New York Times: American College Grads Are Being Pushed out of Coastal Cities

Middle class American college graduates are being priced out of the nation’s high-growth, high-opportunity coastal cities, according to the New York Times.

“Years after lower-wage residents have been priced out of expensive coastal metros, higher-paid workers are now turning away from them, too,” the newspaper reported on May 13, adding that the rising cost of housing:

“Ends up pricing out more and more people — not just people in the middle, but even people with higher incomes and college degrees,” said Jed Kolko, the under secretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The reporters tried to blame rising housing costs but failed to explain why housing costs are rising. The reporters suggested that college grads are leaving for amenities in cheaper, quieter cities because major companies are allowing people to work from home, but they also quoted Daniel Shoag, an economist at Case Western Reserve University as saying, “For college-educated workers … it’s more of a puzzle.”

Yet the anecdotes selected by the New York Times also hinted at one major cause — the federal government’s policy of subsidizing wealthy coastal cities with replacement populations of low-wage, submissive, and hard working migrants who force down the salaries and wages earned by blue-collar and white-collar Americans.

For example, an anecdote described an American professional who was driven out of Seattle, Wash., where roughly 20 percent of the population are foreign-born, most of whom, were recruited for white-collar jobs in the city’s tech industry:

Garrett Lyon, a 40-year-old brand strategist, described having a similar realization in Seattle when he and his wife considered buying a home: “Seattle was crazy, absolutely, absolutely insanely expensive,” he said. They could have afforded a home an hour outside the city, he said. Instead, they moved to Nashville.

The article declined to mention President Joe Biden or the nation’s high-migration economic policies since the 1990s.

Most of Biden’s migrants are blue-collars who are being waived across the southern border by his deputies. This massive inflow of at least 4 million southern migrants drives up housing costs by sharing apartments at higher rents and by working jobs for lower wages. They do this because they are getting the huge prizes of being allowed to stay in the United States and getting their children educated in Americans’ K-12 schools.

The Washington Post reported on May 15 on Will Rodriguez, a Venezuelan who crossed the border illegally before Title 42 ended o May 11:

FWD.us research shows that 100,000 international student graduates each year would stay and work permanently in the U.S. if a pathway existed; they would add up to $233 billion to the U.S. economy this decade and reduce STEM-related talent shortages by about a quarter.

“Why do Republicans support a policy that creates jobs in Democrat states by taking jobs from GOP states?” said John Miano, a lawyer at the Immigration Law Reform Institute. “Can no one figure this out? … They don’t call it the Stupid Party for nothing,” he told Breitbart News in May 2020.

“Just as in the past, immigrants often double their income — or more — by moving to the U.S. from their home country,” Boustan said at a June 2022 presentation at the investor-funded American Enterprise Institute, adding:

Children of immigrants that grow up close to the bottom of the income distribution– so, think about the 25th percentile, for example — are more likely to reach the middle class that children of similar [income] U.S-born households.

Americans lose out because they are less likely to accept the high costs of living in immigrant-crowded cities, they wrote:

Many of the children of U.S.-born parents grow up in areas where their families settled long before, so economic mobility for them is often coupled with the costs of leaving home … In other words, U.S.-born families are more rooted in place, while immigrant families are more footloose—and this willingness to move toward opportunity seems to make all the difference.

“If we’re making immigration policy from the perspective of what is best for Americans, we have to want a system where employers are incentivized — and also politicians are incentivized — to get low-skilled Americans back to work,” noted Jason Richwine, a Harvard Ph.D. who now works at the Center for Immigration Studies. The low-immigration policy would also encourage troubled Americans to “get their social problems straightened out to the best extent that we can, to make them productive people,” he told Breitbart News in June 2022.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

The extraction migration economic policy is hidden behind a wide variety of noble-sounding excuses and explanations. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that Americans must accept foreign refugees, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

But the colonialism-like economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it extracts human-resource wealth from the poor home countries. The migration policy also minimizes shareholder pressure on companies to build up complementary trade with poor countries.

An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, equality-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to divorce themselves from despairing Americans who are being pushed to the bottom of society.

The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. For example, Jia Lynn Yang, the top editor for domestic news  at the New York Times, wrote in a 2020 pro-migration book, titled “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide,” that:

For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [recent immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong. That task will not be easy.

Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. These polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of foreign contract workers into careers sought by young U.S. graduates.