Warren Undercuts Populist Agenda with Donor Class Immigration Plan

President Trump speaks at U.S. Steel’s Granite City Works steel mill in Illinois on July
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

While Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has vowed an economic nationalist-populist agenda, her plans to increase foreign competition against American workers match the solutions routinely offered by the nation’s donor-class and big business lobby.

With a rise in the polls, Warren is doubling down on her economic agenda, calling out multinational corporations for outsourcing and offshoring American jobs for decades.

“There are a lot of giant companies who like to call themselves ‘American,'” Warren said in a new video out on Twitter. “But face it, they have no loyalty or allegiance to America.”

“In a Warren administration, government policy will support American workers,” Warren said. “I call it economic patriotism … this is not a question of more government or less government. It’s about who government works for.”

Warren, however, has juxtapositioned her economic patriotist plan to crack down on outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs by corporations against an agenda to import additional foreign workers for those corporations.

In her immigration outline released last month, Warren promised to “expand legal immigration” beyond current historically high legal immigration levels, at which more than 1.2 million legal immigrants are admitted to the U.S. every year. Part of this plan includes increasing the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.

America should welcome more legal immigration — done in the right way and consistent with our principles … We should reflect our values, which means expanding family reunification and making it easier for relatives of citizens and green card holders to come to the United States,” Warren writes.

Warren writes that her expansion of legal immigration will “grow the economy,” the case often deployed by the donor class and big business lobby to demand more foreign workers.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce executives, for example, told the Washington Post this year that the country is “out of people” and thus more legal immigration is necessary to grow the economy and provide an endless flow of foreign workers to business.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s organization New American Economy is wholey dedicated to lobbying for plans like Warren’s to be enacted in order to grow the U.S. economy and GDP. The organization is headed by Bloomberg and funded by a long list of billionaire donors, including the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard, Delta Airlines, Time Warner Inc., Goldman Sachs, Quest Diagnostics, and Citigroup.

Warren’s plan is also supported by the editorial board of billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, where they argued that the U.S. needs a constant stream of low-skilled foreign workers to fill American jobs.

Meanwhile, America’s working and middle class have seen their wages crushed for decades just as a stream of illegal and legal foreign workers have grown their share of various U.S. occupations.

Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.

Camarota’s research has found that for every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations, their weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent.

Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” economic model, on the other hand, has lifted wages for America’s blue-collar and working-class by decreasing foreign competition in the labor market through stricter immigration enforcement. Trump’s agenda has also shifted power from corporations to U.S. workers where businesses now compete for workers rather than the decades-long practice of workers competing for jobs at businesses.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

COMMENTS

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