During the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this weekend, President Trump broke from his past opposition to the country’s mass legal immigration system, instead touting a legal immigration system that benefits “our corporations.”
While Trump mentioned he wanted to end the process known as “chain migration,” where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country, and the Diversity Visa Lottery, which admits 55,000 random foreign nationals from around the globe to the U.S. every year, the president said he supported admitting more foreign workers to take coveted American jobs to help the big business lobby and corporate interests.
“We need an immigration policy that helps all Americans thrive, flourish, prosper. We need an immigration policy that’s going to be great for our corporations and our great companies,” Trump said. “We need an immigration policy where people coming into our country can love our country and love our fellow citizens.”
“And now, we want people to come in, we need workers to come in but they’ve got to come in legally and they’ve got to come in through merit,” Trump said.
Over the last two months, Trump has regularly touted his support for admitting more foreign workers to the country to compete against America’s working and middle class for jobs, a reversal from his commitment in 2015, 2016, and 2017, where he vowed to reduce overall legal immigration levels to boost the wages of U.S. workers.
Trump was once so supportive of reducing the current unfettered foreign labor competition that American workers have been subjected to through legal immigration levels that he pledged to halt all immigration until the country was at full employment.
“Before any new green cards are issued to foreign workers abroad, there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers,” Trump’s 2015 immigration policy papers stated.
Trump’s shift from a wage-boosting legal immigration system to one that benefits corporations and their shareholders concides with recent big business lobby influence over his White House, at the behest of advisers Jared Kushner and Brooke Rollins.
As Breitbart News reported, an alliance of mostly globalist organizations and business groups have had access to the White House to discuss the national legal immigration policy. These groups include Koch Industries, the George W. Bush Center, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).
Increasing legal immigration would cut the job prospects of the at least 13 million working-age Americans who are either unemployed, not in the labor force but want a job, or who are working part-time jobs but want a good-paying full-time job.
Out of those 13 million Americans who are available for U.S. jobs, about 6.5 million are unemployed. Of those unemployed, close to 13 percent are American teenagers who are ready for entry-level U.S. jobs — the exact jobs that low-skilled foreign workers generally tend to take.
About 1.6 million Americans are not in the labor force at all, but they want a job, including about 426,000 discouraged American workers who are demoralized by their job prospects. Also, there are 5.1 million Americans who are working part-time jobs but who want full-time jobs. More than 1.4 million of these U.S. part-time workers said they had looked for full-time jobs but could not find any.
Mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, puts downward pressure on Americans’ wages, researchers have repeatedly noted.
Every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an American workers’ occupation reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent, researcher Steven Camarotta has found. This means the average native-born American worker today has their weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.
In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by perhaps more than 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.
Likewise, every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.
Those benefitting from increasing legal immigration levels are corporate executives, Wall Street, real estate investors, big business, and multinational conglomerates that would enjoy a flooded labor market with reduced wages, more workers, added residents who need housing, and additional consumers to buy their products.
The mass importation of legal immigrants — mostly due to President George H.W. Bush’s Immigration Act of 1990, which expanded legal immigration levels — diminishes job opportunities for the roughly four million young American graduates who enter the workforce every year wanting good-paying jobs.
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 foreign workers. Meanwhile, if legal immigration continues, there will be 69 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. by 2060. This would represent an unprecedented electoral gain for the Left, as Democrats win about 90 percent of congressional districts where the foreign-born population exceeds the national average.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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