British-born, elite-educated, New-York-based HBO talk show host John Oliver wants more migration into the United States.
“Personally, personally, I think a lot more people should be let in,” John Oliver told his Last Week Tonight audience on September 15.
Americans’ homeland is for immigrants, he told the unenthusiastic audience as he quoted an 1883 advocacy poem that is often declared to be part of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,’ because as corny as it might sound, America at its best isn’t about who you are when you arrive, it’s about who you want to become.
Oliver lamented the popular curbs on immigration without revealing that the government invites 1.1 million legal immigrants into the United States each year to compete for the jobs and housing sought by the 4 million young Americans who turn 18 that year:
Because the truth is for those who want to come here, there is no one [immigration] line to get into … the lines that do exist can be prohibitively long or have sudden dead ends. And for many people — and this is really important — there simply isn’t a line at all.
Oliver also ignored the wealth-shifting impact of mass migration, which has helped create record levels of wage-and-housing poverty in California.
Oliver’s rant detailed the obstacles facing foreigners who try to move into the United States — he didn’t both to mention how many blue-collar and white-collar migrants — or H-1B college-grad workers — would move to the United States if Oliver kicked the doors wide open:
No more than 7 percent of immigrants accepted each year can come from any one country. What that means in practice is the big countries with a lot of immigrants like China, India, and Mexico, are subject to the same numerical caps as tiny ones like Malta.
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It is not just numerical caps — the whole system has a lot of restrictions on who exactly can come here.
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And even getting a work visa in the first place can be very difficult. You have to fit within narrow categories … It’s a complex system. I myself came over on an O-1 visa, which is for persons with extraordinary ability in the arts.
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And it is worth noting, just getting a work visa does not mean you’re going to end up staying here because converting it into a green card can be difficult to practically impossible, depending on your skill level and where you’re from. You need your employer to choose to sponsor you again. And there aren’t many green cards to go around. Only around 140,000 of them are granted every year.
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So your odds of winning that [Diversity] lottery to come into the country are about the same as your odds are of getting shot once you get here, ….Lottery is the longest of among shots, it’s honestly barely even worth talking bout.
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And things could get even worse. There are now reports that [President Donald] Trump’s White House is weighing whether to cut the number of refugees we admit to a zero next year — zero! And if they do that, then please tell me what is the right way for refugees to come in?
John Oliver did suggest that he might be satisfied if some limits, somewhere, are placed on the inflow of migrants, saying “that doesn’t have to mean that everyone who wants to come, gets to come.”
But Oliver is in the entertainment business. More immigrants allow bigger audiences, more advertising revenues, and more wealth for investors — and his place atop the pyramid means he has the wealth to afford decent housing close to his workplace in New York.
He got his college degree from the U.K.’s version of the Ivy League, Cambridge University, so he’s safely inside the establishment’s tightly-guarded walls of credentialled privilege — unlike the vast majority of young Americans trying to save for marriage, housing, and families.
Immigration Numbers
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of about 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints more than 1 million work permits for new foreigners, and rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for investors. The stimulus happens because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a growing economy. The Census Bureau said September 10 that men who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, to bring their median salaries to $45,097 for full time, year-round work.
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