The top leaders of U.S. labor unions expect to recruit President Joe Biden’s migrants and give Democrats the political power to force economic concessions from CEOs and investors.
Public concern about mass migration is not a pocketbook problem but is a “culture wars” distraction created by billionaires, said Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL–CIO.
She spoke in an August 29 address shortly before Labor Day:
For generations now, the richest people and companies in this country have divided us—along the lines of race, of gender, of sexual orientation, of immigration status. Even worse, they convinced us to divide ourselves. While we fought the culture wars with each other … they made off with billions of dollars that our hard work created.
“An [legal or illegal] immigrant does not stand between you and a good job — a billionaire does,” Shuler insisted, despite the reality that business interests favor worker-replacement migration, and despite her promise to push “culture wars” issues, such as abortion and library books.
Shuler did not use her speech to oppose the White House’s policy of bussing more cheap and compliant foreign workers into U.S. jobs, even though nearly all prior AFL-CIO leaders opposed migration expansions.
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Her passivity ensures CEOs feel little pressure to either listen to unions, invest in labor-saving, productivity-boosting technology, or raise wages for their easily-replaced American employees.
The silence is notable because wages rise, families prosper, and politicians gain in the polls in the states where GOP officials resist migration.
“The immigrants with legal status are in high demand, and they know it … [and] they want top dollar,” said Murrie Mehrer, the owner of a small landscaping firm in Lakeland, Florida, where the legislature recently curbed the hiring of illegals. She added:
When you do find one, they want top dollar … [and] when you find someone that has all the credentials, get ready to pay them close to $200 per day.
“He used to pay painters $18-$20 an hour,” said a USA Today report on June 21 about the owner of a construction company in Naples, Florida. “Now, he’s paying $30-$35 … ‘I have to adapt,’ he said.”
The White House’s investor-backed jobs policy transports millions of wage-cutting foreign workers across the 50-state union line along the U.S. border.
“As our economy grows, we need workers that we just don’t have enough of,” White House manager Katie Tobin said in May 2023. “It is in our interest to bring people in and to stay competitive globally,” said Tobin, who was the senior director for transborder security on the National Security Council.
“The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people,” then-secretary Marty Walsh told Fox Business in December 2022.
Shuler is backing those corporate-backed cheap-labor migration policies. “We will turn out next year for President Biden in the most historic labor mobilization of our time!” she said.
The AFL-CIO policy statement on migration endorses economic migration and even amnesty:
The only way to stop the race to the bottom in wages and standards is for working people of all races, religions and immigration status [including legal and illegal migrants] to stand together and demand an end to policies that put profits over people. The entire workforce suffers when millions [of illegals] struggle to support their families without a way to speak up on the job, and ramping up fear in our workplaces [y immigration enforcement] only serves to increase exploitation.
Instead of deporting immigrants, we need to ensure that all working people have rights on the job and are able to exercise them without fear of retaliation.
Shuler backs the high-migration policies in part because she expects a political reward from Biden in exchange for accepting the massive replacement of older, sick, and alienated U.S. workers by younger, healthier, and indebted migrants.
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Biden’s pending reward is a larger role for the progressive-run unions in the companies that accept government spending, for example on climate-related spending programs. She said:
There are historic investments—trillions of dollars — coming down the pike, thanks to President Biden — an investment that is happening because our labor movement pushed for decades. That means MILLIONS of jobs. The question now is: What kind of jobs will they be?
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We are organizing those jobs already. Up and down our coasts, where offshore wind is taking off. In the Deep South, where EV bus factories are being built. Making sure the standard is set: These are good union jobs.
Biden’s deputies are also rewarding unions by encouraging illegal migrants to join unions.
Yet Shuler said little about wage gains for union members or ordinary Americans.
Instead, she promised to achieve the progressive goal of reducing the wage differences among union members from the many different identity groups that progressives are creating and importing:
Remember those wage disparities [between identity groups] I mentioned? The union difference is what solves them. It’s what cuts into that gender pay gap … A younger worker, an older worker, it’s better in a union. Black, White, Hispanic, AAPI, Indigenous, it’s better in a union. Immigrant or fifth generation American, it’s better in a union. LGBTQ+. It’s better in a union. Unions are how we drive real, lasting change.
Union leaders are “going to be a 24/7, 365 political force” for progressive causes such as climate and abortion, she said, adding, and “our right to read the books we want to read.”
Her progressive alliance with globalist investors is sharply different from the view of young GOP leaders.
“This country has prioritized the importation of cheap labor,” including cheap legal immigrants, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl) said in his 2023 book, titled Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity.
Rubio continued:
Across this country today, the immigration system has been corrupted and exploited. And it began, as many of America’s problems do, with the fundamental shift toward a globalized economy.
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But not every business could be exported, which meant Wall Street simply figured out how to import cheap labor, much of it [clarification, not all] coming from illegal immigrants. This was a slower, more subtle process. Sure, some politicians made a big deal about “jobs Americans wouldn’t do,” but otherwise the only outcry came from workers who found their wages stalled, benefits cut, and hours slashed until they could be replaced by someone willing to work more hours for less.
More often than not, it is about jobs Wall Street doesn’t want Americans to do because hiring Americans would require higher wages and better working conditions. To them, it is better to import cheap labor and buy off Americans with cash welfare programs provided by the government.
Biden’s policy of Extraction Migration has added at least four million foreign workers as it tries to reinflate the cheap-labor bubble.
That flood of migrants was urged and welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. It also reduces marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, Heartland states, and overseas markets, and it reduces economic pressure on the federal government to deal with the drug and “Deaths of Despair” crises.
Biden’s easy-migration policies are deliberately adding the foreigners’ problems to the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the growing alienation of young people