Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says Migrants Are a ‘Blessing’ Amid Rising Rents in New York City

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is welcoming more economic migrants into her New York district, where rents are so high that her constituents must earn roughly $50 per hour to pay for a two-bedroom apartment.

What a lot of Republican politicians fail to understand is that not everyone shares their zero-sum, scarcity mindset.

Many of us understand that immigrants and refugees are a blessing. They have so much to offer our country, & much of our growth as a nation is because of them. https://t.co/AEVdPQCMAi

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 16, 2022

The impact of migrants on housing costs is rarely admitted by the establishment media, even though many progressive journalists pay top dollar for homes in non-diverse areas with good schools.

But investor-funded advocacy groups are well aware that “immigrants and refugees are a blessing,” as Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

Many donors from those sectors backed Biden in 2020, and they have been hugely rewarded with a gift of at least 2.5 million migrant renters since 2021.

The massive wave of new customers has helped spike the value of real estate, apartment rents, and the cost of new houses, especially in areas where well-to-do Americans flee from the arrival of diverse populations.

For example, a 2017 report by the CATO Institute says the cost of illegal immigration could be reduced by cutting spending on border enforcement: “If the typical illegal immigrant increases the value of all housing unit prices by 11.5 cents, then illegal immigrants increase nationwide housing values by about $1 trillion.”

The district of Jackson Heights — zip code 11372 — is a lower-income section of Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th district of New York state.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that those constituents need to earn $45.77 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment in her Jackson Heights neighborhood, which lies between Northern Boulevard and 69th Street.

But the average household income in her district is only $63,000, according to the U.S. Census, or just $30 per hour. At those prices and wages, Ocasio-Coztez’s households can only afford to rent one bedroom per family.

Even government-controlled rental apartments are getting more expensive for her constituents. Queens Chronicle reported in June:

When the New York City Rent Guidelines Board voted last month for the largest rent increase for stabilized apartments in a decade, those looking to sign new leases in the coming months — rent-controlled or otherwise — waited with baited breath as they prepared to see prices skyrocket. A recent Douglas Elliman report shows that they were right to do so: May’s average rent price in Queens increased 16.9 percent from that of May 2021.

Biden’s illegal migrants are driving up those prices, partly because they are more willing to share apartments and beds as they work long hours to pay off their smuggling debts and to support their distant families.

The migrants try to save wages for debt payments by crowding into apartments, said Walter Sinche, the executive director of the Alianza Ecuatoriana Internacional, or the Ecuadorian International Alliance. “They have to struggle — they cannot afford to spend too much money … because they want to save,” he told Breitbart News in March.

“A two-bedroom apartment, it’s supposed to be for a family, maybe two [people per bedroom. But now] sometimes, it is five to six or seven in a two-bedroom apartment,” he said.

Rents are “way too crazy, especially here in the area of Queens Corona. A single studio will go for $1,500 to $1,600, and a two-bedroom, sometimes it goes to 2000 to $2,400,” which were up by about $150 in March after the coronavirus crash, he said.

Female migrants are being exploited because employers pay them less than the minimum wage of $15 per hour, Sinche said  “It’s a new wave of new migrants coming to the U.S. and that’s why they [employers] take advantage,” he told Breitbart News. He continued:

The minimum wage in New York, it’s $15 an hour. But since they are new in the country, the people sometimes get paid that amount and sometimes they pay them less. I know people, they get paid like $7, $8 an hour … Like I said, a new generation [of economic migrants].

But Ocasio-Cortez blames the rents spikes on the corporations who are taking advantage of Biden’s population gift:

100% agree with this AOC. No other way to explain the rapid increase in rents and home values over the past 12 months. People are not making that much more today than they were last year to prop up the market this much. Thanks fore bringing this issue to light!

— OC Golden Bear (@OC_GoldenBear) March 11, 2022

 

Extraction Migration

It is easier for government officials to grow the economy by immigration than by growing exports, productivity, or the birth rate.

So the federal government officially — and unofficially — extracts millions of migrants from poor countries and uses them as extra workers, consumers, and renters. This extraction migration policy both grows and skews the national economy.

The policy prevents tight labor markets, and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, or buy homes.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs U.S. graduates need.

This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.