Senate Democrats, many purporting to represent America’s working and middle class, are lobbying President Joe Biden to add millions of illegal aliens to the nation’s workforce — a move that would force more foreign labor market competition against Americans at the lowest end of the wage scale.
In a letter to Biden’s top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, the senators ask that new policies be adopted to ensure that border crossers and illegal aliens released into the United States interior after arriving at the southern border can readily secure work permits, known as “EADs,” to hold American jobs.
“… we ask that the administration make critical policy fixes to eliminate unnecessary barriers preventing new arrivals from working legally even when they should be eligible to do so,” they write:
We encourage DHS to consider the following proposals to resolve the current EAD crisis. Each proposal would either (1) facilitate speedier submission of EAD applications (including by reducing the number of new arrivals subject to the asylum EAD clock), (2) reduce the number of new arrivals who must file EAD applications at all, (3) authorize certain new arrivals to work while their applications are being processed, or (4) expedite USCIS’s processing of EAD applications.
Those who signed the letter include Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Peter Welch (D-VT), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Edward Markey (D-MA), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Most significantly, the senators write that the DHS should prioritize reducing the amount of time it takes for a border crosser or illegal alien to secure a work permit after being released into the U.S. interior and eliminate the fee that applicants must pay to apply for work permits.
“The byzantine EAD system has, for too long, caused real-world harm for newly arriving families,” the senators write.
The letter indicates, again, that Democrats fall on the same side as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, multinational corporations, Wall Street, and Big Tech conglomerates when it comes to promoting mass illegal and legal immigration to cut the cost of labor and, thus, depleting wages for working and middle-class Americans.
Sanders is among the most notable senators who, for decades, said unchecked immigration makes America’s working class “even poorer” because the working class is most likely to compete for jobs against newly arrived immigrants.
“I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer,” Sanders said of mass immigration in 2015.
Amid calls by Democrats to increase foreign competition in the labor market against working and middle-class Americans, labor participation among native-born Americans has steadily declined as foreign workers increasingly make up a higher share of the workforce.
For American men from 16 to 64 years old with only a high school degree, the labor force participation rate has dropped from 88 percent in 1960 to just 67 percent in 2023, research from the Center for Immigration Studies shows.
Even among prime-age working-class American men, 25 to 54, the labor force participation rate has declined from near full employment in 1960, at 96 percent, to just 82 percent in 2023.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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