Millions of Americans have fallen out of the workforce, yet President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies are allowing many illegal migrants to get disaster recovery jobs in Florida.
“Around Southwest Florida, drivers in pickup trucks and big white vans arrive before dawn to collect workers from sidewalks and parking lots,” the Washington Post reported on October 23, adding:
Moises Calix, a 55-year-old from Honduras who lives in New Orleans, packed tools in his Chevy and made a beeline for Florida with his three sons and two pals after an acquaintance invited him to come help tarp roofs. They ate meals from gas stations and slept in the truck, emblazoned with an American flag to blend in.
“They told me there’s work here,” said Moises, who also worked after Katrina and said he’s been paid. “We’re working. You can earn money.”
The government’s decision to tolerate illegal workers is also a rejection of “a great opportunity to draw the millions of [non-working] men back to work,” said Steven Camarota, the research director for the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
The key problem is the massive decline in work among less educated men, and all of the social problems that stem from it. A booming job market in Florida would be helpful in drawing some of these men back in. But by letting immigrants in and letting them get these jobs, it is short circuiting this [back-to-work] process.
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Unless we’re just going to accept this [non-work] problem — and the opioid abuse, the suicides, the crime, and all the other social problems associated with non-work [among Americans] — the way you do fix that is with a tight labor market [that pressures employers to hire Americans] and by not bringing in lots of foreign workers.
Pulling the sidelined Americans back into the workforce will be tough for employers, Camarota acknowledged:
Society might have a very strong desire to draw young people, less educated Americans back into the labor force, but that creates challenges [for company owners]… particularly if the people haven’t worked for a while.
“That’s just the reality … It’s hard to find good [emphasis added] people,” one employer told the Post.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has denounced the hiring of illegal migrants in Florida. In 2020, amid strong resistance from a business-dominated state legislature, he pushed through a useful bill that pressures employers to verify the legal status of some potential hires.
The establishment’s preference for a workforce of grateful, compliant, and cheap migrants is like a lawyer divorcing the aging first wife who paid for his college degree, said one sardonic advocate for Americans:
The first wife? She’s older now. She’s had a couple like kids, and you know, the kids are hard to raise and she’s not looking as good as she used to be, so I’d rather go with a young glamorous wife.
The elite-initiated divorce-by-immigration has been devastating for millions of ordinary Americans.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, a 28.5% increase over the prior year,” said a report in StatNews, which added:
The term deaths of despair comes from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who set out to understand what accounted for falling U.S. life expectancies. They learned that the fastest rising death rates among Americans were from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease.
… the all-cause mortality rate, which should never significantly increase for a large population, increased for working-age white men without college degrees by approximately 25% over the past two decades.
Since about 1990, the U.S. establishment has adopted a policy of Extraction Migration to pull migrants from poor countries to serve the U.S. economy as workers, renters, and consumers.
This strategy prevents wage-raising tight labor markets, and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street.
It also makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.
Yet progressives, Democrats, and business lobbies are clever enough to invent excuses to cover up their preference for cheap migrants over lower-tier Americans, Camarota said.
For example, many illegal migrants are abused by their unscrupulous employers, the Post noted:
Across the parking lot, a dejected group of Hondurans said a man named “Carlos” had called them promising crew chief Fernando Jimenez $600 and his workers $400 each for two days of construction work. After they drove in from Austin, he offered them $100 each. They quit. “You’re risking your life for $100 without security,” said Jimenez, 45, who has a green card. His friends are undocumented.
“I feel like I’m nobody … treated like an animal … horrible,” one evicted migrant told the Associated Press. “Escalona, 24, was angry and mostly broke, save for a check he could not cash — the fruits of an exhausting week of labor on a hurricane-recovery work crew,” said the October 22 report about the abuse of illegal workers.
The Post did not use the obvious abuse to call for a crackdown on illegal hiring.
Instead, the Post‘s writer, Marie Sacchetti, used the abuse to promote a regulatory amnesty that would help illegal migrants take more jobs from Americans:
The scenes of exasperation echoed along the coast [is] spurring complaints that the Biden administration is acting too slowly to expand protections for immigrant workers. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo a year ago allowing undocumented workers, in any industry, to apply for work permits and protection from being deported if they file complaints about labor violations with government agencies or are caught up in worksite investigations.
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Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and other Democrats urged DHS last month to issue “clear” guidance so that more will apply. “We’re not seeing utilization of the program in the way that we need to see it,” she said in an interview.
“Immigration is allowing [progressives and business groups] to ignore the social problems among the less-educated — especially among men,” said Camarota.
Amid the abuse and harm to Americans and migrants, he added, “that’s what they do.”