Monday, May 20, 2019

JOE BIDEN VOWS HE WILL BLOCK SANCTUARY CITIES.... AS MEXICO EXPANDS OCCUPATION TO ALL STATES


Flashback–Joe Biden in 2007 Vowed to Ban Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Aliens



JOHN BINDER
30
2:52

Former Vice President and 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidate Joe Biden (D-DE) previously vowed to ban sanctuary cities across the United States that shield illegal aliens from deportation.

During a September 2007 Democrat presidential primary debate in New Hampshire at Dartmouth College, Biden said he would not support allowing local jurisdictions and states to ignore federal immigration law to help protect illegal aliens from deportation through sanctuary city policies.
The former Delaware senator even went as far as to criticize President George W. Bush’s administration for allowing sanctuary cities to operate in the U.S.
Biden’s exchange with New England Cable News’s Alison King went as follows:
KING: I’d like to hear from Senator Biden, would you allow these cities to ignore the federal law? [Emphasis added]
BIDEN: The reason that cities ignore the federal law is the fact that there is no funding at the federal level to provide for the kind of enforcement at the federal level you need … Part of the problem is you have to have a federal government that can enforce laws. This administration’s been fundamentally derelict in not funding any of the requirements that are needed even to enforce the existing law… [Emphasis added]

KING: So Senator Biden, yes or no, would you allow those cities to ignore the federal law? [Emphasis added]
BIDENNo. [Emphasis added]
Biden has previously held a number of the same positions on national immigration policy as President Trump, whom he now attacks as “racist.”
For example, Biden voiced his support for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration in 2006 and endorsed mandatory E-Verify to ban employers from hiring illegal aliens over American citizens, Breitbart News noted.
“Folks, I voted for a fence, I voted, unlike most Democrats — and some of you won’t like it — I voted for 700 miles of fence,” Biden said. “But, let me tell you, we can build a fence 40 stories high — unless you change the dynamic in Mexico and — and you will not like this, and punish American employers who knowingly violate the law when, in fact, they hire illegals. Unless you do those two things, all the rest is window dressing.”
Currently, Biden is leading the 2020 Democrat presidential primary against Trump by running on a strict open borders platform that not only demands amnesty for all 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S., but promotes additional public benefits for border crossers at American taxpayers’ expense.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants. Similarly, research has revealed how Americans’ wages are crushed by the country’s high immigration levels. JOHN BINDER



Native Born Americans Lag Behind Foreigners in U.S. Workforce Growth



MARIETTA, OH - OCTOBER 25: An employee welds pipe at Pioneer Pipe on October 25, 2016 in Marietta, Ohio. The construction, maintenance and fabrication company employs around 800 people, supplying products to the oil and gas industry. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Spencer Platt/Getty
JOHN BINDER
 676
3:37

Native born Americans have continued lagging behind foreign born workers in the United States’ workforce over the last decade, federal data finds.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data obtained by the Wall Street Journal reveals that while the foreign born workforce in the U.S. economy hits the highest level since 1996 because of the country’s mass legal immigration policy, foreign born workers also are far exceeding native born Americans in terms of labor market growth.
Over the last 10 years, the number of foreign born workers who entered the labor market increased 17.2 percent. At the same time, the number of native born Americans who entered the labor market increased by less than three percent. This indicates that in the last decade, the foreign born workforce in the U.S. economy grew more than six times the rate of the native born workforce.
As Breitbart News reported, legal immigration levels, where 1.2 million mostly low-skilled legal immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers are admitted to the country annually, have driven the number of foreign born workers in the U.S. to its highest level in more than two decades.
Today, foreign born workers make up 17.5 percent of the U.S. workforce and remain undercutting the wages of America’s native born working and middle class.
In 2018, foreign-born workers were cheaper to hire for employers, earning a median weekly salary of less than $760. At the same time, native born American workers’ median weekly salary was $910. The data, though, found that while native-born Americans’ wages have been largely stagnant, foreign-born workers have seen their wages rise.
Though there continue to be nearly 12 million Americans who want a full-time job but are unemployed, underemployed, or out of the labor force entirely, the U.S. has continued admitting more than a million legal immigrants a year to compete for working and middle class jobs against these sidelined Americans.
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants. Similarly, research has revealed how Americans’ wages are crushed by the country’s high immigration levels.
For every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations, their weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent, Camarota finds. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent since 17.5 percent of the workforce is foreign born.
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 about 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 portion 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.
At current legal immigration rates, about one-in-six U.S. residents will have been born outside of the country by 2060, the Census Bureau has found. The foreign-born population in the U.S. is expected to reach 69 million in the next four decades — a boon to Wall Street investors, real estate developers, and big business executives who increasingly profit from more consumers and cheaper workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder



Trump Abandons ‘America First’ Reforms: 


 


‘We Need’ More Immigration to Grow Business Profits




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 20152016, 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.


