Florida GOP Rep. Maria Salazar says her pending Dignidad Act is intended to deliver “cheap labor” to all sectors of the economy.
“When people tell me that I am trying to help big business to have cheap labor, I’m going to answer them: It’s not [just] big business, it’s not only agricultural or construction or hospitality or health care or manufacturing — it’s more,” Salazar told a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday. She added:
Who else? The farmers, people in the dairy business. We all like milk, right? Well, there are 150,000 jobs available in agriculture right now … Manufacturers! I don’t know anyone in the manufacturing world, but I do know that the National Association of Manufacturers decided to do a public press conference to support [the] Dignidad [bill] … It’s agricultural, construction, hospitality [sectors] …
The imported workforce will supply cheaper products, Salazar said: “Americans want affordability, and they want affordable vegetables and fruits.”
Salazar’s “Dignidad” bill floods the U.S. labor market by granting massive amnesties for nearly all migrants. It blocks deportations, provides a work-permit amnesty to nearly all resident migrants, returns deported migrants, and also expands the annual flood of migrant workers, ensuring a huge wealth transfer from pay packets to investors on Wall Street.
The bill does not include any useful cuts in the current huge inflow of roughly 1 million legalized migrants per year. That inflow now delivers roughly one new migrant for every four U.S. births.
Salazar did not mention President Donald Trump’s alternative push for greater American use of workplace robots and other productivity-boosting machines.
“We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” he told Breitbart News in August. Since January 2025, Trump’s low-migration policy has helped to raise wages for a wide variety of Americans in an economy still flooded with President Joe Biden’s migrants.
China’s rush for economic growth is also based on productivity, technology, and science, not immigrant labor.
Salazar’s description of the bill as “cheap labor” for everyone was echoed by retiring GOP legislator Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who was the only other GOP legislator who attended the event. “I gotta tell you, I’ve talked to so many employers in Omaha, and they can’t find workers right now,” Bacon said.
Bacon voiced the preferences of the meatpacking employers in his Omaha district, who maximize their profits by hiring cheap, disposable migrant labor instead of buying productivity-boosting machinery. But under Trump, the companies’ supply of new migrants has been choked off, forcing them to divert profits towards wages and productivity gains.
Bacon argued that a flood of labor is good for employers, so it must be good for America.
You gotta you got a minority [of amnesty opponents], and they’re very loud … they hate immigration. And we had a party like that called the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s, right? So these guys would fit right in there if you ask me. Here’s the thing they don’t deal with. Without immigration, we have a 1.7 [fertility] birth rate [per woman]. That means we have a declining workforce. We have an aging workforce … you can’t grow your companies. It’s bad for America. It’s bad Economics 101.
But the economic alternative of a tight labor market is far better for millions of Americans — and for American births. Before migration pushed down wages and pushed up rents, American families earned decent wages, lived in decent housing, and felt the prosperity and confidence that they needed to have children.
Salazar also railed at those Americans, saying: “Everyone knows that this is a common sense solution — it’s just that there’s a group of people that insist on lying and insist on giving the wrong information.”
Salazar claimed Trump will back her cheap-labor bill because he employs many people:
The President is a very smart guy. He comes from hospitality and from construction. Do I have to tell him that those [migrant] people are needed and … [in] those five sectors, construction, hospitality, agriculture, health care, and manufacturing. This is an economic bill.
I’m trying to give those sectors and the economy a stable labor force, and on top of that, solve problems like [Americans with migrant spouses] and the veterans [without green cards, and] the faith based community [that is losing congregants to deportations].
So we’re just waiting for the president. He is the man, period.
The event was organized by an association of business interests, ABIC Action, which is a spinoff of the American Business Immigration Coalition. Rebecca Shi, the China-born director of the ABIC coalition, summarized the group’s political pitch as “work permits for long-term immigrants lower costs.”
‘Thank you to all of you … and to ABIC for always putting this together,” Salazar said at the press conference.
The ABIC group includes many investors in labor-intensive and consumer-focused businesses, and it is closely allied with FWD.us, which lobbies for the interests of West Coast, high-tech consumer-economy investors. FWD.us is the leading lobby group for more migration.
The top Democrat at the event avoided the Republicans’ cheap-labor-is-good message and instead argued that the bill will help progressives gain more political power.
“If we can get immigration right in Congress, it unlocks so many other opportunities for us to demonstrate to the American public that our politics doesn’t have to be vicious tribalism,” said Rep. Jacob Auchincloss (D-MA), adding:
That is what the Dignity Act does: It secures the border, it creates a rational, economically productive, compassionate set of policies for how new Americans [more migrants] can come to this country, and then for those [illegal migrants] who are already here, it creates a pathway to legal certainty.
Auchincloss’ “vicious tribalism” sneer likely does not refer to the progressives’ very unpopular demands for more chaotic diversity, or the immigrant-enabled election of a Muslim Mayor in New York, or the rising demands from anti-Semitic immigrant groups.
More likely, his sneer was aimed at the majority of Americans who demand that Trump and other GOP election winners enforce Congress’s immigration laws.
Auchincloss did not comment on the bill’s multiple provisions that would supercharge the inflow of foreign graduates into the jobs needed by the Democrats’ progressive base of college grads. The provisions would betray his voters by quadrupling the number of foreign graduates who get green cards, and by legalizing the annual inflow of at least 350,000 foreign graduates into the white-collar jobs needed by U.S. graduates.
Other Democrats, including Dignidad-supporter Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), lament that Trump’s curbs on migration are ensuring higher wages for Americans. “We have a million and a half less [migrant] people in the workforce right now, it’s causing more overtime and having to hire people at higher wages,” Suozzi said in January.
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