President Joe Biden is bragging about growing the United States labor market by expediting work permits for border crossers released into the nation’s interior, even as tens of millions of employable Americans are on the sidelines of the workforce.
“We’re significantly expanding legal pathways to entry so businesses can get workers they need,” Biden told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus during a speech this week.
Biden: "We're significantly expanding legal pathways to entry so businesses can get workers they need. I've also directed my team to make historic increases in the number of refugees from Latin America." pic.twitter.com/UXjVATOuBd
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 22, 2023
The remarks came as Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that the agency would start expediting work permits for border crossers released into the U.S. interior — specifically for those who enter through the administration’s parole pipeline and border appointments via a migrant mobile app.
To massively increase the labor supply — a crucial policy goal for corporate special interest looking to keep wages down while spiking housing costs — DHS will send emails and text messages to border crossers, urging them to apply for work permits.
“To date, more than 1.4 million email and text notifications have been sent by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Ukrainian, and Russian,” agency officials wrote in a press release:
DHS is deploying 50 personnel to New York this month to educate recently arrived migrants on the immigration system and how to apply for employment authorization documents. [Emphasis added]
The announcement came as lawmakers heard from economic experts last week that mass immigration to the U.S. is driving down wages, crowding working class Americans out of jobs, and serving as a boon to big business, Wall Street, and real estate investors.
“If we didn’t have access to all this immigrant labor, employers and the American people … would demand that we try to reinstill the value of work,” Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) told House members. “Raising wages would be one of the most important things to make work more attractive. Immigration lets us not do any of that, including the current flow of massive illegal immigration.”
Notably, Camarota estimates that more than 44 million native-born Americans remain on the labor market sidelines — not including the millions of native-born Americans counted in monthly unemployment figures.
In particular, Camarota finds how the nation’s working class is the most impacted by waves of illegal aliens entering the labor market. For American men 16 to 64 years old with only a high school degree, the labor force participation rate has dropped from 88 percent in 1960 to just 67 percent in 2023.
Even among prime-age working class American men, 25 to 54 years old, the labor force participation rate has declined from near full employment in 1960, at 96 percent, to just 82 percent this year.
As Breitbart News reported in May, Biden has brought in so many legal immigrants and illegal aliens that foreign workers now account for the largest share of U.S. job holders since the numbers have been tracked.
In 2022, foreign workers saw their share of the labor market hit the highest level in almost 30 years at more than 18 percent, with close to 30 million now holding U.S. jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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