Record-breaking mass migration into the United States, Europe, and Australia is causing a “Global Immigration Backlash” against establishment left-wing political parties, admits a New York Times columnist.
“In earlier eras, the political left in the U.S. included many figures who worried about the effects of large-scale immigration,” a New York Times columnist admitted on July 11, adding:
Both labor leaders and civil-rights leaders, for example, argued for moderate levels of immigration to protect the interests of [home nation’s] vulnerable workers … [but] many progressives are uncomfortable with any immigration-skeptical argument. They have become passionate advocates of more migration and global integration, arguing — correctly — that immigrants usually benefit by moving from a lower-wage country to a higher-wage country.
“The global migration wave of the 21st century has little precedent,” said columnist David Leonhardt, adding that “Lower-income and blue-collar workers often worry that their wages will decline because employers suddenly have a larger, cheaper [imported] labor pool from which to hire.”
The Wall Street Journal posted a similar article on July 8, saying, “The influx since the end of the pandemic is altering societies, with many people blaming immigrants for increases in crime and higher housing costs.” It continued:
In Australia and New Zealand … foreigners are being blamed for rising housing costs. U.S. research suggests that an immigration inflow equal to 1% of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rents and housing prices of about 1%.
The Wall Street Journal article was headlined “Immigration Backlashes Spread Around the World.”
However, the authors of both articles downplay the huge economic impact of migration, which has worked with free trade to transfer a vast amount of wealth from middle-class Americans to investors since around 1990:
Share of Total Net Worth Held by the 50th to 90th Wealth Percentiles, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US)
So the citizen opposition is not a “backlash” — it is a rational response to the intended reality that migration transfers wealth from ordinary Americans upwards to wealthy investors, and deliberately fractures the civic rules that help ordinary people manage their lives.
Citizens’ growing opposition, however, has yet to install effective political leaders who can resist the closed-door demands from donors, CEOs, investors, and their pro-diversity, anti-nation progressive allies.
In the United States, for example, President Donald Trump dropped the immigration reform ball in 2017, instead favoring tax cuts for GOP donors and lost reelection to the pro-migration Democratic Party. Three years later, he failed to even complete the border wall — or the more important legal reforms — that he promised in 2016.
In Italy, populist voters elected an anti-migration Prime Minister, but her “government this week said it would issue 425,000 work permits to non-EU nationals between this year and 2025, which Rome said was part of its plan to promote legal immigration to fill gaps in the labour market,” said a July 7 report in the London-based Financial Times newspaper.
“Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Italy granted fewer than 31,000 work permits a year to migrant workers from outside the EU,” the newspaper reported, adding “Among the skilled workers Italy will welcome are electricians, plumbers, construction workers, nurses, bus drivers, hotel employees, mechanics and fishermen.”
In the United Kingdom, the nation’s Conservative Party criticized migration but has deliberately enabled the massive waves of legal and illegal migration that help its donors by suppressing wages and spiking housing costs.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.