Labor Day: Real Wages Are Falling in the Biden Economy
It’s not your imagination: it really is harder to make ends meet these days.
Real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.1 percent from June to July, seasonally adjusted, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Businesses across America are paying their workers more as they struggle to fill a record number of open positions. Wages increased four-tenths of a percentage point in July. But prices are rising even faster. The Consumer Price Index rose five-tenths of a point.
This means that workers are worse off than they were a month earlier.
Zoom out the time frame and things are even worse. Real average hourly earnings nosedived 1.2 percent from July 2020 to July 2021.
The change in real average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.6 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 0.7-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings.
So we’re working more and earning less.
The government tracks a category of job holders called “production and nonsupervisory employees.” In other words, everyone but the bosses. From July 2020 to July 2021, real average hourly earnings decreased 1.1 percent, seasonally adjusted.
When inflation started to pick up earlier this year, many pundits said that there would be a “silver lining” of wage increases.
But wage increases have lagged inflation, so there is no silver lining. We’re just getting poorer.
Voters Swing 17 Points Against Biden’s Migration Policies
Public opinion has shifted 17 points against President Joe Biden’s loose migration policies, according to polls by Morning Consult for Politico.
The August 28-30 poll of 1,997 registered voters shows Biden with 55 percent opposition and just 36 percent support. In April, Biden had 45 percent opposition and 43 percent support on immigration.
This 17-point shift is echoed by other negative polls in August — and it may upset the Democrats’ plan to rush four massive, wage-cutting amnesties through the Senate in the fall.
The September data also shows that only eight percent of independents still strongly support Biden’s immigration policies. Forty percent of independents strongly oppose those policies, 19 percent “somewhat” oppose his policies, and 14 percent have no opinion.
Thirty-one percent of Hispanics strongly oppose Biden’s policies, while 19 percent strongly support those policies, according to the poll.
Overall, the polling shift leaves Biden in the same boat as President Barack Obama shortly before his congressional defeat in the 2014 midterm elections.
The shift is all the more notable because GOP leaders prefer not to talk about the pocketbook damage done to Americans by the government’s inflow of low-wage workers and apartment-sharing renters. Instead, GOP leaders prefer to talk about subsidiary issues, such as chaos on the border and drug smuggling.
The polling drop helps to explain why some officials have welcomed the August directive by federal judges to stop the release of job-seeking migrants into the United States, according to a September 6 report in the New York Times:
But among some Biden officials, the Supreme Court’s order was quietly greeted with something other than dismay, current and former officials said: It brought some measure of relief.
…
In fact, some Biden officials were already talking about reviving Mr. Trump’s policy in a limited way to deter migration, said the officials, who have worked on immigration policy but were not authorized to speak publicly about the administration’s internal debates on the issue. Then the Supreme Court order came, providing the Biden administration with the political cover to adopt the policy in some form without provoking as much ire from Democrats who reviled Mr. Trump’s border policies.
However, the talk about curbs is a political calculation before the 2022 mid-term election. The New York Times article offers no evidence that Biden’s officials believe Americans’ prosperity is more important than the pressure from business donors and progressives to import migrant workers, consumers, renters, chaotic diversity, and potential voters.
The New York Times report also provides some evidence for a split in the White House between Biden’s long-time East coast political allies and the West Coast alliance of pro-migration progressive,s led by Vice President Kamala Harris, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and West Coast investors represented by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group.
So far, the Western faction has been dominant in the White House and is on track to import double the 2020 immigrant inflow to 1.6 million. That inflow is roughly equal to one migrant for every two American births.
But Biden’s deputies are pushing back. For example, last week, Biden’s White House staff appointed a Biden ally to monitor the unpopular Afghan migration that is being pushed by Mayorkas, a Cuban-born immigration zealot. The Washington Post reported September 3:
President Biden has tapped a former governor of his home state, Jack Markell, to temporarily serve as his point person on resettling Afghan evacuees in the United States, White House officials said Friday.
Markell, 60, who served as Delaware’s governor from 2009 to 2017, is a former chair of the National Governors Association and a close adviser to the president. He will be the White House coordinator of what the administration is calling “Operation Allies Welcome,” and he is expected to start next week and stay through the end of the calendar year.
