President Joe Biden’s massive wave of economic migrants is helping employers cut wages, according to a celebratory article in the New York Times.
The article was headlined “Immigration Rebound Eases Shortage of Workers, Up to a Point.” It carefully ignored the legality, popularity, and morality of Biden’s border policy, but declared that Biden’s huge inflow produces economic benefits, and is:
welcome news for the Federal Reserve, which has been concerned that a persistent shortage of workers could send wages higher and lead inflation to become entrenched.
Friday’s employment report for January, showing a blockbuster gain of 517,000 jobs, confirms that the economy continues to demand more labor. Moderating wage growth, however, suggests that enough workers are arriving to keep costs in check.
“When the unemployment rate goes down, you would normally expect wage inflation to go up, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management.
The newspaper also quoted employers who said they are not getting enough replacement workers delivered to them by the federal government.
For example, Al Flores, the general counsel at a group of Tex-Mex restaurants — likely the Gringo’s chain — oversees a workforce of roughly 2,500 people, including about 500 migrants protected by the Temporary Protected Status or the illegal DACA programs.
Under Biden, “it’s gotten a little bit better … because we need the labor,” he told the New York Times reporter, Lydia DePillis.
Glassdoor reports that cooks at the restaurant chain are paid $35,439 a year. In contrast, few migrants compete for journalism jobs, and Glassdoor also reports that New York Times reporters are paid roughly $91,252 a year.
The reality of migration-imposed wage cuts on Americans is fully recognized by investors and deeply unpopular among voters. For example, by 50 percent to 22 percent, Americans agree companies “should raise wages and try harder to recruit Americans even if it causes the prices of their products to rise,” according to a July 2022 poll by YouGov.com.
However, pressure from GOP donors deters GOP legislators from spotlighting the extensive economic damage done to U.S. voters — including to the millions of swing voters who decide the results of elections.
The New York Times article was posted two days after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed a massive spike in the supply of male workers.
Routine annual “adjustments increased the estimated size of … the civilian labor force by 871,000, employment by 810,000, and unemployment by 60,000,” the bureau reported on February 3. The report also noted that just 1.6 percent of the new workers are women, reflecting the administration’s policy of welcoming myriad young job-seeking male migrants.
Most of the extra workers were hired for jobs in services, such as retail, warehousing, transport, or construction, but there was little gain in the sectors where employers hire fewer illegal migrants:
Employment showed little change over the month in other major industries, including mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction; wholesale trade; information; financial activities; and other services.
The huge inflow of workers also helped suppress wage gains for ordinary Americans amid an inflation rate of 9.1 percent in 2022. The BLS noted that:
In January, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 10 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $33.03. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 4.4 percent.
Migrants also helped to spike the inflation that hurts Americans by helping to raise the cost of housing, transport, and some critical commodities, such as eggs.
The migrant inflow also reduced pressure on investors and employers to hire sidelined Americans, including many of the underemployed men in heartland states. The BLS reported:
The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job was 5.3 million in January, little changed from the prior month. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.
Nonetheless, amid the bad news for American youths, employees, and families, the New York Times quoted multiple employers who gained from the supply of cheap and compliant labor.
“The fact that we were able to onboard a high number of refugees has greatly helped our overall staffing position, and our existing employee morale, because they’re not working so many hours of overtime,” said Matthew Bray, a hiring manager at Amcor plc.
The newspaper reported that the Australian-owned firm hired 75 Afghan and Congolese refugees for jobs near Oshkosh, Wis. — even though only two in three adult residents of Wisconsin are in the workforce. The workforce participation rate in the state has declined from a peak of 74 percent in 1997 to just 65 percent in late 2022.
The inflow of migrants also reduces pressure on companies to invest in labor-saving, wage-boosting technology. For example, Wisconsin companies also have the ability to buy or rent industrial robots that would allow American workers to do more work and earn more wages each day.
The inflow of foreign labor also drives up government spending, because it provides more poor customers for government aid and welfare agencies.
So the New York Times allowed the owner of two government-funded clinics in Florida to claim that the inflow of migrant labor would be good for American society:
“By holding the [working] population back, it holds me as an employer back,” Mr. [Brendan] Ramirez said. “You can serve the community much better than I’m serving the community now. I just don’t have the personnel to do it.”
Ramirez’s clinics get taxpayer payments via the Medicaid program for aiding poor migrants who suffer from depression, addiction, and other mental health problems.
Extraction Migration
Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate.
But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.
This policy floods the labor market and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to older investors, coastal billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for many Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.
Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.
This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.
Migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.
This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. For example, one of the New York Times‘ top editors, Jia Lynn Yang, views immigration as a way to discard Americans’ European-centric culture. She wrote in her 2020 pro-migration book, titled One Mighty and Irresistible Tide:
For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong.
But the progressive-backed, colonialism-like migration policy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.
Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
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