American companies want more U.S. customers, so top executives at Tinder and Grindr have swiped right to support the Dream Act amnesty for at least 3 million young illegal-immigrant consumers.
The executives at the two hook-up sites have signed a pro-amnesty petition which has also been signed by top executives at PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, Best Buy, Crate and Barrel, Mastercard, automaker General Motors and food supplier General Mills, Levi Strauss and the Gap.
The CEO signatures are being collected by FWD.us, an advocacy group launched by one of the wealthiest men in the world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The group’s billionaire and millionaire founders made their money in the information-technology industry, not in the retail sector. Their priority is to keep importing cheap white-collar technology workers for themselves and their myriad subcontractors.
The technology CEOs are pushing for the Dream Act amnesty because they want to keep the 3 million-plus young illegal-immigrant consumers in the United States. But they also want to block President Donald Trump’s major immigration reform, dubbed the RAISE Act. That legislation would raise wages and salaries for many Americans, in part, by reducing annual immigration from 1 million per year to roughly 600,000 people per year.
CEOs and lobbyists are trying to sink the RAISE Act by quickly pushing the huge Dream Act amnesty through Congress this year. If the Dream Act become law without getting packaged with the RAISE Act in a compromise, then Trump loses his DACA-amnesty trading card needed to win the Democrats’ approval for passage of the RAISE Act. Once the RAISE Act is blocked, then Zuckerberg and his allied technology CEOs can restart their push to import additional cheap white-collar professionals.
Most national economies, such as China, grow their economy and wages by investing in labor-saving machinery. But the United States also grows its economy by importing consumers and workers. This economic policy of mass-immigration grows Wall Street and government revenues but it does little to raise average wages for Americans.
The nation’s economy now includes 43 million legal and illegal immigrants who have hugely expanded the nation’s purchases of autos, Ramen noodles, soft drinks, furniture, apartments, TV ads, entertainment and much, much else. The immigrants’ 41 million American children have further expanded consumption as they boosted the nation’s population to roughly 320 million consumers. The New American Economy business group described the scale of this immigration-stimulus:
The New American Economy business group described the scale of this immigration-stimulus:
Nationally, immigrants earned $1.3 trillion in 2014 and … nearly $927 billion in spending power, which they frequently used to purchase goods and services, stimulate local business activity, and create jobs in the broader U.S. economy.
In Arizona, illegal immigrants added $3.1 billion in spending power to the state in 2014, while the overall population of legal and illegal immigrants added $16 billion in spending power, according to the advocacy group.
The New American Economy advocacy group was jointly founded by billionaires Mike Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, who has since shelved plans to create a Spanish-language version of Fox News.
CEOs rarely describe immigrants as customers. They instead prefer to cloak their economic self-interest in media-ready talk about “Dreamers” and “a nation of immigrants,” as if the nation’s 280 million native-born Americans are somehow less important than imported customers.
The CEOS and their lobbyists often talk about immigration as a component of the nation’s economy and a source of revenues for politicians, even though Americans’ wages have flatlined since 1973 while housing prices have risen in crowded cities.
But in March 2015, Google’s then-chairman Eric Schmidt frankly endorsed immigration to as a cure for shrinking consumer demand in Europe and Japan.
“Most stock markets assume modest [revenue] growth, so how are you over a couple of decades to deal with the fact that one-third of your customers are going to go away?” he said. “Well, one [way] is to produce more customers through immigration,” he said at a March 18 event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. Schmidt is now the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.
Economists also talk about the buying power of migrants, usually while calling for more imported consumers.
“There are millions of [illegal] immigrants living in this country … [who] are not going out and shopping,” because of Trump’s enforcement policies, said Robert Kaplan, the head of the Federal Reserve of Dallas, and a voting member of the Federal Reserve which regulates the economy by adjusting interest rates. “They are staying home,” Kaplan complained during a May 31 presentation at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “They’re afraid if they go out they may not come home.”
Other co-signers of Zuckerberg’s DACA petition top executive at Starbucks, Wal-Mart Stores and Target Corp., which still has not recovered from it’s 2016 decision to deny sexual privacy to men and women in its changing rooms and bathrooms.
Firms that sell services to Latino customers have also signed up, including the president of Fiesta Foods . His company’s website says:
Craig Gaylord, President of Fiesta Foods after opening his first grocery store in Hermiston, Oregon saw the fast growth of the Hispanic population in the area. He also saw the there was nowhere in the area where this increasing community could fulfill all of their shopping needs. He began to study Hispanic marketing in 1997. He then opened the first Fiesta Foods in Pasco, Washington in April, 2003. This store became the leader in Hispanic marketing in the Northwest. With the store’s great success he proceeded to open the second Fiesta Foods in Sunnyside, Washington in May, 2006. The third Fiesta Foods opened in Yakima, Washington in June, 2007. All three stores have been a great success focusing on the concept of “Selling fresh foods for less.”
Another signer is the CEO of Evans Food Group, which is a leading supplier of pork rinds to Latino customers:
The CEO’s petition signatures are accompanied by a mass of signatures from technology companies trying to keep the RAISE act down, and by a slew of immigration lawyers whose customer base will be shriveled if the DACA migrants are sent home or if the RAISE Act becomes law.
Other signers include National Hispanic Media the Coalition, and professionals in the education business, for example, the CEOs of the Miami-Dade County public schools and KIPP L.A. Schools.
Many of the CEOs use immigrants as workers, as well as consumers. So Zuckerberg’s petition is backed by top executives at the Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott hotel chains which also sell services to, and also employ, large numbers of immigrants.
Real-estate billionaire Penny Pritzker is on the list. She runs PSP Capital, which is based a short distance away from another petition signer, Chicago Joe Castillo, a real-estate agent at Mi Casa Real Estate. Their mutual support for the DACA illegals makes sense because Latinos are a rising share of the Chicago real-estate market.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. However, the government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants to compete against Americans for jobs.
The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals.
That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most also want to favor legal immigrants, and many even sympathize with illegals.
Amid the huge inflow of new workers, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades.