Republican Monica De La Cruz, running in Texas’s 15th congressional district, says illegal immigration is a “gut punch” to the wages of America’s working class while the nation’s wealthy see “virtually no impact” on their livelihoods.
During a press call last week, De La Cruz focused her attention on the massive downward economic pressure that decades of illegal immigration have on working and middle-class Americans looking for high-wage jobs, affordable housing, and social services that are not crowded.
“The last thing we need to be doing is driving down wages and that’s the first thing illegal immigration does,” De La Cruz said.
In 2020, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report admitted that “immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
The report came as years of extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that current immigration levels burden United States taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to corporate special interests and newly arrived immigrants.
Similar research shows how Americans’ wages are crushed by high immigration levels.
“In manual labor … wages can drop by $800 to $1,500 a year,” De La Cruz said. “I don’t know any single family that can stand losing $1,500 a year. That could be two to three months of baby formula or eight months of gas. The downward pressure that illegal immigration has on wages is an economic fact and a reality.”
In De La Cruz’s south Texas district, the economic burden of illegal immigration can be a make-or-break moment for many Hispanic American families. Most American adults agree.
A survey from May found that about 73 percent of Americans believe their job prospects are cut as a result of mass immigration. Only 26 percent said illegal immigration does not pose a risk to the U.S. labor market.
“The average income for Hispanic families is $54,000 per year. Hispanics tend to have larger families which means more mouths to feed and less money to do that … this is a gut punch to American workers,” De La Cruz said.
“Illegal immigration also further limits public resources,” she continued. “South Texas has some of the worst access to healthcare in the state … how on Earth are we going to provide for the over four million illegal immigrants that have crossed under Biden when we can’t even take care of our own citizens?”
Illegal immigration, as De La Cruz noted, is also a class issue — one where working and middle-class American communities are forced to absorb nearly all the costs while the wealthiest tend to get even richer.
Following decades of mass immigration to the U.S., the top one percent of American income earners now own more wealth than the entire American middle class. The middle 60 percent of income earners, defined as the middle class, have seen their share of national wealth plummet to less than 27 percent — the smallest ever recorded for the income group.
“Illegal immigration has virtually no impact on the elites’ lives,” De La Cruz said. “Wall Street bankers don’t have to worry about a poor Central American undercutting their wages … they don’t live here and they do not speak for us.”
De La Cruz’s remarks come as Republican candidates in the midterm elections have largely avoided talk of the economic consequences for Americans as a result of mass immigration, where 2.2 million illegal aliens have entered the U.S. since President Joe Biden took office in addition to two million more who have entered on green cards and temporary work visas.
Instead, Republican candidates have turned their attention to more donor-friendly talking points about “chaos” at the U.S.-Mexico border and national security threats. The reluctance to discuss immigration in economic terms is mostly the result of big-dollar donor support for mass immigration.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its members, for instance, back doubling legal immigration to bring in a constant stream of cheaper foreign workers for companies to hire and amnesty for all 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living across the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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