President Joe Biden’s pending Build Back Better (BBB) bill will shrink inflation by cutting Americans’ wages with a flood of roughly 9 million legalized and new workers, according to Facebook-funded FWD.us, a leader in the pro-amnesty movement.
“As the United States continues to experience historic labor shortages contributing to inflation and driving up costs for families, FWD.us analysis below shows that immigration relief could help address these shortages and curb inflationary trends,” said the group’s December 12 report.
That anti-inflation message is being echoed by the Democratic establishment as it tries to overcome opposition from a few Democratic Senators, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
“Price increases continue to squeeze family budgets,” President Joe Biden said on December 10. “The challenge of prices underscores the importance that Congress move without delay to pass my Build Back Better plan.”
“If we want to fight inflation and lower costs, the best thing we can do is to pass Build Back Better,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in another December 10 statement.
But the FWD.us report is directly targeting Americans’ wages as it pushes Democrats to deliver what its investors want — more cheap labor, more revenues, more profits, and higher stock values.
The FWD.us report continues:
Families in our country are gravely concerned by inflation, and persistent worker shortages present a clear inflationary pressure [via rising wages]. Not only can immigration provisions in BBB shore up existing workforces in industries experiencing labor disruptions, the act’s provisions would also allow, in the long term, millions [emphasis added] of potential new workers backlogged in the lawful immigration system to come to the U.S. to work.
The report acknowledged the rising wages spurred by President Donald Trump’s 2020 reduction in immigration: “[The extra migration] could help offset the decrease in lawful immigration experienced during the Trump Administration, a likely contributing factor to our current labor force shortages.”
Numerous groups — including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs — have credited Trump’s reduced labor supply for boosting Americans’ wages.
The FWD.us report comes as more Democrat politicians and pro-migration activists tout more migration as a wage-cutting fix for inflation.
“Our economy stands to benefit tremendously from allowing more folks to work legally, especially as we face a labor shortage that continues to contribute towards inflation,” said a December 5 statement from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) to a pro-migration website, LatinoRebels.com. The LatinoRebels site is quietly funded by very establishment donors, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which uses Facebook profits to fund FWD.us and other pro-migration groups.
CASA,an advocacy organization for Latino and immigrant people and other immigrant advocacy groups rally outside the White House in Lafayette Park, to demand that the Biden administration take action on citizenship for all on May 26, 2021 in Washington, DC (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images).
“If you have more people that are allowed to work in this country, then there’s gonna be less of a tight labor market,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) told LatinoRebels.com on December 2.
The Democrats’ top advocate for amnesty and migration, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), also backed the argument, according to a Bloomberg reporter: “Asked if immigration parole proposal in [the pending Build Back Better bill] would decrease inflation, Durbin says ‘Oh most certainly … If there are more workers filling those jobs, it’s deflationary.'”
However, the FWD.us report and Democrats ignore the inflationary impact of new immigrants on rents and housing prices. Those prices are already rising in 2021 as the nation’s cheap-labor/low-tech housing industry builds few new homes — and as 2 million new migrants, legal and illegal, compete for housing against the roughly 4 million young Americans who entered the workforce in 2021.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., talks about the the Build Back Better bill during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Dec. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
The FWD.us report also hides prior claims by pro-amnesty groups that an amnesty will raise wages for the illegal migrants already working in the United States. “Such [legalization] reforms would increase earnings and productivity for undocumented workers, eventually leading to increased tax contributions and local spending,” the Center for American Progress claimed in 2020.
The FWD.us report even links to a report saying inflation is rising because employers are bidding up wages during a labor shortage:
“The growth in the working-age population is not going to slow, it’s actually going to decline,” [Charles] Goodhart said Tuesday at a conference sponsored by the European Central Bank. “People will bid up wages in order to deal with the shortages of workers they will be increasingly facing — that’s not transitory, it’s here for the long-term.”
