President Barack Obama grudgingly admitted Tuesday night that mass-immigration does reduce Americans’ wages.
The admission came in the final year of his eight-year tenure, during which a huge inflow of low-wage workers — who double as welfare-funded consumers — has kept Americans’ wages flat and the stock market running high.
The final official text of his Jan. 12 State of the Union speech said “Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.”
But he departed from the text, and actually said that “immigrants aren’t the principal reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.”
When he said “principal,” he admitted that immigration has at least a partial impact on wages, even as he tried to pin most of the wage-cutting blame on CEOs who keep pace with their competitors by rationally paying lower wages during a government-imposed glut of native and imported labor.
Obama’s admission that immigration cuts wages is a rare acknowledgement by an establishment politician that the law of supply and demand does operate in the labor market, despite much denial by immigration-boosters.
But it is also a politically awkward admission by Obama — because Obama and his establishment allies in the GOP and in business want to increase the annual inflow of foreign workers and consumers into the U.S. economy. House Speaker Paul Ryan is one of those allies — he’s been pushing for years to allow companies to hire “any willing worker” from the U.S. or overseas.
In 2013, for example, Obama used existing laws and his presidential power to pump up the inflow to 2 million foreign workers, even as 4 million young Americans began looking for jobs. Unsurprisingly, that year, the extra foreign labor flattened wages, boosted corporate profits and spiked the stock market.
The extra immigration also cuts wages for American white-collar professionals, who are locked out of jobs and good wages by a resident population of at least 1 million foreign college-grad guest-workers, plus millions more immigrant college-grads.
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That’s also obviously a bad deal for Americans, who see their own and their children’s wages, political power and civic peace traded away for the mutual benefit of progressives, business groups and foreign migrants and cultures.
Obama has long known that mass immigration cuts wages — but that’s a price he’s willing to impose on Americans to achieve his progressive fundamental transformation of the United States. Obama made his intentions clear in 2006, when he wrote in his autobiography that large-scale migration hurts the wages of African-Americans.
“This huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole… [but] it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans,” Obama admitted.
But those immigrants would help the Democratic Party, he wrote. “In my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a coalition that could help America live up to its promise,” he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.”
That reach for progressive power cancels Americans’ right to control their borders, says Obama. In November 2014, for example, Obama told a Chicago audience that “there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.”
“Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently… that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration,” Obama said in the same Chicago speech, which was intended to justify his decision to grant work-permits to roughly 5 million foreign migrants living illegally in the United States.
Obama’s give-away was later stopped — perhaps temporarily — by federal courts, not by the GOP’s leaders in Congress.