President Joe Biden’s border officials are planning to dramatically expand legal migration into Americans’ workplaces, neighborhoods, and society, according to a May 31 New York Times article.
“We want to take a broad approach toward opening up the legal avenues that have always been available but that [President Donald Trump’s officials] tried to put roadblocks upon,” one senior Biden appointee told the New York Times.
The appointee, Felicia Escobar Carrillo, works for Alejandro Mayorkas, the pro-migration chief of the Department of Homeland Security. “There are significant changes that need to be made to really open up all avenues of legal immigration,” she said.
But the Mayorkas plan is a direct challenge to the “tight labor market” plan endorsed by President Joe Biden in a May 28 speech.
Biden said:
Rising wages aren’t a bug; they’re a feature. We want to get — we want to get something economists call “full employment.” Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract workers. We want the — the companies to compete to attract workers.
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Look, this isn’t just good for individual workers, it also makes our economy a whole lot stronger. When American workers have more money to spend, American businesses benefit. We all benefit. Higher wages and more options for workers are a good thing.
The Mayorkas plan may be curbed by Biden’s intervention. But it can also be curbed if GOP legislators deny funds and if pro-American groups file lawsuits to block abuses of migration-law loopholes.
Americans already see the wage benefits of a tight labor market because of policies set by President Donald Trump in 2020.
The New York Times reported May 30 that federal agencies have “been issuing far fewer immigrant work visas during the pandemic thanks to travel and other restrictions, so employees from abroad who usually fill temporary help, agricultural and seasonal positions are missing from the labor market.” The Times added:
Teens are earning more than just fatter paychecks as employers try to lure applicants. Workers at Kennywood are receiving season park passes for themselves and three family members — a bonus worth around $300. Applebee’s offered an “Apps for Apps” deal in which applicants who were interviewed received a free appetizer voucher. Restaurants and gas stations across the country are offering signing bonuses.
In contrast, the Mayorkas plan would extract foreign migrants from other countries and uses them to flood the labor market, depress salaries and spike real estate prices.
Under Mayorkas’ plan, workers would compete for company jobs — flipping Biden’s plan to have companies compete for workers.
Two reporters at the New York Times — Michael Shear and the worker-importation plan, which is likely written using poll-tested language:
The blueprint, dated May 3 and titled “D.H.S. Plan to Restore Trust in Our Legal Immigration System,” lists scores of initiatives intended to reopen the country to more immigrants, making good on the president’s promise to ensure America embraces its “character as a nation of opportunity and of welcome.
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Divided into seven sections, the document offers detailed policy proposals that would help more foreigners move to the United States, including high-skilled workers, trafficking victims, the families of Americans living abroad, American Indians born in Canada, refugees, asylum-seekers and farm workers. Immigrants who apply online could pay less in fees or even secure a waiver in an attempt to “reduce barriers” to immigration. And regulations would be overhauled to “encourage full participation by immigrants in our civic life.”
The New York Times did not post a copy of the draft plan, and it also downplayed the wealth-shifting economic consequences of government-imposed labor inflation, saying:
Most research has shown that legal immigration to the United States has benefits for the country’s economy, especially at a time when the country’s population growth is slowing. But Mr. [Ken] Cuccinelli and others who favor severe restrictions on immigration say it is obvious to them that letting foreigners compete for jobs — especially when the country is still recovering from an economic downturn like the one created by the pandemic — will hurt the prospects for American citizens.
In reality, decades of experience show that labor inflation does both — it expands the economy and hurts working Americans.
Legal immigration and illegal migration expand the economy by importing more consumers, renters, and workers, regardless of their health or skills. That inflow boosts Wall Street investors with extra revenues and profits.
But migration simultaneously cuts Americans’ wages, spikes real estate costs, and diverts much wealth from heartland states to the coasts, such as Los Angeles and New York.
Migration also distorts national politics by shifting power to university-credentialled progressives and creating an alliance between the progressives and coastal investors, such as the investors in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group.
