The American middle class wouldn’t be “seriously” helped by repatriating the country’s population illegal immigrants, President Barrack Obama told an audience in Indiana.
That statement was intended to sneer at Donald Trump’s popular call for the repatriation of at least 11 million illegals, cutbacks on the use of white-collar guest-workers and a pause in the record level of legal immigration, which is now 1 million each year. That’s roughly one legal immigrant for every four Americans who turn 18 every year.
But Obama’s weasel-word — “seriously” — is his hidden admission that America’s weakening middle class would gain from the homeward return of at least 8 million migrants.
As he has said before, without the extra supply of illegal workers, employers will be under more pressure to offer higher wages and worker-training programs to Americans.
Obama has done this hidden-admission trick in prior speeches and in his autobiography — and reporters generally ignore the concession.
Back in in January 2016, Obama told Congress and a national TV audience 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.” But even if not a principal reason, Obama was admitting there that immigrants are a partial reason.
He did the same thing in his 2006 autobiography, when he wrote that “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.”
Watch Here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4601182/obama-admission-immigration
He gets away with this trick because most viewers don’t see the rhetorical flim-flam, and because the establishment media really admires his his verbal dexterity and also supports more immigration. Amusingly, the media has been so determined to ignore the costs of Obama’s migration policy that it was unable to see how Trump’s focus on repatriation, guest-workers, labor supply and wages would completely upturn Americans politics in 2016.
Here’s how Obama repeated the trick in a speech delivered in June 1, in Elkhart, Ind. Ironically, the speech was intended to damage Donald Trump, but Obama’s admission on migration and labor may end up helping the New York upstart.
First came the president’s straw men — the ridiculous claims that Obama says are the true views of his rivals — which are only erected so that Obama can burn his critics as lying lunatics
Here’s the fourth myth: That immigrants are taking all of our jobs.
There is no serious person on the low-immigration/high-wages, side of the nation’s immigration debate who says “all” jobs are being taken by migrants. Obama’s statement was just a fly-by presidential sneer, a nudge-and-wink to the Democratic audience and also a subtle warning of future ridicule to any media deserter who dares follow the obvious data about labor, migration and wages.
Admittedly, it is true that some analyses show that immigrants scooping nearly all the new jobs produced in the early part of Obama’s slow, slow, economic recovery.
All the net job gains among females since the beginning of the recession have gone to foreign-born women, according to data released Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Since the beginning of the recession in December 2007 to April 2015, 1.37 million more immigrant women are employed — from 9,041,000 in December 2007 to 10,413,000 in April 2015.
Native-born women, on the other had saw net employment decline by 143,000 in that same timeframe. From 59,322,000 in December 2007 to 59,179,000 last month.
But no-one in the debate says “immigrants are taking all of our jobs” except for sneering liberals.
Obama’s frequent use of this straw-man debating tactic has become a joke in Washington D.C.
For example, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell’s new autobiography describes McConnell’s reaction to Obama the debater: “After he assigns straw men to your views, he enthusiastically attempts to knock them down with a theatrically earnest re-litigation of what you’ve missed about his brilliance. The topic at hand rarely matters — what to do on the debt limit or what to get for lunch.”
One past that part of his speech, Obama next offers up some finger-wagging fake modesty, an appeal to science and some blatant fakery, and a juvenile insult to President Ronald Reagan;
Now I want to look — let’s look at the numbers. Right now, the number of people trying to cross our border illegally is near its lowest level in 40 years. (Applause.) It’s near its lowest level in 40 years. It’s lower than when it was before I came into office, it’s lower than during [no title] Ronald Reagan’s time.
Unfortunately for Obama, wonks outside the administration have used data from his deputies to calculate the current inflow of illegals, and showed that roughly 550,000 illegals crossed the border in 2014 and another 550,000 illegals crossed in 2015. According to the Center for Immigration Studies;
Our preliminary estimate is that, of the 3.1 million immigrants who arrived in that last two years, about one-third, 1.1 million (or 550,000 annually) were new illegal immigrants, a significant increase from the 700,000 illegal immigrants (350,000 annually) who entered in 2012 and 2013.
The CIS chart looks back at illegal immigration 26 years ago, when the Reagan-era boom was still pulling in a huge number of migrants. That 199o level was still lower than Obama’s spike of 550,000 per year.
