There are no Americans in America and no history of America — just immigrants and their “story,” says a new video by former President George W. Bush’s Bush Center.
“America’s story is an immigrant story,” says the video. “Now as before, American is a nation of immigrants,” says the video which refers to 280 million Americans — including many who voted for George W. Bush in 2000 — merely as an unnamed blob of “population,” “labor force,” “workers,” and even “natives.”
America would be weak without immigrants, the video argues, as it declares that “immigrants make America strong.”
In fact, the video even describes the American children of immigrants as “immigrants” to help minimize the impact of Americans on their own nation.
The Bush Center’s pro-immigrant line echoes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s repeated claim that even illegal immigrants are “the best of the best … they make America more American when they come here and that’s why our country will not stagnate.”
The Bush video does show why imported workers and imported consumers are good financial news for investors.
The key number for investors is that immigrants almost double the annual increase in the labor force and so help to prevent a “tight labor market” which would force businesses and investors to compete for scant workers by offering higher wages.
Immigration provided 45 percent share labor force increase from 2006 to 2016, the report says. In practice, the policy provided employers with 9.2 extra million workers (and consumers) during a decade of massive unemployment, wealth loss, and low wages.
The Bush Center’s “grow the economy” pitch hides that fact that a high-immigration policy grows stock market values for investors and CEOs while freezing or cutting wages and salaries for employees and voters.
In contrast, the “Hire American” policy set by President Donald Trump has created a tight labor market by simultaneously growing the economy and blocking an increase in legally imported workers.
Trump’s “Hire American” is forcing employers to raise wages and working conditions before the 2020 election — at the cost of delivering fewer profits to investors.
The Wall Street Journal reported March 8 that “hourly worker wages … were up 3.4% from a year earlier in February, the strongest pace since April 2009.” The Journal continued:
Jermaine Waller is one worker feeling the benefits of higher wages. After eight years working minimum-wage security jobs, Mr. Waller, 31, grew frustrated and pursued training, becoming certified as a collision-repair technician.
In February he started work at Blossom Chevrolet in Indianapolis, Ind., which offered Mr. Waller a raise to $17.50 an hour to lure him from another dealership. He said a shorter commute means he could surprise his son with lunch at school.
“I can afford the stuff I never had—and to be the Dad I never had,” he said.
In response, the Bush center is lobbying the White House to cut voters’ wages by approving more H-1B visa for foreign graduates and more H-2A and H-2B visas for foreign blue-collar workers:
The Bush Center has been invited to present its cheap-labor views to White House officials:
The views are posted online and say increased immigration of college graduates via the H-1B program, increased immigration of blue-collar workers via the H-2B and H-2A programs, the award of more green cards to Indian college graduate outsourcing workers, and amnesty for illegals. The extra workers should be free to take jobs where wage levels are rising, the report says: “Employees should be granted the visa, allowing wage levels to signal where the most pressing labor needs exist.”
The Bush Center urges the government to enforce the immigration laws, but it does not suggest that the government enact enforcement reforms before the labor supply is expanded.
The Bush Center’s policy pitch is being touted by Todd Schulte, the director for a lobbying group created by West coast investors, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Schulte, Zuckerberg, and most of the FWD.us board are Democrats but are strong advocates for the high-immigration, cheap-labor economic policy favored by the establishment.
The Bush Center’s upbeat video does not address the diversity and conflict caused by immigration, which hurts the ability of ordinary Americans to control their government, nor the 2016 election when an outsider was elected to reverse the elites’ cheap-labor economic consensus.
The cheap-labor policy was set in the 1960s after almost 20 years of rapid wage growth.
In an October 2018 article for Time magazine, Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy explained the government-boosting origin of the “Nation of Immigrants” claim:
Few felt it as deeply as President John F. Kennedy. In his 1964 book A Nation of Immigrants, recently re-released, my great-uncle outlines the compelling case for immigration, in economic, moral, and global terms. “The abundant resources of this land provided the foundation for a great nation,” he writes. “But only people could make the opportunity a reality. Immigration provided the human resources.”
Both Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush strongly favored this cheap-labor policy. In 1990, the first President Bush signed a bill doubling legal immigration, and in 2006 and 2007, George W. Bush pushed for a bill that would have further increased immigration.
In his two terms, George W. Bush pushed to enact a pro-investor “any willing worker” law that would have allowed 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 that 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.
Since Bush’s 1990 bill, the rising population of immigrants in the United States has prompted the Democratic Party to shift its attention, rhetoric, and policies away from the economic interests of blue-collar Americans and towards immigrants. In February 2018, for example, Pelosi gave a long speech in the House in which she praised illegal migrants as better than Americans:
We recognize that they are a blessing to America … the dreamers are all over our country, Mr. Speaker, they are a blessing so across the board …
These are the best of the best. They are so fabulous …
Let us acknowledge the dreamers and their optimism, their inspiration to make America more American…
The same pro-elite, pro-migrant, anti-American stance is echoed by establishment columnists, including Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times columnist who wrote in January 2019:
But economically and strategically, open borders isn’t just a good plan — it’s the only chance we’ve got. America is an aging nation with a stagnant population. We have ample land to house lots more people, but we are increasingly short of workers. And on the global stage, we face two colossi — India and China — which, with their billions, are projected to outstrip American economic hegemony within two decades.
The establishment’s immigration policy has predictably widened the wealth gap, but it also resulted in Trump’s 2016 defeat of Jeb Bush and his election to the presidency in 2016.
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after high school or university. The federal government then imports roughly 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest workers and roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and it also tolerates about eight million illegal workers.
In 2019, because of catch-and-release rules mandated by Congress and the courts, the federal government also will likely release at least 350,000 Central American laborers into the U.S. job market, even as at least 500,000 more migrants sneak past U.S. border defenses or overstay their visas.
Overall, in 2019, the U.S. government will allow at least two million new foreign workers into the United States to compete for the starter jobs sought by the latest wave of four million U.S. graduates. The new migrants also undermine the 24 million other Americans and the roughly three million legal immigrants who have joined the workforce since 2014.
This federal policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth for investors shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar graduates and blue-collar foreign labor.
This cheap labor economic policy forces Americans to compete even for low wage jobs, it 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, burden college graduates, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.