The thrust of the FWD.us report is that the BBB’s migration changes would reduce claimed “labor shortages” by delivering “millions of potential new workers” to the U.S. economy.
This argument refers to at least four categories of foreign workers who would be allowed to buy green cards, regardless of their impact on American families.
The first category of foreign workers is the roughly 1 million contract workers who have been imported by companies to replace American university graduates. This foreign workforce includes many gig workers in the technology sector, but also many foreign graduates in a growing variety of “healthcare, university, design, and manufacturing careers.”
The pending BBB bill also would sell fast-track green cards to an uncapped population of future foreign workers — perhaps millions — who sign contracts that will take jobs from American graduates during the next decade. These workers are likely to settle in the coastal states, thus reducing investors’ incentives to create jobs in the interior states, such as Manchin’s West Virginia.
The third category of workers is the waiting population of “chain migrants” seeking to join recent legal immigrant family members. This population now includes 4 million people who are waiting in a multi-year line for some of the roughly 230,000 green cards that are distributed each year to relatives of immigrants. The BBB bill would allow the four million chain migrants in the line to buy green cards if they can fly into the United States, for example, on a tourist visa to visit Disney World. Most would settle in coastal states, further boosting housing costs for the sons and daughters of Americans.
The fast-track process would likely encourage more people to apply for chain migration status, delivering yet more workers and house buyers in the next several years. Other countries have seen real estate bubbles amid mass immigration .
The pending chain migrants are selected by new immigrants, not by Americans, U.S. employers, or government-drafted standards for productivity. This migrants-select-migrants policy ensures that many arrivals have few skills and can only garner low-wage jobs. Their arrival would further flood the low-skilled labor market, thus trimming inflation by suppressing wages for millions of Americans and other recent immigrants.
But all migrants, even if unskilled, sick, or old, are a boon to business groups because they spike consumer demand for groceries, retail goods, and housing. So any inflow of millions of migrants would increase housing costs, as well as stock market values for people who own real estate or shares in groceries, retail stores, or the healthcare and auto industries.
That’s a win-win for most investors, whose stock values would rise amid the further stagnation of Americans’ careers, salaries, wages, and housing.
Speaking of investors, the breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at other sites.
The FWD.us report is titled: “Immigration relief in BBB can help curb inflation by stabilizing supply chains amidst historic labor shortages.”
As usual, establishment journalists, including the Washington Pos t’s Greg Waldman , ignore migration as they spotlight the most popular aspects of the BBB spending plan.
The University of California, Santa Barbara, has unveiled plans for “Munger Hall,” a dormitory for more than 4,500 students, designed by Charles T. Munger, a billionaire and executive at Berkshire Hathaway. The design has been denounced by architect Dennis McFadden, who served as a consultant on the university’s design review committee. McFadden resigned in protest of the building.
UCSB students gathered outside of the library last month to protest the building of Munger Hall, and the December eviction of students. (Source: Twitter/@Atmikalyer) In his letter from October 24, McFadden wrote to the chairwomen of the committee that the building design constituted a “social and psychological experiment.” He continued, “In the nearly 15 years I served as a consulting architect to the DRC, no project was brought before the committee that is larger, more transformational and potentially more destructive to the campus as a place than Munger Hall.”
“The basic concept of Munger Hall,” he wrote, “as a place for students to live is unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”
McFadden also wrote how he was “disturbed” by Munger’s design to house the students into a 1.7 million-square-foot, 11-story building with the vast majority living in small, windowless rooms, “wholly dependent on artificial light and mechanical ventilation.”
University administrators have since said that the design and the project are moving forward “as planned.”
Projected to cost $1.5 billion and scheduled to open in 2025, Munger Hall will be the world’s densest dormitory and the eighth densest neighborhood in the world, behind a district in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Although the dorm will be located next to the Santa Barbara coast, the vast majority of its residents will be unable to see it.
