Sen. Amy Klobuchar is promising to tear down President Donald Trump’s border reforms that have almost stopped the northward flood of poor migrants into Americans’ workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools, and that have also raised wages and opened opportunities for sidelined Americans.
But Americans need immigrants, the Minnesota Democrat insists — without admitting migrants also force down wages and force up housing costs. In June 2019, she said:
Immigrants, they do not diminish America, they are America … we need to step back and talk about is the economic imperative here … We have a situation right now where we need workers in our fields and in our factories.
“We need workers,” Klobuchar told Fox News’ Bret Baier February 2019, without mentioning Minnesota wages jumped by five percent in 2018 amid the low unemployment rate. She continued:
I think we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and I look at this is not just a moral issue. I actually look at it as an economic issue. When you look at, in my state, we need workers for some of the jobs, especially in rural areas. We have a 2.8 percent unemployment rate.
“To me, this is an economic issue for our country,” Klobuchar told a February 19 Town Hall meeting hosted by CNN. She continued:
We have always been a country that is built by immigrants, right? We all have our stories in America. And I believe that immigrants don’t diminish America, that they are America. That means to me that we need to have comprehensive immigration reform, something I’ve long supported. And I view this, first of all, if you look around our country, something like around 70 of our Fortune 500 CEOs — this is a few years back — were immigrants … We have immigrants that have built this country.
Klobuchar repeatedly says immigration should provide employers with more workers while ignoring the supply-and-demand reality that worker shortages push up wages and force employers to buy more wage-boosting labor-saving machinery. For example, her plan for rural areas suggest that employers are entitled to get imported workers when Americans refuse to work for low wages:
Senator Klobuchar is also committed to passing comprehensive immigration reform in the first year of her presidency. Immigrants accounted for more than a third of rural population growth from 2000 to 2018 and comprehensive immigration should include providing a pathway to citizenship and updated policies that will help rural communities get the workers they need when they need them.
Klobuchar’s business-first immigration platform promises to raze Trump’s border reforms that are now blocking much illegal immigration and pressuring employers to raise wages for employees.
Her platform says she will allow migrants to seek asylum in the U.S. without leaving their home countries, will allow migrants to get asylum with claims of domestic violence. She will allow migrants who bring children to get released into the United States, will force more catch-and-release by shrinking detention spaces and banning private prisons and will convert deportation funds into welfare programs for migrants.
Those policies helped end the 2019 cross-border flood of roughly one million people in 2019, including hundreds of thousands of children who will further crowd the K-12 schools needed y the children of blue-collar Americans.
The 2019 inflow of one million migrants arrived alongside the one million new legal immigrants invited by the federal government and the more than one million foreign contract-workers who have been hired by private companies. That huge mass of three million migrants and contract workers are often eager to work for low wages, to share tenement housing, and also to push aside many of the four million Americans who turn 18 each year.
Klobuchar’s immigration platform revives the Cold War claims that American is a ‘Nation of Immigrants,” even though it is a nation of 285 million native-born American adults and children. Her immigration platform outlines:
Senator Klobuchar believes that immigrants don’t diminish America, they are America. She stands on the shoulders of immigrants and knows that immigration is a key part of moving our economy and our country forward. She is also proud to represent a state that has the largest Somali population and the second largest Hmong population, many of whom arrived as refugees.”
The Minnesota Senator has said many times she supported the 2014 ‘Gang of Eight’ amnesty that would have added 30 million immigrants to the nation’s population in just ten years.
A 2013 report by the Congressional Budget Office predicted the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and immigration bill would reduce the share of income that goes to wage earners and increase the share that goes to investors. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
All that cheap labor would boost corporate profits and spike the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers forces down wages.
“If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs, wages are going to go up.”