“If Democrats really wanted to help minorities and underserved communities … they’d limit immigration to protect American workers,” Donald Trump Jr. said in his speech on the first night of the convention.
The statement is one straight out of Economics 101 and a reminder of the deep divide in the GOP between the populist voters and the core GOP establishment of business moguls and donors. The establishment favors the large-scale inflow of immigrant workers, consumers, and renters, while the voters want immigration minimized until the economy recovers.
Elsewhere in the speech, Trump declared
[Joe] Biden also wants to bring in more illegal immigrants to take jobs from American citizens. His open border policies would drive wages down for Americans at a time when low-income workers were getting real wage increases for the first time in modern history.
Since 2016, Trump’s administration has seen a back-and-forth struggle between populist voters and business donors. Trump overcame stiff opposition from the “swamp” to eventually block illegal blue-collar migration over the border. That policy helped push up wages for blue-collar Americans at a faster rate than white-collar wages.
Since June 22, Trump has begun to trim the huge inflow of white-collar visa workers that take jobs from U.S. college graduates.
Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign is promising a nationwide amnesty for illegal immigrants, rapid increases in legal immigration, and a dramatic jump in refugee settlement. Democrats also promise a temporary halt to border enforcement, the inflow of more visa workers, plus a green-card giveaway to many temporary visa workers who already have taken jobs from American graduates.
Immigration shifts wealth from wages to stocks, from young to old, from central states to the coasts, from the many to the few.
Yes, migrants get huge relative gains in pay & civic life by moving into US.
But investors skim the $$ from the diversity#H1Bhttps://t.co/PVA75K3v9T— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 21, 2020
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