Munger, the 97-year-old vice chairman of the investment fund Berkshire Hathaway, has been described as Warren Buffet’s righthand man. He endowed $200 million to the UC campus on the condition that he designed the housing plan himself, despite having no formal architectural qualifications.
In an interview with TheNew York Times , Munger said, “I’m not a bit surprised that someone looked at it and said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ What’s going on here is that it’s going to work better than any other practical alternative.”
As for the windowless dorms, Munger said that they would have “virtual windows” that use LED lights to replicate natural light. Without a shred of irony he said, “If you want it romantic and dim, you can make it romantic and dim … When in your life have you been able to change the sun? In this dorm, you can.”
“It’s a pretty cheerful place,” he added, “these little bedrooms.”
McFadden wrote in his letter that a building’s access to natural light and nature were essential to improving a person’s physical and mental health. “The Munger Hall ignores this evidence and seems to take the position that it doesn’t matter.”
He also noted that the university was hell-bent on approving the project to satisfy its billionaire donor: “It was clear the (design review committee) was a mere formality … The design was 100 percent complete, approval was not requested, no vote was taken and no further submittals are intended or required.”
Many students have spoken out against the plan, with one comparing the bedrooms to “solitary confinement.” Another wrote, “You are asking for students to get depression and commit self-harm,” adding, “Strongly reconsider this entire plan.”
Paul Golderberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker , wrote on Twitter, “This design is a grotesque, sick joke—a jail masquerading as dormitory,” adding, “No, design isn’t up to billionaire donors.”
Other online commenters called the dorm plans “barbaric” and an incubator for COVID-19, with some even comparing it to the panopticon, the 18th-century concept for a prison where the inmates guarded themselves after being under constant surveillance from a central tower.
Munger’s plans will have two single-occupancy bathrooms, meaning one toilet and shower, for every eight bedrooms. While Munger acknowledged that he may die before the project is completed he was confident that “it will be widely regarded as the best in the world.”
Munger Hall has had other precedents, including the Munger graduate housing, a 630-student dorm at the University of Michigan that opened in 2015.
An online forum of students there noted, “It was terrible … too many roommates (meant) no cohesion or standards. The lack of windows was depressing. Munger is about as out of touch as billionaires come.”
Another student wrote that “lack of windows messed up one of my roommates really badly with school and mental health and well-being.” There was “no sense of time if you’re just in your room with no natural light.” Another wrote, “unfortunately the floor plans at UCSB look far worse than what we have here.”
Thousands of people have already signed a petition to cancel the UCSB project and it could be the spark for renewed student protests at the school. All across the country, the lack of decent, affordable housing has seen many students and their supporters demanding change.
At Virginia Commonwealth University, 400 students at a dormitory in Johnson Hall were told to move after dangerous levels of mold were discovered. Some students had already begun feeling ill in October but have only now been told it was unsafe to live there. Many students were left with no alternative source of housing.
Last week saw a sharp escalation of the strike by 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City, which continues in the face of strikebreaking threats by the administration. In an effort to shut down the walkout before finals, the university warned striking student workers that it might replace them in the Spring semester if they remained on strike beyond Friday, December 10.
Picketing at Columbia University (WSWS Media) Columbia workers rejected this attempt at economic blackmail and held out on the picket line. A poll conducted by the Student Workers of Columbia union (SWC) bargaining committee found that 87 percent of union members and nearly 77 percent of supporters of the strike wished for the strike to continue. Of those who wanted to extend the strike, 98 percent indicated that they wished to do so in direct response to the threats by the administration.
In response to Columbia’s threats to not rehire the workers, the union filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The union is arguing that the strike is an unfair labor practices strike rather than an economic one. In the former type of strike, it is illegal for employers to retaliate by replacing workers.
The SWC parent union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), continues to limit strike pay to a poverty-level $275 a week, despite sitting on a massive strike fund of nearly $800 million, hoping the economic impact on striking workers will force them to accept a deal.
