Economic Update: Today's Class Struggles with Chris Hedges
Big Tech, Koch Network Cheer Biden’s Amnesty to Flood U.S. Labor Market
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations are cheering on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would pack the United States labor market with more foreign visa workers for business to hire over American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
— Amazon Public Policy (@amazon_policy) February 18, 2021
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there
is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are
out of work today and hundreds of thousands of
U.S. graduates enter the labor market every
year looking for white-collar professional jobs
with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
FNC’s Homan: Mayorkas Is Touting Border Encounters Several Times what Obama Admin. Considered a Crisis
On Saturday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox News Live,” Fox News Contributor and former acting ICE Director Thomas Homan reacted to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defending the Biden administration’s approach on the border while he was testifying before Congress earlier in the week by pointing out that the number of encounters at the border in June was several times what the Obama administration — which Mayorkas served as Homeland Security Deputy Secretary during — considered a crisis.
Homan said, [relevant remarks begin around 3:20] “Mayorkas, when he was Deputy Secretary under Obama, when we had a thousand illegal entries a day, Secretary Jeh Johnson called us all in and would say, what the hell is going on? We’ve got a thousand illegal entries. What are we doing about it? It’s a crisis. Now, we’ve got three to four times as many of that. Now, the Deputy Secretary, who is now the Secretary says, this is a success story.”
President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said that when he ran DHS, if there were more than 1,000 border apprehensions in a day, that was considered a bad number and that “I know that a thousand overwhelms the system.” According to Border Patrol’s monthly numbers for June, there were an average of about 3,300 encounters between ports of entry per day, with the total number of encounters averaging about 4,820 per day.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Biden Expands Mexico’s Gatekeeper Role at U.S. Border
The White House has announced a new deal that gives Mexico even more power over the flow of wage-cutting economic migrants into jobs and communities throughout the United States.
“Today we are announcing our full support for an international multipurpose space that the Government of Mexico plans to establish in southern Mexico to offer new refugee and labor options for the most vulnerable people who are currently in Mexico,” said the July 28 announcement by the White House’s top security official, Jake Sullivan.
The deal cements the gatekeeper role of Mexico’s pro-migration government at the U.S. border, responded Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “It gives Mexico leverage over the United States, because now [President Joe] Biden had to expend political capital to persuade the Mexicans to do this and has become dependent on them [to minimize chaos at the border],” she told Breitbart News.
The gatekeeper deal “improves the optics [at the border], but it’s not going to reduce the flow” of migrants into Americans’ workplaces and communities, Vaughan added.
The deal also “suggests that the Biden administration has been willing to sacrifice a deal on the [cartel] drug [smuggling] problem to get the migration deal that it wants,” she said. On July 25, lower-level Biden officials announced a toothless deal over drug smuggling.
The deal also will not stop the cartels’ labor smuggling, because many people will pay the cartels to help them get around the Mexican gatekeepers as well as U.S. border agents, she added. But it will also allow U.S. elites to hurt Americans’ pocketbooks by using the new migrants to ratchet down Americans’ wages and push up their housing costs and inflation.
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The July 28 statement said the gatekeeper deal:
builds on a series of successful legal pathways initiatives that President Biden and President Lopez Obrador have agreed to launch during the last year. The expanded cooperation between the United States and Mexico to manage our shared border in a humane and orderly way is a testament to strong and enduring bonds of friendship and partnership between our two countries.
In January 2023, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he favors the continued inflow of Latino migrants into the United States. “What we want is an in-depth solution,” Obrador told a January 10 press conference with Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He continued:
And we do celebrate the fact that the U.S. administration has taken — made the decision, rather, to have an orderly migration flow in the case, for instance, of our Venezuelan brothers and sisters. And I understand that this plan will also be extended — will be expanded to benefit other migrants, other countries.
…
There’s hope [for migrants]. A hope that this is — a purpose is going to be accomplished: the purpose of going to the United States to work, to live. We celebrate this.
Obrador sees himself as a champion for Latino and Mexican migrants to the United States. “Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States — 40 million [including people] who were born here in Mexico, [or] who are the children of people who were born in Mexico,” Obrador gushed.
He also took time to slash at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for opposing illegal migration, saying:
One of the governors of our neighboring country headed a movement to take migrants to New York, to Washington, and just drop them there. This is politicking. This is completely inhuman. This should not be done. Because there are those who forget that we are all migrants.
The new deal may also accelerate the inflow of Mexicans into the United States.
In June, roughly 50,000 Mexicans were allowed to cross the border, which is a sharp rise from 15,000 per month seen in April and prior months. Those extra Mexicans are likely a combination of the workers and families looking to join with illegal migrant Mexicans in the United States.
The gatekeeper likely violates the 1965 and 1990 immigration laws that protect Americans and their families from employers who import low-wage workers. The July 28 announcement claims it is legal without providiing any details or justifications:
For example, the deal cited “new refugee and labor options for the most vulnerable people who are currently in Mexico.”
