President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border plan is a dollars-and-cents betrayal of working Americans and their families, says Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
“This bill is, above all, a betrayal of American workers,” Hawley wrote in a February 5 article for CompactMag.com, adding that it would :
[H]and employers the ultimate anti-worker kryptonite: a shadow army of reserve labor, at the service of companies that have plenty of cash for dividends and stock buybacks, but somehow never enough to pay American workers a fair wage. After decades of flatlining pay and deteriorating protections, American labor deserves better. And a backroom deal like this isn’t merely bad policy—it is insulting.
Americans can have an open border for migration or a fair and level labor market for Americans, he wrote, adding, “but never both.”
President Joe Biden walks along a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, Jan. 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
Hawley is one of the leading voices against the giveaway bill. He helped other senators decide late on Monday to block fast-track approval of the migration-boosting bill when it comes up for a vote on Wednesday — and he will likely speak out as advocates of the bill try to blame the Republican turnabout on the personality of Donald Trump.
Hawley wrote:
At the heart of the new border bill is a radical idea: legal provisions that, after a quick intake screening, would grant immediate work authorization to individuals requesting asylum …
If illegal immigrants could get this immediate work authorization—without fear of removal—we can expect a huge influx of migrants claiming asylum purely to get these benefits. Would they ever be heard from again? Doubtful. And second, the bill would allow employers to slash wages for American workers. Why risk employing an American citizen—who might be a member of a union and might insist on fair treatment—when you can hire illegal aliens newly authorized to work?
His pocketbook politics put him at odds with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which announced its support for the bill on February 5:
We look forward to working with Members of Congress to pass these commonsense measures that will improve America’s security by addressing our southern border and supporting Ukraine and Israel.
Hawley’s kitchen-table perspective on immigration politics is also largely ignored by the white-collar journalists in D.C. Most of the journalists have been trained to ignore real-world outcomes and to portray Capital Hill fights as morality plays featuring good insiders against bad outsiders.
Hawley’s perspective is a minority among Republican legislators. But it is a growing theme that is politically tied to former President Donald Trump’s enthusiastic and populist-themed majority in the party’s vital base.
That pocketbook politics theme is pulling over more Republican politicians as they zig-zag between pro-migration donors and pro-American voters.
For example, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), was picked by D.C. insiders as the Republican face of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty. But in 2023, he authored a book saying that “This country has prioritized the importation of cheap labor.”
Migrants walk beside the US-Mexico border fence in Lukeville, Arizona, on Dec. 11, 2023. (Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty)
Rubio continued:
Across this country today, the immigration system has been corrupted and exploited. And it began, as many of America’s problems do, with the fundamental shift toward a globalized economy.
…
But not every business could be exported, which meant Wall Street simply figured out how to import cheap labor, much of it [clarification, not all] coming from illegal immigrants. This was a slower, more subtle process. Sure, some politicians made a big deal about “jobs Americans wouldn’t do,” but otherwise the only outcry came from workers who found their wages stalled, benefits cut, and hours slashed until they could be replaced by someone willing to work more hours for less.
More often than not, it is about jobs Wall Street doesn’t want Americans to do because hiring Americans would require higher wages and better working conditions. To them, it is better to import cheap labor and buy off Americans with cash welfare programs provided by the government.
The “border deal” is an easy NO. It reads like a parody of an actual border security bill.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 5, 2024
Hawley’s article shares the same theme as Rubio’s book, saying:
America’s big corporations want cheap labor. They don’t want to raise wages or improve working conditions. They’d prefer to maintain the status quo of stagnant wages, unsafe workplaces, increasingly oppressive scheduling practices, and countless other harms. They want employees who will work as cheaply as possible, which means they want massive immigration flows—legal and illegal—to continue.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the economy after allowing investors to move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.
The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.
The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, and reduced native-born Americans’ productivity and political clout. It has reduced high-tech innovation, crippled civic solidarity, and allowed government officials to ignore the rising death rate of discarded Americans.
The immigration policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The colonialism-like policy has also killed many thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.
