The Washington Post is crediting President Donald Trump’s 2020 migration cuts for rising wages and improving workplace technology in 2022.
But the credit for raising wages is portrayed as blame for creating a “shortage of immigrants”:
The slowdown in legal immigration began well before the pandemic, [and] the covid-19 crisis intensified the process as the Trump administration effectively halted the flow of foreign-born workers into the United States
The list of supposed problems caused by the “shortage of migrants” includes wage gains for ordinary Americans, according to the December 15 article:
“It’s been three years of trying absolutely everything,” said [Kansas hotel manager Alonzo] Arteaga, who has raised pay by about $3 an hour and offers discounted monthly rates to employees. “It feels like the workers really aren’t there.”
“Labor force shortages …. [prompt] companies [to] raise wages to compete for a smaller pool of workers and to keep existing staff,” the article said, admitting the Econ. 101 law of supply and demand applies to America
Americans also gained because employers were forced to buy productivity-boosting machines that will help Americans do more work — and earn more wages — each day, the newspaper says.
The Post spotlighted a farm in Texas that grows greens, onions, cabbages, and melons. it is now paying higher wages and “doubling down on automation and investing in machines that can wash, cut and bag vegetables,” the Post admitted.
The Post‘s article — like many others in Jeff Bezos’s pro-migration, progressive newspaper — played up the preference of employers, investors, and migrants.
In most cases, the Post‘s articles simply ignore the decent and rational preference of Americans for decent wages and working conditions.
For example, a December 15 article complained that successful public opposition blocked a plan to amnesty at least two million DACA migrants, saying:
A genuine opening to address two major national problems is slipping away. There’s the absurdly unjust legal limbo endured by dreamers brought here as children through no fault of their own. And there’s the fiendish challenge of managing soaring numbers of desperate people seeking refuge in the United States at a time of rising international displacement.
…
It could have demonstrated that government can manage asylum-seeking effectively while remaining true to our core values, potentially opening political space for widening channels to more legal migration later.
This progressive view — call it Brahmin Economics — pretends that mass immigration does not cut Americans’ wages, skew investment, slow technology, nor shift wealth to Wall Street.
The elitist perspective also helps to hide the government’s role in creating the claimed “labor shortage” for many low-productivity businesses.
“The reason that so many of these companies are unable to find workers now is because they rely on a flawed business model that only succeeds when the payroll is artificially held low [by the post-1965 inflow of] foreign workers,” Rob Law, then the director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart in December 2021.
Since 1965, and especially since 1990, the federal government has imported millions of cheap workers for business. This policy of inflating the labor supply allowed many employers to launch many low-productivity companies that cannot survive a higher-wage economy, he added.
Once the federal cheap-labor bubble was burst by Trump and covid in 2020, employers had to raise wages to keep their employers.
The employers that could not pay higher wages had to close down. That deflation process wiped out many businesses throughout the United States, especially restaurants.
The Cheap Labor Bubble — although unnamed — was described by a different reporter at the Washington Post, Mark Fisher.
In December 2021, he interviewed Hasit Patel, an Indian migrant who was then operating the two-star La Quinta franchise budget hotel for the chain’s owners. Patel — who is likely an E-2 visa manager — admitted to Fisher that his franchise plan depended on a steady supply of government-delivered cheap migrant labor:
[His] struggle to find [replacement] labor felt like a blow to his whole notion of what made America great. An immigrant from India, he believed that the health of the U.S. economy was protected by a constant refreshing of the workforce, an injection of striving immigrants willing to take on some of the unpleasant jobs that many Americans are loath to do — like cleaning [his] hotel rooms.
“I can’t compete with the warehouses for wages,” Patel said. “The government should let us get [very cheap] people from India, even just for six months. The government has to realize there are certain job categories that American people don’t want to do anymore.”
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It remains a struggle to hire, he said, even after he raised wages from $8.50 to nearly $11 an hour and offered more flexible schedules. One housekeeper who didn’t return told Patel he would clean rooms again but only if he could live in the hotel. “I can’t become a shelter,” the owner said.
Similarly, the media’s cheerleading for illegal-migrant farmworkers has also helped to create the labor shortage on U.S. farms.
The federal government has long allowed the U.S. companies that grow specialty crops – fruits, for example — to use cheap illegal migrant labor.
This post-1965 federal policy was a temporary boon for the farm companies and investors. It meant they did not have to spend some of their revenues to develop and buy high-tech harvesting machinery — nor focus on the crops they could grow better than foreign farm companies with cheaper labor and more sunlight.
But progressives insist on doubling down on investors’ use of stoop labor.
On December 15, for example, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), unveiled a new amnesty plan that would increase the flow of cut-rate workers to farm companies around the nation:
Bennet’s bill would allow employers to request some H-2A workers for year-round work. It would also freeze farmworkers’ wages in 2023, and limit how much they could increase over the following decade to stem rising labor costs.
Bennet posted his plan after the GOP’s populist base showed its opposition to corporate labor giveaways, and effectively killed a draft bipartisan amnesty and giveaway.
Companies outside the United States are exploiting the federal government’s labor policy.
For example, foreign farm companies are increasingly investing in technologies to cut the cost of planting, picking, and sorting farm produce. That gives them a growing economic advantage over cheap-labor U.S. farms.
The agriculture department reported in February 2022:
Agricultural exports are expected to grow at an annual rate averaging 0.8 percent per year from 2021 through 2031. The value of U.S. agricultural imports is projected to increase by an average annual rate of 6 percent over that same period as domestic consumer spending is expected to remain strong over the next decade combined with domestic preferences for an array of agricultural goods that continue to exceed domestic production.
The federal government’s migration policies have also minimized investment in the rural states that depend on the farm sector.
Those policies deliver much migrant labor to airports and bus stations in New York, California, Florida, Washington, New Jersey, and Texas. That subsidy for coastal investors minimizes the labor-market pressure for coastal investors to set up new well-paying businesses in districts outside the main cities, or in Kansas, Nebraska, Maine, North Dakota, or Oregon.
GOP politicians, however, have noticed this government-imposed economic tilt.
This fall, midwestern GOP Senators blocked a plan to let more U.S. companies import more foreign white-collar workers for government-funded high-tech jobs in the Midwest.
This week, the GOP united with some liberal Democrats to block the “EAGLE Act” giveaway to coastal investors. The remarkable win against billionaire investors was ignored by the Washington Post‘s editors.
However, the GOP’s 2022 success in defeating several cheap-labor amnesties and giveaways, has not blocked Presidnet Joe Biden’s border policy.
The easy-migration policy is reinflating the nation’s Cheap Labor Bubble by importing at least 2.5 million migrants — along with the rising inflow of visa workers and legal immigrants. The mass inflow will cut wages, reduce workplace investment, inflate housing prices, and keeps millions of alienated Americans on the sidelines.
The wage cuts and rental spikes hit lower-income Americans the hardest — and they are disproportionately black and Latino.