Watch–Democrat Abigail Spanberger Parrots Business Lobby: ‘Employers’ Need Amnesty for Illegal Aliens

Abigail Spanberger, Rep. Dave Brat’s (R-VA) opponent in Virginia’s 7th District, says amnesty for all 12 million to 22 million illegal aliens living across the United States is necessary to “meet the needs of the employers.”

Spanberger parroted the usual talking points of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable on the issue of immigration, claiming that amnesty for illegal aliens is necessary to inflate the labor market, drive down wages, and provide cheap foreign workers to employers.

“We need comprehensive immigration reform that is strong on border security and strengthing our points of entry,” Spanberger said. “But we also need immigration reform that will meet the needs of the employers, here throughout the 7th District, here throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

“And we need comprehensive immigration reform to give certainty to DREAMers, to children who were brought here through no fault of their own by their parents,” Spanberger said, endorsing an amnesty for all illegal aliens eligible and enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Brat rebutted Spanberger’s claims that amnesty for illegal aliens helps American citizens.

“As the labor supply goes up with a huge amnesty, American wages go down, American jobs go down, and so our efforts [on avoiding amnesty] have been very positive,” Brat said.

“My opponent falls to the very far left on this issue of immigration,” Brat continued. “She has been on the record in favor of sanctuary cities … she’s saying don’t follow the law of the land.”

“The ICE agents are the ones who are protecting us from the 300 million lethal doses of fentanyl last year, the heroin, the opioids, the human trafficking,” Brat said.

Spanberger’s claims that amnesty is necessary to provide readily available cheap foreign workers to businesses are the same talking points used by the business lobby that has advocated for years for an expansive amnesty for all illegal aliens that would drive floods of illegal and legal immigration to the U.S., further driving down wages for Americans.

In a case of wage depression due to mass immigration, California’s construction industry saw once good wages in the 1980’s suddenly decreased and flatlined due to massive amounts of illegal and low-skilled legal immigration to the region.

Blaine Taylor, a whistleblower, said the construction industry in California once offered a starting wage of about $45 an hour in the late 1980s. Fast-forward to 2018 — nearly two decades into when illegal aliens began flooding the industry — he now says that wages have fallen by more than half, standing at just $11 an hour.

A recent Harvard/Harris Poll revealed that nearly half of Americans now say illegal immigration crushes U.S. wages. About 73 percent of supporters of President Trump’s say illegal immigration reduces wages for Americans. Another nearly 60 percent of Americans living in rural regions of the country say illegal immigration reduces U.S. wages.