President Trump is reversing his campaign commitment to reduce overall legal immigration levels to the United States in order to raise the wages of America’s working and middle class, as he is now demanding more immigration.
During his State of the Union (SOTU) address this week, Trump went off-script while discussing national immigration policy, saying he wanted to admit “the largest numbers ever” of legal immigrants to the country.
“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” Trump said. “I want people to come into our country, in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”
Currently, the U.S. imports more than a million legal immigrants annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration. This booming legal immigrant population has not only rapidly shifted the demographics of the nation, but research indicates it will hand over all electoral dominance to Democrats in a matter of decades.
Mass legal immigration has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
Trump’s off-script comment, though, seems to be his preferred immigration stance, as he is now telling reporters he is doubling down on his mass legal immigration statement, claiming there will be a labor shortage if we don’t admitt more legal immigrants.
“We need people in our country because our unemployment numbers are so low and we have massive numbers of companies coming back into our country,” Trump reportedly told the media.
“I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in,” Trump said. “We need people.”
Trump to regional reporters on his SOTU claim he wants immigrants coming to the U.S. “in the largest numbers ever.”
Q: Is that a change in your policy?
A: “Yes, because we need people in our country because our unemployment numbers are so low…” pic.twitter.com/YZYjYkTl4I— Bryn Stole (@brynstole) February 6, 2019
The statements are a break from the president’s commitment in 2015, 2016, 2017, when he continuously advocated for reducing overall legal immigration to raise the wages of American workers.
Trump’s immigration policy papers from his 2016 presidential campaign called for an immigration moratorium until the nation was at full employment.
“Before any new green cards are issued to foreign workers abroad, there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers,” the Trump immigration policy papers stated.
In 2017, he reiterated this commitment to reducing legal immigration levels by endorsing Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue’s (R-GA) RAISE Act, which would have reduced current levels to about 500,000 admissions a year, as well as ending chain migration.
As blue-collar U.S. wages have risen thanks to a tighter labor market, white-collar U.S. wages have yet to see significant growth, indicating a professional labor market that does not need additional legal immigrant workers to compete against Americans.
While illegal aliens are likely to compete for jobs against American blue-collar workers and black Americans, mass legal immigration to the U.S. has stagnated wages for America’s white-collar professionals as they compete against about 1.5 million cheaper imported foreign visa workers and a million new legal immigrants every year.
The mass importation of legal immigrants — mostly due to President George H.W. Bush’s Immigration Act of 1990, which expanded legal immigration levels — diminishes job opportunities for the roughly four million young American graduates who enter the workforce every year wanting good-paying jobs.
Though Trump claims the country needs more foreign workers to take U.S. jobs, Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates there are millions of Americans who continue to be on the outskirts of the labor market and are wanting to increase their job prospects, not reduce them.
While more than a million legal immigrants continue being admitted to the U.S. to take coveted American jobs, there remains 6.5 million Americans who are unemployed, 12.9 percent of whom are teenagers, and 6.8 percent of whom are black Americans.
Overall, about 1.3 million U.S. workers have been jobless for at least 27 weeks, accounting for about 19 percent of the unemployed population. Roughly 5.1 million workers are working part-time but want full-time jobs, and 1.6 million workers want a job, including 426,000 workers who are discouraged by their job prospects.
In the last decade alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual low-skilled immigration scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates, as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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