Big business interests are ramping up their lobbying for amnesty for illegal aliens and more legal immigration to the United States as nearly 16 million Americans remain jobless and millions more are underemployed.

On Thursday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce held a virtual conference pushing to import more foreign workers to the U.S. to fill American jobs.

Mary Beth Sewald, the CEO of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, said immigrants, not Americans, “built” the U.S. and are the “foundation of this country” while advocating for amnesty and more legal immigration.

Amnesty, Sewald said, is “absolutely vital” to the post-pandemic recovery.

For the upcoming fiscal year, businesses are seeking to outsource nearly 310,000 high-skilled jobs through the H-1B visa program, according to data published by the Dallas Morning News.

Similar trends are occurring with low-skilled jobs where there has been a 60 percent spike over the last four years in the number of foreign H-2A visa workers that U.S. farms have sought to import.

Even as nearly 16 million Americans are jobless and another 4.6 million are underemployed, business executives said the solution to getting workers is not getting jobless Americans off the sidelines of the labor market but rather inflating the labor market with more foreign workers.

“We don’t have the people for all these tech jobs,” an executive with the firm Bresatech told the Dallas Morning News. “But we could have the people if we would just relax our immigration laws and allow those folks to come over.”

The Chamber, for months, has been lobbying Congress to pass an amnesty for illegal aliens while increasing legal immigration levels. In June, Chamber CEO Suzanne Clarke said the group is leading “the charge” for more immigration, as Breitbart News reported, asking for a doubling of the number of foreign H-1B visa workers that businesses can import.

“The world’s best and brightest who want to pour their talent and energy into our economy should have every opportunity to do so, which is why the Chamber will continue to lead the charge in doubling employment-based immigration, including H-1B and H-2B visas,” Clarke said.

A flooded labor market from mass legal and illegal immigration to the U.S. has had a devastating impact on the nation’s working and middle class while redistributing wealth to the highest earners. While creating an economy that tilts in favor of employers, the economic model helped keep wages stagnate for decades.

Between 1979 to 2013, wage growth for the bottom 90 percent of Americans grew just 15 percent. Meanwhile, wage growth for the top one percent of Americans was nearly 140 percent higher.

Researchers have found that a flooded labor market can easily diminish job opportunities and wages for Americans.

One particular study by the Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camarota revealed that for every one percent increase in the immigrant portion of an 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 as more than 17 percent of the workforce is foreign-born.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.