NYTimes Celebrates Biden’s Cheap Migrant Labor in Elite’s Hotels

Wealthy New Yorkers will get cheaper weekend getaways because President Joe Biden's migrat
Taylor Davidson via Unsplash
Neil Munro

Wealthy New Yorkers will get cheaper weekend getaways because President Joe Biden’s migration flood is washing away marketplace pressure to raise wages for Americans, says a celebratory article in the New York Times.

“The [extra supply of workers] has been helpful for businesses like the Weekender hotels in the Adirondacks, ” reporter Jeanne Smialek wrote on July 24, adding:

The firm’s six [legal J-1] visa workers are spread across three of its seven properties, said Keir Weimer, the founder of the company, and are a small but important chunk of its 85-person work force.

The company has also been having an easier time competing for employees in general after a few years of adaptation. Mr. Weimer estimated that pay was up 10 to 15 percent over the past 15 months [when migraton was lower], but said wage growth was beginning to cool.

“We’re starting to now get more defined on career-track progression and having wages tied to performance and promotion, rather than just market,” he said. “There’s definitely less wage pressure than there was a year ago.”

The average wage in the area around Old Forge is just $31,844, according to CensusReporter.org.

The article was titled “A Flood of New Workers Has Made the Fed’s Job Less Painful. Can It Persist?” The article spotlighted investors’ hopes that the wage cuts forced by illegal migration can reduce overall inflation before the top leaders in the Federal Reserve pump up interest rates.

Many investors on Wall Street oppose those interest rate hikes — and they welcome Biden’s inflation-reducing, wage-cutting migration of millions of migrant workers via the nation’s borders and airports. The inflow of workers is aided by the government’s inflow of short-term visa workers, such as the J-1 and H-2B workers.

Most migrants will hard work for lower wages than needed by American parents. That poverty holds down the portion of inflation that comes from rising wages.

Many businesses favor migration because it allows them to hire cheap and compliant migrants instead of less-desirable American workers, such as former convicts or argumentative workers.

But mainstream Americans and their families have more leverage to win higher wages and better conditions when the federal government reduces migration, as it did under President Donald Trump.

Smialik’s favoritism for investor-backed, wage-cutting migration earned her some online criticism:

Smialik did not mention that Biden’s wage-cutting migration is also boosting one form of inflation that is favored by New York’s wealthy investor class — real-estate inflation. The Bank of Montreal in Canada recently reported: that migration inflates the value and cost of housing:

We have shown in the past that there is a very clear-cut positive relationship between population growth and real home price increases (roughly, every 1% rise in the former translates to a 3% increase in the latter. For inflation, the relationship is less obvious. But, looking at 18 countries from 1999 to 2022 suggests that there is at least a weak positive relationship.

Smialik, however, also knows that many Americans get sidelined when employers are able to prefer and hire alternative migrants.

In contrast to sidelined Americans, migrants are younger and healthier and do not have criminal records, evidence of drug use, or poor work history. In 2017, she wrote about the huge population of 20 million sidelined Americans for Bloomberg.com:

Mike Schlager has gotten plenty of practice at job interviews over the past 15 months.

The 55-year-old from Buffalo lost his job as a lumber-company information systems manager a year ago. He was the highest-paid person in his department when it underwent a management change, so the dismissal didn’t come as a complete surprise. In fact, he’d started looking into new jobs months before he was axed.

Still, he was unprepared for what came next: more than a year of fruitless running on the hiring treadmill. Schlager estimates that he’s applied to 70 or 80 positions. A dozen companies called him back repeatedly. Whenever management or the human-resources department realizes he’s in his 50s, the offer disappears.

Smialek also wrote about Tyler Moore, in Mingo, West Virginia:

He didn’t get the job for which he made that 240-mile (386-kilometer) drive, but he dropped in to his old rehab center on the way home. When he explained his predicament, the director of operations told him that he could come back until he gets on his feet. The group has found a job for him in plastics manufacturing that could turn full-time after a 30-day probation period. The position is enabling him to pay $100 a week in rent. It’s a chance to build an employment record as he fights to have his record expunged.

Still, moving out requires a tough tradeoff: Moore would have preferred to stay close to home, because his family is still in Kentucky and his father is in his seventies. And the job probably isn’t a pathway to wealth and ease. But what Moore wants most is mere self-sufficiency.

Smialik’s underlying problem is that she works for the New York Times, where top editors push migration as an ideological cause:

The editors include Jia Lynn Yang, who is an ideological advocate for nation-changing migration.

In her 2020 pro-migration book, titled “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide,” Yang wrote:

The image of the Statue of Liberty, the Emma Lazarus poem at the statue’s base, the notion of America as an eternal “nation of immigrants,” — these make up an intoxicating part of this country’s mythology. Set against all the sins of America’s past — from slavery to the removal and genocide of American Indians — the arrival of open-hearted immigrants, grateful for a chance at a new life on our shores serves as a constant renewal of hope in the American project. If there is salvation for this country, it very well may lie in the underlying gratitude of a refugee whose life has been saved by the granting of a visa.

Yang’s parents migrated from Taiwan, and she wants to mobilize migrants to transform America — quickly and permanently — regardless of Americans’ concerns:

For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong.

Extraction Migration

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.