Employers should pay higher wages in the labor shortage, and the government should cut the labor shortage by welcoming migrants, according to meandering and emotional answers given by President Joe Biden at a CNN town hall.
“The way you raise wages for people at the bottom rungs of the job market is by letting fewer [migrants] in to compete with them,” noted Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. But, he added, Biden’s incoherent and contradictory preferences are commonplace in the lobbying hothouse of Washington, D.C.
“I’m not letting this go,” Biden vehemently told the July 21 townhall audience at Cincinnati, Ohio. He continued:
We talk about DREAMers sort of generically. Let’s think about it now, what it really means. You’re 5-years-old. You’re 9-years-old. Your mommy or dad says, “I’m going to take you across the Rio Grande, and we’re illegally going to go into the United States.” What he’s supposed to say? “Not me! That’s against the law.”
…
These are kids who have done well. And so, what we’re going to do is, first of all, appeal the case, number one, but number two, we’re going to make sure that as [a] number of my Republican colleagues say they support the right of DREAMers to come … They should be able to stay in the United States of America.
Yet at the same event, Biden also touted wage raises for working Americans — even though decades of migration have slashed job opportunities and wages for more than 100 million Americans.
Biden’s wage comments came when a restaurant operator asked him, “The entire industry, amongst other industries, continue to struggle to find employees. How do you and the Biden administration plan to incentivize those that haven’t returned to work yet?”
Biden told the restaurant operator he likely will have to raise wages amid the current shortage of workers:
All kidding aside, I think it really is a matter of people deciding now that they have opportunities to do other things and there’s a shortage of employees. People are looking to make more money and to bargain. And so I think your business and the tourist business is really going to be in a bind for a little while.
“There may be other reasons that wages are higher for less-skilled workers, but clearly one of them is when competition from [legal and illegal] immigrant workers creates a loose labor market when there are more workers chasing fewer jobs,” Krikorian noted.
But few politicians want to recognize that their promise to pro-migration lobbyists also wrecks their promises of wage-raises for voters, he said, adding:
Not making the connection between immigration policy and wages for American workers is either obtuse or deliberately deceptive. I just find it hard to believe they can’t make that connection … I think it’s more likely they just literally just put it out of their minds so it never occurs to them. And if it ever whispers to them in the back of their minds, they push it away.
Biden’s pro-amnesty answer — but not his wage-raising answer — was touted by a sprawling network of pro-migration activists funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and anonymous progressive donors. For example, Chris Golden, one of the communication activists at Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, applauded Biden’s statement as “animated” and “passionate”:
Zuckerberg’s network of investors is working closely with West Coast Democrats — such as Vice President Kamala harris — to pressure Biden’s East coast deputies to support multiple economy-changing, wage-cutting amnesties in the pending 2021 budget bills.
Overall, investors want to import more migrants — even very poor migrants — because they spike sales, rental rates, profits, and stock values.
But migration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, and wrecks their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture.
In general, legal and illegal migration moves wealth 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. Biden’s revived federal delivery of legal and illegal labor also helps to move wealth — and social status — from heartland red states to the coastal blue states and from the rural districts to the urban districts within each state.
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