to do that is to block [Americans’] sneakernet, you know, one person going from one company to another taking what’s between their ears with them.”
The Democrats are backing Mayorkas, even though there is minimal public support — and declining Democrat support — for cheap labor immigration policies. Just 19 percent of all voters support the establishment’s preference for importing foreign workers, and 66 percent prefer the populist demand for “businesses to raise [Americans’] pay and try harder to recruit non-working Americans,” says Rasmussen Reports.
But support for migration among Democrat leaders is not driven by polls or the promise of wage raises. Instead, it is driven by Democrats’ progressive elitist vision of themselves as champions for foreigners, guides for business elites, and leaders of Americans. For example, Mayorkas justified a 2021 amnesty push by saying:
Today our immigration system is badly broken … The cost of that broken system is incalculably high. It represents a profound toll, not only on [foreign] families seeking to contribute to our nation and forge their own American dream, but on our economic prosperity, and our moral authority as well … [Joe Biden] knows that our solutions must reflect the broad sweep and impact of immigration across issues and constituencies, because key sectors of our economy from agriculture to technology rely on immigration, and he knows that immigrants are a key driver of economic growth.
Mayorkas’ nomination will be reviewed by the Senate’s homeland defense committee, which will likely be chaired by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH).
Portman is up for reelection in 2022 and voted against Mayorkas in 2013. The other GOP members include Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
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