President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration in the United States is producing higher wages and better working conditions on American dairy farms, the New York Times admits.
Though 1.5 million legal immigrants continue to be admitted to the country every year, and illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border soars to historic levels, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency efforts to go after employers who hire illegal aliens are proving to be an economic surplus for lower-wage workers.
The latest New York Times report on immigration details complaints from dairy farmers who argue that they needed illegal aliens to survive as a viable business. Recent ICE raids of dairy farms, they claim, have made dairy farming more difficult as they can no longer readily rely on cheaper, foreign workers.
Dairy farm workers, on the other hand, are seeing the benefits of Trump’s “Hire American” tight labor market through increased wages and better working conditions:
Without a legal alternative to informal migrant labor, the competition between dairy farms to retain migrant workers is so fierce that farm owners, once notorious for underpaying and mistreating workers, are now improving working conditions and wages to entice employees to stay on their farms, workers said. [Emphasis added]
Victor Cortez is an immigrant who has worked on a dairy farm in western New York for 18 years. A few years ago, farm owners “wouldn’t let us leave the farm,” he said, adding, “They wouldn’t pay us as much as they promised they would.” [Emphasis added]
“But the good thing about it now,” he said, “is that we get paid more and this farmer is good to me.” [Emphasis added]
For decades, a flooded labor market for America’s working and middle class due to mass legal and illegal immigration has produced generations of low-wage workers, stagnant salaries, and a cheaper labor economy — a benefit to employers at the expense of American workers.
Center for Immigration Studies Director Mark Krikorian said that rather than U.S. dairy farms relying on an endless flow of cheaper, foreign workers, the federal government ought to provide subsidized loans for smaller dairy farmers to invest in robots and machines that can do the work more efficiently and without Americans having to subsidize the cost of illegal alien labor.
A Bloomberg report from 2015 highlighted the effectiveness of dairy farmers mechanizing:
A recent analysis by Goldman Sachs revealed how Trump’s tightened labor market for America’s working and middle class helped grow wages by four percent in 12 months.
ICE has played a crucial role in carrying out Trump’s “Hire American” economic nationalist agenda by indirectly reducing the foreign competition, which U.S. workers have been subjected to. Last fiscal year, for example, ICE agents deported more than a quarter of a million illegal aliens, including more than 95,000 deportations of illegal aliens who were living in the interior of the country.
Currently, the nation’s Washington, DC-imposed policy on mass legal immigration — where about 1.5 million unskilled legal immigrants are admitted to the U.S. every year — is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates, as working and middle-class Americans have their wealth redistributed to the country’s top earners through wage stagnation.
Research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has discovered that immigration to the country shifts about $500 billion in wages away from working and middle-class Americans to new arrivals and economic elites.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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