Marco Rubio: U.S. Immigration Policy Is Driven by Wall Street

ORLANDO, FL - NOVEMBER 07: U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speaks at a rally at the Cheyenne
Octavio Jones/Getty Images
Neil Munro

The federal government’s migration policy is driven by business and economics, not by claims about “citizens of the world,” says Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

“This country has prioritized the importation of cheap labor,” including legal cheap labor, he said in his book, titled, “Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity.”

Rubio continued:

Across this country today, the immigration system has been corrupted and exploited. And it began, as many of America’s problems do, with the fundamental shift toward a globalized economy.

…

But not every business could be exported, which meant Wall Street simply figured out how to import cheap labor, much of it [clarification, not all] coming from illegal immigrants. This was a slower, more subtle process. Sure, some politicians made a big deal about “jobs Americans wouldn’t do,” but otherwise the only outcry came from workers who found their wages stalled, benefits cut, and hours slashed until they could be replaced by someone willing to work more hours for less.

More often than not, it is about jobs Wall Street doesn’t want Americans to do because hiring Americans would require higher wages and better working conditions. To them, it is better to import cheap labor and buy off Americans with cash welfare programs provided by the government.

Rubio’s book reflects his long experience in immigration policies — especially in 2013 and 2014 when he withdrew from the so-called “Gang of Eight” amnesty amid loud demands from many donors for more immigrant consumers, workers, and renters.

Rubio’s clear-eyed criticism of legal and illegal migration comes as many Americans recognize immigration’s metastasizing damage to Americans’ pocketbooks, children, housing, health, innovation, society, and confidence.

In Rubio’s Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis declared May 10:

Nobody has a right to immigrate to this country. We determine as Americans what type of immigration system benefits our country, but when you’re doing immigration, it’s not for their benefit as foreigners, it’s for your benefit as Americans.

So if there’s legal immigration that’s harming Americans, we shouldn’t do that either. For example, some of these H-1B visas, they would fire American tech workers and hire foreigners at lower wages. I don’t agree with that. I think that’s wrong.

Even the elitist Atlantic magazine posted a June 2 article spotlighting the link between investors and migration:

[Federal policymakers say] labor is just another commodity, like wood or oil, and Americans are best off when it is plentiful and cheap … American public policy has largely managed to keep things that way. Over the past 50 years, as both parties supported the entry of millions of unskilled immigrants and the offshoring of entire industries, America’s per capita gross domestic product more than doubled after adjusting for inflation. Productivity of labor rose by a similar amount, and corporate profits per capita nearly tripled. Yet over the same time period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly earnings of the typical worker rose by less than 1 percent.

This growing public skepticism is shredding the establishment’s 1950s “Nation of Immigrants” narrative.

For example, a June 3-6 YouGov poll of 1,500 citizens asked, “In general, do you think immigration makes the U.S. better off or worse off?” A 36 percent plurality of all respondents said immigration — legal and illegal — makes the country “worse off,” while just 31 percent said immigration makes the nation “better off.” Registered voters split 37 percent worse off, and 35 percent better off.

This sea-change in public opinion is colliding with the accelerated migration being pushed by President Joe Biden’s administration’s deputies, including his pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.

On December 13, for example, Mayorkas told ElPasoMatters.org:

Our immigration system as a whole is broken. It hasn’t been updated or reformed in more than 40 years. We look to our partner to the north that has a much more nimble immigration system that can be retooled to the needs at the moment. For example, Canada is in need of 1 million workers and they have agreed that in 2023, they will admit 1.4 million … immigrants to fill that labor need that Canadians themselves cannot. We are stuck in antiquated laws that do not meet our current needs. And they haven’t been working for many, many years.

The establishment’s pro-migration policies are worsening the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.

Worse, the inflow of migrants extracted from poor countries reduces the incentive and ability of U.S. politicians, government officials, and business leaders to overcome their expanding political differences in ways that could help reduce Americans’ problems.

Biden and his deputies “are just giving up on Americans, and figuring the immigrants will replace them because they’re somehow better,” Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, recently told Breitbart News. “It’s appalling and immoral.”

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