On Thursday Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) blasted Senate Democrats for their hypocritical “fair shot for everyone” campaign to raise the minimum wage after passing massive amnesty legislation that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined would actually lower the wages of American workers.
Sessions called the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the minimum wage increase “breathtaking,” because instead of tightening the labor market, Senate Democrats want to “raise the wage floor while expanding the labor supply,” which Sessions said would predictably result in pushing out millions of American workers from the labor force.
“They talk about fighting for workers, yet they colluded with some of the world’s most powerful financial interest groups to pass an immigration bill that would reduce Americans’ wages and surge their unemployment,” Sessions said. “They’ve named their campaign ‘a fair shot for everyone’ but a more accurate name would be ‘a fair shot for everyone but American workers.'”
Democrats and President Barack Obama are calling for the minimum wage to be increased to $10.10 an hour, even as they aggressively pressure the House to pass amnesty legislation that would import more foreign workers in the high-tech and low-skilled fields at a time when Americans without college degrees and minorities are struggling to find good jobs.
Sessions said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and other Senate Democrats “have forgotten the law of supply and demand–the surplus of labor is pushing wages down, and yet Democrats want to provide companies with twice as many new guest workers while also tripling grants of permanent residency.”
He also cited research from Harvard professor Dr. George Borjas, who found “that American workers lose an average of $400 billion in wages each year due to competition from lower-cost workers brought into the U.S. from abroad.”
“The long-term unemployed, younger workers, and those without high school diplomas, will be hardest hit,” Sessions reasoned. “If an employer has one minimum wage slot to fill, that employer has a financial incentive to hire a new guest worker over someone who been out of the workforce for many years. Indeed, from 2000-2013, all net job gains went to immigrant workers.”
Sessions said that trend would continue under the economic plans Senate Democrats are pushing and emphasized that if Democrats wanted “to give every worker a fair shot, the answer is not a one-size-fits-all-circumstances wage, but an immigration policy that is more compassionate to American workers.”
“Washington can’t rewrite the law of supply and demand: we can’t rebuild our middle class if we continue to bring in record numbers of new workers for companies to hire at the lowest available wage,” Sessions concluded.
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