President Trump continues to request “more” foreign workers enter the United States to take American jobs that would otherwise go to sidelined U.S. workers as the southern border is overrun with record levels of illegal immigration.
For a month, Trump has made requesting more legal immigration to the country — beyond the already historically record levels of more than 1.2 million new legal immigrants a year — part of his stump speech.
The push for more legal immigration was first made in off-the-cuff comments at his State of the Union address, where he said he wanted to admit “the largest numbers ever” of legal immigrants to the country.
For the fourth time in a month, during a roundtable with business executives and U.S. job outsourcers like Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, Trump said, again, he wanted to increase legal immigration levels to benefit the profits of corporations.
“We want a lot of people coming in … 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,” Trump said.
The comments are a direct rebuke 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.
Simultaneously, while Trump requests more foreign workers to take U.S. jobs, foreign nationals have shown up in record numbers to the southern border — most of whom want American jobs. The continuing increase in illegal immigration has seemed to some to be a result of Trump’s promotion of wanting more foreign workers.
If you’d stop saying “We need workers” and “We want people to come in” at every available opportunity, it would help … https://t.co/5KhvCVdGNM
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) March 7, 2019
Labor market is tightening to the point that unemployed Americans are reentering the labor force and wages are starting to tick up. The last thing U.S. needs is to import more foreign labor. The President promised American workers first! There is no labor shortage in the U.S. https://t.co/6ROPLno9O1
— NumbersUSA (@NumbersUSA) March 7, 2019
Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs voiced concerns over Trump’s repeated demand to increase legal immigration levels, noting that the request was made on the same day that record illegal border crossing totals were announced.
“That Mr. Trump would advance the interests of the globalist elites ahead of our citizens would be a tragic reversal on any day,” Dobbs said. “But today … that the southern border is being overrun by a record number of illegal immigrants, it all means that the White House has simply lost its way.”
In the month of February, there were more than 76,000 illegal border crossings and inadmissible foreign nationals, the most in this month in 12 years — a record for Trump’s administration. These border crossers are first apprehended, but the majority will be released into the interior of the country.
Researchers and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials project there will be anywhere between 840,000 to close to a million illegal border crossings this year, with up to 500,000 illegal aliens successfully crossing into the U.S.
The vast majority of illegal aliens and border crossers continue to be from Mexico and Central America. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has noted that nearly 78 percent of Hondurans arriving at the southern border come to the country to look for jobs, which is not an eligible asylum claim. Likewise, more than 91 percent of Guatemalans arrive in the U.S. to also look for work.
The globalist political establishments have previously praised mass migration of economic migrants as a necessity to fill labor shortages, though wage data and job data reveal that no such labor shortage exists.
Trump’s move away from his “America First” legal immigration reforms — which included a pause on all immigration until the country was at full employment — remains out of step with voters. Most recently, a Harvard/Harris poll found that 3-in-4 Americans favor politicians who support an immigration system that benefits the job prospects and wages of U.S. citizens — not corporations and employers.
Similarly, polling Pulse Opinion Research has consistently revealed that, over the last two years, American voters have vastly preferred reducing legal immigration levels as opposed to increasing levels. As of March 2018, more than 6-in-10 voters said they wanted to see less immigration to the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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