CNN’s Jake Tapper Touts Amnesty, Hides Pocketbook Damage

LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 10: Thousands of immigrants and supporters join the Defend DAC
David McNew/Getty Images
Neil Munro

A last-minute, back-of-an-envelope amnesty plan by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) could help migrants get amnesty and also tighten U.S. border security, CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed on Sunday.

But Tapper hid the economic pain that is inflicted on ordinary Americans by the government delivery of more migration into Americans’ workplaces and housing.

In a Sunday CNN interview with Sinema, Tapper sugar-coated the vague, undebated, draft bill by describing it as an effort to “provide extra security for the border and also provide a path to legal status for the [illegal migrants] dreamers.”

“Thom and I are working with a coalition of members in both parties in the Senate right now to build the support to try and pass this legislation,” Sinema replied. “To be honest, Jake, I don’t know if we can get it done or not by the end of this year — but we’re trying so hard,” she added.

Yet the business-boosted bill would allow hundreds of thousands more legal immigrants. It would fund the delivery of many new migrants via wider asylum doors through the border, and would allow at least two million “DACA” migrants to get citizenship for the illegal-migrant parents who brought them into the United States.

That border rush would also inflict huge economic harm on Americans, many of who are seeing their wage cuts and their rents raised, by President Joe Biden’s refusal to block millions of poor and hard-working migrants.

Tapper ignored the pocketbook impact of migration on Americans — but sympathetically urged Sinema to describe her own childhood poverty. She replied:

My family faced really tough times when I was a kid. So, I was born into a middle-class family, but my parents got divorced when I was little. And, I mean, that’s pretty common, right? There are lots and lots of families that go through that situation.But after my parents got divorced, things were tough. And so we ended up living in a — kind of an old gas station … we didn’t have running water or electricity. And that was a challenge. [ I was] about the age of 8, a little — until not quite 12 … My parents’ church helped us a lot during those times. Family and friends helped us during those times. And so I think that’s how I really developed this — what some people would say is an interesting mix — but I actually think is pretty normal, of both wanting to encourage folks to work really hard and do their best to get that shot at the American dream, and absolutely recognizing that, sometimes, we have to help people on their path to that American dream.

Tapper was eager to sympathize with the Senator, saying:

Essentially, you were homeless? … And how did that affect you both as a person and as a politician? … It was just an abandoned gas station, and you made it your home? …  Did it have plumbing? Did it have electricity? …  It just sounds like a very traumatic experience for a little kid. Did you have heat in the winter?

“It just sounds traumatic, it just sounds rough,” Tapper added.

Sinema replied:

Jake, there are a lot of families in our country today who are living in that kind of insecurity, lots of families.And so, actually, that’s one of the reasons I decided to enter public office, because I want to create an economy and a community that ensures there are fewer families living in situations like we struggled through, and that we create more opportunities for folks to get that shot at the American dream, and that we’re making sure that we’re creating an economy that works for everyone.

But Tapper’s sympathy for Sinema, and Sinema’s claim of wanting “an economy that works for everyone,” are undermined by the text of the amnesty-and-immigration bill.

Amnesty and migration cut wages, and push working Americans out of jobs and onto welfare. They drive up housing costs and reduce workplace productivity and family fertility. They fuel resentful tribalism and chaotic diversity that make it harder for ordinary Americans to manage their society.

The transfer of human resources from poor countries also boosts the wealth of investors, landowners, and executives, further expanding the gap in wealth and power between elites and ordinary people.

Immigration is about money, Dane Linn, a senior vice president at the elite Business Roundtable, told a pro-migration event organized by The Hamilton Project. “Clearly we’re the business community: It’s about the economics of it too — and I make no apologies for that,” Linn said on December 7.
Curbs on immigration force companies to help educate and hire Americans, Linn admitted. “We can’t recruit enough people from other countries to meet the workforce needs today or in the future … as a result, many of our firms are growing the domestic pipeline,” he said.

Migration advocates periodically admit migration helps to curb wages.

For example, the Des Moines Register reported on December 11 about the agricultural sector’s complaints about a claimed worker shortage and their push for a farmworker amnesty bill.

The draft “Farm Workforce Modernization Act” would allow employers to sideline American workers and technology investment, and instead, swap citizenship to foreign workers in exchange for several years working for cut-rate wages. The newspaper reported:

“Nearly everyone I talk with is significantly short of the number of employees they’d like to have,” said Bill Northey, CEO of the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, a group representing seed, fertilizer and other agriculture companies. “Often that number is 10-15% short of who they’d really like to have.
[Because of the shortage] “Most have significantly increased their salaries,” said Northey, a former Iowa agriculture secretary and undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Trump administration. “That’s helped, but it doesn’t create people out of thin air. They need a bigger pool of folks to reach out to.”
…
Salary restrictions for farm workers under the House bill would save businesses nearly $2.8 billion through 2024, an amount that includes $37.4 million in Iowa, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington, D.C., think tank.
Many rural towns have already lost wealth and people because the federal government has long pressured farm communities for cheap food by allowing a massive inflow of wage-cutting farm labor. In Iowa, for example, the urban exploitation of the rural communities has depressed wages, spiked drug deaths, and thinned out the rural populations;
Rural areas in Iowa lost population: In 62 counties that are not part of metropolitan or micropolitan areas, the population dropped to 797,433 from 818,477, a 3% decrease, the [most recent 10-year] census showed. Altogether, 67 of Iowa’s 99 counties lost population.

Rising wages can draw people back into agricultural areas, said a 2020 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, saying that a study “found that rural counties with higher salaries and job growth were especially effective in attracting workers from urban areas.”

But migration advocates sneer at Americans’ learned and deep opposition to Congress’ amnesty bills.

“For many impeders, one word, “amnesty” — less a thought than an evasion of thinking — suffices to paralyze immigration policy,” establishment columnist George Will wrote in a December 11 op-ed. “Incessantly shrieked, this word sends legislators stampeding away from providing to America’s very approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants … something that is in the national interest: a path to citizenship.”

Extraction Migration

Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.

This policy floods the labor market and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to older investors, coastal billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.

Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.

This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.

Outside government, migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.

This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.

But the progressive-backed, colonialism-like migration policy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.

Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.

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.

 

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