The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly university-credentialed progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950s’ corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
Carney: Summer Vacation Hotspots Say They’ll Shut Down Rather Than Hire Young Americans
Many of the businesses that used to provide employment to American teenagers are now so dependent on foreign workers that they say they’ll cut back on their business or shut down entirely this summer because of delays in getting visas.
That is a shocking choice given the fact that millions of Americans remain out of work. More than 17.4 million Americans are collecting some form of unemployment insurance right now. While many of those workers are arguably over-qualified for summer jobs at hotels, restaurants, and retail stores in popular summer destinations, there are plenty of Americans looking for jobs who would be good candidates—but employers act as if they cannot be hired.
There are 543,000 Americans aged 16 to 19 who are counted as officially unemployed, meaning they are looking for work but cannot find it. That includes 136,00 black teenagers, a group with an unemployment rate of 18.1 percent. Overall, the teenage unemployment rate is 13 percent.
Yet these would-be workers are apparently invisible to employers. Here’s the Associated Press report:
The owner of seafood restaurants on Cape Cod has eliminated lunch service and delayed the opening of some locations because his summertime influx of foreign workers hasn’t arrived yet.
More than a thousand miles away, a Jamaican couple is fretting about whether the rest of their extended family can join them for the seasonal migration to the popular beach destination south of Boston that’s been a crucial lifeline for them for decades.
As vaccinated Americans start to get comfortable traveling again, popular summer destinations are anticipating a busy season. But hotel, restaurant and retail store owners warn that staffing shortages exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic could force them to limit occupancy, curtail hours and services or shut down facilities entirely just as they’re starting to bounce back from a grim year.
The problem, they say, is twofold: The annual influx of seasonal foreign workers has stalled in places because of the pandemic. Businesses have also struggled to attract U.S. workers, even as many have redoubled their efforts to hire locally amid high unemployment.
“It’s the ‘Hunger Games’ for these employers, fighting for getting these guest workers into the country while also trying everything they can to recruit domestically,” said Brian Crawford, an executive vice president for the American Hotel and Lodging Association, a Washington, D.C.-based industry group. “It’s really frustrating. They’re trying to regain their footing after this disastrous pandemic but they just can’t catch a break.”
While some Americans may be discouraged from returning to work because they can collect more by remaining on unemployment, this does not really apply to younger workers seeking summer jobs.
The AP explains what happened to mess up access to foreign workers preferred by summer hotspots.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden let expire a controversial ban on temporary worker visas such as the J-1 program for students and the H-2B program for nonagricultural laborers imposed by former President Donald Trump.
But American embassies and consulates remain closed or severely short-staffed in many countries. The U.S. has also imposed restrictions on travelers from countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil and South Africa because of the emergence of new virus variants or rising COVID-19 cases.
Advocates for the J-1 program, which brings in about 300,000 foreign students annually, urged the State Department in a letter Thursday to exempt the applicants from the travel bans and provide other relief so they can start their summer jobs. Ilir Zherka, head of the Alliance for International Exchange, which sent the letter along with more than 500 supporting groups and companies, argued the J-1 program doesn’t just benefit local economies, but also helps strengthen national security by promoting understanding and appreciation of U.S. culture.
Supporters of the H-2B program, meanwhile, have renewed their call to overhaul the program, which is capped at 66,000 visas per fiscal year. The Biden administration, citing the summer demand from employers, said Tuesday it will approve an additional 22,000 H-2B visas, but lawmakers from New England and other regions that rely on the visas for tourism, landscaping, forestry, fish processing and other seasonal trades say that’s still inadequate.
“That’s infinitesimal. It isn’t anywhere close to the need,” said Congressman Bill Keating, a Democrat representing Cape Cod.
The “need” apparently cannot be filled by unemployed American teenagers. (Also, does anyone really believe national security is significantly improved or that these temporary worker programs promote “understanding and appreciation of U.S. culture?”)
The explanations for this make so little sense that I don’t think they are even trying. Here’s one saying it comes down to “a simple math problem.”
But the need for international workers on Cape Cod — where soaring housing costs have been a major barrier to generating a substantial homegrown workforce — boils down to a simple math problem, Hay said.
Provincetown, a popular gay resort community at the very tip of the cape, has just 2,200 year-round residents, yet restaurants like Hay’s employ about 2,000 workers in high season alone.
“We’re on a dead-end street up here, basically,” he said. “There’s no one else coming.”
If soaring housing costs are a problem, how does adding more workers help? Where do the foreign workers live? If businesses can bring workers in from as far away as Brazil or Ireland, why can’t they bring kids in from Detroit or Minneapolis?
Poll: Majority Disapprove of Biden’s Handling of Illegal Immigration
The majority of Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico border, where the administration has welcomed thousands of migrants into the nation’s interior without having to quarantine or test for the Chinese coronavirus, according to a recent poll.
