Mitch McConnell: Joe Biden’s Amnesty Is ‘Rough Day … for American Workers’

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, speaks during a news conference follow
Sarah Silbiger/Pool via AP
Neil Munro

Amnesty for illegal immigrants is bad for American workers, according to a tweet from GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.

“A proposal to gut immigration enforcement and give blanket amnesty? Rough ‘day one’ for American workers,” said the tweet.

The tweet is McConnell’s first mention of immigration on his Twitter account.

The tweet came as GOP politicians are moving to embrace the populist policies they will need to get reelected in  2022 and 2024, and also to regain a majority in the Senate.

“Before we deal with immigration, we need to … make sure everyone has the chance to find a good job,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said January 19. He added:

America should always welcome immigrants who want to become Americans. But we need laws that decide who and how many people can come here, and those laws must be followed and enforced. There are many issues I think we can work cooperatively with President-elect Biden, but a blanket amnesty for people who are here unlawfully isn’t going to be one of them.

“It is deeply troubling that most of Joe Biden’s first acts as president were to protect illegal immigrants and encourage illegal immigration at the expense of American jobs and workers,” Sen. Ted Cruz  (R-TX) said after Biden announced his amnesty plans.

Other GOP senators focus on regulation, businesses, borrowing, and taxes while ignoring the damaging impact of foreign workers moving into Americans’ jobs.

McConnell’s tweet comes as GOP’s corporate donors cheerlead for the progressives’ offer of cheap immigrant labor, regulatory favoritism for expensive energy, and other policies that help transfer Americans’ wages into investors’ stock values.

However, McConnell’s tweet only spotlighted illegal immigration. His criticism echoes the view of the GOP establishment, which claims foreign workforces are harmful to Americans when the workers arrive illegally — but become beneficial when they arrive legally.

The vast majority of Americans tell pollsters that the federal government should ensure Americans have decent jobs before it allows companies to import more foreign workers.

The polls show Americans’ deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into the skilled jobs needed by young and mid-career American graduates.

The multi-racial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based opposition to labor migration co-exists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media’s magnification of many skewed polls that still push the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

Investor-backed progressives deride the public’s civic solidarity as “xenophobia.” But migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states. For example, immigration extracts jobs and wealth from — interior states — such a McConnell’s Kentucky — for the benefit of coastal investors and coastal cities.

Legal migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, and extract consumers and workers from poor countries.

Legal migration also helps corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.

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