Liberals are siding with corporate America over the nation’s workers in their promotion of mass immigration, a key tool in keeping wages down, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota told lawmakers this week.
During a hearing before the House Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee, led by Chairman Bob Good (R-VA), Camarota said liberals — such as President Joe Biden — have broken with historical precedent in recent decades to defend the interests of corporations against American workers when it comes to national immigration policy.
“Historically, progressives from Eugene Debs to A. Philip Randolph, they got that if you have lots of immigration, you tend to push down wages,” Camarota said:
Unfortunately, a lot of progressives are lying with corporate America on this — they want low wages. And they’re perfectly happy to ignore this crisis of non-work among working-age people, particularly the U.S.-born. Immigrants haven’t suffered this same problem. It’s particularly U.S.-born men without a college degree and we know it’s a social disaster. [Emphasis added]
Even former President Obama, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, admitted that illegal immigration threatened the wages of America’s working class:
"The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century."
— NumbersUSA (@NumbersUSA) August 30, 2020
-- Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope pic.twitter.com/R10Np1r2m1
As Breitbart News reported, Camarota estimates that more than 44 million native-born Americans remain on the labor market sidelines — not including the millions of native-born Americans counted in monthly unemployment figures.
“If we curtailed immigration and enforced our law, we would be forced to draw these people back which will not be easy … less immigration would be enormously helpful but it is not the only issue,” Camarota said:
One of the things immigration is doing is holding down wages, there’s some crowding out … it’s letting us ignore this problem [of non-work]. If we didn’t have access to all this immigrant labor, employers and the American people … would demand that we try to reinstill the value of work. Raising wages would be one of the most important things to make work more attractive. Immigration lets us not do any of that, including the current flow of massive illegal immigration. [Emphasis added]
Center for Immigration Studies
In particular, Camarota detailed how the nation’s working class is the most impacted by waves of illegal aliens entering the U.S. workforce. For American men 16 to 64 years old with only a high school degree, the labor force participation rate has dropped from 88 percent in 1960 to just 67 percent in 2023.
Even among prime-age working class American men, 25 to 54 years old, the labor force participation rate has declined from near full employment in 1960, at 96 percent, to just 82 percent this year.
Corporate America, Camarota said, is seemingly fine with such grim workforce outlooks as they focus on lobbying Congress and Biden for more overall immigration, even as Americans, by a majority, want less immigration.
“The reason corporate America wants [unchecked illegal immigration] is they want lower wages,” Camarota said. “… why that’s bad is two fundamental reasons: It reduces the job in terms of the wages and benefits it’s likely to pay, making it less attractive, and second, it … when we hear that employers are telling congressmen ‘We can’t find any workers, give us more immigrants,’ what you’re not hearing them say is ‘We need to figure out how to get all these Americans … who are out of the labor force.'”
As Breitbart News reported in May, the Biden administration has brought in so many legal immigrants and illegal aliens that foreign workers now account for the largest share of United States job holders since the numbers have been tracked.
In 2022, foreign workers saw their share of the labor market hit the highest level in almost 30 years at more than 18 percent, with close to 30 million now holding U.S. jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
