Let’s move immigration policy back into partnership with Americans

“Are you earning too much money?” Briahna Joy Gray asks on a recent episode of Rising.

Real wages have been stagnant since the 1970s, but Gray notes (as we have) that the conventional wisdom among the policy elite is that “the real problem here is that workers aren’t working enough and that wages are just too high.”

Immigration has long been a favorite tool to keep labor costs down. Here is Jared Bernstein, who would go on to serve as chief economic advisor to Vice President Biden during the Obama administration, in 2007:

Employers are very quick to raise the specter of a labor shortage, but often it’s another way of saying they can’t find the workers they want at the price they’re paying…They are unwilling to meet the price signal the market is sending, so they seek help in the form of a spigot like immigration.”

There is no such thing as an oversupply of labor from a pure-profit perspective. And when the cheap labor lobby speaks, Congress usually listens. As Jonette Christian reports, “The original versions of both the America Competes Act and the Build Back Better Act included significant foreign worker expansions.” The lame duck Congress will no doubt try to pass more expansions to keep wages down.

Congress won’t just be deciding who gets fair compensation and who doesn’t; they will also be deciding who gets the jobs and who doesn’t. Christian, again:

According to The Seattle Times, 71 percent of the tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign born, and 40 percent in Seattle. Many are here on guest worker visas provided by Congress. And the numbers have steadily increased.

And who doesn’t get the jobs? According to a recent NAACP report, “State of Tech Diversity: The Black Tech Ecosystem,” Blacks and Latinos in America aren’t getting tech jobs. Black talent constitutes 13 percent of the U.S. workforce and 8.6 percent of STEM graduates, but only 3.6 percent of technical workers, leading Ivory Toldson, director of innovation and research strategy at the NAACP to conclude: “Diversity in tech is a modern civil rights issue, and we cannot afford to be indifferent to the unsettling statistics in this report.”

“We’re all in this together,” Christian writes.

So…

“Why do employers believe they should have access to whatever labour they need at whatever wages they choose?” asks Oren Cass.

“Perhaps the culprit is globalisation?”

As national labor markets are opened up to the global labor supply, Cass suggests that American corporations are “released” from their own self-interested obligation to care about / invest in American workers:

Thus the growing, somewhat comical cries from the business lobby that one cannot possibly be expected to run a successful operation with these {local} workers. The champions of free markets, creative destruction and competition proudly tout the power of such forces to solve any problem if incentives are right. But give them the challenge of turning a profit with the local labour force and suddenly all is lost.”

Immigration expansionists sometimes defend their cheap-labor policies with a globalist posture, but America would set a better example for the international community by demonstrating how a nation cares for its citizens.

“After all,” writes Pamela Denise Long in an article for Medium, “political power and representation are anchored in the boundaries of a nation not the globe. The issue of citizenship is not an issue of racism nor isolationism; it’s about stability of our nation state.”

Long echoes the sentiment of the ecological economist Herman Daly, who died last week:

Human rights and welfare safety nets are provided by national governments—not by failed states—and not by global corporations, nor by the United Nations, however necessary the latter may be….With erased boundaries there would be no recognition of limits or scarcity, and hence no need to share, nor any definition of fellow citizens who have first claim to our sharing. Nor would there be any reason to distinguish better from worse ways of sharing, not in our “country of immigrants” where continuous wealth increase at the top is fueled by continuous increase in cheap labor at the bottom.”

JEREMY BECK is a V.P., Deputy Director for NumbersUSA