Biden’s Labor Chief Promotes Worker Replacement, Says Immigrants Are ‘Only Way’ to Fill Jobs

The Democrat party’s pick for Secretary of Labor says CEOs are being victimized by a shortage of immigrant workers.

Companies want to hire another 11 million people, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told Fox News on September 2, adding:

If those 11 million jobs had to be filled tomorrow, we certainly don’t have enough people in the United States to fill those jobs … the issue of workers has to be addressed and the only way [emphasis added] you can do it is through immigration.

“When I talk to CEOs from companies all across America, they’re all in favor of immigration reform,” he said, “they’re all in favor of pathways — of visas — for people coming into the United States working and we’re going to have to have that real serious conversation because at some point it will begin to impact our economy.”

But Walsh “doesn’t seem to know what’s going on in the U.S. labor market in terms of real wages for the less-educated, or the labor force participation,” responded Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“There are two main things that you could do [to get Americans into those jobs] — make it more attractive to work and make it less attractive to sit on your ass,” he said:

Could you ever get teenagers to work like they did in the 70s? No, but could you get a million more teenagers to work? Yeah. Could you ever get men to have the labor force participation rate of 96 percent — say non-college men 25 to 54 — that we had in 1964? No, but could you get it up to 88 percent instead of 84 percent or 83 percent? Yes.

The government should try to fill jobs with some of the roughly 60 million adults not working by allowing wages to rise, he said.

The 60 million number includes 5.5 million people who said they want a job but are not part of the unemployment numbers because they have not looked for jobs in the last four weeks.

The government should also try to raise the productivity of American workers with better training and machinery, he added:

The most important way to make a country actually richer on a per capita basis — which is all that really matters — is productivity. If you want to grow the per capita GDP, productivity is really a key option, and there’s no evidence that immigration helps to do that.

Walsh “seems to be entirely captive to the perspective of Wall Street, which wants a bigger economy and ignores the fact that productivity growth is the real key to increasing wages and improving the standard of living,” he added.

Some GOP legislators are looking at ways to help non-working Americans rejoin the labor force. For example, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), told a town hall event:

There is a number of innovative ideas I would support. [Former Sen.] Phil Gramm came to the Senate where we were talking about our labor shortage and one of his suggestions was to coax seniors to re-enter the workforce — don’t charge them payroll tax. They’re not paying it anyway so they want to get back in and earn a few extra bucks.

But that pro-American, anti-poverty proposal was quickly stabbed by Todd Schulte, the president of a billionaire-funded pro-migration advocacy group:

[I] would suggest a better approach is a pathway to citizenship (work permits!) for undocumented immigrants, not terminating DACA/TPS/H-4 EADs, and modernizing and expanding vs trying to slash legal immigration avenues for those coming in the future.

Schulte heads FWD.us, which is a trade lobby created by wealthy West Coast investors, including Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, and various other investors-billionaires. The group was formed in 2013 to maximize the inflow of foreign workers, taxpayer-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters into the U.S. economy. The investors have close ties to many Democrats, including Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain.

The mostly female staff of the group tries to hide the identity of the investors who founded and funded the group. But copies exist at other sites.

Many local business groups are also calling for sidelined Americans to be replaced with eager, compliant, hard-working migrants.

“On July 7, about 30 business and humanitarian leaders gathered in Nemo [South Dakota] to initiate plans for Freedom’s Haven for New American’s Workforce,” said a September 2 report in Watertown Public Opinion. The report by a local real estate appraiser Brad Johnson continued:

The group, led by Lake Area Technical College President Mike Cartney, recognizes that South Dakota’s economy depends on more immigrant and guest workers. [Sen. John] Thune, who participated in the July meeting, had just asked President Joe Biden to increase the number of [H-2B] work visas.

…

Critics of Thune and anyone who suggests more immigrants be welcomed and allowed to work, allege that these workers take jobs the U.S. citizens would fill. Obviously, that is not the case in South Dakota. One employer said Wednesday that a $21 an hour part-time job to wash cars in Brookings, a college town, had no applicants.

However, many companies are trying to sell automated car cleaners that allow a few employees to earn good wages while washing many more autos:

Many companies are being pressured by labor shortages to invest in high-tech, high-wage gear, including dairies in South Dakota:

Similarly, a new meatpacking plant in South Dakota will rely heavily on automation, DRGNews reported July 19:

The Western Legacy Development Corporation facility will utilize robotics and artificial intelligence along other tech applications thereby creating a completely automated packing line, which will make the facility safer, more efficient, more humane, and will provide consistent cuts of meat that would not ordinarily be achieved by a human with known margins for error

Many pro-migration advocates and journalists admit that labor migration is the “Third Rail” of U.S. politics. For example, Johnson wrote:

That will take congressional action to modify, and Thune, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., plan to meet with business leaders sometime in September to map out a strategy. Part of that strategy will be insulating the three men from the inevitable attacks coming from those who … demonize anyone who supports making immigration easier.

The government’s policy of pumping foreign labor into the U.S. economy has distorted the incentives for the nation’s CEOs, investors, and political leaders Camarota said.

Immigration “allows them to both be empathetic and indifferent at the same time,” he said.

Immigration “lets us ignore the problem of all these men sitting on the sidelines, not even looking for work,” he said, adding:

They do want to care … but they’re just exasperated to some extent with the nonworking black — and white and actually U.S.-born Hispanic population — because the truth is raising the labor force participation rate of less-educated men is very challenging. It’s not clear exactly how to do it, whereas just bringing the foreigners — and having a lot of sympathy for them — is easy …. The immigrants seem to be more more virtuous because they work. Everything is perfect — they’re nice and quiet and so forth.

Training less-educated Americans, especially at small companies, “is thankless, with lots of frustration and lots of failures. Given how kids are raised today, it’s more and more failure all the time,” he said, adding:

There are all kinds of [social tools] that have atrophied as a consequence of immigration. There used to be seasonal employers at the beach or in the mountains, or at [summer] camps, who had all kinds of contacts in the cities and suburbs with ministers and other community leaders to help them funnel young people to those seasonal jobs. That’s all gone– [employers] just use the H-2B [and] H-2A workers and illegal immigrants. [Employers] don’t need to worry about keeping their contacts.

For politicians and government officials, the easy option is to “pay them their disability and give them Medicaid,” Camarota said.

But Democrats also want immigration to deliver them additional immigrant voters on election days. In a May statement, Walsh downplayed the value of non-citizen teporary visa workers, saying, “We need to figure out some immigration laws and get some reform. Not H-2B visas, H-2A visas, not those visas — that’s not immigration.”

 

Extraction Migration

It is easier for government officials to grow the economy by immigration than by growing exports, productivity, or the birth rate.

So Washington, DC, deliberately extracts millions of migrants from poor countries and uses them as extra workers, consumers, and renters. This extraction migration policy both grows and skews the national economy.

It prevents tight labor markets and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married,  raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that would allow Americans and their communities to earn more money.

This migration policy also reduces exports by minimizing shareholder pressure on U.S. companies to build up beneficial and complementary trade with people in poor countries.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

An economy fueled by extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives an excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.

This economic strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “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.

Similarly, establishment Republicans, media businesses, and major GOP donors hide the skew towards investors by ignoring the pocketbook impact and by touting border chaos, welfare spending, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs needed by young U.S. graduates.