That section may describe how the United States plans to help Mexico by redirecting some of the large and expensive population of migrants in Mexico up to the United States.
For example, the President annually sets the annual cap for refugee inflow — and his deputies could redefine the economic migrants as approved refugees. The annual inflow is technically uncapped, but it is limited by Congress’scontrol over the funding. However, Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, is trying to create a huge refugee inflow that is funded by private groups, such as employers, ethnic lobbies, and foreign migrants.
The “labor options” mentioned in the deal likely include work permits for the uncapped H-2A farm sector visa workforce. The huge workforce is being used by farmers and their investors to avoid the development and procurement of U.S.-built high-tech farming gear.
Mayorkas has repeatedly argued that U.S. employers need more migrants to fill jobs, even though many millions of younger and older Americans have been pushed out of the job market by cheap, hard-working, and compliant migrants.
To reach that economic goal — and also his personal goal of equity between Americans and foreigners — he has admitted roughly eight million migrants via a wide variety of legal, illegal, and quasi-legal routes since early 2021.
The gatekeeper announcement also reversed Mayorkas’s claimed justification for his January 2023 program that claimed to want to slow the migration of people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The January plan allowed 360,000 migrants per year to fly into U.S. airports from four countries. But Mayorkas and his deputies claimed that they would block and deport migrants from those four countries if they did not wait their turn for the airport parole program.
But the gatekeeper deal will allow migrants from those four countries to skip the airport parole line by moving into Mexico and then applying for the refugee program. It says:
We also commit to accept refugee resettlement referrals from qualified individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who are already in Mexico.
Mayorkas’s airport pathway has already allowed 170,000 economic migrants from those four countries to take jobs and homes needed by young Americans.
The gatekeeper deal also expands the flow of indirect economic aid to the dictators who control those countries, because it allows their migrants to send remittances home from U.S. jobs.
Many of Biden’s migrants are pitiable, many are admirable, most are eager to work — and all were unlucky enough to be born outside the United States. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported:
Mary Otaiyi, 33, of Nigeria, carried her sleeping 4-year-old on her back while holding her 10-year-old’s hand. She said they had flown to Brazil, then walked and bused through Bolivia, Peru and onward into Mexico, taking a month to get to America.
”I came for a good life for my kids,” she said. “I have no relatives here and no job in Nigeria.”
But the Democrats’ easy-migration policies are deliberately adding the foreigners’ problems to the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.
Worse, the inflow of migrants reduces the incentive and ability of politicians, government officials, and business leaders to overcome their expanding political differences in ways that help reduce Americans’ problems.
More Than 60% of Migrants Remain in New York City Shelters as Mass Immigration Exacerbates Costly Rents
More than 60 percent of migrants who have arrived in New York City since the spring of last year remain in taxpayer-funded shelters across the city’s five boroughs. Mass immigration has also only exacerbated the city’s sky-high rents that are often out of reach for working and lower-middle-class New Yorkers.
Data published in the Wall Street Journal this week reveals that of the more than 90,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City since April 2022, almost 61 percent are still living off taxpayers in shelters.
Mayor Eric Adams (D) said migrants will likely cost New York City taxpayers close to $3 billion this fiscal year alone after they have already spent some $1.4 billion to house, feed, and care for the new arrivals.
The issue has become so widespread that migrants now outnumber native New Yorkers in the city’s shelter system, with the city housing about 55,000 migrants compared to roughly 50,000 New Yorkers.
Meanwhile, mass immigration to New York City has only helped send rents skyrocketing for native New Yorkers and those moving to the city.
The median rent today in the city is about $3,700 a month, according to data compiled by Zillow. This represents a $200 increase compared to the same time last year. The city has the most inventory of rental properties, starting at $5,000 a month and going all the way to $150,000 a month.
Chart via Zillow
Last month, rents in New York City hit a new high, with the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment across the five boroughs costing a pricey $3,900 a month — a nearly nine percent increase compared to the same period the year before.
The addition of tens of thousands of newly arrived border crossers and illegal aliens, on top of those thousands of legal immigrants who arrive monthly, coincides with New York City’s increasing unaffordability for working and lower-middle-class New Yorkers.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Housing Economics found that “increases in immigration into a metropolitan statistical area are linked with rising rents and home prices in that metropolitan statistical area and neighboring metropolitan statistical areas.”
RELATED — J.D. Vance: Illegal Immigration Robs Americans of Dream of Owning a Home
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban AffairsMass immigration’s impact on boosting housing costs for Americans is so pronounced that New York Magazine recently admitted that it is “bad for housing prices.”
In 2013, a study by the Michael Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, which promotes mass immigration, explained how the importing of tens of millions of immigrants over decades had helped raise housing costs by $3.7 trillion for the next generation of homebuyers but spun the figure as the creation of “housing wealth.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
