Federal immigration policy allows employers to exploit poor people just like slavery enabled employers to exploit African people, according to a pro-amnesty article published by the New York Times.
“This is nothing new,” says the Monday article by Marcela Valdes, a progressive writer at the New York Times Magazine. It continues:
America’s economy has always relied upon a mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit … “These [economic] spaces that were once filled by slaves are now filled by immigrants,” Anita Sinha, a professor of law at American University told me. “They are exploitative by design.”
“In the United States, versions of these economic dynamics have always been in play, but what has changed over the past 100 years is the way that immigration policy has created a permanent class of disenfranchised ‘illegal’ workers,” writes Valdes, who declines to name this type of exploitative economy.
Bizarrely, Valdes justifies this slavery-like economic model because it aids migrants and delivers cheap products and services to Americans. She writes:
The “solutions” [to migration] rarely address the root cause: Unauthorized immigration, for all the obstacles America throws at it, remains a boon for countless U.S. employers and a reasonable bet for migrants who seek a better life.
…
American consumers benefit from these systems every time they find exceptionally inexpensive ways to get their lawns cut, their bathrooms cleaned, their houses built, their apples picked, their nails painted and their young and old cared for. The prices we pay for these services have been subsidized for generations by transnational migrants.
Other reporters at the New York Times have begun describing the progressives’ exploitative economy. For example, the newspaper posted an article headlined “Illegal Mopeds and Fake Names: Migrants Scrape By in Underground Economy” on September 15:
Mr. [Mayco] Milano, desperate to pay back the large debts he incurred in bringing his wife and three children to the United States, rents a moped (with helmet, lock and bag, but no license plate) for $400 a week; for the privilege of using an Uber Eats profile under the name “Jessica,” he pays a weekly cut of $150 to a Venezuelan woman.
These black-market fees eat up most of what he earns, but they enable him to work, which he does for more than 10 hours a day, seven days a week.
Valdes’s support for the slavery-like exploitation of millions of illegal migrants seems strange for an author at the New York Times. After all, the newspaper has endorsed the political claim that the nation’s history does not date from 1776 but from the 1619 arrival of the first lifetime slaves.
Yet her quasi-endorsement of exploitation labor has a purpose.
The purpose is to help expand the flow of migrants into the United States. That purpose is exposed when she says illegal migrants should be awarded citizenship if they sneak into the United States and work illegally for five years in what she describes as modern slavery.
Valdes writes:
Among academics, another idea keeps resurfacing: a [five-year] deadline for deportations [Emphasis added]. Most crimes in America have a statute of limitations, Mae Ngai, a professor of history at Columbia University, noted in an [2005] opinion column for The Washington Post. The statute of limitations for noncapital terrorism offenses, for example, is eight years. Before the 1924 Immigration Act, Ngai wrote in her book about the history of immigration policy, the statute of limitations for deportations was at most five years. Returning to this general principle, at least for migrants who have no significant criminal record, would allow ICE officers and immigration judges to focus on the recent influx of unauthorized migrants.
Yet her dangled offer of citizenship would provide a massive reward to millions of additional migrants to take jobs at very low wages — perhaps cutting tobacco and sugar in a plantation run by Wall Street.
Her preferred policy would massively expand the scale of damage caused to Americans by what she describes as the modern version of slavery.
Valdes even admits some of the economic damage when describing how black Americans were replaced by cheaper migrants:
When the anthropologist Angela Stuesse investigated the history of the poultry industry in Mississippi, for example, she found that when African American workers organized for better wages and working conditions in the 1970s, businessmen cultivated an alternative work force of Latin Americans, whom they found in Texas and Florida.
Overall, Valdes’s argument for amnesty relies on the incorrect claim that Americans can do nothing to stop migration, Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. He added:
I see it as coherent [only] if you accept her perspective that there is literally no way to stop business from importing this captive labor. That is the first assumption, the starting assumption of her perspective on this.
But Americans have used their voting power to curb labor migration, Krikorian continued:
We do not take for granted that the flow of cheap labor is inevitable. We think it can be dramatically reduced, and in fact, it has been, with positive results, not just during the [multi-decade] period of low immigration in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, but also during a shorter period under the [Donald] Trump administration when the economy was booming and immigration actually fell. [Migration] didn’t go away, but it was lower, and the result was a tighter labor market that benefited the very [immigrant] people that I think this reporter is genuinely is rooting for.
…
We’ve run what amounts to a social experiment a couple of times which shows that you can reduce immigration and improve the lot of workers. She doesn’t think that’s possible, and so she’s putting forth a way … that makes it a little more humane.
Valdes’s article is headlined “Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works.”
Valdes’s plans to trade citizenship for five years of grueling work will be popular among investors, for example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and George W. Bush. In 2004, Bush said:
New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.
The employer-first policy is now backed by President Joe Biden and his deputies.
As Valdes tries to push more migrants through the cheap-labor exploitation mill, she dismisses the option enshrined in American laws.
The popular — but unenforced — laws limit migration to push the nation’s economy towards a tight labor market and high wages. Those high wages would prod CEOs and investors to invest in high-tech automation and wage-boosting productivity and to seek more buyers for U.S. goods by investing in developing countries.
Valdes’s article is also silent about the costs and harms of cheap labor migration.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow further reduces the political clout of native-born Americans because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — especially labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
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