Bipartisan Amnesty?! 📉 Lower Wages is a Feature of Immigration Policy, Not a Bug

The American Business Immigration Coalition flew in to D.C. this week to remind us that lower wages is a feature of immigration policy, not a bug.

“Inflation continues to be stubbornly high,” said Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition in her opening remarks. Her organization’s solution to that problem is to “secure the workforce” by increasing legal immigration and legalizing millions of people working in the U.S. illegally today.

In other words, increasing the supply of workers through immigration will lower labor costs and thus inflation. Lower wages is a feature of immigration policy, not a bug.

“That’s why we’re here to support the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, the Dignity Act, the AFU Act,” Shi continued. But those bills do not secure the workplace; they do not offer protections for American workers (citizens and legal immigrants) against an immigration system designed to displace them with newer, cheaper foreign labor.

“We’re calling on Congress for common sense solutions to provide work permits and green cards to law abiding immigrants,” said the CEO of a home building company, referring to inadmissible aliens working illegally in the U.S.

Want to secure the workforce? Cast down your buckets where you are!

The number of U.S.-born men not in the labor force — neither working nor looking for work — remains near a historic high for an economic expansion. Since 2020, 9 out of 10 new jobs have gone to immigrants; and more than half of those have gone to illegal workers.

In the late 19th century, Booker T. Washington called on industrialists to stop importing foreign workers while millions of former American slaves and their descendants were there in their midst. “Cast down your buckets where you are” Booker bellowed! He told the story of a ship full of sailors who were dying of thirst until another vessel came along and advised them to drop their buckets into the water below. To the desperate sailors’ astonishment, the water was fresh and drinkable. They were saved. They had not realized that they had drifted into the mouth of the Amazon river!

Today, there are millions of working-age Americans who are not in the labor force right here to quench the thirst of American business.

Destructive bipartisanship

Representatives of both political parties took part in the fly-in event and vowed to work with their colleagues to make sure illegal workers keep their jobs. None offered a word of concern for legal workers.

“Immigrant workers are the most important workers that we have,” Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) told the crowd. “You need to have a workforce that can do the jobs that can keep the economy moving.”

There is no job Americans can’t or won’t do. Americans work in all 474 occupations tracked by the Department of Commerce. Americans make up the majority of the workforce in all but six of them (and those six occupations represent less than one percent of the American workforce. You wouldn’t know if from the Members of Congress who stood with the American Business Immigration Coalition this week.

“We have to make a legal pathway for the Dreamers,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) who went on to adding farmworkers, healthcare workers, and other workers throughout blue-collar industries for whom he believes illegal employment should be rewarded.

Are legal workers overemployed or overpaid in those industries? Of course not. We don’t need to outsource the security of our workforce when there are Americans here and now who will do any job for a fair wage. Lowering wages through mass immigration is a self-defeating policy.

Yet Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) praised illegal workers as “the silent heroes [who] do the work that is needed.”

“They do not have a criminal record,” she said, “many of them have been paying taxes.” Yes, she allowed, they did violate immigration law “but someone gave them a job, someone made them stay, and someone profited from their labor.”

Yes, someone profited from their labor. Many people profited, including some at the fly-in lobbying for amnesty and increased immigration!

The proper response to people who profit off of illegal labor is 1) require them to verify the work authorization of their employees, and 2) punish illegal hiring with heavy fines and time in jail.
As for illegal workers who pay taxes, Barbara Jordan expressed the sensible approach to that population thirty years ago:

“There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough.”

Jordan chaired the last bipartisan commission on immigration reform, which recommended immigration reduction and a crackdown on illegal hiring as a means to making it easier for Americans to find good paying work, not harder. Jordan epitomizes what Dr. Pamela Denise Long calls “constructive bipartisanship” as opposed to the “destructive bipartisanship” on display at our nation’s capital this week.