Amnesty & Indifference

The surge in illegal immigration has added millions of less-educated workers to the U.S. labor market. Most illegal aliens are economic migrants seeking work, legally or illegally. Most of them are hard workers. The United States doesn’t need them.

• The nonemployment rate for Black Americans with a high school degree is close to 40%.
• Six out of ten Black Americans with less than a high school degree are jobless. That’s a nonemployment rate twice the level of the Great Depression.

Political leaders calling for more immigration are carrying on the unseemly American tradition of indifference to foundational Americans descended from slaves.

If Mayor Adams took a tour of U.S. communities with low levels of immigration, he’d find American teenagers working as lifeguards. Employers who offer competitive wages and flexible hours to teens find a willing workforce. Increases in low-wage immigrant employment, on the other hand, has been found to decrease work for teens.

Another Executive Amnesty?

Meanwhile, the White House is studying “a range of proposals” from corporate lobbies to give work permits to roughly 700,000 citizens of other countries who are in the U.S. illegally. The American Business Immigration Coalition has a message for President Biden: “These are people who have been here, paying taxes for decades.” 

NumbersUSA also has a message for President Biden, but we can’t say it better than Barbara Jordan.

Black Baltimore: Unseen and Unconsidered

The Coalition of Concerned Freedmen is calling the Biden administration to reject proposals to rebuild the bridge with illegal foreign labor. They are also calling for:

“a comprehensive environmental impact statement of the proposed labor sourcing plan and, procuring an economic analysis on a plan to source labor and apprenticeship opportunities from the local and national descendant of U.S. slaves community that reflects the percentage of Black people in Baltimore, currently 62%, according to Census.gov.”

“The appropriate civil rights call-to-action,” the group concludes, “quotes from award-winning journalist Roy Howard Beck, author of Back of the Hiring Line: Let Americans do the Work and Put Descendants of U.S. slaves at the Front of the Hiring Line.”

Related: Will Biden use bridge tragedy to pass an amnesty?

Lower wages is a feature of immigration policy, not a bug.

A Director at the International Monetary Fund said the quiet part out loud when she told a reporter that “abundant labor coming across the border” was helping U.S. economic growth. Why? “Wages are not pushing up, because there is no strong pressure because of lack of labor.”

There it is. Mass immigration isn’t solving a labor shortage, it’s depressing Americans’ wages. 

Pundits and politicians regularly celebrate lowering wages as a means to tackling inflation. Not so fast. Mass immigration is also driving up housing prices, which “​​has played a large role in the inflation of recent years.”

Got that? To fight inflation, policy makers are using mass immigration to lower wages, increase the cost of housing, keep interest rates high, and – wait for it – contribute to inflation!

P.S. $500,000,000 gets transferred from Americans who compete with immigrants to people who use immigrants. 

Yes, the economy gets bigger, but what’s the point of a bigger economy if it isn’t helping the people who make up the national community?

There are no jobs Americans won’t do.

Oh, there are applicant shortages in America. You can find lots of examples where there aren’t enough applicants for jobs offered at certain wages. But there is no shortage of labor. Nor is there such a thing as a “job Americans won’t do.”

Out of 472 civilian occupations tracked by the government, only six have a majority foreign-born workforce: Ag graders and sorters; misc. personal appearance workers like fingernail painters (62%); plasterers and stucco masons; sewing machine operators; misc. ag workers like animal breeders; and tailors/dressmakers/sewers. These six occupations account for less than one percent of the total U.S. workforce. And even in those occupations, native-born workers make up one-third to one-half of the workforce.

But “we need them to pick the crops,” as former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently said, displaying a common inside-the-beltway indifference to the Americans who have been driven out of the agricultural industry by cheap-labor immigration policies.

Just last year, Black farm workers reached a settlement with Mississippi growers for replacing them with white guest workers from South Africa.

Since Congress restarted mass immigration in 1965, one blue-ribbon commission after another has warned of the harm done to American workers. Congress has responded with more amnesty and more indifference.

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Explore More: Hiring Line Initiative; Economic Challenges; Rewarding Bad Behavior.