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.

 


12M Americans Out of Workforce as DHS Approves 30K More Foreign Workers






AP/Elise Amendola
JOHN BINDER
7 May 2019390
3:09

Nearly 12 million Americans remain out of the United States labor force as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approved 30,000 more foreign workers  businesses can bring to the country to take blue-collar U.S. jobs.

As Breitbart News reported, Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan said this week that he would approve an additional 30,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to be brought to the U.S. by businesses to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs. This comes as former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen approved an additional 30,000 H-2B foreign workers in March.
Every year, U.S. companies are allowed to import 66,000 low-skilled H-2B foreign workers to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs. For some time, the H-2B visa program has been used by businesses to bring in cheaper foreign workers and has contributed to blue-collar Americans having their wages undercut.
Meanwhile, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data notes that there are nearly 12 million Americans who are either unemployed, underemployed, or out of the workforce but wanting a job.
About 5.8 million Americans remain unemployed. Those most likely to compete against cheaper foreign workers in blue-collar and entry-level industries — U.S. teenagers and black Americans — continue to have significantly higher unemployment rates than other demographic groups.
For example, of the 5.8 million Americans unemployed, about 754,000 are teenagers with an unemployment rate of 13 percent. Likewise, there are 388,600 black Americans who are unemployed, for an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent which is more than double the white American unemployment rate and more than triple the Asian American unemployment rate.
About 2.7 million of the unemployed population either lost their job or completed a temporary job, while 1.2 million, or 21 percent of the total unemployed, said they have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks.
Similarly, 4.7 million Americans are underemployed, that is U.S. part-time workers who want full-time jobs but are unable to find them. Another 1.4 million Americans are marginally attached to the labor force. These are U.S. workers who are ready and willing to work if they could fine a full-time job.
Of those 1.4 million Americans who are marginally attached to the labor force, 454,000 say they are “discouraged” by their job prospects and do not believe there is work for them in the current labor market.
While millions remain on the sidelines of the workforce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has suggested that the U.S. is “out of people” in their efforts to lobby Washington, D.C. lawmakers to support an expansion of the country’s legal immigration system.
For weeks, landscaping companies and lawn care businesses complained to DHS officials that there are not enough workers to fill blue collar and entry-level jobs, Breitbart News has been told. Experts, though, have warned that wage hikes that have benefited blue-collar and working-class Americans will not continue should more foreign workers saturate the labor market, decreasing the price of labor while subjecting Americans to increased competition for jobs.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 


Fixing America’s Unemployment Crisis


Trump was elected in part on the promise of creating jobs, but how about those who stopped looking for work?
What has been called a “quiet catastrophe” has been unfolding in America: the collapse of work for millions of America’s men, and, more recently, for America’s women as well.
Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates there are 10 million men who are jobless and no longer looking for work. According to calculations using 2014 data, an estimated 3.6 million women are in the same situation.
President-elect Donald Trump has announced a raft of policies meant to spur economic growth and create jobs, but thought needs to be given to what specific measures might help this urgent situation.
How to address this crisis depends on what one understands the problem to be. A graph showing the prime-age employment rate for men provides a kind of Rorschach test for possible responses.
Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, and author of, most recently, “The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity,” focuses on the cyclical upturns in the jagged line, on those periods of prosperity when workers regain jobs that had been lost.
Eberstadt focuses on the straight trend line, which has been going inexorably and disastrously downward for decades.
Bernstein and Eberstadt represent two typical and contrasting approaches to the unemployment problem.
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If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the great recession.
— JARED BERNSTEIN
Bernstein published the graph in a chapter he contributed to Eberstadt’s book “Men Without Work,” in which he critiques Eberstadt’s diagnosis of the employment crisis.
For Bernstein, the key is a missing demand for labor.
“If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the Great Recession,” Bernstein said in an interview. “That doesn’t sound to me like a group that has given up. It sounds to me like a group that is not facing ample opportunity.”
For Eberstadt, the problem is a detachment from work.
Using various government databases, Eberstadt gives a composite portrait of those men who are out of the workforce and not looking for work.
They don’t read newspapers, seem to have few familial responsibilities, and tend not to be involved in a church or their communities. They spend most of their time entertaining themselves with TV or hand-held devices; 31 percent admitted to survey takers that they used illegal drugs.
Bernstein counters this portrait by noting that the causal connection may go from a lack of employment opportunities to suffering from depression, which then leads to these men planting themselves on the couch.
As to the individual motives of the non-working, Bernstein said, “We just don’t know.” His advice to Trump is to aggressively pursue full employment, which involves the federal government using a number of different tools.
An officer waits to escort Harvey Lesser, an unemployed software developer, from his apartment after serving him with a court order for eviction in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 11, 2009.

