White House Economic Plan Puts Migrants Ahead of American Families

U.S./Mexico Border
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, AP Photo/Eric Gay
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s White House is prioritizing jobs for migrants above helping many millions of poor Americans get decent jobs, according to priorities in its annual “Economic Report of the President.”

A growing share of men are not even trying to find jobs, the baby boom generation is retiring, and there are fewer young Americans, said the Biden-endorsed report, which listed several “Options to Boost the U.S. Labor Supply.”

The report’s first option for raising the number of workers is “Increasing Immigration” — not helping Americans get decent jobs. It says:

Overall, research also suggests that the effects of newly arrived immigrants on the wages and employment of the domestic population are quantitatively very small, and that the fiscal effects of immigration are generally positive.

Vast evidence shows migration cuts family wages and spikes housing costs, yet the report also urges an amnesty for at least 11 million “undocumented individuals” and the importation of many more white-collar visa workers for the jobs needed by U.S. graduates:

immigration reform that provides a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented individuals would help to increase the labor supply … Additional immigration reforms could include removing per-country caps on employment, expanding diversity lottery visas, and expanding the J-1 exchange visa program, which would bring additional faculty, scientists, and students to the United States for training and sharing knowledge and method

The report’s second option is the nation’s traditional policy of rewarding investors and CEOs who find, train, and employ their fellow American citizens, including the least-qualified, least-employable workers.

Yet even this second option in the report — “Drawing More [American] Adults into the Labor Market ” — is portrayed as an opportunity for more government intervention, not as the normal workplace bargaining of growing companies and wage-seeking employees in a tight national labor market.

So the report’s list of approved interventions includes federal childcare, get-out-of-jail programs, aid checks, regional economic development, regulation to force better workplace conditions, and unionization, which is described as “Improving workers’ bargaining power.”

The report rejects the obvious option of helping Americans by tightening the labor market with migration curbs so employers must hire even the least-wanted Americans with offers of wages, training, and decent treatment.

President Donald Trump used that policy in 2019 and 2020 — and quickly pressured employees to pay higher wages and also invest in productivity-boosting machinery.

“The last expansion pulled many workers into the labor market, and the continued growth in participation between 2016 and 2019 surprised many economists,” the report admitted without mentioning Trump’s migration curbs.

But Biden’s business-backed progressives mostly prefer more migration and have welcomed at least 6 million legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and temporary migrants into Americans’ housing and workplaces.

“On average, wages adjusted for inflation declined over the year [2022], though they saw growth in the second half,” the report said without mentioning Biden’s migration expansions.

However, the White House’s report was written by a team of advisors with their own perspectives that can differ from Biden’s senior deputies.

So their report also includes admissions and evidence showing how migration curbs would help 150 million working Americans — plus the roughly 6 million non-retired Americans who were sidelined when factories were exported to China and local jobs were filled with migrants. For example, the report said:

The steepest declines in [workforce] participation since the 1970s have been among men without a four-year degree; these men have also experienced declines in wages throughout much of this period. It is reasonable to wonder, therefore, if declines in labor demand [by employers for Americans] can account for declines in participation, particularly among men without a four-year degree.

“It’s a political document, that’s what it is,” explained Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

 [The White House is] indifferent to this decline in labor force participation [caused by immigration and outsourcing] and all of the social problems — everything from substance abuse, overdose deaths, obesity, crime, mental health problems, suicide, and early death — [that] are all associated with being out of the labor force.

The civic disasters impose huge costs on Americans’ society, he added:

All the fiscal costs [government spending] associated with the disability, incarceration, crime, and healthcare — that result from all these people being out of the labor force — are borne by all taxpayers, including gainfully employed persons.

And the social problems don’t stay confined to communities where all these people live. The crime and social dysfunction spills out everywhere.

On March 19, the New York Times described the civic and economic damage outside a sandwich shop in Phoenix, Ariz:

[The owner] looked out the window toward Madison Street, which [since 2018] had become the center of one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with as many as 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. On this February morning, he could see a half-dozen men pressed around a roaring fire. A young woman was lying in the middle of the street, wrapped beneath a canvas advertising banner. A man was weaving down the sidewalk in the direction of Joe’s restaurant with a saw, muttering to himself and then stopping to urinate a dozen feet from Joe’s outdoor tables.

“It’s the usual chaos and suffering,” he told [his wife] Debbie …

…

Within a half-mile of their restaurant, the police had been called to an average of eight incidents a day in 2022. There were at least 1,097 calls for emergency medical help, 573 fights or assaults, 236 incidents of trespassing, 185 fires, 140 thefts, 125 armed robberies, 13 sexual assaults and four homicides. The remains of a 20-to-24-week-old fetus were burned and left next to a dumpster in November. Two people were stabbed to death in their tents. Sixteen others were found dead from overdoses, suicides, hypothermia or excessive heat. The city had tried to begin more extensive cleaning of the encampment, but advocates for the homeless protested that it was inhumane to move people with nowhere else to go, and in December the American Civil Liberties Union successfully filed a federal lawsuit to keep people on the street from being “terrorized” and “displaced.”

The authors of the report recognize the civic damage caused by the loss of jobs and wages, and they included a section titled “Deaths of Despair in the United States”:

… these deaths of despair primarily affect white Americans without a four-year college degree, living in areas of the country that have a very low share of the workingage population employed. While economists usually frame employment as a choice between paid work and alternative uses of time, Case and Deaton’s (2020) work highlights the importance of good jobs in providing meaning, structure, and purpose to a community. They write: “Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive. It is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of pride, and of self-respect that comes with the loss of marriage and of community that brings on despair, not just or even primarily the loss of money.”

“Trying to fix the social pathologies of West Virginia or Baltimore, or even in the Rio Grande Valley is very hard … immigration lets them ignore the problems,” Camarota said.

The tacit admission that fewer Americans will work when their wages are forced down amid outsourcing and migration is repeated elsewhere in the 507-page report:

relative wages for men without a four-year degree have declined steadily for many decades, reducing their status, marriage prospects, and job satisfaction. [Pinghui] Wu finds that changes in relative wages account for almost half the growth in labor force exits among noncollege men between 1980 and 2019.

…

[President Barack Obama’s] CEA (2016) also concluded that low wages were the primary driver of male participation declines, with smaller roles for supply factors.

…

 

Despite the incomplete nature of the evidence on participation declines, the extensive research literature does point to policy measures that could boost participation among men … efforts to improve wages and working conditions for men without a four-year degree would likely draw more of them into the labor market.

…

 

stagnating wages and rising inequality are key drivers of declines in labor force participation.

Extraction Migration:

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.

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