Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar is channeling her inner Jeb Bush by arguing that migrants are vital to economic growth.
“To me, this is an economic issue for our country,” Klobuchar told a February 19 Town Hall meeting hosted by CNN. She continued:
We have always been a country that is built by immigrants, right? We all have our stories in America. And I believe that immigrants don’t diminish America, that they are America. That means to me that we need to have comprehensive immigration reform, something I’ve long supported. And I view this, first of all, if you look around our country, something like around 70 of our Fortune 500 CEOs — this is a few years back — were immigrants. Twenty-five percent of our U.S. Nobel laureates were born in other countries, right? That’s a pretty amazing thing. We have immigrants that have built this country.
Klobuchar’s policy of using migrants to stimulate growth is straight from Jeb Bush’s 2015 pitch to investors, retailers, real estate owners, and CEOs in Detroit:
How do we be strategic about this and how do we create high sustained economic growth? And that’s to shift away from family reunification being almost the sole driver of legal immigration to narrowing that to what every other country has, spouse and minor children, and dramatically expanding immigrants that are coming to work. A guest worker program to deal in the areas where there are shortages.
The high skills agenda that is desperately important for us where H-1B visa holders languish and don’t get, don’t get their status improved. Investors, DREAMers, people that come to our great universities, all these people should be welcomed in our country and the unwritten contract ought to be embrace our values, and you can pursue your dreams in this great country. And by doing so you’re creating opportunity for more people … Our demography could be huge strength for high sustained economic growth, or if we do nothing of it will end up becoming a significant problem.
Numerous studies and reports show that the high immigration economy urged by Klobuchar and Jeb moves a huge amount of wealth from pay packets to stock portfolios, from young families to wealthy older investors, and from voters up to donors. In 2016, Breitbart News reported:
Immigration shifts roughly $500 billion in wages away from Americans and from established immigrants, directing that money toward new immigrants and to major employers, according to a dramatic report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
On page 128, the report plays up the benefits of immigration by saying the inflow of skilled and unskilled immigrants has ”generated an immigration surplus of $54.2 billion, representing a 0.31 percent overall increase in income that accrues to the native population.”
But that flood of low-wage immigrants also cuts marketplace wages for Americans by 5.2 cents on the dollar, admits the report, titled “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.”
The pro-immigration report doesn’t provide a total dollar figure for the immigration tax of 5.2 percent, even though it supplies the dollar figure for the “immigration surplus.”
But the report notes that native-born Americans provide 83.5 percent of labor in the $17.5 trillion dollar economy. Two-thirds of the economy — 65 percent — is labor, so the value of the 5.2 percent wage cut on Americans adds up to roughly $494 billion per year.
In contrast, President Donald Trump promised a “Hire American” economy which is now expanding employees’ wages and wealth, while also brings sidelined workers back into the economy, growing the economy, and is even boosting productivity, which is the only way for Americans to raise their living standards and build up the country.
In Trump’s “Hire American” economy, wages grew by three percent nationally in 2018, and by 5.2 percent in low migration Minnesota.
Blue-collar wages are rising fastest because Trump curbed the inflow of refugees and illegal migrants. Wages for white-collar professionals have stalled partly because he has done little to reduce the resident population of at least 1.5 million colleg educated foreign temporary workers.
Trump's 'Hire American' policy allowed job switchers to win a 4.6% wage gain in 2018. Of course, CEOs & investors are pushing him & Congress to flood the labor market with immigrants. But how many politicians want to cut voters' wage growth by Nov. 2020? https://t.co/Sspb4N7rbS
Klobuchar is already on record complaining about low unemployment which boosts wage, urging Congress to import more blue-collar workers and more skilled workers, such as the H-1B visa workers which suppress salaries for Americans college graduates and their expensively educated children. On January 12, for example, she said:
I think we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and I look at this is not just a moral issue. I actually look at it as an economic issue. When you look at, in my state, we need workers for some of the jobs, especially in rural areas. We have a 2.8 percent unemployment rate.
In 2013, she voted for the Gang of Eight’s amnesty-and-cheap labor bill, which would have doubled the inflow of legal migrants, allowed companies to hire an unlimited number of foreign college graduates, and shifted yet more of the nation’s wealth from employees to investors. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” said a 2013 report from the Congressional Budget Office, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Klobuchar’s cheap labor amnesty legislation was blocked by GOP primary voters, it helped cost the Democrats nine Senate seats in 2014, and it persuaded a TV host in New York to run for the White House.
Dem. Pres. candidate Sen. Klobuchar is worried by low unemployment & wants more foreign workers in Minnesota, where wages rose 5.2% in 2018. What is the political payoff from promising to block voters' wage raises? Why is Pres. Trump saying the same thing? https://t.co/qAKxKRLUJJ
Klobuchar’s pro-migration answer on CNN came after a sneering question from Jonathan Burroughs, a healthcare consultant, and an avid mountaineer:
Currently, our national immigration policy is focusing on a false message of border security. How would you address the root cause of the problem, which is that unskilled Americans are afraid of skilled immigrants taking their high-paying jobs away from them?
Klobuchar did not reject Burrough’s scorn towards Americans. She responded by saying “OK. I would probably describe it in a different way, and I’ll start with that.”
Business lobbies back the federal government’s economic policy of using both legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth. But that policy also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That annual inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as the population of two million visa workers and eight million working illegal immigrants — floods the labor market. The flood spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The federal government’s cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.
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