Donald Trump Enforces Immigration Laws, So NYT Sides with Cheap-Labor Business

MIAMI, FLORIDA - MAY 03: Construction workers are seen at work on May 03, 2019 in Fort Lau
Joe Raedle/Getty
Neil Munro

President Donald Trump’s deputies are showing more than a half million companies which of their employees are illegals — so the New York Times is helping the business executives complain about the political pressure to hire blue-collar Americans and pay them decent wages.

NYT reporter Miriam Jordan is a graduate of the elite Columbia and Stanford universities, and she covers immigration from the perspective of employers and immigrants — but rarely from the perspective of American employees. Under the May 16 headline “Letters From Washington: Your Employees Could Be Undocumented,” she described how Trump’s restart of the “no-match letter” program is spotlighting possible illegals in company workforces.

The no-match letters have been sent to 570,000 employers by the Social Security Administration whenever Social Security Numbers declared by employees turn out to be stolen from Americans or otherwise do not match federal data. The program was stopped by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The NYT article admits the widespread use of illegals in the construction, restaurant, and agriculture industries:

Kathleen Campbell Walker, [an immigration lawyer] who practices in El Paso, said that one of her clients, a small restaurant chain, could lose a third of its work force. Another, which boasts 50,000 workers in multiple states, had also been alerted of discrepancies by the government.

Jeff Joseph, an immigration lawyer in Denver, said that half of the dairy farms he represents have received no-match letters in the last two months.

The $1.3 trillion construction industry, which relies on large numbers of undocumented immigrants, is among the hardest hit.

“At a time of low unemployment, we need to be out there finding workers and lobbying for sensible immigration reform instead of reacting to no-match letters,” said Stan Marek, chief executive of Marek Brothers, a large construction company with operations in Texas and Georgia that has received dozens of no-match letters.

…

In California’s agricultural-rich San Joaquin Valley, 49 growers and other businesses that collectively employ 39,978 workers have been alerted by the government that 24,132 employees had irregularities.

But the white-collar reporter ignores the massive theft of wages from blue-collar Americans, which is caused by the flood of illegals competing against Americans’ wages and pushing them downwards. The competition shifts roughly $500 billion from employees to investors each year, according to analysis provided by the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Instead, the author and her editors in New York end up echoing demands by businesses for a bigger government subsidy of cheap imported workers:

Many employers have complained that the resumption of no-match letters is a piecemeal approach that fails to address the difficulty many employers face in finding legal workers. “The only remedy to this mess is comprehensive immigration reform,” said Mr. [Manuel] Cunha of the farmers’ league.

The no-match program was stopped by Bush and Obama because both welcomed the vast influx of cheap illegal workers. Those workers helped cut American workers’ wages by providing cheap labor to white-collar professionals, such as the elite-university editors and reporters at the New York Times.

Mass immigration also transfers wealth from workers to CEOs and investors, while also shifting investment and real estate gains from the heartland to the coastal cities, such as New York.

The sympathetic focus on the interests of immigrants and employers is commonplace among reporters who cover the immigration beat for establishment publications. Few reporters have the professional freedom to recognize the connection between the supply of imported labor and wages paid to Americans, while many prefer to focus on migrants’ gains, on helpless migrant children, on claims made by pro-migration groups, and on the laments of employers who are being pressured to raise wages in Trump’s lower-immigration “Hire American” economy.

However, a few mainstream publications, including Breitbart News, track the practical economics of imported labor, such as the rising wages for Americans caused by Trump’s Hire American economic strategy.

Breitbart News also covers the damaging impact of cheap imported labor on the productivity of Americans:

Immigration numbers to know:

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.

The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.

This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.

This policy of flooding the market with cheap foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

 

 

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