However, Democrats have a card up their sleeves for the 2022 election — GOP leaders do not want to mention the pocketbook costs of Biden’s migration wave.
Republican leaders oppose the Democrats’ pending amnesty. But the donor-funded GOP leaders — such as Rep. John Katko (R-NY) — do not want to promise any fix for the pocketbook impact of migration on Americans communities. Instead, they try to steer voters’ concerns towards subsidiary non-economic issues, such as migrant crime, the border wall, border chaos, and drug smuggling.
However, populist-minded Republican leaders, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), have defended the economic interests of Americans.
Migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
Thi pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
Washington Post Absolves Biden Administration as Migrants Drown, Work for $5 per Hour
Poor migrants work for as little as $5 per hour and drown in flooded New York basements, according to two articles by seven reporters in Sunday’s online Washington Post.
But neither Washington Post article mentioned the federal government’s role in creating the high-migration, low-wage economy that delivered the poor migrants — and pushed many Americans — into New York’s submerged apartments.
One small portion of the toll was sketched on Sunday, in the September 5 Washington Post:
When the remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped seven inches of rain on the New York City area in about three hours … 11 of the 13 people who were killed were found in basement apartments that, in most cases, were never legally converted into residential space.
Most of the dead were immigrants; they’d come to New York from Trinidad, Nepal and China. They were busboys and kitchen helpers and 7-Eleven clerks, and in a city where apartments rent for far more than many immigrants’ first jobs pay, the only [affordable] housing they’d been able to find was below ground.
The federal government’s immigration policy deliberately extracts legal and illegal workers, consumers, and renters from many poor countries so they can be exploited by U.S. employers, landlords, and investors. Those migrants cluster into coastal cities, pushing up rents for migrants and Americans alike.
The four authors of the article — Stephanie Lai, Vera Haller, Samira Sadeque, Marc Fisher — did not acknowledge the government’s delivery of migrant victims to the flood.
Instead, they invited New York leaders to blame the drownings on other aspects of the federal migration problem, such as the city’s inability to enforce housing rules, or the possibility that federal migration laws might be enforced:
“At least 100,000 people — and there’s a strong possibility there’s a lot more — are living in those apartments,” Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said Friday. “So many people who end up in the illegal basements are fearful to communicate for fear they might be evicted or, worse in their mind, deported.”
But for many years, New York’s elite praised the inflow of migrants for boosting the city’s wealth.
The New York Times posted a similar article on September 2, which also remained silent about the federal government’s role in the drowning of migrants — and of poor Americans — in New York’s cheap basements:
In one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, they have offered low-income New Yorkers, including many working-class families who work in restaurants and hotels, affordable places to live. The basement apartments also provide some extra income for small landlords, many of whom are also immigrants.
…
Deborah Torres, who lives on the first floor of a building in Woodside, Queens, said she heard desperate pleas from the basement apartment of three members of a family, including a toddler, as floodwaters rushed in. A powerful cascade of water prevented anyone from getting into the apartment to help — or anyone from getting out. The family did not survive.
Like the Post, the New York Times downplayed the poor Americans who are forced by government-engineered high rental costs to live in basement apartments. Four reporters wrote the New York Times article – Mihir Zaveri, Matthew Haag, Adam Playford, and
The Washington Post‘s second article on Sunday, September 5, described the economic conundrum where roughly 8 million Americans are refusing to return to their low-wage jobs:
At heart, there is a massive reallocation underway in the economy that’s triggering a “Great Reassessment” of work in America from both the employer and employee perspectives. Workers are shifting where they want to work — and how. For some, this is a personal choice. The pandemic and all of the anxieties, lockdowns and time at home have changed people. Some want to work remotely forever. Others want to spend more time with family. And others want a more flexible or more meaningful career path. It’s the “you only live once” mentality on steroids. Meanwhile, companies are beefing up automation and redoing entire supply chains and office setups.
…
[Cindy] Lehnhoff has been helping a child care center in northern Virginia recruit more staff. Their infant room remains closed, because they don’t have enough people, and one of their veteran workers was just poached by a nearby elementary school. As she spoke with The Washington Post, Lehnhoff pored over the Indeed.com job portal. It showed more than 2,000 job posts in the Fairfax County, Va., area for child care teaching assistants. Most paid $12 to $13 an hour, a bit less than many nearby fast food restaurants and retail stores.
