Last week, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) introduced Biden’s amnesty legislation into the Senate. The plan seeks to legalize, and eventually provide American citizenship to, about 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States today.
Also, the plan is likely to double legal immigration levels — where already more than 1.2 million green cards are awarded to legal immigrants annually — even as more than 17 million Americans are jobless but wanting full-time employment.
Biden drops minimum wage hike from COVID-19 relief bill
Seizing on an advisory ruling Thursday by Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have effectively abandoned any effort to raise the federal minimum wage.
MacDonough ruled that incorporating the proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 as part of the Democratic COVID-19 relief bill would violate the so-called Byrd rule, which limits the type of provisions that can be included in bills passed under the budget reconciliation process. Biden and the Democratic leadership are seeking to move their $1.9 trillion bill through Congress by means of the reconciliation process so that it can be passed by a simple majority in the Senate.
A budget reconciliation measure requires only a majority vote in the 100-member Senate, as opposed to a regular bill, which, as a practical matter, requires 60 votes in order to overcome a filibuster. With the Senate evenly split between the two parties, Vice President Kamala Harris would cast the deciding vote in the upper legislative chamber.
The Biden administration has seized on the parliamentarian’s ruling as an excuse to drop the minimum wage hike from the relief bill. On Friday, the White House announced that Harris would not exercise her power to overrule the parliamentarian, making clear that the abandonment of one of Biden’s major election campaign pledges is a matter of choice, not necessity.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders meekly accepted the White House climbdown, and his fellow so-called “progressive,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announced that she would vote in favor of a relief bill stripped of the minimum wage increase.
The dropping of the $15 per hour minimum wage, which would still leave millions of workers in poverty, is the latest demonstration that the Biden administration will be one of reaction, not reform. The brutal, bipartisan ruling class offensive against the working class is indicated by the failure to raise the federal minimum wage, presently at the near-starvation level of $7.25 per hour, for 14 years.
As Biden and the Democratic Party are well aware, there is no way the Republican Party would supply the necessary votes to overcome a filibuster and pass a significant minimum wage increase under the regular procedure.
The exclusion of the proposal will affect some 27 million US workers making less than $15 per hour, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. This is under conditions where millions of workers remain out of work, with some 10 million jobs yet to return since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic last March.
Of the jobs that have returned, many are low-paying and temporary, leaving millions of workers and their families struggling to survive on poverty wages and forced to rely on charity, while facing eviction, utility shut-offs and crushing credit card debt in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed over 520,000 lives in the US.
The relief bill, including the $15 minimum wage provision, is expected to be passed by the House on a party-line vote early Saturday. Any version passed by the Senate will exclude the minimum wage provision, setting the stage for a reconciliation process and a final bill that will leave out the minimum wage increase.
The Biden administration and the Democrats see passage of the relief bill largely as a means of providing political cover for their intensified drive to reopen the schools and businesses, a policy, demanded by big business and the banks, that will lead to untold thousands of additional infections and deaths.
The bill includes a pitiful $170 billion earmarked for schools, far short of what would be required to provide the level of ventilation and sanitation, as well as expansion of staff, needed to make the schools safe for in-person instruction.
There is nothing preventing Harris from ignoring the parliamentarian and moving forward with the bill, $15 minimum wage included. Alternatively, the Democrats could replace the parliamentarian, as the Republicans did in 2001 when the official ruled against then-President George W. Bush’s proposed tax cuts.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden was “disappointed in this outcome,” but that he “respects the parliamentarian’s decision and the Senate’s process,” and will “work with leaders in Congress to determine the best path forward…”
The same day, Biden said he was willing to “compromise” on a separate measure that would be lower than $15 an hour. Democratic Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has announced her opposition to increasing the minimum wage to $15, while Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has touted his support for an $11 an hour minimum wage.
On Friday, White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese told the Washington Post that “the vice president is not going to weigh in.”
In fact, Biden already signaled his intention of dropping the minimum wage increase weeks ago. In a February 7 interview on CBS Evening News, Biden said the wage increase as part of the relief package was “not going to occur.”
CNN reported that an anonymous Biden administration official viewed the parliamentarian’s ruling not as a negative, but as a positive development, which cleared “the way for the bill’s passage in the Senate.”
Workers disgusted by the latest capitulation by the Democrats registered their anger on social media. Twitter user @lockfoward4 wondered, “What was the point of all the effort in Georgia if the Dems are not going to take advantage of it?”
Another user with the ironic handle @russianbot3004 dryly remarked, “Respect the process more than the tens of millions [of] workers who would get a raise. Noted.”
“Harris continues her long run of protecting the corrupt and rich and hurting the poor,” @sistercrow remarked, while @ckroberts71 asked, “It’s just so principled to keep people in poverty, isn’t it @VP?”
Study: Amnesty Will Cost ‘Hundreds of Billions’
President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan will spike Social Security spending by “hundreds of billions” over the next few decades, according to a forecast by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
The February 22 report, titled “Amnesty Would Cost the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds Hundreds of Billions of Dollars,” says:
The new taxes paid by the average amnesty recipient amount to only half of the $94,500 noted above. The net effect of amnesty is therefore $140,330 [in Social Security benefits] minus $47,250 [in paid taxes], which is about $93,000 per recipient. In any large-scale amnesty, in which millions of illegal immigrants gain legal status, it is easy to see how the net cost could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The predicted $93,000 per person cost would be a financial burden for taxpayers — but would be a giveaway to business groups because the Social Security payments will be converted into purchases of consumer products, healthcare services, medical drugs, apartments, and food.