The Zuckerberg investor group has close ties to senior White House officials, including Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. In April, the group helped reverse a White House decision to stabilize the inflow of refugees in 2021. The group is now using its network of subsidized allies to use the reconciliation process to revive the stalled amnesty and cheap labor bills:
NPR reported:
[Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum] says Biden will soon have to demonstrate that he’s willing to put the same kind of political muscle behind getting something done on immigration.
“After infrastructure gets off the table, we need to make sure that immigration is the next issue on the couch at the Oval Office,” he said. “And we’re not there yet.”
Mayorkas repeatedly claims that the United States is a Nation of Immigrants — instead of a nation of Americans and their children — and has repeatedly sketched his plans to legally import more migrants.
“We have a three-pronged approach,” Mayorkas told a Senate hearing on May 13. “Address the root causes [of migration], to build legal pathways [into the U.S.], and to advocate more with the hope that Congress will pass immigration reform,” said Mayorkas, who tweeted April 28 that “immigrant-owned businesses that are the backbone of our communities — and of our country.”
“We’re increasing and improving legal migration,” Tyler Moran, a Mayorkas ally in the White House official, told the May 14 Washington Post. “We have put in place a number of policies creating legal pathways to migrate and seek protection, and we see that as a metric of success,” she added.
Mayorkas is already opening numerous side doors in the nation’s immigration law. Those side doors can legally admit an uncapped number of asylum seekers, deported parole recipients, teenage workers, refugees, and unreported illegal migrants.
On May 25, the Associated Press described one of the lawfully deported migrants who Mayorkas invited to return using his legal authority to parole people into the United States:
Keldy [Mabel Gonzales Brebe] counts her blessings to be together as a family, free from death threats in Honduras and the pain of separation.
Yet now they face new difficulties. Keldy’s son, Mino, dropped out of school to help pay rent on the house that six of them share. Keldy sleeps on the living room sofa. She wants to get a job, but is caring for her 7-year-old autistic niece and an unsteady 75-year-old mother, along with cooking and cleaning for the family. She sees drug use on the streets of the Kensington section of Philadelphia where they live.
“I hear gunshots sometimes. With my sister, when we run a quick errand, I look around to see whether someone was killed,” Keldy said. “La Ceiba, where I grew up, was like that.”
Mayorkas has also demolished the Trump-era regulations that protect American graduates from the uncapped inflow of college-trained foreign workers favored by U.S. Fortune 500 companies. The companies are pushing legislation that would allow companies to hire foreign workers with the promise of U. S. citizenship in exchange for 10 years of low-wage, no-complaint work.
GOP populists are spotlighting the wage-shifting impact of elite-backed labor migration.
“One of the sad things about an immigration crisis like the one we now face is how badly hurt our own fellow citizens are, especially the most forgotten – our poor,” Ken Cuccinelli, a former top DHS official for President Donald Trump, told Breitbart News. He continued:
Those of us on the right need to fight to protect America’s poor, including their wages and job opportunities, from being destroyed by a flood of illegal labor into the low end of the labor market. Too often, our poorest fellow citizens – who are disproportionally minorities, btw – are forgotten in the scramble of such a crisis.”
If the government does not “artificially inflate the labor supply, then if you want that work done, you have to pay workers more to attract them to the work that you want done,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) pointed out during a March interview on Mobile, AL radio’s FM Talk 106.5. Brooks continued:
The employers will be put in a position where they either have to pay the wages that are necessary to attract the workforce they need that is necessary for their businesses to operate, or they go out of business. But that’s the way it is supposed to be in a free enterprise economy where the market forces allocate resources to what’s profitable and denies it to what is not profitable.
“There is no job in America that Americans won’t do — there are jobs that Americans won’t do at the paltry wages that some employers want to pay,” said Brooks, who is running for U.S. Senate in Alabama.
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, bipartisan, rational, persistent, 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.
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