Trump Abandons ‘America First’ Reforms: ‘We Need’ More
Immigration to Grow Business Profits
7:16
Ahead
of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump is abandoning his prior
“America First” legal immigration reforms to support increases of legal
immigration levels in order to expand profits for businesses and corporations.
For the fourth time in about a month, Trump suggested
increasing legal immigration levels. With Apple CEO Tim Cook sitting next to
him at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he not only wanted more legal
immigration but that companies needed an expansion of new arrivals to grow
their business.
“We’re going to have a lot of people coming into the country. We
want a lot of people coming in. And we need it,” Trump said:
It’s not a question of do we want [more immigration], these folks are going to
have to sort of not expand too much. And if we tell them … these are very
ambitious people around this table. They don’t like the concept of not
expanding. We want to have the companies grow and the
only way they’re going to grow is if we give them the workers and
the only way we’re going to have the workers is to do exactly what we’re doing.
[Emphasis added]
The comments are a direct
rebuttal of the president’s commitments in 2015, 2016,
and 2017, where he vowed to reduce overall legal
immigration levels to boost the wages of U.S. workers and reduce the
displacement of America’s working and middle class.
In 2017, for instance, Trump touted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and
Sen. David Perdue’s (R-GA) RAISE Act legislation, which would have cut legal
immigration down to about 500,000 arrivals a year rather than the current
admission of more than one million legal immigrants annually who compete
against working-class Americans for jobs.
Trump, at the time, said legal immigration levels needed to be
trimmed to “reduce poverty, increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and
billions of dollars,” arguing that the current importation of more than a
million legal immigrants every year “has placed substantial pressure on
American workers, taxpayers, and community resources.”
“Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been
immigrants, and very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against
brand new arrivals,” Trump said in 2017 of current legal immigration levels.
“And it has not been fair to our people, to our citizens, to our workers.”
NumbersUSA’s Rosemary
Jenks said Trump supporters must remind the White House of the commitment that
the president made on the campaign trail when it comes to legal immigration
reforms.
“We need to remember all of the promises that candidate Trump
made on immigration. Which included, most importantly, putting
Americans first,” Jenks told Breitbart News.
“I would certainly hope, that in order to keep his campaign
promises that before even talking about expanding legal immigration, he would
work with employers to recruit the 50 million working-age Americans who are
outside the labor market,” Jenks said. “Or work with these companies to hire
laid-off GM workers. They’re Americans, they should come first.”
Trump’s newfound support for
increasing legal immigration levels has become part of his stump speech on the
issue, repeating the same sentiment most recently at the
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
There, Trump said the country needs more foreign workers to help
corporations.
“We need an immigration policy that’s going to be great for our
corporations and our great companies … we need workers to come in but
they’ve got to come in legally and they’ve got to come in through merit,” Trump
said.
Trump’s shift in legal
immigration views has coincided with the White House giving accessto a myriad of globalist
business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the George W. Bush
Center, and a number of libertarian organizations funded by the pro-mass
immigration billionaire Koch brothers.
Spokespeople for the Chamber of Commerce,
LULAC, George W. Bush Center, and Koch Industries dominate the immigration
talks in White House currently. breitbart.com/politics/2019/…
Globalist Business Groups Dominate Immigration Talks at
White House
Increasing
legal immigration beyond their already historically high levels would crush the wage and job gains that Trump’s
“Hire American” economy has made possible thus far. Nationwide, wages rose
3.0 percent in 2018. For Americans who switched jobs, wages rose by 4.6 percent
and by 5.2 percent in Minnesota where few migrant workers choose to live.
Though unemployment has
remained low, there continues to be at least 13 million working-age Americans who are
either unemployed, not in the labor force but want a job, or who are working
part-time jobs but want a good-paying full-time job.
“Increasing immigration is the one thing that can wipe out all
the wage gains, all the employment gains for those blue collar workers who
switched parties to vote for him,” Jenks said. “I hope someone in the White
House has his interest in mind who is telling him this.”
