A series of establishment-backed ethnic advocacy groups are hoping to push through a huge amnesty for millions of migrants and their employers during the first few weeks or months after the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
“Top Latino and immigrant advocacy groups who’ve seen details of the coming package said they were stunned by the boldness of Biden’s plan,” according to a Politico report, which talked to ethnic advocates who met with Biden on Thursday.
“We were totally floored by the immigration plan and the level of clarity,” Jess Morales Rocketto, executive director of Care in Action, told Politico.
Biden’s plan “is the most aggressive agenda that I have seen on immigration reform from day one — not only the legislative package but also executive orders,” said Hector Sanchez Barba, head of Mi Familia Vota.
The report also provided evidence that Democrat politicians know the amnesty is very unpopular, especially in a recession where wealth is increasingly being concentrated in wealthy, Democrat-dominated districts:
Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) said a “piecemeal” approach is not an option. “The administration has a very limited window of opportunity before House members begin running for reelection,” she said. “Every day that passes is a day that the window shuts just an inch more…We’ve got to get it done in one fell swoop.”
The Politico report, however, did not mention the economic impact of the amnesty and cheap labor bill on Americans, including the many working class Hispanic Americans who backed Trump in the 2020 election.
Any amnesty bill may be blocked by a small number of moderate Democrats — provided legislators from the establishment side of the GOP do not cross the aisle.
For years, many pollsters’ results have shown deep and broad opposition to cheap labor migration — and the inflow of temporary contract workers — into the jobs young and old Americans need.
The multiracial, cross-sex, nonracist, class-based opposition to cheap labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The public skepticism toward migration is understandable because migrants help transfer massive wealth from American wage earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states. That economic impact helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016 — and it boosted his support among working class whites, blacks, and Latinos in 2020.
The economic impact of immigration was downplayed by the two Politico reporters.
However, many of the advocacy groups are backed by an alliance of businesses and progressives. For example, a representative from Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group attended the meeting. Zuckerberg and other West Coat investors created the FWD.us group in 2013 to help pass that Gang of Eight amnesty.
In 2013, for example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) noted that the 2013 Gang of Eight bill would have reduced the share of new national income that went to wage earners and would have increased the share that went to investors, such as Zuckerberg. “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,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost corporate profits and spike the stock market, the report also said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” according to the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
A January 2020 Congressional Budget Office report points out that the federal government’s inflation of the labor supply drives down Americans’ wages: “Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
The FWD.us website has recently been edited to remove the page, which showed the many wealthy investors who joined with Zuckerberg to create the advocacy group:
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