President Joe Biden marked the tenth anniversary of the DACA work permit giveaway by touting the migrants’ role in the U.S. economy, even as Americans’ wage gains fall below the inflation rate.
“These young people contribute to our community in ways that are both big and small,” Biden said in a White House video about the foreign population in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, adding:
They’re entrepreneurs who start businesses. They serve in our military. Dreamers are our friends and neighbors and are Americans [in] every way except on paper. It is time to provide them with [the] permanent protections they deserve.
The giveaway of work permits to the roughly 800,000 illegal migrants was announced by President Barack Obama during a June 2012 campaign-style speech in the White House’s Rose Garden.
The high-profile giveaway to foreign migrants during a deep economic recession marked the Democratic Party’s dive into “woke” identity politics and also put Donald Trump on track for his electoral win in 2016.
The high-profile program has endured repeated legal challenges, partly because the Supreme Court dodged the core issue — the White House’s legal authority to award work permits without approval from Congress.
On Wednesday, investor, corporate, and university lobbyists sponsored a perfunctory demonstration of about 400 people on Capitol Hill. Legislators joined the lobbyists to declare their support for the illegal migrants, whose estimated number ranges from 660,000 to more than two million.
Like many other Democrats and Republicans, Biden ignored DACA’s knock on economic impact on Americans. For example, the federal government’s acceptance of the DACA migrants increases competition for jobs and reduces pressure on employers to pay decent wages. The foreign population also raises rents, sharpens competion for shares resources — such as college spots — and reduces the federal government’s interest in the welfare and success of poor Americans.
Those impacts were waved away by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) when Breitbart News asked her on Wednesday if Americans should get some compensation once the DACA migrants are legalized. She responded:
Are you trying to imply that allowing dreamers and DACA recipients and their families to stay — who are already here — are going to take away jobs other people? … How can you say that when they’re already here living in the community and [employers] still have don’t have enough people? … They contribute and they do not take jobs away, and you should stop peddling those lies. Truth matters.
Democrats tend to magnify the contribution of the DACA workers, yet they also minimize the impact of their arrival on Americans, responded Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies:
The DACA workforce “is wonderful, it’s valuable, [employers] can’t do without it, and on the other hand, it makes no difference [to rival American workers] … that’s essentially their argument,” Camarota said.
The economic impact of migration was exposed in 2020 when Trump’s migration curbs — plus the coronavirus disease — reduced the supply of migrant workers for many less-productive jobs in many states, including Nevada.
“The balance of power appears to have shifted to workers,” the NevadaCurrent.com reported in July 2021 in an article about Nevada employers’ claims there was a shortage of willing workers:
They have options.
Many employers have tried to woo workers with signing bonuses, perks or gimmicks. Some major national employers, including McDonalds and Chipotle, have publicized raising their starting or average wages.
Raising wages is seen by many as the obvious solution to the worker shortage.
“We used to be able to pick and choose our employees,” Justin Moscove, a manager at the Flowing Tide Pub told a Reno TV station in December 2021. “Now, when someone walks in the door … [we] hire you on the spot.”
The 660,000 people with DACA work permits comprise just one-third of one percent of the U.S. labor force, he said. About 75 percent of foreign-born young Latinos are working, which is slightly higher than the rate for native-born Americans, he added.
But the DACA workforce is less educated than native-born Americans, and mostly works in less productive jobs, he said. “So, in healthcare, few doctors, some nurses, but mostly healthcare support,” he said.
Camarota continued:
It’s not because they’re lazy. It’s not because they all came to get welfare … Rather, it simply reflects their educational attainment in the modern American economy and the existence of a well-developed welfare state.
“In general, it’s the people with a college education or more, who are in fiscal surplus” because they pay more in taxes than they get in support from governments, he said.
“The people who work but have less than a college education are generally in fiscal deficit,” and consume more in benefits than they fund with taxes, he said.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, equality-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The extraction migration economic policy is hidden behind a wide variety of noble-sounding excuses and explanations. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
But the colonialism-like economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources wealth from the poor countries.
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