Out of those 13 million Americans who are available for U.S.
jobs, about 6.5 million are unemployed. Of those unemployed, close to 13
percent are American teenagers who are ready for entry-level U.S. jobs — the
exact jobs that low-skilled foreign workers generally tend to take.
About 1.6 million Americans are not in the labor force at all,
but they want a job, including about 426,000 discouraged American workers who
are demoralized by their job prospects. Also, there are 5.1 million Americans
who are working part-time jobs but who want full-time jobs. More than 1.4
million of these U.S. part-time workers said they had looked for full-time jobs
but could not find any.
Mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, puts downward
pressure on Americans’ wages, researchers have repeatedly noted.
Every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an
American workers’ occupation reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent,
researcher Steven Camarotta has found. This means the average native-born
American worker today has their weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent
because of current legal immigration levels.
In a
state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor
force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by perhaps more than
12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor
force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.
Likewise, every one percent increase in the immigrant
composition of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent.
Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would
reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.
The mass importation of legal
immigrants — mostly due to President George H.W. Bush’s Immigration Act of
1990, which expanded legal immigration levels —
diminishes job opportunities for the roughly four million young American
graduates who enter the workforce every year wanting good-paying jobs.
In the last decade alone, the
U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing
American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage foreign
workers. Meanwhile, if legal immigration continues, there will be 69 million foreign-born residents living in
the U.S. by 2060. This would represent an unprecedented electoral gain for the
Left, as Democrats win about 90 percent of congressional
districts where the foreign-born population exceeds the national average.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Mitch McConnell Fails to Prevent Revolt Against Trump’s National Emergency Declaration
3:12
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has broken a reported promise to President Donald Trump, admitting Monday that he failed to prevent Republican Senators from passing a resolution blocking a national emergency declaration on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Speaking at an event Louisville, McConnell said that while the resolution will pass in the Senate, it is highly likely the House will vote to uphold the president’s veto. “What is clear in the Senate is that there will be enough votes to pass the resolution of disapproval, which will then be vetoed by the president and then in all likelihood the veto will be upheld in the House,” he said.
The admission comes after Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) announced Sunday that he joined three of his fellow Republican senators to vote with 47 Senate Democrats in backing an anti-declaration resolution which passed the House. “I can’t vote to give the president the power to spend money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress. We may want more money for border security, but Congress didn’t authorize it. If we take away those checks and balances, it’s a dangerous thing,” Paul said, the Bowling Green Daily News reported.
In addition to Paul, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Susan Collins (R-ME) will also support the measure, while Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have not made their position on resolution public.
Later this month, the Senate will vote on the resolution to prevent President Trump from reallocating, without Congress, billions of dollars to fund the construction of a Southern border wall. In February, President Trump announced that he would declare an emergency to build the wall after Congress passed legislation providing $1.3 billion for barriers. He plans to divert $3.6 billion from military construction of the wall and transfer another $3.1 billion towards the construction. As the New York Times reported, McConnell promised the president to support the declaration, signaling that he would quell any opposition to the measure.
[A]fter a particularly unpleasant meeting with the secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, the president was threatening to torpedo the deal, according to two people briefed on the exchange. Several hours and several phone calls later, McConnell had persuaded Mr. Trump to once again agree to sign the bill to avert another government shutdown looming at midnight Friday.But persuasion came at a price: The president would declare a national emergency to try to secure wall funding without congressional approval, he told the majority leader — and Mr. McConnell would have to back him.
Later in his remarks Monday, the Senate Majority Leader said attempted to talk the president out of issuing a declaration, saying that it may set a precedent of abuse by future Democrat administration seeking to prosecute their progressive agenda without Congress. “That’s one reason I argued without success that he not take this route,” McConnell said.
“I was one of those hoping the president would not take the national emergency route,” added the Kentucky Republican. “Once he decided to do that I said I would support it, but I was hoping he wouldn’t take that particular path.”
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