President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend immigration will protect wages for Americans, according to a Tuesday morning statement from the White House’s press secretary.
“President Trump is committed to protecting the health and economic well-being of American citizens as we face unprecedented times,” said the statement from press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. The statement continued:
As President Trump has said, “Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers.” At a time when Americans are looking to get back to work, the action is necessary.
The statement comes as pro-migration business lobbies and progressives complain that Trump’s suspension is “xenophobic” or “racist.”
For decades, the flood of legal and illegal immigrants has been used to drown blue-collar wages in construction, trucking, retail, the food industry, and manufacturing. This economic trend has pushed millions of blue-collar voters — including many blacks and Latinos — to back Trump in 2016.
In response, Trump promised a policy of “Hire American” during his 2017 inauguration speech.
Blue-collar wages rose rapidly in 2018 and 2019, partly because Trump’s border policies slowed and then stopped the inflow of blue-collar migrants from South America.
McEnany’s statement was silent about the huge impact of immigration and visa workers on American college graduates — even though the graduates are an important swing-voting bloc in the 2020 election.
Since his inauguration, Trump has not curbed the inflow of white-collar migrants via the various visa programs, such as the H-1B and OPT programs.
These white-collar programs are used by CEOs and investors to keep roughly 1.5 million foreign workers in U.S. college jobs and to force down salaries for a wide range of American graduates. For example, one U.S. computer expert told Breitbart News that he is being paid just $20 an hour by a major U.S. bank, after starting his careers in the early 1980s.
In general, business groups — including the influential tech companies — strongly support the salary-cutting white-collar visa programs. At the same time, Democrats prefer to defend the inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants each year.
Trump’s deputies are likely to continue some visa programs.
The preserved programs likely include the H-2A program that delivers carefully scheduled blocs of farmworkers to agricultural job sites around the country, the J-1 visa for foreign-trained doctors, and the 0-1 “genius visa” program that allows accomplished scientists and business executives into America.
Many polls show that American voters like — and want to like — immigrants. But the polls also show that the public strongly objects to companies hiring foreign workers before American employees. For example, an August 2017 poll reported that 68 percent of Americans oppose companies’ use of H-1Bs to outsource U.S.-based jobs that could be held by Americans.
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