A new ad by President Trump’s re-election campaign goes after Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden for wanting to flood the United States labor market with millions of illegal aliens.
The ad notes Biden’s support for providing amnesty to the roughly 11 to 22 million illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S. — a plan that Democrats have said is first on their list if they sweep the November elections — while acknowledging that immigration is a labor issue, a populist principle that Biden has long denied.
“Citizenship … for 11 million undocumented folks,” Biden says in the ad.
“That means 11 million illegal immigrants competing for American jobs, eligible for free healthcare, Social Security, and Medicare,” a narrator states. “America can’t afford Joe Biden.”
Indeed, Biden’s immigration plan includes an amnesty for illegal aliens currently living in the U.S., freeing all future border crossers into the country while they await immigration hearings, taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens, and restarting welfare-dependent legal immigration.
Providing taxpayer-funded healthcare to all illegal aliens would likely drive up costs for American taxpayers, costing an estimated $23 billion to $66 billion every year.
Longer lasting costs, though, would come in the form of crush wages and labor market gains for America’s working and middle class who would be instantly forced to compete against newly legalized foreign nationals under the Biden plan.
There are currently 30 to 40 million unemployed and underemployed Americans, all of whom want full-time employment with competitive wages and good benefits. Economists have found that their job opportunities and wages can be easily diminished by high immigration levels.
One particular study by the Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camarota revealed that for every one percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupation, their weekly wages are cut by perhaps 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by potentially 8.75 percent, since more than 17 percent of the workforce is foreign-born.
The high immigration policy is a boon for giant corporations, real estate investors, Wall Street, university systems, and Big Agriculture that can cash in on an economy that offers low wages to a flooded U.S. labor market.
In contrast, Trump has sought to remake the U.S. economy by tightening the labor market through less foreign competition against Americans, thus shifting bargaining power away from business and to workers.
Trump’s latest measure halted visa programs while tens of millions of Americans are jobless due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis. The executive order seeks to shore up about 600,000 U.S. jobs for unemployed Americans that would have otherwise been taken by foreign workers on visa programs such as the H-1B, H-2B, J-1, L, and H-4 visas.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.