President Donald Trump’s enforcement of immigration laws has delivered hundreds of jobs at higher wages to sidelined African Americans in Chicago after a Swiss-owned bakery was penalized for employing roughly 800 illegals.
The good news was admitted in a Chicago Sun-Times article:
Ed French, owner of Elgin-based Metro Staff Inc., says his company became the main provider of [replacement] workers for the bakery and that about 80 percent of them are black. According to French … wages [are] up by about 25 cents an hour, to just above minimum wage.
He says everyone hired through his company is permitted to work in the country and has passed a background check and drug test.
According to a former consultant to the bakery, MSI paid the black workers $14 an hour, versus the $10 an hour the Mexican workers were making through Labor Network.
Newly hired Latino-Americans are also getting the higher wage.
The wage-cutting illegals — mostly Mexicans — were employed at the Cloverhill bakery in Northwest Chicago and the company’s other bakeries in Cicero and Romeoville. When the illegals were fired, the company’s output fell and it lost customers. The Swiss owner, Aryzta, has since sold the Cloverhill bakery to Hostess Brands.
Nationwide, many companies and their allied politicians are complaining that Trump’s pro-American policy is leaving them with few imported workers and is forcing up wages. However, CEOs have kept wage increases to just a 1 percent increase from January 2017 to January 2018, after considering inflation.
Trump’s win for Chicagoans comes as local Democratic politicians try to help illegal immigrants instead of Americans. For example, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin spend much of December, January and February trying to win an amnesty for at least 3 million illegal immigrants, which would have ensured a flood of new legal workers for jobs in Chicago and other cities. On January 15, for example, Durbin told reporters:
I’m focused on one thing — not that meeting [with Presidenet Donald Trump] — but on making sure that those who are being protected by DACA and eligible for the DREAM Act have a future in America. I am focused on that full time.
Durbin’s amnesty would also have denied the jobs and wage-raises to the roughly 600 African Americans now working at Cloverhill.
Trump’s pro-American policy has won him significant support among working-class blacks as black unemployment has fallen to historic lows.
The good economic news from Chicago is offset by the increased diversity and conflict imposed by the pro-immigration Democratic and business groups. OakPark.com reported comments from Dan Giloth, a project director with the Chicago-based Coalition Against Segregation of Employees group:
“Although they lost lots of [illegal] workers through the ICE audit, their response has been hiring lots of workers, mainly blacks, giving them little training, working them excessive hours and giving them mandatory 12- to 16-hour shifts,” he said. “When workers get hurt, they’re essentially thrown away” …
OakPark.com also reported:
Lisa Pintado-Vertner, a member of Oak Park Call to Action, said that employees have told her that Aryzta tries to “pit groups against each other, because if you divide you can conquer,” she said.
“We hear stories from African Americans who say Latinos won’t speak English to me and Latinos who say blacks are lazy.”
The Sun-Times reported that African American employees at Cloverhill summoned Trump’s ICE agents amid blue-collar conflicts over language, hours, shifts, favoritism and pay.
Lynne Lane, a union steward at Cloverhill, says there are tensions as the two groups work side by side. Lane, who is black, says it was black workers at the bakery who called a government hotline to report the Mexican workers to immigration authorities.
“It was [African American] workers in the plant that saw, you know, like I said, that had been treated unfairly and treated like secondary-class citizens” by Hispanic workers, Lane says. “So it was a whole lot of employees in the company. Well, they was given a number, as far as I know. They was given a number to call … to call Immigration.”
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via 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.
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