The Washington Post/ABC News poll revealed that about 53 percent of American adults said they disapprove of the way Biden is handling illegal immigration at the southern border — including 42 percent who said they “strongly disapprove” of Biden’s handling and 10 percent who said they “somewhat disapprove.”
Just 37 percent of American adults said they approved of Biden’s handling of illegal immigration.
The poll showed that Biden’s transformation of the U.S.-Mexico border into a welcoming center for border crossers to merely check-in at before their release into the nation’s interior is unpopular with swing voters, GOP voters, those who lean Republican, conservatives, and non-college-educated Americans.
About 58 percent of swing voters said they disapprove of Biden’s handling of illegal immigration, along with 86 percent of Republicans, 85 percent of those who lean Republican, and 78 percent of conservatives.
Meanwhile, 56 percent of non-college-educated Americans said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of illegal immigration — including 72 percent of white non-college-educated Americans.
Across income levels, a plurality of 48 percent earning less than $50,000 a year disapprove of Biden’s handling of illegal immigration, as well as 52 percent of those earning $50,000 to $100,000 a year, and 62 percent of those earning more than $100,000 a year.
The poll is the latest to show that the issue of mass immigration to the U.S. is dragging down Biden’s approval. Voters in swing districts, for example, are moving toward Republicans strictly because of Biden’s handling of illegal immigration, polls found this month.
Aside from the skyrocketing illegal immigration levels at the southern border, where nearly 170,000 border crossers were apprehended in March, the Biden administration has gutted interior immigration enforcement.
Last week, for instance, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced they would no longer be fining illegal aliens who refused to depart the U.S. after having previously committing to do so. Instead, Biden is canceling the debt of illegal aliens who were fined under former President Trump’s administration.
Likewise, DHS is preventing about 9-in-10 deportations with “sanctuary country” orders that have resulted in a 70 percent drop in the number of criminal illegal aliens in federal custody and an 80 percent reduction in arrests of illegal aliens.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
George W. Bush Leads Secret Push for Amnesty, Cheap Labor
Former President George W. Bush told radio host Hugh Hewitt on April 22 that he is working with the Koch Network to help President Joe Biden pass an amnesty and cheap-labor bill through Congress.
“We’ve got a coalition of like-minded people working this issue,” Bush told Never Trump Hewitt Thursday.
Bush, whose poll rating dipped to 33 percent in 2008 after pushing amnesties in 2006 and 2007, continued:
Many of them are involved on Capitol Hill. So the Bush Center is spearheading a reform movement. It’s quiet except for this book [of paintings], which makes it not quiet. … We’re talking to people about, you know, what needs to be done. I mean, the Koch Brothers, for example, I know that’s a word [Koch] that scares a lot of people on the left, but they’re very much in favor of a rational immigration policy. And they’re putting money behind it, and they’re pushing hard. … Now there hasn’t been interparty outreach, yet. But maybe it’s not quite ripe. My view is if the President is sincere about this, he ought to sit down with, you know, some rational Republicans. But … he’s got to finish his initial agenda, however. He’s got a lot on his plate right now. But eventually, I think there’s a deal to be done.
The Koch network includes a wide variety of Republican donors who would profit from any inflow of new workers, consumers, apartment renters, and home buyers. Many business groups are already working with Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group of investors to organize Democrats behind a bill that would import more labor, consumers, and renters.
However, Bush ignores the economic impact of more immigration, and he, instead, suggested that Americans will be irrationally afraid of amnesty. “What’ll happen is people will scream amnesty. And once you lob the word amnesty out there, it scares people.”
Bush did not name any of the “rational Republicans” who might join his immigration push. However, a group of GOP senators met this week with the Democrats’ top amnesty advocate, Dick Durbin (R-Il). The GOP members were Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mike Rounds (R-SD):
Bloomberg: "On Immigration, George W. Bush Is a Portrait of Failure."
(We can never resist an excuse to post another article describing Bush's "Any Willing Worker" fundamental betrayal of every American family)https://t.co/8UQkglcUyc— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) April 21, 2021
Bush said he also wants the legislation to bring in even more foreign workers. They would likely include foreign college graduates who will accept low wages — and the promise of green cards — in exchange for working white-collar jobs American graduates need. Bush said:
It [will] help our economy, but it’ll make the border more secure. If people are doing work that needs to be done, and we have a legal entry system that enables them to do so, they don’t have to sneak across the border. So step one of help fixing a broken border is to rework our work laws, both high-skilled and lower skilled.
Bush did not comment on the damaging impact of immigration on Americans’ wages, nor about how immigration — both legal and illegal — is driving up housing prices, discouraging high-tech investment, and moving wealth from interior states to the coastal states. Nor did he talk about Americans’ right to their own national labor market and their right to fight with employers for higher wages, better conditions, and more labor-saving investment.
