Americans should celebrate the inflow of migrants into new jobs throughout the economy, even as many American men remain on the economic sidelines, says a Washington Post columnist.
The “share of prime-working-age men in the workforce still hasn’t matched its February 2020 peak [and] is also far below historical highs,” said the June 2 “Celebrate” column by Catherine Rampell.
But more migrants and women are streaming into new jobs, Rampell wrote, adding, “Let’s celebrate the underdogs helping supercharge our economy.”
Rampell’s column celebrates President Joe Biden’s great migration which has smuggled roughly 4 million migrants over the southern border. The illegal inflow is in addition to the normal airport inflow of roughly 1 million legal immigrants, and the fast-growing inflow of legal and illegal white-collar visa workers.
RELATED: GOP Rep. Hunt: Democrats’ Migration Pushes Americans into Poverty:
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Biden’s inflow is a sharp change from Steven Miller’s implementation of President Donald Trump’s curbs to migration. Under Trump and Miller, the share of American men in the workforce began to rise — and their wages grew — after decades of managed decline.
Rampell’s posted chart admits that Biden’s migration-spiked economy has failed to restore the share of men who were working during Trump’s term:
President Joe Biden’s current 89.1 percent share means that roughly 6 million unemployed American men are not even looking for work.
Some have retired early, some are wealthy, and some are lazy. But many of the 6 million are unprepared for low-wage work alongside competition from younger, healthier, and eager migrants.
Yet Rampell prefers to praise the massive migration inflow as normal and to celebrate the huge 9.3 percent expansion in the foreign workforce:
Today, trends in legal immigration have largely normalized, and the numbers of immigrant workers in the United States have more than recovered. You can see this in the labor market data: Employment [number, not share] levels for native-born Americans are just a touch higher than in February 2020, when the pandemic recession began (up on net by 0.3 percent); among foreign-born workers, employment has shot up by 9.3 percent.
People waiting to apply for asylum camp near the pedestrian entrance to the San Isidro Port of Entry, linking Tijuana, Mexico with San Diego, Thursday, June 1, 2023, in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
Rampell also celebrated the pressured movement of more women into the low-wage labor market, regardless of the resulting decline in births, writing:
Some commentators (myself included) worried that these [coronavirus] disruptions might set working women back a generation or more by knocking them off the career trajectories they had been on.
… as a group, rather than being economically scarred by covid, female workers seemed to have emerged stronger than ever.
Rampell’s column inadvertently reveals how the wage-cutting, rent-spiking inflow of foreign workers minimizes the incentive for establishment figures — such as herself — to take the difficult political decisions that are needed to get sidelined people back to work, or to raise all-important productivity growth above the current rate of just 1.1. percent:
Productivity growth is vital because it allows ordinary Americans to do more work each day and so earn more money each day. Overall, productivity raises ordinary people’s wages — and without triggering the inflation that is now being boosted by migration.
Productivity also helps U.S. companies to expand the U.S. economy via trade. Such trade reduces elites’ pressure for migration and also allows foreign countries to modernize their societies without their young being getting extracted to the U.S. economy.
But the U.S. establishment prefers the easy option of allowing illegal migration over the difficult task of promoting productivity.
An aerial image shows migrants waiting along the border wall to surrender to Border Patrol agents for immigration and asylum claim processing after crossing the Rio Grande river into the U.S. on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, on May 11, 2023. (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
Rampell celebrates Biden’s preference for poverty migration, blue-collar migration, and white-collar migration — even though Biden could pressure companies to grow productivity and pull sidelined American men back to marketplace work with offers of more wages, training, and respect.
Biden’s policy also shows the eagerness of his deputies to reinflate President George H.W. Bush’s post-1990 cheap-labor bubble. The labor bubble allowed investors to boost stock market gains via a bigger consumer economy after the export of many high-wage manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico.
Biden’s administration’s preference for more migration also means that wealthy investors do not face marketplace pressure to help reduce early “deaths of despair,” help people get off drugs, push Mexico on the drug trade, or reduce crime.
The fentanyl epidemic is destroying America pic.twitter.com/3fFgUf9LJF
— Clown World ™ (@ClownWorld_) June 2, 2023
“The migration issue “is not just a question of prioritizing US citizens over foreigners,” tweeted commentator Mickey Kaus, adding:
It’s a question of what sort of society we want to have — one where all (even unskilled & ex-cons) can earn enough to live as social equals, or a society that throws large swaths of workers onto the scrapheap.
Rampell has long supported more migration into Americans’ labor market, echoing the establishment’s demand for more cheap workers, apartment-sharing renters, and welfare-aided consumers.
Rampell is tied to the establishment. For example, her brother is an investor in the financial services sector. Most of his start-up companies have asked the federal government for H-1B visa workers to avoid hiring American graduates at higher salaries or paying them with stock options.
Similarly, her pro-migration article was touted by Google’s search engine:
Many other establishment figures favor the use of migrants to expand the economy, regardless of the pocketbook and civic impact on ordinary Americans. Ron Brownstein, a senior editor at the Atlantic, wrote on May 30:
Even as businesses across the nation are complaining about their inability to find enough workers, the federal government is struggling to stem the relentless flow of migrants at the Southern border trying to find work in the US. No one suggests the answer to worker shortages is to open the border, but it remains a paradox that the nation is straining to keep out migrants looking to work even as employers say the shortage of workers is preventing them from filling millions of jobs. That worker shortfall has also emerged as a key factor driving persistent inflation and higher interest rates.
“There’s a mismatch between government policy and the economic reality on the ground,” said David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “We have a policy designed to keep people out and meanwhile we have a crisis in the labor markets where we have nearly 10 million open jobs and have for two years now.”
Brownstein, however, admitted that the call to import more foreign workers is “politically radioactive.
WATCH: Drone Footage Shows LONG LINES of Immigrants Gathered at El Paso Border:
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Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
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