The Bidenomics Atrocity: 7 Migrant Jobs for Each American Job

The results are in: The Democratic Party’s Bidenomics strategy produced a disastrous score of just 160,000 extra jobs for Americans during each year of President Joe Biden’s presidency.

President Joe Biden’s dismal Bidenomics also created jobs for 4.7 million migrants — including almost three million illegals, according to federal data collected by the Center for Immigration Studies and reported on February 7.

So Bidenomics created 7.3 migrant jobs for every job gained by an American, even as it also exploded the national debt by $8 trillion.

Bidenomics also flatlined wages, spiked housing costs, and slowed workplace investment.

The Bidenomics 7:1 policy — 4.7 million jobs for migrants, 645,000 for Americans — was deliberate.

Bidenomics deliberately stranded millions of working-age Americans outside the workforce, without jobs or prospects, often homeless and on drugs, and usually dependent on expensive government aid.

“The share of working-age (16 to 64) U.S.-born men not in the labor force — neither working nor looking for work — is likely 22.1 percent in January 2025 and remains near a historic high for an economic expansion,” the Center for Immigration Studies reported February 7. The 22 percent — one in five! — is far above the 16.6 percent seen in January 2000.

If Biden and Congress had cared, roughly 5 million working-age American men could have been found, trained to use work-multiplying machinery, de-toxified, put back on their feet, and hired into starter jobs.

But Biden’s deputies repeatedly showed that they favored importing more migrants than the once-normal option of helping millions of ordinary Americans get ready for high-productivity jobs.

“As our economy grows, we need workers that we just don’t have enough of,” Katie Tobin, the senior director for transborder security on the National Security Council, told a D.C. audience in May 2023. “So it is in our interest to bring people in and to stay competitive globally.”

“We look to the north, with Canada,” migration czar Alejandro Mayorkas told a Texas audience in September:

Canada takes a look at its market needs, and it says, “You know what? We need 700,000 foreign workers to address our labor needs domestically.” And, so, they build a visa system for that year to address the current market condition. And they say, “We’re going to bring in a million people.” And it’s market sensitive.

We [in the United States] are dealing with numerical caps on labor-driven visas that were set in 1996. It’s 2024. The world has changed. It is remarkable how there can be [elite] agreement that [the visas system] is broken and not have an agreement on a solution. The country is suffering as a result of it.

During their four years, Buden’s deputies replaced those Americans with a flood of roughly 9 million southern migrants, roughly three million legal airport migrants, and roughly 4 million temporary migrants. Those airport arrivals included roughly 1.5 million white-collar workers carrying H-1B, J-1, L-1, and OPT/EAD visa documents that allow them to take jobs from American college graduates.

That huge inflow displaced many Americans from jobs, cities, and the workforce. The displacement was so massive that the share of Americans who held jobs arguably declined during Biden’s years. In a chart posted by Harvard economist Jason Furman, the other countries that did badly on that measure were the migration-flooded United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany.

Mayorkas, Tobin, and Biden’s other deputies had several reasons to prefer inviting migrants over helping their fellow Americans.

First, migration is a rapid way to expand the national pool of consumers, workers, and renters before the next election. Migration means there is no need to wait 25 years for Americans to marry, raise their kids, and get them into jobs. Their get-rich-quick policy worked; The inflow of migrants quickly expanded the economy, creating a rush of extra profits and new stock values for investors — even as the rush of migrants pushed down wages and pushed up housing costs for ordinary Americans.

RELATED — White House Despairs: ‘Pollsters Are Not Asking the Right Questions’ About Biden’s Economic Policies

Second, the rush of migrants held down the wage-driven inflation once the gusher of Biden spending spilled into pay packets and weekly wages. That was good for the White House’s friends on Wall Street. For example, Goldman Sachs celebrated the inflow of wage-cutting migrants because it would reduce inflation.

Third, Biden’s deputies favored more migration because it reduced the pressure on employers to divert their profits and stock values toward greater workplace productivity.

Normally, productivity improvements — such as better-skilled workers, swifter robots, and subtle software — are very desirable because they generate both extra profits for CEOs and higher wages for workers. However, productivity improvements are expensive, so they reduce near-term quarterly profits, stock values, and executive bonuses. This means that most investors are loath to invest in productivity — especially because the government has deliberately helped them by extracting millions of workers and consumers from poor countries since 1990.

The results of this cheap labor vs productivity trade-off can be tracked over a few years. For example, the loss of migrant labor during Trump’s first-term crackdown and the coronavirus disease “spurred approximately an additional $55 billion in investment in the U.S. economy,” the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Loius reported in June 2024. But the investment fell — and so did productivity gains — once Biden’s deputies flooded the labor market with cheap migrant workers.