Instead, Bush emphasized that business executives would get compliant, grateful workers to work jobs in their estates:
You know, Hugh, I’m a tree farmer, believe it or not. And you know, we’ve got eight Mexican [visa worker] laborers on our farm. And they, I think we’re in our third year with them working there. But every year, they have to reapply for a visa. So the way the rule works is you apply and you go through the bureaucracy, and then they have to go home for two months out of every year, which is fine, because they go home during the season where we’re not, you know, spending much time digging trees. And the question, though, can they get back in? Will the government let them in? And it creates a lot of uncertainty for a small business, because if the government at one point says no you can’t come back, all those years of training goes down the tubes. And so it sets us back.
Bush did not mention the option of hiring free-speaking Americans and of providing them with decent wages, labor-saving machinery, and employment stability that would encourage them to stay on the job for years. Instead, Bush prefers to hire grateful and cheaper foreign workers via the H-2A or H-2B programs, despite the cost of lawyers and regulations.
Bush has long been a strong advocate of replacing outspoken Americans with cheap and grateful foreign labor. In 2004, for example, Bush pushed Congress to create an “Any Willing Worker” program.
The program would have wiped out Americans’ right to a national labor market by offering shares of Americans’ citizenship to foreigners if they agreed to undercut Americans by taking jobs where employers offered meager wages.
“New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country,” Bush announced on January 7, 2004. “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job,” he said.
The New York Times reported January 7, 2004:
The president’s proposals were designed to appeal to Hispanic groups, a constituency that the White House is focusing on as Mr. Bush seeks re-election this year. The proposals are expected to be embraced by President Vicente Fox of Mexico, who has been lobbying for them for the past three years.
GOP staffers are scoffing at Bush’s campaign-like reappearances, which feature his paintings of immigrants.
“Any Republican still taking their cues from George W. Bush or the neocons is laughably out of touch,” a Senate GOP aide told Breitbart. “Calling for mass amnesty while lockdowns have forced millions of Americans out of work is unhinged. This kind of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and pro-corporate globalism decimated the working class. … People have had enough.”
Bush justified the hiring of visa workers instead of Americans by saying the policy would make the border more “orderly“: “And I’m just one of many, many, many examples of small business owners that rely upon foreign labor. And there’s got to be an orderly way to do it. So to me, that’s what a merit [immigration] system means.”
Once there is an orderly migration system that provides employers with plenty of legal migrants, he said, the federal government can build border barriers against migrants who try to enter illegally:
By the way, I, too, am for a fence. I probably built more fence than any president did. But a broken system makes it harder to enforce the border, no matter how much fence you have. For example, Border Patrol agents are no longer, they’re worrying more about asylum cases than they are about border enforcement. And therefore, it makes the border less secure. And so if we can fix the asylum system, you know, have more judges, more courts, then all of a sudden, we get a more secure border:
George W. Bush tried to abolish Americans' right to their own national labor market – yet he is painted as a moderate by powerless estb. journos.
His 'Any Willing Worker' plan is still being pushed step-by-step by Mark Zuckerberg's FWDus & the Fortune 500https://t.co/OnaVmdRTw1— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) April 19, 2021
Bush’s political strategy is to first pass a DACA bill for at least three million foreign migrants, then pass a larger amnesty for the remaining illegals in the United States:
Start with DACA, and that’ll give people confidence to then go to the next issue. I think the two easiest issues to solve, at least the two more logical issues to solve, are DACA and work. And you know, you and I share the same view on undocumented aliens, that if they pay their taxes and are good citizens and are assimilating, they ought to be given not immediate citizenship, but a right to become a citizen after those who are going through the legal process finish their time.
Any amnesty creates massive new problems. For example, an amnesty offer paralyzes the enforcement of immigration law and also encourages mass illegal migration, such as the rising tide of migrants who are coming over Biden’s border since he offered an amnesty to migrants who persuade officials they were in the United States before January 2021.
The amnesty would also accelerate Democrats’ hopes for demographic change that would cement their national power. On January 5, legal immigrants in Georgia help Democrats win two Senate seats, pushing all 50 GOP senators out of their jobs as members of the Senate majority.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition by Americans to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs young U.S. graduates seek.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democrat, rational, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one aother in the union of 50 states.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly university-credentialed progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950s’ corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It 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, from red states to blue states, and from the central states — such as former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana — to the coastal states, such as New York:
Dick Durbin after George W. Bush endorses a 2021 amnesty: "Bless you … for saying what you did."
Durbin should be generous: Bush's cheap labor policies helped the Democrats win Georgia's two Senate seats and the Senate majority in January. https://t.co/axX1aQTq5C— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) April 24, 2021
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