“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 access to 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.
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.
Trump Abandons ‘America First’ Reforms: ‘We Need’ More Immigration To Grow Business Profits