The Democrats’ amnesty push threatens to cut Americans’ wages by encouraging more illegal migration, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said on June 15.
“We have a crisis at the border — illegal migrant flows that we haven’t seen in a generation,” Cotton told a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He continued:
The very fact that the United States Senate is having a hearing on granting a massive amnesty under these conditions will simply exacerbate this [migration] crisis. It will be used tonight — tonight — by traffickers and smugglers to … encourage more people from around the world to make that very dangerous trip. That will then put even more stress on our border, on our law enforcement agencies, lead to more crime in this country, to lower wages, and fewer jobs for the American people.
“They know that our borders are open,” Cotton said.
Cotton’s criticism was echoed by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO):
When you see the effects of the drugs that are flowing across this border into every community of my state … You can’t visit a community in my state that is not frankly awash in drugs. From where? From across the border. Our border is in a state of total crisis, and it is a crisis that is affecting every single person in my state and in this country.
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce and are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants and the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.