Business Pushes for Lame-Duck Amnesty

Amnesty
AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Business groups and their progressive allies are pushing Congress to accelerate more corporate migration during the lame-duck session after the election.

The business push for cheap labor is hidden behind plaintive, media-magnified calls for the amnesty of “Dreamers.” That term is used by advocates and the media to glamorize roughly three million younger illegal migrants who were brought to the United States as children by their foreign parents.

President Joe Biden “needs to use his bully pulpit but also his political capital to make sure that he’s delivering for immigrant youth who have been here since they were children,” said Marielena Hincapie, who heads the National Immigration Law Center. “There is no other time — Let’s not wait until the Supreme Court rules,” she told Politico on October 20.

But the lobbying push is powered by business groups that have many higher priorities than a “Dreamer” amnesty.

Those higher priorities include an amendment in the House’s must-pass defense authorization bill that would allow companies to dramatically escalate their extraction of white-collar workers from poor foreign countries. If approved, the new migrants will help shrink salaries paid to millions of indebted, family-raising American graduates.

That amendment is matched by a Senate amendment that could be added to any moving bill, which is backed by Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il), and Republican Mike Rounds (R-SD)

Bloomberg.com reported on October 11:

Senators have introduced a slew of NDAA amendments on other immigration issues. Most will be passed over, but some may make it into a bipartisan managers’ package, and a few may get a vote on the Senate floor. Advocates will try to include many of those same proposals, plus others, in an omnibus spending bill, though prospects remain uncertain.

Efforts include proposals to offer a path to citizenship to noncitizen service members and veterans, recapture unused family and employment-based visas from years past, and restore diversity visas lost to bureaucratic delays and Trump-era travel restrictions.

Overall, business groups prefer to keep reporters focused on young migrants instead of the replacement workers. For example, an advocacy group of West Coast investors — FWD.us — touted a full-page pro-amnesty advertisement in the Wall Street Journal:

The FWD.us investor group backs migration because it boosts their businesses with more wage-cutting workers, more consumers, and more renters. The founders include Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg. It was created in 2013 to help pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” cheap labor and amnesty bill.

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

FWD.us has long fueled the DACA debate to minimize media coverage and public recognition of Fortune 500 migration.

The Wall Street Journal ad was sponsored by a spinoff of FWD.us, the Coalition for the American Dream. It declared:

The worker shortage will get worse for the United States if hundreds of thousands of critical workers [the ‘DACA” recipients of illegally-awarded work permits) are stripped of their legal ability to support themselves and their families. That is the situation we currently face if this ruling becomes final, and it is the reason for our request today.

Given that DACA applications and renewals were granted on a rolling basis, the end to this program means that an estimated 22,000 jobs would be lost every month for two years. That is roughly 1,000 job losses per business day at a time when the U.S. economy already faces significant workforce shortages.

When the last DACA recipient’s work permit expires, the U.S. will have lost more than 500,000 jobs, and the U.S. economy will lose as much as $11.7 billion annually — or roughly $1 billion monthly — in wages from previously employed DACA recipients. (To put this into perspective, in Texas alone, 400 healthcare workers and 300 teachers will be forced out of their jobs each month.)

“It is, first and foremost, a humanitarian issue, but the broken system is also harming manufacturers’ competitiveness,” said Jay Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers.

“Our communities, businesses, and economy have all benefitted from the contributions of these young men and women,” claimed Matthew Shay, CEO of the National Retail Federation. “It is time to provide them with a pathway to lawful permanent residence and ultimately American citizenship.”

The business groups also paid for similar ads in the Dallas Morning News and the Charlotte Observer to pressure Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

Of course, any reduction in the number of illegal foreign workers is a boon to more than 100 million Americans who have lost wages and affordable housing because the establishment has pumped millions of cheap, submissive, and hard-working migrants into Americans’ workplaces.

Since January 2021, Biden has allowed roughly four million illegal migrants, visa workers, and legal immigrants into the United States, alongside many foreigners who take jobs after getting tourist visas. That mass inflow damaged Americans’ salaries by flooding the labor market and helped to spike inflation and housing prices.

The migrants are extracted from poor countries with the goal of diverting a larger share of the nation’s income toward investors and Wall Street.

The damage is exemplified by Julia Mallman, a single, childless, 42-year-old kindergarten teacher in Fairfax, Virginia. Her monthly rent jumped by 25 percent as Joe Biden’s migrants rented spaces in her apartment complex, she told the Washington Post on October 20:

“So many emotions when I saw that,” Mallman said. “I was furious. And disappointed. And demoralized.”

She got a post-pandemic gut punch that is hitting renters across the nation this year. After landlords largely suspended rent hikes and federal assistance came during shutdowns, renters are now paying a steep price for that brief clemency. Nationwide, rents are up 11.3 percent this year, according to the real-estate-research firm CoStar Group. In some parts, like in Mallman’s working-class complex, the penalty … is weighing in at 25 percent.

 “Who can afford this?” she asked, showing me the contract she decided to sign after all, on the day it was due. “The prices are pretty much the same everywhere I look.”

The federal government’s Extraction Migration economy strategy is hidden from the public behind a screen of ineffective border defenses, pro-migration media coverage, official lies, and complex laws.

Even a New York Times writer recognized the scam in an October 20 op-ed:

The border, I think, is imperfect by design: Porous enough to ensure that some people will inevitably manage to get through, delivering a steady supply of cheap and under-the-table labor. Closed enough to prevent a glut of newcomers. Lenient at times because we are a land of immigrants, but punctuated with attention-grabbing crackdowns to dissuade too many people from trying their luck.

The GOP legislators in the House and Senate recognize their voters’ deep opposition to the wealth-shifting migration. So they are zig-zagging away from their donors’ demands before the election. NBC News reported on October 20:

A Republican aide said the “business community always underestimates how hard it is to get legislation through on this topic and tends to misread the political environment.”

Even Democrats doubt Republicans will OK the amnesty, NBC reported:

“From what I’m seeing and hearing, Republicans are not budging on this,” the Democratic aide said. “I’m glad these companies are doing this now, but they’re only as effective as their outreach.”

But the progressive groups keep pushing, amid much damage to Americans.

“It’s clear that the ball is in President Biden’s hands,” Greisa Martínez Rosas, the director of the donor-backed United We Dream group, told Politico.

“He needs to say that it’s his number one priority … He needs to say that clearly, publicly and many times. I think that he can use his bipartisan experience to bring Republicans to the negotiating table,” she told Politico.

 

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