Report: Joe Biden Cuts ICE’s Protection of Labor Rights

US President Joe Biden speaks on Covid-19 response in the State Dining Room of the White H
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will stop deporting migrants who violate Americans’ right to their own national labor market, according to a report in the Washington Post.

The Washington Post reported on February 7 that Biden’s draft policy says agents will not be allowed to deport illegal migrants caught taking American’ jobs and wages:

While ICE’s new operational plans are not yet final, interim instructions sent to senior officials point to a major shift in enforcement. Agents will no longer seek to deport immigrants for crimes such as driving under the influence and assault, and will focus instead on national security threats, recent border crossers and people completing prison and jail terms for aggravated felony convictions.

“Generally, these convictions [needed for deportation] would not include drug based crimes (less serious offenses), simple assault, DUI, money laundering, property crimes, fraud, tax crimes, solicitation, or charges without convictions,” acting director Tae Johnson told senior officials in a Thursday email advising them on how to operate while new guidelines are finalized.

“They’ve abolished ICE without abolishing ICE,” an agency official told the Washington Post. “It literally feels like we’ve gone from the ability to fully enforce our immigration laws to now being told to enforce nothing.”

Biden’s policy “is a green light to businesses to discriminate against Americans” by hiring illegal aliens, said Rob Law, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The administration is depriving Americans of their right to earn a decent living … it is a blatant transfer of wealth and opportunity away from American labor, and to greedy corporate interests,” he told Breitbart News.

Under 8 U.S. Code § 1324a, passed by Congress in 1952, companies are barred from hiring foreigners unless the foreigners have work permits:

(1) In general

It is unlawful for a person or other entity—

(A) to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien (as defined in subsection (h)(3)) with respect to such employment …

The law has been the bedrock of Americans’ labor rights, social status, and economic prosperity because it forces wealthy employers to bargain with the limited supply of American workers — roughly 150 million — by offering decent wages and conditions.

If the law is ignored, unauthorized foreigners will face minimal risk of deportation for working illegally — providing they do not commit major cries.

The flood of illegal labor will allow all employers to cut their pay offers to Americans who need to maintain a decent living standard, buy homes, and raise children. The money saved from pay cuts is normally diverted to company profits and stock values, not productivity-boosting innovation, automation, and training.

The GOP’s business wing has repeatedly tried to abolish Americans’ right to a national labor market. For example, President George W. Bush touted his plan for “Any Willing Worker” plan.

Biden has given little evidence that he will step up the prosecution of CEOs for hiring illegal aliens.

During his tenure, deputies for President Donald Trump allowed some workplace enforcement, usually in low-wage worksites, such as chicken-disassembly plants. In August 2019, for example, Americans were able to get jobs at high wages following a series of workplaces rid by ICE in Georgia. President Barack Obama also allowed some workplace enforcement. But neither president did anything significant to enforce Americans’ workplace rights at white-collar worksites.

Biden’s deputies have already canceled an ICE office that was created to prevent discrimination against American graduates by CEOs who are eager to hire the many foreign graduates who accept low wages if they can stay in the United States.

At the border, Biden’s deputies have begun welcoming a massive wave of migrant families seeking to join their illegal migrant spouses and fathers who are now working U.S. jobs.

The importance of Americans’ right to their national labor market was described in July 2020 by Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture capital fund, Thiel Capital. In a July 2020 interview, he told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):

You have the right to your own [national] labor market. Given that your country maintains a right to conscript you [for war, and] to tax you, [then one] part of the social contract is that [Americans] get a share in your country’s wealth through having a right [to work in the United States, without competition from foreign nationals]. Now the interesting part about it is, if we [elites] can just get your right declared [to be] an impediment to the free market, we can take your right [by forcing you to compete against foreign workers in the United States] without having to pay you anything for it.

The managerial elite — “the center” — is using migration to steal wages and value from Americans, Weinstein said:

There’s a huge problem that we need to get to, which is that the reason that we can’t get out of our national nightmare at the moment, is that the center has to make a move that it refuses to do. And the center — or “the core” would be a better way of saying it — has to admit that it became kleptocratic. And so the corruption of the core left and the core right means that there’s nowhere [for Americans] to turn.

Americans’ right to their labor market has long been diluted by the federal government’s willingness to import more labor for use by companies. The extra labor is delivered by legal immigrants, illegal migrants, refugees, legal visa workers, work-permit foreign graduates, temporarily legal illegal aliens, asylum claimants, and work licenses for illegal aliens.

Decades of data and experiences have persuaded the vast majority of Americans — and many elite economists, lobbyists, and legislators — that migration moves money out of employees’ pockets and into the stock market wealth of investors and their progressive supporters.

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.

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

The public’s recognition of this “Wages to Wall Street” economic policy comes amid perpetual insistence from business lobbies — and reporters — that supply and demand in the labor market are unrelated.

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and immigration in theory.

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