Stimulus and Subsidies

Bernstein believes the key to the downward trend his graph shows is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. He favors trade policies that will reduce America’s chronic trade imbalances, which will create more demand for domestic manufacturing.
Bernstein also favors an infrastructure program, with the caveat that “you have to do it right,” he said.
He would like to see the federal government get involved in communities that “don’t have enough businesses, child care slots, supermarkets, and stores—these are a classic market failure.”
The federal government could subsidize private employers in these neighborhoods, giving them an incentive to move their businesses there.
Bernstein also favors special efforts to help those with a criminal record, and Eberstadt agrees finding ways to help this population is key to addressing the problem of non-working adults. He estimates that, by the end of 2016, there will be 20 million with a felony conviction in their past.

 


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Only a complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
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“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
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The latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch brothers.
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Efforts by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty

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A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

MAGA vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 

The general public typically equates the Chamber of Commerce with local Mom and Pop businesses in their area which meet for networking and mutual support in local chapters across the country. This is erroneous. According to theHill
While local chambers cater to the needs of car dealers and restaurant owners, the national Chamber operates as the lobbying arm of large corporations that have never met a big government program they did not like.
They are weapons dealers pushing billion-dollar battleships and telecommunication lobbyists protecting slow Internet at the world's highest prices. They are lobbyists for pharmaceutical companies, big banks, and Wall street traders who treat the American people as gullibles to be fleeced without mercy.
Even seasoned politicians are susceptible to having misconceptions about the Chamber. Former U.S. senator Jim Demint admits he naively thought it was lobbying for free enterprise and creating a better business environment for everybody. Now he says, "I pronounce them part of the swamp." Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich), a conservative, adds, "I believe in free markets and am against cronyism and corporate welfare, and they [the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] support those things."
So what is the USCC? It is a business lobbying group that represents 80% of the Fortune 100 companies and is by far the largest interest group in Washington. According the Wall Street Journal, the Chamber spent $125 million in lobbying in 2014 and $95 million last year. This dwarfs the spending of any other interest group. One tactic the Chamber uses to swell its revenue is to solicit money from big international companies to promote specific goals. Since donor names are not public, the Chamber can pursue controversial fights without identifying the firms behind the effort.
The Chamber of Commerce and its president Thomas Donohue came into conflict with Donald Trump and his America First platform very early on. For 18 months during the runup to the 2016 election, the Chamber spared no effort to demonize Trump. In doing so, the Chamber was carrying water for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Donohue and company figured they could better deal with Hillary than Trump in the Oval Office. In this, the Chamber was exactly right. 
The big hangups the Chamber and its client base had against Donald Trump involved immigration, trade, and tariffs. Adhering to its corporate masters’ call for a continuous supply of cheap labor, the Chamber lobbies for more immigration and resists tight border controls. Trade is much the same. Past trade pacts have allowed Wall Street to grow obscenely rich in the outsourcing of American jobs to third-world countries for sake of the bottom line of the multinationals. In the process, over a million ordinary Americans were left holding the bag. 
All this is still playing out today. The president is striving to adjust the unfair trading arrangements that the political class, in cahoots with the big money interests on Wall Street, have saddled the U.S. with.  But Trump and his trade team of Robert Lighthizer, Wilbur Ross, Steven Mnuchin, and Larry Kudlow are fighting not just China, but what is effectively a Fifth Column here at home. It's composed of the likes of the Chamber of Commerce and a sizable portion of the political establishment, which is used to dipping its beak in special-interest money. 
As to this latter point, just look at the breaking news of the dealings of Joe Biden's son, Hunter, with the Chinese government. Writing in the New YorkPost, Peter Schweizer outlines in detail the $1.5 private equity deal the younger Biden made with the Chinese while Biden was vice-president. And now, Joe Biden is out on the stump soft-peddling the damage China has done to the U.S. economy and downplaying its threat to us and pretending to be for the working man. You can't make this up.
It's important not to conflate Big Business (Wall Street) with small business (Main Street). Wall Street is the financial economy. It pushes paper around. For example, they write derivatives on real assets, say stocks, to the point where the value of derivatives traded is far greater than the assets they are based on.Investopedia says this: "The derivatives market is, in a word, gigantic -- often estimated at more than $1.2 quadrillion on the high end."
A quadrillion is 1,000 trillion. In dollar terms, a quadrillion is 15-times the GDP of the entire world.
Main Street actually makes and sells things. For over a generation or more, Big Biz has dominated Main Street. This is why the Midwest and other places across the U.S. are littered with closed factories and why middle-class wages stagnated. In many ways, the financial economy is parasitic on the real economy. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump represented Main Street while Clinton was in the pocket of the big money interests on Wall Street. 
What this means is that what is good for Main Street will not be good for Wall Street and Big Biz, at least not in the short run. What benefits the American worker -- fair trade policy and tight immigration control -- will initially hurt Big Biz and Wall Street. And the hurt will continue until the financial economy is scaled back to its proper size and is no longer allowed to the tail that wags the American economic dog. Until then, MAGA is at war with Big Biz and the bought-and-paid-for political establishment. And this explains much of the resistance to Trump's tariffs and trade position.
A closing observation says a lot. Thomas Donohue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, is 80 years old. His board is pushing him to retire. The replacement they are looking at is former Congressman Paul Ryan. A perfect fit given the Chamber's agenda.