The article has three authors — Heather Long, Alyssa Fowers, and Andrew Van Dam — but not one mention of immigration.
The federal government has inflated the annual new labor supply by at least 15 percent per year since around 1995. President George W. Bush promoted cheap migrant labor, and President Barack Obama invited Central American job seekers to ask for asylum. The result was a massive inflow of cheap labor and an economic bubble of low-wage jobs.
That bubble burst once President Donald Trump, the coronavirus, and federal unemployment aid slashed the supply of Americans and migrants who were willing to take the low-wage jobs.
In response, companies are now raising wages and buying labor-saving machines to help employees do more work. But the employers are also demanding yet more migrants to do the low-wage work Americans refuse to do.
In response, the labor bubble is being inflated again by President Joe Biden and his progressives deputies, including homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas.
They are pulling hundreds of thousands of migrants across the union line that marks the borders of the United States.
They have restarted the policy of extraction migration, and are likely to add roughly 1.6 million migrants during 2021. That global race for Americans’ jobs includes tens of thousands of Afghans, and hundreds of thousands of people from Central America, including at least 25,000 older teenage boys who are deemed “Unaccompanied Alien Children.”
The flood of new labor allows employers to refill many of the low-wage jobs — the restaurant jobs, the subcontractors’ day-labor jobs, the meatpacking jobs, delivery jobs, the construction jobs, and many more.
Biden knows a tight labor market is good for Americans. Judges have directed him to protect Americans by barring job-seeking migrants from crossing the 50-state union’s line. Multiple polls show his policies are increasingly unpopular.
Yet his deputies — such as immigration zealot Mayorkas — continued to pull global migrants into the U.S. labor market, where many are happy to earn $7.50 for their hourly labor.
But this big-picture macroeconomics story is hidden by the Washington Post, which prefers to miniaturize and personalize every aspect of immigration policy.
Washington Post author Maria Sacchetti, for example, posted a third article on Sunday that allows amnesty lobbyists to praise and flatter Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for promising to push an amnesty through Congress.
But Sacchetti does not even refer to the economic damage done to Americans by companies’ government-granted ability to hire millions of illegal foreign workers, nor the windfall gains that go to wealthy employers, investors, and coastal cities, such as New York. Her article does not quote a single critic of cheap-labor migration.
Instead, she builds her article on personal stories, such as an illegal-migrant couple that lost their low-wage jobs when the coronavirus shut down the city:
“We went to bed and the city woke up paralyzed,” said Maria Mejia, who dreams of becoming a U.S. citizen and opening her own buffet-style restaurant. “But the city kept going. And who kept it going? We did. The undocumented.”
But those personal stories lift the corner on the city’s welcome for low-wage, rent-paying migrants:
[Mejia’s] husband returned to work at a mom-and-pop supermarket last year, but like many undocumented immigrants, he has no health insurance, no overtime pay and no vacation time. He is paid $5 an hour, six days a week. The official minimum wage in New York is $15 an hour.
Another migrant, Oscar Lopez, 34, works as an “air-conditioner installer,” wrote Sacchetti. “He hadn’t returned to Mexico since he left 17 years ago. He needs the $21-an-hour job that pays his family’s expenses in both countries.”
Glassdoor reports that New York’s HVAC technicians earn roughly $31 per hour.
But Sacchetti does recognize that New York’s government welcomes the poor migrants who crowd into the city’s real estate market:
New York has attempted to integrate undocumented immigrants, providing them legal aid, issuing them city identification cards and state driver’s licenses, and creating a $2.1 billion state fund for “excluded” workers ineligible for federal pandemic aid.
Sacchetti’s guides to New York’s economic underground include both the National TPS Alliance and Make the Road New York.
Both groups are part of Mark Zuckerberg’s network of pro-migrati0n and pro-amnesty groups that are lobbying the media and Congress to pass a reconciliation amnesty this fall.
The lobbying campaign has urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media. The network is also funding online ads praising Schumer for promising to push the amnesty through the Senate this year.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters.
The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His fast-growing retail empire gains from the government’s inflow of additional consumers and workers.
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