Judiciary Hearing Witness: Effort Underway to Facilitate Immigration To Suppress Wages

There is an effort to facilitate immigration as a means to suppress wages, a witness at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on immigration enforcement argued Tuesday.

“I think there is an effort underway to facilitate immigration — legal and illegal — into the United States in order to suppress the wages of American workers and I think there’s a lot of talk about rising economic inequality in America,” Temple University law professor Jan Ting told the committee. “I’m concerned about that and I think dealing with illegal immigration is part of doing something for American workers. Protecting their jobs, protecting their wages.”

Ting point out that while wages have remained stagnant, the stock market has been on the rise, arguing of the combination “it is not a contradiction.”

He further highlighted fast-food workers who have been demeaning wage increases to $15 an hour.

“Good luck with that, because the president has already announced he’s going to add 5 million illegal immigrants to the legal work force in 2015 and every employer knows that,” Ting said in reference to President Obama’s executive amnesty.

Ting later went on to call the increase in income inequality and the willingness to ignore the role of immigration in that phenomena a “national scandal.”