Migration helps grow New York’s Democrat government, state Gov. Kathy Hochul told Politico.com.
“Capitalism is what lures immigrants still, and the city and the state depend on immigration,” Politico’s pro-migration editor said to Hochul during a staged meeting at a diner. Hochul responded:
Yeah, and [after] this [Trump] crackdown on immigration, we need to have an immigration plan that makes sense … because our economy desperately needs the labor, the vitality, the diversity, and New York is an example of what immigrants do.
Hochul did not distinguish between legal immigration and illegal migration as she dismissed the role of citizens:
I want to be the place where the talent comes to … People have to come here and be successful. You know why? Because they generate the revenue so I can support universal child care, education, building more housing, and they create jobs.
Hochul’s claim counts the benefits to progressives and the bigger-government party — but ignores the many costs to citizens.
Those costs include reduced wages, lower workplace investment, and costlier housing. It also worsens intrusive government, more government debt, distracted schools, crowded hospitals, criminal damage, chaotic civic diversity, and citizens’ loss of political power in their own country.
Those increasingly recognized costs helped elect Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024.
But government spending on migrants — via various federal and state anti-poverty programs — feeds the Democrat Party’s political machines.
For example, migration spending recruits grateful clients, election-campaign volunteers, and critical donors. Those partisan benefits are displayed in New York and Minnesota, where gushers of federal money flow into the states’ economies via Democrat-run political machines.
“It’s good for the Democratic machine politically,” said Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. ‘It both increases votes, and also transforms society in ways that democratic arguments are heard all the more sympathetically,” whatever the merits of fiscal gains and losses, he said.
But governments’ migration-related spending also benefits businesses, for example, by allowing CEOs to pay poverty wages to migrants and Americans.
The government subsidies for cheap, wage-cutting migrants — who are usually hired via staffing companies — is a loss for citizens and a boon for business, said Jay Palmer, a migration consultant.
A manager at [a slaughterhouse] in Alabama, which employs thousands of people all over the state, actually told me that he would hire foreign workers — documented or undocumented — over American workers because the wages are so low. He can hire foreign undocumented workers that go through staffing agencies — Haitians, Somalis, Hispanics — and their wages are so low he can get two and a half [migrants] for every one [American].
The business-funded Cato Institute pushes Hochul’s pro-migration argument, despite its claim to be an advocate for small-government libertarianism. “Illegal immigrants … pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits,” Cato claimed on October 23. It added:
Deporting them not only adds to the debt directly through spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement but also indirectly through reduced tax revenue … it would be nearly impossible to make mass deportation make fiscal [government budget] sense.
The narrow payoffs from migration also help to explain why a large number of GOP politicians favor migration.
“When people tell me that I am trying to help big business to have cheap labor, I’m going to answer them: It’s not [just] big business, it’s not only agricultural or construction or hospitality or health care or manufacturing — it’s more,” Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) told a Capitol Hill press conference in April. She added:
Who else? The farmers, people in the dairy business. We all like milk, right? Well, there are 150,000 jobs available in agriculture right now … Manufacturers! I don’t know anyone in the manufacturing world, but I do know that the National Association of Manufacturers decided to do a public press conference to support [the] Dignidad [bill] … It’s agricultural, construction, hospitality [sectors].
“I’ve got to tell you, I’ve talked to so many employers in Omaha, and they can’t find workers right now,” retiring House Rep. Don Bacon (R-NB) said at Salazar’s press conference:
You got a minority [of amnesty opponents], and they’re very loud … they hate immigration. And we had a party like that called the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s, right? So these guys would fit right in there if you ask me. Here’s the thing they don’t deal with. Without immigration, we have a 1.7 [fertility] birth rate [per woman]. That means we have a declining workforce. We have an aging workforce … you can’t grow your companies. It’s bad for America.
Less migration, he insisted, “is bad Economics 101.”
Meanwhile, Americans’ wages are rising amid Trump’s low-migration, high-tech economic strategy.
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