Author and immigration expert Mickey Kaus says an expansive amnesty for illegal aliens threatens Americans’ wages first and foremost, as a flooded labor market keeps U.S. wages low and stagnant.
In an interview with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday, Kaus told Deputy Political Editor Amanda House that staving off an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens — a plan the GOP House is considering — is “crucial” to securing higher wages for American workers, as President Trump’s tightened labor market has done thus far.
Listen to Mickey Kaus’ full interview here:
Kaus said:
If the amnesty was just the 700,000 people that are in Obama’s DACA program now, that are protected now, it would be limited. We know who they are, the impact would be contained. What [Congress] is talking about is everybody who might be eligible for Obama’s program and even sort of into the future, people who age into it, and that’s like 1.8 million [illegal aliens], but really it’s going to be much more because of the potential for fraud. There’s going to be millions and millions of people coming across the border and then claiming that they’ve been here all along and it’s going to be a big mess. [Emphasis added]
…
We are finally getting to the stage of people who do basic work… maybe not college graduates, maybe college graduates who took majors that have no economic value, are starting to make some money because employers are desperate for workers. So we see Costco raising their wages and some fast food places are paying $17, $18 an hour. There are only a few [fast food chains raising wages], but if the market stays tight, there will be more of them. And that will be a huge shift in American culture that ordinary workers will be able to become middle class people again, or close to middle class, lower middle class at least. [Emphasis added]
Employers want to bring in cheap immigrants to stop this. They would rather not pay wages, so there’s a huge lobbying campaign… that is the crucial economic fight going on now and that’s the main affect of immigration. [Emphasis added]
A group of business first Republicans have signed onto the discharge petition to force a vote to bring an expansive amnesty plan for illegal aliens enrolled and eligible on the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to the House floor.
The discharge petition could lead to the massive DREAM Act amnesty — which could give amnesty to a great portion of the 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. — being passed out of the House and Senate with a veto-proof majority.
In an effort to stop the discharge petition amnesty, House Republicans are working on an immigration compromise bill. The legislation, as Breitbart News reported, would not immediately reduce legal immigration levels, at which more than 1.5 million immigrants enter the U.S. every year.
Mass immigration for decades has resulted in stagnant wages for American workers. In one example, as Breitbart News reported, construction wages in California were once upwards of $45 an hour. When illegal aliens and legal immigrants flooded the U.S. labor market over the past four decades, wages drastically dropped, with starting construction wages at anywhere between $10 to $11 an hour, a whistleblower revealed.
The big business-preferred cheap labor economic model of importing more than one million new legal immigrants every year to compete mostly for working and middle-class jobs against Americans has resulted in decades of stagnant and even decreased wages for U.S. workers:
Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers, 15 years and older, 1960 to 2016.
For instance, the massive importation of low-skilled foreign nationals to the U.S. has translated to a cheap labor economy that has aided in keeping American men’s wages stagnant for at least 44 years, as Breitbart News reported. Median earnings for American men working full-time were actually lower in 2016 than they were in 2007.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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