House Democrats are set to run their congressional campaigns on promising to increase wages for American workers despite their efforts in pushing continued cheap labor immigration.
In their newest campaign slogan “For the People,” Democrats are focusing on three key issues, one of which is a promise to raise the wages of American workers.
Those wage increases — which President Trump has delivered on by seeking to tighten the labor market with stricter immigration enforcement — sought by Democrats are threatened, though, by their campaign to end all immigration enforcement in the U.S.
As Breitbart News has reported, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency — as Democrats have plotted — would allow illegal aliens to enter and settle permanently in the country, flooding the tightened U.S. labor market with low-skilled foreign nationals and depressing wages for America’s working and middle class.
For decades, mass immigration — where the U.S. imports more than 1.5 million immigrants a year — has led to rampant wage stagnation for American workers. Most recent polling shows that nearly half of Americans say illegal immigration crushes U.S. wages.
In a recent case of wage stagnation caused by illegal immigration chronicled by Breitbart News, American workers in the California construction industry had their wages cut in half after floods of illegal aliens inundated the state since the late 1990’s.
“The reality is that a person that was hired as a laborer in 1988, I paid $15 an hour and within a month if I could leave him on the job alone, he got $20 an hour,” a whistleblower explained. “If I hired somebody that already knew how to do certain types of labor or certain types of operations, they would get $20 an hour.”
“Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour,” the whistleblower said.
In widely cited research by the Center for Immigration Studies, researcher Steven Camarotta revealed that for every one percent increase in the immigrant population of a U.S. workers’ occupation or field, the workers’ weekly wage is reduced by about 0.5 percent. In a workforce where the immigrant population makes up about 10 percent of all workers, U.S. wages are reduced by five percent.
The Democrats’ plan to abolish immigration enforcement would reverse the current tighter labor market that Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” agenda has delivered, likely spurring an immediate depression of wages.
Between 1973 and 2017, wages for American workers grew by only ten percent. This means that wages grew by only 0.2% every year over the past more than four decades.
Meanwhile, since 2005, the U.S. has continued to bring in more than a million mostly low-skilled foreign nationals every year. Over the last decade, the U.S. imported more than ten million foreign nationals to the country, exceeding the population of New York City.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.