Pelosi on record border numbers: “We need them to pick the crops”

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked if she discouraged Democratic members of Congress from expressing concern over the historic crisis at the border. Pelosi answered by bringing up a presumed “shortage of workers in our country,” and, as an example, said Florida agriculture needs illegal workers to “pick the crops.”

Pelosi’s comments were widely criticized. Nonetheless, her comments are consistent with the messages sent by other Democratic leaders in Congress.

In March of 2021, when the administration’s policies were already clearly leading to a surge at the border, House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler said the real crisis “consists of a shortage of workers.”

Earlier this year, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin joined other Democrats in saying that the best way to fight inflation would be to increase immigration to slow wage growth.

No response to Pelosi’s comments was better than that of columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon:

[H]er comments exposed something the Left has been struggling mightily to hide: that they talk about immigration in moral terms when in actual fact, they think about immigration in economic terms.

The national minimum wage remains a laughable $7.25 an hour, but few Americans are still making that little. Almost 80% of American workers now earn at least $15 an hour, thanks to the pandemic labor market. That’s still not a living wage in any major metro area, but the tight labor market has had a huge impact on low-wage and blue-collar laborers.

You know how you undo those gains? Import an entirely new working class from a failed socialist state made up of people who are willing to work for much less money than an American worker. Undercut working-class Americans by opening the border and signaling to the working class of other countries that there is work for them here.”

You can view Pelosi’s comments and Ungar-Sargon’s monologue here.

LISA IRVING is a Content Writer for NumbersUSA’s Media Standards Project