Exclusive–Kris Kobach: Surge of Illegal Immigration ‘Undercutting’ Trump’s Wage Hikes for Working Class

Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach says the flood of illegal immigrants arriving in the United States on a daily basis is “undercutting” President Trump’s “Hire American” economy by threatening to choke recent wage hikes for America’s blue collar and working class.

Trump’s populist-nationalist agenda of increasing immigration enforcement throughout the interior of the U.S. and discouraging the hiring of illegal aliens has led to historic four percent wage gains over the last 12 months for the country’s blue collar and working class.

Kobach, though, told SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight that the wage growth for blue collar American workers will be “hurt” if soaring illegal immigration levels —  up to 1.5 million illegal aliens could be added to the 11 to 22 million illegal population this year — are not quickly stopped.

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Kobach said:

[Rising illegal immigration levels are] going to hurt those good numbers. So the numbers are good – in the last 12 months we’ve seen 3.4 percent average marginal increase in wages. That’s terrific. We haven’t seen wage growth like that in more than a decade, but the current treatment of these caravans is going to hurt that. [Emphasis added]

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We are seeing tens of thousands of unskilled, largely unskilled, being brought onto the market, right off these caravans, and that is going to have a negative effect on wages. We’re undercutting the progress that the president’s administration has made in wage growth if we continue to hand out work permits to these asylum applicants, these caravan members. [Emphasis added]

Kobach said that border crossers and illegal aliens who are detained briefly before being released into the interior of the country, through the Trump administration’s expanded Catch and Release policy, are eventually able to obtain work permits, which allows them to compete against America’s poor, working, and middle class for blue collar U.S. jobs.

“Believe it or not, when these people come in and say the magic word asylum, regardless of whether they have any plausible claim to asylum, we’re giving them what’s called immigration parole, which is then used as a basis for giving them a work permit,” Kobach said. “So we’re handing these people a work permit before they even establish that they are entitled to asylum.”

As Breitbart News most recently reported, American construction workers are currently enjoying a $25.34 average hourly wage — six percent more in wage earnings when compared to the year before — thanks to Trump’s efforts to tighten the labor market.

Those wage hikes, though, face fierce downward pressure when mass illegal and legal immigration admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals to the country every year, forcing America’s working and middle class to compete against a growing number of cheaper, foreign workers.

Research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has discovered that the country’s Washington, D.C.-imposed mass illegal and legal immigration policy shifts about $500 billion in wages away from working and middle class Americans toward new arrivals and economic elites. The study’s results dictate that mass immigration is a wealth redistribution program that benefits corporate executives, big business, and employers, while crippling the wages and job prospects of American workers.

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6-9:00 p.m. Pacific).