The federal government’s refusal to recognize the costs of legal migration is a “boomer approach” to immigration policy, said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
The immigration problem “is not just the illegal immigration,” Gaetz told Breitbart News:
It’s the legal immigration where you now have a system where we tell these young people go get your STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] degree, go learn how to code [software], and then they do that — they accrue massive amounts of college debt — and then we bring in somebody from India who is able to do the job for $50,000 or $60,000 bucks a year on some work visa.
Big tech scoops all those up and it deprives a lot of Americans of jobs.
So we have to think about immigration, not just at the broken border. I think that’s almost like a very Boomer approach to the broader immigration challenge we have that informs on both legal and illegal immigration.
Gaetz’s comments are interesting because they might show some GOP leaders — even former President Donald Trump — are willing to challenge the legal migration policies that have allowed coastal investors to import their own foreign workforces.
Some GOP leaders, notably Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), have already drafted proposals to level the free market for labor in the United States.
The post-1990 visa worker policies have tilted the national economy in favor of California and New York — and it has also tilted the labor market against American college graduates.
The visa worker rules have shut many Americans out of good Fortune 500 careers because they have allowed CEOs to keep a huge foreign labor force in many vital jobs. These foreign workers — perhaps 1.5 million workers — now hold many important jobs, such as search-engine designers at Google, content screeners at Twitter, news editors at Facebook, engineering jobs at Intel, and research jobs at Qualcomm.
Those no-rights foreign visa workers are preferred by CEOs because they are cheaper, compliant, and cannot quit to create innovative companies.
These visa workers are imported via the H-1B, OPT, TN, J-1, H4EAD, O-1, and E-2 visa programs. Many additional foreigners illegally work in the hidden pyramids of Fortune 500 subcontractors after illegally overstaying their visas, forging documents, and arriving on B-1/B-2 non-work visas.
The federal government makes very little effort to reduce fraud and often encourages foreigners to take these vital jobs.
Congress’s decision to let the coastal investors have their own labor pipeline also ensured that the high-tech economy was built in California, Washington state, and a few other locations. Investors now face little pressure to hire heartland Americans — or to create satellite offices in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Maine, etc — because they can hire their new workers by sending a bus down to LAX airport.
During his term in office, Trump was slow to reform the white-collar migration policies, such as the H-1B visa program.
His deputies did launch useful reforms in his last year — but those reforms were not anchored by law or regulation, and were quickly washed away by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies.
That failure to reform the white collar programs likely cost Trump much support among white collar, suburban voters. In turn, that loss helped tip the election against him in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
This year, heartland Republican Senators — chiefly, Sen. Todd Young, (R-IN) —blocked an investor-backed Democratic plan to dramatically expand the replacement of American graduates by foreign graduates.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants —plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers.
The inflationary policy makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.
Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.
Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
Business-backed migration advocates hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration is good for migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
The polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration — but they also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.