  

Chamber of Commerce Demands More Immigration: ‘U.S. Is Out of People’



The United States Chamber of Commerce is vowing to continue fighting President Trump’s shaping of the Republican Party into a pro-U.S. worker party of blue collar working and middle class Americans.
In an interview with the Washington Post, numerous Chamber of Commerce officials said the organization’s corporate lobbying efforts would soon attempt to court more elected Democrats to support their economic libertarian agenda of more free trade and increased legal immigration.
“The GOP’s drift toward protectionism, nativism, and isolationism since Donald Trump took over the party in 2016 is also at odds with the Chamber’s longtime support for expanding free trade, growing legal immigration and investing in infrastructure,” the Poststory details.
Specifically, Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donahue said the U.S. needed more legal immigration so that corporations and business secure a never-ending flow of cheaper labor, claiming the country is “out of people.”
And they’re still looking to work with Trump even on areas where they’re not really in agreement, such as immigration. The Chamber advocates for protecting the “dreamers” from deportation and expanding rates of legal immigration“The fundamental issue is that the United States of America is out of people,” said Donohue. “We have the lowest unemployment we’ve had in 65 years. We have brought more people back into the workforce and still have the lowest unemployment.” [Emphasis added]
Despite Donahue’s claims, at least 12 million Americans who want full-time jobs remain on the sidelines of the workforce. This includes 6.2 million Americans who are unemployed that want a job, 4.5 million Americans who are underemployed working part-time jobs, and 1.4 million Americans who continue to be entirely out of the workforce though they want full-time employment.

More than 12 million Americans remain unemployed, underemployed, or out of the labor force but wanting a job. Tight labor market still has some slack. 


Feds: More Than 12M Americans Remain Sidelined Out of the Workforce




While millions remain on the sidelines of the workforce, the Chamber of Commerce has routinely advocated for increasing legal immigration levels as a boon to corporations while depressing job prospects and wages for America’s working and middle class. Already, about 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants are admitted to the country every year, to the detriment of U.S. wages.
The Chamber of Commerce’s push to increase legal immigration levels is vastly out of step with Republican voters and American voters as a whole. Last year, nearly two-out-threeU.S. voters said they supported reducing legal immigration, while most recently about 43 percent of Republican voters said immigration hurts the country.
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current mass legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.
Borjas has previously called the country’s legal immigration system the “largest anti-poverty program” in the world at the expense of blue-collar Americans and middle-class taxpayers.
Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one-percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his 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 about 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.
Though corporate interests and the open borders lobby have sought to sway Trump from his “America First” illegal and legal immigration agenda, senior advisor Jared Kushner recently said the president’s top priority in terms of the White House’s reform efforts is protecting Americans’ wages.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.