During President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address (SOTU), the president asserted that it is working- and middle-class Americans who are left paying the price for unchecked, mass illegal immigration to the United States.
“Meanwhile, working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration — reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools and hospitals, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net,” Trump said.
It is true that working- and middle-class Americans are forced to subsidize mass illegal immigration to the country. Every year, illegal immigration of hundreds of thousands of illegal alien residents costs American taxpayers about $116 billion.
As Trump noted, America’s working and middle class also are burdened with stagnant and crushed wages as they are forced to compete against cheaper, illegal alien workers. In California, specifically, a flood of illegal immigration to the state depressed construction worker wages from $45 an hour in the 1980s to now $11 an hour.
In the last decade alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual low-skilled immigration scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.