Wages in Canada are shrinking under the double damage of immigration and inflation, says a report by Bloomberg News.

“About 1.9 million [immigrant] newcomers entered the country in the five years through December … [so]  workers, with fewer labor shortages acting as leverage, are scoring tiny wage increases — currently running at 2% on average — that leave them poorer after inflation of almost 5% is factored in,” says the November 21 report.

But in the United States, U.S. employers are being forced to pay higher wages because voters elected President Donald Trump and his pro-American lower-immigration policy in 2016, Bloomberg.com notes:

In the U.S., which has orchestrated a sharp drop in immigration, the labor-market dilemma is the inverse: Workers are scoring the biggest pay hikes in decades — nearly matching soaring inflation — at the same time that employers can’t find enough staff to operate at full capacity, hamstringing the economic expansion.

The report also notes that Canada’s employers gain more power in the workplace when the government imports cheap workers to fill the underpaid and unpleasant jobs that Canadians refused to do without higher wages and more automation:

There has been a “surge in Canadian prime-aged population,” says Avery Shenfeld, the chief economist at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. These new immigrants, he says, are “less likely to say ‘shove it’ to work in sectors where shortages are most acute.”

The Bloomberg report is headlined: “As Immigrants Pour In, Wages Stagnate in Surging Canadian Economy.”
The report comes as pro-migration advocates are rehashing claims of a “labor shortage” in a nation with 170 million American workers, including millions of unemployed Americans.

For example, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell suggested November 22 that employers have a right to cheap foreign labor even when Americans demand higher wages:

Many factors contribute to our nationwide labor shortages, which are, in turn, driving supply-chain problems and inflation … But there’s one underappreciated factor contributing to labor shortfalls that the Biden administration could alleviate almost immediately: the “missing” immigrant workers.

Immigration inflows slowed sharply during the Trump administration and then collapsed under the combination of Trump-era policies and pandemic-driven closures … There are millions fewer immigrants here today than would have been the case if pre-Trump trends in immigration had continued.

Rampell described some of the migrants who are being used by employers to fill jobs that would otherwise provide rising wages to blue-collar Americans and their families:

[They] been employed in industries experiencing high-profile labor shortages: truck driving, food services, nursing, tech … Abelardo Rios is a telecommunications field technician who has been installing 5G equipment in Florida. His employer sometimes struggled to recruit workers even before covid-19, he says, “because not everybody is willing to go up a tower that’s 400 feet.”

Rampell, Princeton ’07,  is a persistent advocate for the extraction of poor workers and consumers from foreign countries.  That’s good for CEOs, but especially good for clever investors, such as her Harvard-graduate brother, who works for Andreessen Horowitz, an investment firm in Silicon Valley.

The extraction of cheap workers and extra consumers from poor countries allows U.S. investors to promise that their new firms will earn higher future profits without any need to invest outside the United States. That promise can boost their wealth once they sell the firms to investors on Wall Street.

The 2021 push for more immigration is being led by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors who stand to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters. The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.

Rampell’s op-ed in the Washington Post is a close match for the lobbying agenda of FWD.us. She writes:

Eliminating some redundancies from the process [of awarding work permits to migrants] is a good start. The agency could also automatically extend more existing work permits while applicants wait for their renewals to be processed. Some categories of noncitizens already get this courtesy, but even those grace periods are too short. Asylum seekers, for instance, have their existing work permits auto-extended for up to 180 days while the renewal application awaits processing.

Curiously, Rampell does not mention the draft Build Back Better bill that is soon to be debated in the Senate. The bill would provide the investors with much of what they want, including perhaps 3 million extra chain migrants, and a new supply of foreign college graduates for the jobs sought by U.S. graduates.

In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens regional wealth gaps. It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The political and economic impact of migration also helps to shrinks the political power of the news media, which is now failing to cover Congress’ draft plans to further expand legal migration into Americans’ labor and housing markets.

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.