The George W. Bush Presidential Center is helping to develop a White House immigration policy, as it is urging the government to help CEOs and investors hire an unlimited number of foreigners in place of white-collar and blue-collar Americans.
Employers should be allowed to freely hire foreign graduates for middle-class jobs, said the center’s recommendations. “Congress and the Administration should eliminate, or at least increase, the visa cap” for foreign college graduates, says the center’s recommendations on immigration.
“Industries like agriculture, construction, landscaping, and hospitality rely on low-skilled foreign workers to fill vacant jobs … A higher cap [on the inflow of workers] tied to labor market demand would better serve the needs of American businesses,” said the recommendations, which would eliminate any future wage-raising labor shortages.
If Americans’ wages and salaries begin to rise, the imported labor will rush in to end the labor shortage, the recommendations suggest. The extra imported labor would spread through the economy when rising “wage levels signal where the most pressing labor needs exist,” the recommendations say.
In sharp contrast, voters’ wages rose by three percent nationwide during 2018 because of Trump’s “Hire American” low-immigration policy. Wages rose by 4.6 percent for people who switched jobs and by 5.2 percent in Minnesota where migrants have increased the labor force by only ten percent. Wages barely climbed during 2018 in states that have a large percentage of imported labor.
The institute’s wage-cutting, open border recommendations are important because the institute has been invited by White House officials to help develop a pro-business immigration policy that would effectively end President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “Hire American.”
The White House process was sketched out by the McClatchy news service:
“What we want to do is kind of figure out what are the things that everyone agrees on,” the official said. “Where are the areas where there is disagreement and then what we can do is take all that to the president and then let him and the vice president, let them make decisions on what our policy will be.”
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According to meeting agendas obtained by McClatchy, those invited to sessions with Kushner come from some of Trump’s core constituencies in the worlds of religion, law enforcement, agriculture and business. They include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Heritage Foundation, Association of Builders and Contractors, Faith and Freedom Coalition, Council on National Policy, George W. Bush Center and Select Milk Producers.
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One participant described [Trump son-in-law Jared] Kushner as listening a lot and encouraging others to speak. He is less interested in the finer details of immigration policy and focused on reaching a consensus, that participant said. Two people involved said Kushner asks people to talk about what they want instead of what they oppose.
The Bush center’s recommendations do not mention the concerns of Trump’s 2016 voters, such as stagnant wages, the rising student debt owed by American graduates, the rising real estate costs and healthcare bills which Americans must pay, nor the decade-long freeze on Americans’ salaries since legal immigration was tripled by President Geoge H.W. Bush’s 1990 immigration expansion bill.
In fact, the Bush center says immigration policy should be designed to grow the economy first, not salaries or wages. The center’s focus on growth via the importation of consumers, renters, and workers would help investors, real estate owners, employers, and immigrants and undermine Americans who are seeking to raise their wages and to build a better and wealthier society for themselves and their children. The recommendations say:
The objective of immigration policy should be to affirm America as the land of opportunity — where people of any background can work hard, develop ideas, and benefit from the fruits of their labor.
The focus on immigrants echoes the progressives’ claim that America is a “land of immigrants,” not a land of Americans.
The Bush report also suggests that immigrants are more valuable than Americans and their children. “America’s greatest advantage has always been its ability to attract diverse people from all corners of the globe and bring them together to build the American dream,” the report says, ignoring Americans’ world-changing history of solidarity, trust, cooperation, inventiveness, and hard work.
The center also calls for an amnesty of illegals, while noting that deportation of illegals will reduce the labor supply. “Removing all unauthorized immigrants would cause the labor force to shrink by around 4.5 percent and could lead to reductions of GDP up to $4.7 trillion over ten years.”
Any reduction of the labor supply would force investors and employers to raise Americans’ wages if they wanted to keep their existing employees or hire new employees. “A pathway to citizenship is the most reasonable solution,” says the Bush center.
The center’s business-first, society-second, approach is made clear at the center’s web page. “At the George W. Bush Institute, we believe immigration policy should be used as a tool for economic growth and prosperity.”
The center declined to answer questions from Breitbart News.
The center’s open border for business plan echoes the repeated efforts by President George W. Bush to enact a pro-investor “any willing worker” law which would allow employers to hire anyone from around the world. Bush’s “any willing worker” plan was blocked in 2001, so he backed amnesties in Congress in 2006 and 2007 which created the open-ended “Probationary Z Visa.” The Z visa plan offered work permits to all migrants who reached the United States within one year — and gave border officials just 24 hours to prove the migrants’ documents were fakes. The ambitious proposal quickly failed.
In 2013, Bush also backed the huge “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill which sought to flood the middle-class labor market by offering two ways to provide green cards to an unlimited number of foreign graduates. The amnesty bill so skewed the labor market towards investors that the Congressional Budget Office reported, “the rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades.”
In 1990, Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, signed an immigration deal that roughly tripled the legal immigration rate, shifted wealth from wage earners to investors, and spiked stock market values.
The 2006 and 2007 amnesty plans were so unpopular among voters that Bush’s poll ratings sank from roughly 45 percent at the start of 2006 down to roughly 35 percent at the end of 2007, and then-Sen. Barack Obama used his opposition to build his 2008 outsider campaign. After the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty was approved by the Senate, the Senate Democrats lost nine seats, so allowing Trump to have a Senate majority in 2017.
Business groups and Democrats tout skewed polls that prod Americans to declare support for migrants and for the claim that the United States is an economy-expanding “Nation of Immigrants,” not a nation of Americans.
The alternative “priority or fairness” polls — as well as the 2016 election — show that voters put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a globalized, high-immigration economy.
The federal policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That annual inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as the population of two million visa workers and eight million working illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees, especially the wages earned by the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The federal government’s cheap labor policy 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 millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.
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