At least 11 million people — perhaps 20 million — are living illegally in the United States. The number rises as people overstay their visas, evade deportation orders, or sneak over the border — but it also falls as some migrants get deported, leave, or find ways to get green cards via the rolling “Adjustment of Status” process.
But taxpayers’ expenses are also economic gains for business groups and investors. In January 2020, a coalition of business groups sued deputies for President Donald Trump after he reduced the inflow of poor migrants into the U.S. consumer market, saying:
Because [green-card applicants] will receive fewer public benefits under the Rule, they will cut back their consumption of goods and services, depressing demand throughout the economy …
The New American Economy Research Fund calculates that, on top of the $48 billion in income that is earned by individuals who will be affected by the Rule—and that will likely be removed from the U.S. economy—the Rule will cause an indirect economic loss of more than $33.9 billion … Indeed, the Fiscal Policy Institute has estimated that the decrease in SNAP and Medicaid enrollment under the Rule could, by itself, lead to economic ripple effects of anywhere between $14.5 and $33.8 billion, with between approximately 100,000 and 230,000 jobs lost … Health centers alone would be forced to drop as many as 6,100 full-time medical staff.
CIS promised a more detailed report:
This is just a rough estimate. We are currently working on a detailed model that will provide more precise costs for both Social Security and Medicare. Again, however, any reasonable calculation will produce a large cost, simply because amnesty will convert so many outside contributors into actual beneficiaries.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
However, Biden’s officials have been broadcasting their desire to change border policies to help extract more migrants from Central America for the U.S. economy. On February 19, for example, deputies of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas posted a tweet offering support to migrants illegally working in the United States and to migrants who may wish to live in the United States.
We'll get 1 million-plus Biden migrants this year, warns ex-Obama/DHS official now at Harvard.
The warning includes a weak criticism of the ethnic lobbies & open-borders progressives who are undermining an Ivy League giveaway in the amnesty bill.#H1B https://t.co/RqZBEGcxKO— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) February 22, 2021
Josh Hawley: Biden ‘More Focused’ on Amnesty than Working Class Job Losses
Sen. Josh Hawley says President Joe Biden is “more focused” on providing amnesty to millions of illegal aliens than grappling with potential economic doom for America’s working class.
Last week, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) introduced Biden’s amnesty legislation into the Senate. The plan seeks to legalize, and eventually provide American citizenship to, about 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States today.
Also, the plan is likely to double legal immigration levels — where already more than 1.2 million green cards are awarded to legal immigrants annually — even as more than 17 million Americans are jobless but wanting full-time employment.
Specifically, a McKinsey Global Institute analysis detailed by the Washington Post reveals that the overwhelming longterm economic burden, as a result of the Chinese coronavirus crisis, will be put on working and lower-middle class Americans.
The Post reports:
In a report coming out later this week that was previewed to The Washington Post, the McKinsey Global Institute says that 20 percent of business travel won’t come back and about 20 percent of workers could end up working from home indefinitely. These shifts mean fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and downtown shops, in addition to ongoing automation of office support roles and some factory jobs. [Emphasis added]
…
“We think that there is a very real scenario in which a lot of the large employment, low-wage jobs in retail and in food service just go away in the coming years,” said Susan Lund, head of the McKinsey Global Institute. “It means that we’re going to need a lot more short-term training and credentialing programs.” [Emphasis added]
…
Indeed, the number of workers in need of retraining could be in the millions, according to McKinsey and David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-wrote a report warning that automation is accelerating in the pandemic. He predicts far fewer jobs in retail, rest, car dealerships and meatpacking facilities. [Emphasis added]
Hawley, in a statement online, called Biden out for pursuing an amnesty and increased foreign competition against Americans while millions remain jobless and millions more are underemployed and potentially looking at future unemployment.
“Can’t figure out why Joe Biden is more focused on supporting illegal immigration than working Americans,” Hawley wrote on Twitter.
Can’t figure out why Joe Biden is more focused on supporting illegal immigration than working Americans
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) February 22, 2021
In Hawley’s home state of Missouri, unemployment is especially hitting the working and middle class. For example, Americans in construction, extraction, building and grounds cleaning, food service, production, and transportation have the highest rates of unemployment as of last month.
In contrast, those in fields like engineering, architecture, and criminal justice — all of which are vastly less likely to have to compete for jobs against foreign workers — have some of the lowest unemployment rates.
Biden’s amnesty plan is being cheered by big business, tech conglomerates, and corporate special interests who boost their profit-margins by cutting labor costs, which often begins with hiring cheaper foreign workers over Americans.
“We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions,” Amazon executives wrote in a statement about the amnesty.
A flooded U.S. labor market has been well documented for its wage-crushing side effects, so much so that economist George Borjas has called mass immigration to the country the “largest anti-poverty program” at the expense of America’s working and lower-middle class.
Recent peer-reviewed research by economist Christoph Albert acknowledges that “as immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in US data.”
Albert’s research also finds that immigration “raises competition” for native-born Americans in the labor market. Similarly, research from June 2020 on U.S. wages and the labor market shows that a continuous flow of mass immigration exerts “stronger labor market competition” on newly arrived immigrants than even native-born Americans, thus contributing to the wage gap.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), likewise, has repeatedly noted that mass immigration cuts Americans’ wages. In 2013, CBO analysis stated that the “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan would “slightly” push down wages for the American workers. A 2020 CBO analysis stated that “immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
Every year, about 1.2 million legal immigrants are given green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are annually awarded temporary visas to full U.S. jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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