Ivanka Trump, Larry Kudlow Tout Tight Labor Markets

CPAC 2020 / Twitter
Neil Munro

Ivanka Trump and Larry Kudlow praised President Donald Trump’s tight labor market during a February 28 CPAC 2020 event.

“Of all the new jobs created last year … 73 percent of them were secured by people on the sidelines of the economy, not even on the unemployment [line],” said Ivanka Trump, who is managing an employee training program for Trump. She continued:

They had given up, they had been marginalized, they were outside of the formal workforce, they no longer even qualified as unemployed. They were not in the [unemployment] numbers. We are seeing workforce participation rates go up, as it should. We’re not as high as we should be in terms of able-bodied, working  Americans [with jobs] … We’re starting to see that pick up.

Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, said:

There is probably, based on our numbers, at least 6 million more Americans who could come back into the labor force. So while we are all in favor of legal immigration reforms based on merit, the fact remains that we have to take care of at least 6 million more Americans [who are not] in the workplace.

“Low unemployment rates are forcing employers to get creative … [and] wages are higher,” said Ivanka Trump, who is managing a project to promote employer investment in employee training. She continued:

We’re were saying that our national policies are achieving the desired goal that everyone wants, which is decreasing income inequality. So there’s a lot of talk about inequality, but this president’s policies — because more people are working than before, because wages are rising, and because they’re proportionately rising for the lower-income earners —  income inequality is decreasing for the first time in over 12 years. Because the policies are working! And we’re really just at the beginning of it.

Establishment experts, advocates, and journalists rarely admit that Trump’s low-immigration policies have boosted wages for millions of blue-collar Americans. But many have quietly admitted that the supply of extra labor helps suppress Americans’ salaries. The admissions come from independent academics, the National Academies of Science, the Congressional Budget Office, executives, more academics, New York Times reporters, state officials, unions, more business executives, lobbyists, the Washington Post, employees, the news and editorial sides of the Wall Street Journal, federal economists, Goldman Sachs, oil drillers, Wall Street analysts, fired professionals, legislators,  construction workers, New York Times subscribers, and Robert Rubin.

The CPAC 2020 statements from Ivanka Trump and Kudlow are sharply different from media reports of recent statements by Trump’s chief of staff.

“We are desperate, desperate for more people,” Mike Mulvaney told the elite audience at Britain’s Oxford University on February 19. “We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”

Business lobbyists are also pressuring administration officials to preserve their supply of compliant H-1B workers. Nationwide, roughly one million Indian visa workers hold jobs that are sought by American graduates.

Companies’ hiring of foreign visa workers allows workplace discrimination against Americans and deflates innovation while executives use the compliant Indian workers to spike stock prices.

 

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