The escalation of the strike brought with it the intervention of the Democratic Party. On Wednesday, Democratic Congressional Representative from New York Jerry Nadler wrote a letter to Columbia University which congratulated the union and made appeals to “good faith” negotiations between the bargaining unit and the administration. Nadler’s letter was signed by several Democratic US Congressional Representatives from New York, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members Jamal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
New York State Senator Robert Jackson also appeared at the picket line Wednesday to declare his support for striking student workers. The intervention by these Democrats reflects an understanding of the politically explosive situation in which the strike is unfolding. The strike, the largest in the country at present, is part of an international strike wave that emerged this fall and just as another deadly wave of the pandemic erupts.
Meanwhile, the mediation process is continuing. In mid-November, the SWC leadership agreed to bring third-party state mediator Kevin Flanigan into discussions with the university. Since then, talks have given way to concession after concession, with Flanigan continually threatening to rescind his participation should students be unwilling to budge on certain key demands.
One such demand dropped by the SWC was the provision that students working under 10-hours per week be covered by the university’s health insurance plan, amounting to several millions of dollars saved by the university. The initial demand of a $26 per hour wage was reduced to $24. Current wage increases being discussed amount to a paltry 3 percent yearly over the course of what could be a 5-year agreement.
To put this in perspective, inflation rose to 6.8 percent last month, increasing at a rate not seen since the 1980s. Food prices have surged by 6 percent, while the cost of used automobiles has jumped by 31 percent. Accounting for this inflation, the SWC and the university are now essentially negotiating over how large a pay cut student workers will receive.
Columbia acknowledged in a letter Friday that the strike has caused a major disruption at the school. In many cases it is not possible to award students a grade outside of pass or fail for their classes. In other cases, students will simply receive a temporary mark of “Credit Pending,” with coursework continuing beyond the semester.
Faced with their failure to browbeat student workers into ending their strike, the deans of Columbia’s four undergraduate schools are currently working on further contingency plans in the event the strike extends throughout finals and the grading period.
The Columbia University administration consists of the staunchest representatives of American capitalism. Its president, Lee Bollinger, makes over $1 million annually, while the university board is composed of leading officials from the corporate, military, and state apparatuses.
Students opposing low wages and living standards not only confront their employers but the entire financial system. In order to win their demands, strikers at Columbia must expand their action to other universities and industries across the city, country, and the world. The primary obstacle to such a mobilization of graduate student workers, however, has been the strike leadership itself, the UAW, as well as the AFL-CIO bureaucracy more broadly.
Whether organizing student workers in prestigious American universities or factory workers in manufacturing plants across the Midwest, the American labor apparatus is thoroughly hostile to any action which threatens profit interests that make its privileged position possible.
The UAW is a particularly corrupt and foul manifestation of the historical bankruptcy of the American trade union system. Two former UAW presidents, Dennis Williams and Gary Jones, are currently serving prison sentences for embezzling union funds.
In 2021, the union oversaw the betrayal of struggles by 3,000 employees at Volvo Trucks in Dublin, Virginia, 10,000 John Deere workers across the country, and more than 3,500 workers at Dana automotive as they sought to win back decades of concessions. In each of these cases, the union bureaucracy resorted to lies, manipulation, and threats to bully workers into accepting contracts that similarly failed to meet even a basic increase in real wages. Workers formed rank-and-file committees to coordinate and develop their opposition to sellout contracts independently of the union.
Struggling students at Columbia must turn away from the corrupt trade union bureaucracy and instead turn toward the organization of an independent rank-and-file committee. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is a network of workers’ organizations that are completely independent of the trade unions and seek to unite workers in all industries internationally against attacks on jobs, wages, and living standards. Rank-and-file committees are united in the view that there is no shared, “common interest” between the profits of big businesses and the working class. The World Socialist Web Site will provide full assistance to Columbia strikers interested in forming such a committee. Contact us today.
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