Next up, Obama the rhetorical wizard palms the face-up deuce of reality by flipping the topic from illegal immigration to legal immigration, then distracting his audience with some fake honesty, then flicking out the fake ace hidden in his sleeve.
It’s true that new immigrants [legal immigrations, not illegals -ed.] sometimes compete for service and construction jobs [not just sometime, but nearly always -ed.]. But they also start about 30 percent of all new businesses in America. (Applause.)
Thirty percent of all new business? But those businesses tend to be much smaller and employ fewer employees that businesses founded by Americans, in part, because most migrants are unskilled and lack technical training. For example, the median income of immigration households per person is $14,00. For American households, the median income per person is $21,000. Also, 51 percent of immigrant households get welfare, compared to 30 percent of Americans’ households.
Then he delivers the rubber-hammer blow to the low-immigration/high-wages argument, not just once, but twice.
But most important, immigrants are not the main reason wages haven’t gone up for middle-class families … So deporting 11 million immigrants … wouldn’t do anything to seriously help the middle class.
Then he delivered his political pitch for more Democratic-leaning immigrants;
Now, what would help is if we fixed our immigration system the way I’ve proposed, so that everybody plays by the rules, so that we’ve got strong border security … That would grow our economy faster. That would shrink our deficits further. We just need a Congress that’s willing to make it happen. We need a Congress that’s willing to make it happen.
But “grow our economy faster” doesn’t help ordinary Americans because Obama’s bill would have provided employers with a decade-long flood of cheap legal immigrant labor — or three immigrants for every four Americans who graduated from school or college. Even the GOP-steered Congressional Budget Office admitted in 2013 that Obama’s amnesty-and-cheap-labor plan would have cut wages, and shifted more of the nation’s annual income towards wealthy investors and away from ordinary wage-earners for the next 10 or 20 years.
American voters are probably O.K. with Obama’s quickly-palmed “main” and “seriously” admissions. Few Americans want to blame immigrants, or immigration in general, for driving down wages. But many Americans also see cheap, imported labor, both white-collar and blue-collar, as important reasons for the flat-lining of Americans’ wages since even before 2000.
They believe that because there’s plenty of evidence that surplus oil reduces gas prices, bumper crops reduce grocery prices, and that extra immigrant labor forces down wages, even for university-trained white-collar workers. That’s why Trump is almost level with Hillary Clinton in the national polls.
Even economists who say immigration expands the size of the economy will quickly admit that it can reduce wages for the Americans forced to compete with migrants. That downward pressure is made much worse because the federal government offers only to immigrants an immensely valuable government prize for accepting lower-wage jobs — namely, U.S. citizenship for themselves, their spouses, their parents and all their children and descendants.
In contrast, white-collar native-born American already have citizenships. So they cannot accept citizenship in lieu of wages — and they still need higher wages to pay off their college costs.
In 2016 testimony, Harvard professor George Borjas showed how the profits of cheap immigrant labor go to employers, not employees;
If we look at the impact of immigration over the last few decades in the U.S., one rough rule of thumb that comes out is that when you increase supply of workers in a particular group by around 10 percent, the wage of that group will go down by three percent, which is not a trivial number but it’s not a huge number either … So, we have a fifty billion dollar gain on net that accrues to [Americans, plus] a huge redistribution [of wealth] from the people who compete with immigrants, to the people who use immigrants of around half a trillion dollars a year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f94YPWgvm5M
Clearly,Obama needs a better diversion to distract viewers as he hides his admissions that cheap immigrant labor reduces Americans’ wages. Instead of a fancy cloak or some firecrackers, he uses the go-to scapegoat — his on-again, off-again political allies in corporate boardrooms.
That’s not fair — because he recruited those companies in 2013 and 2014 to push his doomed amnesty-and-cheap-labor “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill that has helped launch Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Whatever. So here’s his June 1 version of the blame-it-on-my-allies distraction:
But most important, immigrants are not the main reason wages haven’t gone up for middle-class families. Those decisions are made in the boardrooms of companies where top CEOs are getting paid more than 300 times the income of the average worker.
He used he same distraction in in his January State of the Union Speech;
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.
So why does he keep replaying this cheap rhetorical trick?
Because he gets away with it, and because he thinks poor immigrants are the Democratic Party’s killer app to win perpetual power. At least, that’s what he said in his 2006 autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope.”
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 … In my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a [progressive] coalition that could help America live up to its [progressive] promise.
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.
The nation will find out if Obama’s “black and brown” plan works this November.