Basically, Biden’s team stuffed the economy with more federal dollars, unproductive workers, consumers, and renters — and the stock market zoomed to record levels. MorningStar.com reported:

The 46th president of the United States is bringing his time at the White House to a close with the S&P 500 SPX up over 55% since he took office on Jan. 20, 2021. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA advanced more than 39% over the same period, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite COMP jumped nearly 46%, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

But there was a flaw. The migrant workers also need to sleep and eat, and so they fuelled rent, housing, and food inflation far more than Biden’s deputies expected. “On net [after inflation], real wages have fallen since January 2021.” former White House economist Furman wrote in a February 10 article for Foreign Affairs.  Once inflation ate into wages, ordinary Americans averaged a wage gain of less than half a percent during Biden’s four years.

Furman’s economic analysis is titled “The Post-Neoliberal Delusion And the Tragedy of Bidenomics.”

The analysis is echoed by one of Elon Musk’s investor friends, Chamath Palihapitiya. He is an immigrant from Sri Lanka who founded Social Capital, which seeks to make money from the health, financial services, and education sectors.

Ironically, Trump and his GOP deputies gained many new jobs in January 2025 when the understandably angry voters defenestrated Biden and his deputies in November.

Despite the obvious damage and chaos, the establishment’s media is still hiding the Biden/Mayorkas economic disaster from citizens, mostly by posting sympathetic stories urging Americans to empathize with unlucky but hard-working migrants.

On February 4, the Washington Post reported on two imported workers who Mayorkas “paroled” into U.S. jobs to reduce the pressure on U.S. employers to raise wages:

Among them were a 25-year-old man from the Boston area who asked that his name not be used, because he, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter fear losing their temporary protection and being deported to Venezuela. He said they fled extreme poverty and fear under the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro in 2023, and trekked for three months through a hazardous jungle and north into Mexico in order to reach the U.S. border.

In Venezuela, he worked as a construction worker for $30 a week, unable to pay for basics such as milk. In Massachusetts, he earns $180 a day working on a demolition crew and moonlights cleaning at a hotel. His wife also has a job cleaning at a hotel. He said Trump is wrongly portraying Venezuelans as criminals. “We came to this country to work,” he said.

For the moment, President Donald Trump is helping to fix the mess by blocking the arrival of Mayorkas’ illegal and quasi-legal migrants. He is also helping by deporting perhaps 1,000 migrants a day, starting with criminals and migrants who have lost their legal appeals to stay.

Predictably, establishment media outlets worry that Trump’s shutdown of the Mayorkas migration might raise wages for ordinary Americans. For example, Politico.com reported on February 7 that “a broad-based crackdown on immigrants could slow the economy’s expansion and choke off a supply of workers that Kansas City Fed researchers and others say have alleviated staffing shortages and eased wage pressures [emphasis added].”

Rationally, business lobbyists are now working to ensure Mayorkas’ roughly 9 million illegals can stay — and to ensure the continued inflow of more migrants and visa workers.

On February 10, BusinessInsider.com reported that a “Make America Wealthy Again” [MAWA] lobbying campaign seeks to persuade Trump to keep most migrants:

“Trump as a businessman understands that if he doesn’t have 200 guys cutting the grass at his golf courses, then they don’t look right, and people won’t want to play golf there,” says Cristina Antelo, the founding principal at Ferox Strategies, a lobbying firm that counts the National Retail Federation, Walmart, and the tobacco giant Reynolds America among its clients. “There’s a way to get to Trump and make him realize that. How many businesses does he need to hear from before he’s like, ‘Crap, I really am going to paralyze the entire US labor market if I do this’?”

The MAWA plan is to apply pressure on business allies in Trump’s inner circle, rather than on the president directly, and to steer clear of Stephen Miller, the administration’s most outspoken anti-immigration hard-liner. “Stephen Miller won’t ever be convinced. Forget that,” says a lobbyist from a prominent trade association. “But Trump can be convinced not to screw over fellow businesspeople. Miller isn’t the only dude who has Trump’s ear.”

…

In addition, lobbyists have already begun reaching out to members of Congress and their staffs — both on Capitol Hill and in their districts back home — via phone, Zoom, and in-person meetings. Several lobbyists describe a campaign of “shock and awe,” one that will seek to apply “1,000 points of pressure” to GOP members of Congress who understand that immigrants are willing to take low-paying, high-risk jobs that are shunned by most Americans. Among those being targeted is Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, who chairs the House Agriculture Committee.

Trump’s voters backed him because he seemed to promise he would Make Americans Great Again — not just America.

If he resists pro-migration pressure from businesses, he may show Americans how a low-migration policy of “tight labor” can create greater productivity, higher wages, more trade, more innovation, and a stronger economy, as Blackrock CEO Larry Fink argues.

But Trump is zig-zagging under lobbying pressure from people such as Elon Musk.

On Sunday, February 9, for example, Trump again touted a misleading article that defended the H-1B visa program which has been used since 1990 to push millions of American graduates — and their families — out of good careers.

The Wall Street Journal article echoed Mayorkas as claimed “U.S. companies find it crucial … And [because] one way to reduce illegal immigration is to allow more legal pathways to meet the needs of the U.S. economy.”

Trump has yet to issue a formal policy statement on the increasingly unpopular inflow of white-collar visa workers.

But he may be forced to show his cards this week at his White House meeting with India’s Prime Minister.