Foreign migrants take American jobs illegally because the federal government will not let them take the jobs legally, according to a new article in the New York Times.
“The Reagan-era amnesty in 1986 caused only a temporary drop in the number of undocumented immigrants because it was not accompanied by a robust system for legally bringing in low-skilled workers,” said the January 27 news article by reporter Miriam Jordan.
The editor-approved headline was “The Reality Behind Biden’s Plan to Legalize 11 Million Immigrants,” referring to illegal migrants.
The New York Times‘ perspective on illegal migration matches George W. Bush’s “Any Willing Worker” strategy, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies:
It is the business perspective that the level of immigration should be set by market conditions, that there are no limits. The desires of business and of the immigrants are the two things that determine how many immigrants come here, not the American people’s elected representatives.
The same claim was loudly made in 1990 when Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and President George H. Bush doubled the inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers in the 1990 immigration expansion act.
Nonetheless, 5.5 million illegal migrants moved into the United States from 1900 to 2000, doubling the illegal population to seven million, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security.
That illegal inflow happened even though Congress also created the blue-collar H-2A and H-2B visa worker programs in 1986 and allowed the J-1 program to quadruple during the 1990s.
The Bush/Kennedy 1990 act also allowed CEOs to push two generations of U.S. professionals out of skilled careers because it allowed the Fortune 500 CEOs to import a huge number of H-1B visa contract workers. That legal inflow still helps investors suppress competition by minimizing the number of innovative Americans and consolidating their control of the sector.
The New York Times report also downplays the civic and economic value of automating and mechanizing lower-skilled jobs, claiming that “Demographers say a shortage of blue-collar workers highlights the need for immigrants, in ever larger numbers, to perform low-skilled jobs.”
There is growing evidence that labor migration reduces pressure on investors to redirect their profits back into the productivity-boosting training, innovation, automation, and robotics that can keep lower-skilled Americans and America rich, stable, and more equal, amid growing worldwide competition.
“If the [pro-migration advocates] got their way, we would end up with the United Arab Emirates in North America,” where a wealthy elite dominates a population of imported, powerless, and replaceable workers, Krikorian said. He added:
The [advocates] just say, “Well, a rising tide raises all boats, and more immigrants mean there’s also more demand [for American workers] in the economy and so everybody wins.” There is no cost, there are no trade-offs, there are no losers, just a happy-clappy way of looking at the issue.
I think they believe [their own claims] because they don’t want to think beyond that. And [they think] people who put forth a different position are bad people and so [the different position] can’t be right because they’re bad people.
Jordan’s view is commonplace throughout the establishment — and in the White House following the election of President Joe Biden.
“President [Joe Biden] outlined his plan to reduce migration,” said a January 23 White House statement:
by … increasing [migrant] resettlement capacity and lawful alternative immigration pathways [in the United States], improving processing at the [U.S.] border to adjudicate [migrants’] requests for asylum, and reversing the previous administration’s draconian immigration policies.
“One of the things that I think is critical to remember,” said Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s newly hired coordinator for the southern border, in a June 2020 conversation with other migration advocates, is that:
The United States closed off almost every other avenue for migration from Central America, and indeed, from Mexico to the United States, which in some respects, not completely, forced people to seek asylum, right? There aren’t temporary worker programs other than agricultural and low skilled H-2A [programs], and those have struggled, frankly, to keep up with both demand and processing. And so people have sort of resorted to requesting asylum, both for legitimate reasons, but also because they don’t know of any other way to get to the United States.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory.
The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that 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.
Migration allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of innovative American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.
Jordan’s George W. Bush-like statement at the New York Times is echoed by editors at the investor-dominated Wall Street Journal.
Under a January 26 headline, “On Immigration, Compromise Beats Amnesty,” columnist Jason Riley called for investors to compromise with progressive groups:
… the amnesty debate is largely a side issue. Simply legalizing the status of these migrants—most of whom have been in the country for more than a decade—won’t solve the larger problem, which is the imbalance between the number of [worker] visas available and the number of foreigners who want them. After World War II, the federal government’s Bracero program extended work visas to Mexican migrants to address a U.S. labor shortage, and the rate of illegal immigration plummeted … The biggest failure of the 1986 amnesty under Ronald Reagan was that it did little to expand ways to come lawfully. Mr. Biden should avoid making the same mistake.
“The only answer to this [migrant pressure] quandary is to open more legal pathways,” WSJ columnist Mary Anatasia Gray wrote January 24.
The New York Times offers uncritical support for labor migration, but also it reports the spreading poverty in immigrant-dominated suburbs and cities.
On January 29, for example, the New York Times posted a detailed report showing the coronavirus’s spread through the migrant-heavy Los Angeles region:
County officials recently estimated that one in three of Los Angeles County’s roughly 10 million people have been infected with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. But even amid an uncontrolled outbreak, some Angelenos have faced higher risk than others. County data shows that Pacoima, a predominantly Latino neighborhood that has one of the highest case rates in the nation, has roughly five times the rate of Covid-19 cases as much richer and whiter Santa Monica.
…
The essential workers who risk getting sick on the job are more likely to be Latino and more likely to live in overcrowded houses and apartments without space to isolate, experts have saidthroughout the pandemic.
Their jobs — including those in warehouses, food processing plants, restaurant kitchens and factories — are likely to be lower paid, and workers are less likely to be able to take time off when they’re sick.
The large-scale use of migrant labor also leaves American workers more vulnerable to pressure from foremen and hiring managers. The Wall Street Journal reported January 5:
In a 2019 report by Barclays Research that examined data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the bank’s analysts said that opioid use in the U.S. has made workers in the industry less productive and has increased costs to the industry. While the precise number of overdose deaths in the North American construction industry is hard to determine, the workers are roughly six times more likely than workers in other manufacturing, industrial and service industries to become addicted to opioids, according to the report.
…
Mr. Anderson, a 28-year-old elevator mechanic who works in New York City, became addicted to Percocet and OxyContin when he started his first construction job framing houses at 19 years of age. He found that he could get more work done when he was high and unable to feel the strain of the job.
“I was doing my thing, doing my work, and life didn’t become a mess,” he said. “It was no harm, no foul.” Eventually, however, he found he couldn’t even get to work without the drugs and spent almost all his money on the pills. When those became too expensive or difficult to find, he switched to heroin.
Jordan’s New York Times article included a quote from a California academic who has seen his state transformed by commingled waves of cheap legal and illegal labor since 1990:
“The principle is simple: If you carry out a broad legalization [of illegal migrants], it doesn’t freeze undocumented migration flows as long as labor demand persists,” said Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
“That’s why you need to increase the number of legal-entry opportunities, to accommodate future migrants,” Cornelius emailed Breitbart News.
However, Cornelis declined to answer any questions about the impact of a migrant-flooded labor market on the distribution of wealth and poverty throughout California and the United States.
Many investors gain from importing a population of poor, taxpayer-aided consumers.