GOP legislators should back two pending amnesties for several million illegal migrants on Thursday because “the approach has deep support from business groups,” according to the Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post.
If the GOP does not back the wage-cutting amnesty for DACA migrants, and also for the American-displacing agricultural cheap labor bill, then, according to the Post, they will:
fall in line with a nativist minority, in thrall to former president Donald Trump, who reflexively oppose any steps toward inclusion for people who can be portrayed as “the other”? That’s not just a choice on a discrete piece of legislation. It’s a defining fork in the road for a party wrestling with its future.
The two bills exclude any reforms that would slow the inflow of illegals or to reduce the number of visa workers who push down Americans’ wages.
In fact, the farmworker bill would allow agriculture employers to replace many Americans with low-wage H-2A visa workers. The visa workers would also minimize payroll spending in rural towns so they can bring their wages back to their families in other countries.
Under President Donald Trump’s migration curbs, wages for blue-collar Americans jumped — and so did Trump’s support among the fast-growing Latino populations.
“Men at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution saw their wages rise in 2019: a 2.6% increase at the 50th percentile and a striking 5.7% increase at the 10th percentile, along with a 4.2% increase at the 20th percentile,” according to the 2019 yearly report, by the left-wing Economic Policy Institute.
“Families near the bottom of the income and wealth distributions generally continued to experience substantial gains in median and mean net worth between 2016 and 2019,” says a September 2020 report by the Federal Reserve banking system. The report, titled “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2016 to 2019: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances.”
In 2020, Trump exceeded “expectations by inspiring higher-than-anticipated Republican turnout,” Democrat data analyst David Shor told New York magazine in March. “He exceeded them mostly through persuasion. A lot of voters changed their minds between 2016 and 2020,” he said, adding:
I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now, momentarily, have to accept this very, very, very thin Democratic trifecta. Because if these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions.
Democrats “have no margin for error. If we conduct ourselves the way we did after 2008, we’re definitely going to lose,” Shor added.
“Democrats are committed to a regime of open borders where any person, from anywhere in the world, has a right to enter the United States for any reason, even if migrants are assaulted or killed on their way to the border,” GOP Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said March 18. “Democrats feel better about themselves. They assume a superior moral position by pursuing such a policy.”
But the Post insisted the amnesties are popular, saying:
In a Quinnipiac University poll released last month, 83 percent of Americans, including nearly two-thirds of Republicans, said dreamers should be allowed to stay in the United States and ultimately qualify for citizenship. With numbers like that, bipartisan support in Congress for a Dream Act should be a slam dunk.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to 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 corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
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.