President Joe Biden’s administration is growing the United States labor market by adding millions of foreign workers for employers to hire, leaving jobless Americans on the sidelines.
Data published in the New York Times shows that the Biden administration is aiding employers by adding millions of foreign workers to the labor force — ensuring wages stay stagnant — even as native-born Americans struggle to get back into jobs since the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
“The foreign-born workforce grew much more quickly than the U.S.-born workforce, Labor Department figures show,” the Times reports:
“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. “So there must be something else moving in the labor force, and there is a very likely explanation here that immigrants are coming in and taking jobs.” [Emphasis added]
But despite the resurgence in the foreign-born labor force — about four-fifths of it are people legally allowed to work in the United States, by one calculation — there are bottlenecks. [Emphasis added]
Chart via New York Times
By focusing on adding foreign workers to the labor market, the Biden administration is ignoring efforts to get native-born Americans back into the workforce. The administration’s foreign competition addition to the labor force adds tremendous weight for the nation’s working and lower-middle class looking to find high-paying jobs with decent benefits packages.
The Times previously detailed how working-class American men from 35 to 44 years old are currently struggling the most to reenter the labor force:
Hundreds of thousands of men in their late 30s and early 40s stopped working during the pandemic and have lingered on the labor market’s sidelines since. While Mr. Rizzo has recently returned to earning money, many men his age seem to be staying out of the work force altogether. They are an anomaly, as employment rates have rebounded more fully for women of the same age and for both younger and older men. [Emphasis added]
About 89.7 percent of men ages 35 to 44 were working or looking for work as of November, down sharply from 90.9 percent before the pandemic. The group’s employment rate showed signs of rebounding last month, but has been unusually depressed on average over the past year. [Emphasis added]
The decline in labor force participation among middle-aged men has spanned racial groups, but it has been most heavily concentrated among men who — like Mr. Rizzo — do not have a four-year college degree. The pullback comes despite the fact that wages are rising and job openings are plentiful, including in fields like truck driving and construction, where college degrees are not required and men tend to dominate. [Emphasis added]
In addition to those millions of foreign workers given temporary visas to take American jobs, the Biden administration is adding tens of thousands of border crossers to the labor market via a parole pipeline that allows those released from the border to secure work permits.
“What the Democrats have never explained is … how working families are helped by flooding the labor market with cheap illegal labor,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) said last week during a congressional hearing.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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