Americans’ immigration laws can be changed in “bite-sized pieces” to let employers hire foreign workers instead of Americans, former President George W. Bush told an advocacy group backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“We’re working with a big coalition here in the Bush center,” Bush said in a May 6 interview arranged by the National Immigration Forum (NIF), which has been funded by Zuckerberg:
Can we get something done? I think so, but it’s going to have to be in bite-sized pieces … We don’t recognize the fact that there are jobs that need to be done and [foreign] people willing to do them and that needs to be part of a reform.
That “willing worker” goal would destroy Americans’ right to their own national labor market where American employers and American employees can compete on a level playing field for work and wages.
The “willing worker” goal pushed by Bush and his right-of-center Koch network is also being pushed by Zuckerberg’s left-of-center amnesty campaign.
The goal is hidden inside the January 20 amnesty and cheap-labor bill that was introduced by Joe Biden and cheered by Zuckerberg’s coalition. The bill creates an easy way for companies to hire an unlimited number of mid-skill foreign graduates in exchange for the promise of getting green cards in just ten years.
The plan builds on the existing pipelines of visa workers, which are imported via the H-1B, Optional Practical Training (OPT), L-1, TN, B-1/B-2, and other visa worker programs. Even though only about 80,000 foreign graduates get green cards per year, this green-cards-for-work labor system has allowed companies to build a foreign workforce of at least 800,000 mid-skilled foreign contract workers.
That huge mid-skill, no-rights workforce displaces hundreds of thousands of young Americans. This displacement slows technology growth, but it spikes profits by reducing pay, and it also reduces the chance that groups of U.S. or foreign tech workers can split off to create their own novel technologies and companies.
The NIF arranged the interview with Bush. It is part of a larger coalition of Zuckerberg-backed left-wing groups that are using street protests and lobbying to push Congress to pass multiple amnesties in 2021. George Soros has also supported the NIF’s spinoffs.
Bush explained that his personal low-profit, old-economy business on his estate could not survive if he had to rely on higher-wage, blue-collar American labor:
I’m a tree farmer — live oaks, red oaks if you need any … It’s not a very profitable business I want you to know, but it works because there are eight H-2B visa holders who come up [from Mexico] and work for us. They’re skilled, big family people, they send their money home to their families, but [the H-2B visa program requires] they have to go home every year for two months.
Then there’s a question as to whether or not the government let him back in after the two-year hiatus. That creates enormous uncertainty and if at some point, the government says “You can’t come back in,” then all of a sudden, we got a real problem.
“We’d benefit economically when people come to do work that needs to be done … and yet the system doesn’t recognize that now [because] it’s antiquated and broken, and it complicated, and it’s confusing,” Bush complained.
Bush explained why he does not favor Americans over migrants. “It depends on where you start your philosophy from. I started mine from ‘All life is precious, and we’re all God’s children.'”
While president, Bush’s poll ratings dipped to 33 percent in 2008 after he pushed amnesties in 2006 and 2007. Those amnesties included his “Any Willing Worker” plan, which would give American citizenship to foreigners if they agree to undercut Americans by taking jobs where employers offered meager wages.
“New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country,” Bush announced on January 7, 2004. “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job,” he said.
In April, the Cato Institute released a survey that showed that strong majorities of Americans believe U.S. immigration policy should first serve the interests of their fellow Americans, not of employers or investors.
“Nearly two-thirds (63%) of Americans say it’s more important when making immigration policy to consider what ‘benefits the United States and its current citizens,’” said the April 27 survey of 2,600 U.S. adults. The survey also showed that 60 percent of Americans want to reduce immigration by at least half.
Bush acknowledged the unpopularity of his plans. “There’s been a lack of leadership on the issue because … it is a very hot political issue,” Bush admitted to the NIF group. “Once an issue becomes politically hot, it’s very difficult to, you know, paint a positive picture.”
For many 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.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, rational, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.