The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal is slamming President Donald Trump’s immigration principles with the same complaints, narratives, and terms used by establishment reporters at supposedly liberal publications.
The matched criticism of Trump’s popular and populist pro-American policies highlights the mutually beneficial solidarity of global-minded economic interests with diversity-minded professionals. This year, they have closed ranks to block the public’s demand for higher wages and a redistribution of economic, political and cultural power from the centralized elites back to ordinary Americans.
The journal’s business-first editorial board frankly recognized that immigration reductions would pressure employers n a free market for labor. But the board cloaked its peers’ economic concerns in a selfless declaration for “young adults” threatened by “the restrictionist right”:
The issue is how to fix Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama program that granted work permits and legal immunity to some 800,000 young adults who were brought into the U.S. illegally as minors. Last month the Administration announced that it would end DACA in six months, giving Congress time to pass a permanent fix for these so-called Dreamers …
The new White House demands include 70 immigration “priorities” that amount to everything that the restrictionist right has ever sought. They include appropriating funds to complete a wall along the southern border and slashing legal immigration by half …
The awkward topic of economic self-interest is delayed until the fifth and sixth paragraphs:
[The White House] wants Congress to expand employment-discrimination laws to replace U.S. citizens with foreign workers, which would be a sop to trial lawyers and unions. Just what the American economy needs: more labor lawsuits.
According to the White House document, “immigrants who come here illegally and enter the workforce undermine job opportunities and reduce wages for American workers, as does the abuse of visa programs.” What alternative economy are they living in? The real labor problem is a shortage, as the jobless rate has hit 4.2% nationwide. America’s tight visa caps are sending high-tech jobs to Canada and agricultural production to Mexico …
So the board advises a quick Trump surrender, for humanitarian reasons, of course:
The political reality is that most of Mr. Trump’s demands have no chance of passing no matter which party controls Congress. The President and his anti-immigration strategist—White House aide Stephen Miller —may think DACA is the only carrot big enough to leverage their agenda through Congress. But most Democrats will be only too happy to blame Republicans next year if DACA expires without a fix and young adults start getting deported to countries where they have no family.
This would be a humanitarian calamity, and a monumental lost political opportunity. Mr. Trump needs legislative victories to show he can govern, but his immigration bait and switch may guarantee another failure.
Any surrender from the White House would be a windfall for investors because they would lose once immigration curbs force employers to raise salaries in a tight labor market. Investors, including the co-founders of Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us and Mike Bloomberg, are rallying against the Trump reforms. For example, Bloomberg’s immigration lobbyist said “all the efforts now to use the Dreamers as these political pawns to get the wish list of all these other enforcement measures are only going to undermine that [amnesty] deal … They’re all non-starters.”
Michael Shear at the New York Times reflected the elite’s humanitarian-cloaked support for cheap-labor immigration as he wrote his lede:
WASHINGTON — The White House on Sunday delivered to Congress a long list of hard-line immigration measures that President Trump is demanding in exchange for any deal to protect the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers, imperiling a fledgling bipartisan push to reach a legislative solution …
While it is unclear whether Mr. Trump views the demands as absolute requirements or the beginning of a negotiation, the proposals, taken together, amount to a Christmas-in-October wish list for immigration hard-liners inside the White House. Immigration activists have long opposed many of the proposals as draconian or even racist.
Only in the eighteenth paragraph did Shear briefly follow the money to explain Trump’s purposes:
Administration officials responsible for securing the border and enforcing the nation’s immigration laws told reporters on Sunday night that the changes requested by the president were essential to protecting American workers from unfair competition and deterring what they described as a never-ending flow of illegal immigrants into the country.
In contrast, Trump emphasizes the money in his letter announcing his immigration principles:
The question is what ought to be the priority for Congress? The priority for Congress ought to be to save American lives, protect American jobs, and to improve the well-being of American communities. These reforms accomplish that … the [principles] deal with issues that are of vital importance to community safety and economic security, whether it be protecting low-income African-American and Hispanic workers from unfair displacement, preventing the release of dangerous criminals aliens in our sanctuary cities, closing glaring loopholes in our borders through rules on Unaccompanied Alien Children and asylum reform, ending a system of chain migration that depresses wages and increases unemployment.
At the Washington Post, reporter David Nakamura focused his lede on the interests of illegal immigrants, saying:
The Trump administration released a list of hard-line immigration principles late Sunday that threaten to derail a deal in Congress to allow hundreds of thousands of younger undocumented immigrants to remain in the country legally.
After seven paragraphs, Nakamura demurely mentioned the money, writing:
In a conference call with reporters, White House aides described the proposals as necessary to protect public safety and jobs for American-born workers, which was a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign. The president has moved to tighten border security through executive orders, including curbs on immigration and refugees from some majority-Muslim nations and an increase in deportations.
But instead of explaining the impact of cheap labor on Americans’ wages, Namakmura invited Democrats to claim racism, writing:
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a longtime advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, in an interview called Trump’s proposals “an extension of the white supremacist agenda.” He said it is “fanciful thinking that you can sit down with a man who has based his presidential aspirations and has never wavered from his xenophobic positions. I never understood — I just never got it, how you go from Charlottesville and white supremacists to reaching an agreement with him.”
Politico‘s Seung Min Kim followed the same hide-the-money template, writing in her lede that;
President Donald Trump laid out his immigration principles for Capitol Hill on Sunday — a list of hardline policies that could seriously complicate the prospects of striking a deal with Democrats over the future of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants.
She also hid the money in paragraph seven, briefly writing without elaboration:
In a letter to Congress, Trump said these policy priorities “must be included as part of any legislation addressing” DACA because without the changes, “illegal immigration and chain migration, which severely and unfairly burden American workers and taxpayers, will continue without end.”
“The media is falling down on the job,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “It is not illuminating the important questions – the size of the potential amnesty and its effects,” he told Breitbart News. “But I don’t know if it is necessarily skewing the politics, because who believes these guys anymore?”
In reality, four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But business groups have used their political power to tilt the labor market in their favor, via the federal policy of importing 1 million consumers and workers each year. The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals. Universities employ roughly 100,000 foreign guest workers.
That Washington-imposed economic policy of 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.
The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.
Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most Americans also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with illegals.
Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a growing percentage of the nation’s annual income is shifting to investors and away from employees. The business-funded Hamilton Project suggests that the shift is transferring $1 trillion per year from 160 million employees to the nation’s investors.
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