Americans should celebrate the inflow of migrants into new jobs throughout the economy, even as many American men remain on the economic sidelines, says a Washington Post columnist.
The “share of prime-working-age men in the workforce still hasn’t matched its February 2020 peak [and] is also far below historical highs,” said the June 2 “Celebrate” column by Catherine Rampell.
But more migrants and women are streaming into new jobs, Rampell wrote, adding, “Let’s celebrate the underdogs helping supercharge our economy.”
Biden’s inflow is a sharp change from Steven Miller’s implementation of President Donald Trump’s curbs to migration. Under Trump and Miller, the share of American men in the workforce began to rise — and their wages grew — after decades of managed decline.
Rampell’s posted chart concedes that Biden’s migration-spiked economy has been unsuccessful in restoring the share of men who were working during Trump’s term:
The share of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force reached a record high last year, per new data from the Labor Department. pic.twitter.com/8MypbI3nPx
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) June 5, 2023
https://cis.org/Report/Employment-Situation-Immigrants-and-USBorn-Fourth-Quarter-2022
President Joe Biden’s current 89.1 percent share means that roughly 6 million unemployed American men are not even looking for work.
Some have retired early, some are wealthy, and some are lazy. But many of the 6 million are not ready for low-wage work alongside the race from younger, healthier, and ambitious migrants.
Yet Rampell prefers to praise the enormous migration inflow as ordinary and to celebrate the huge 9.3 percent increase in the foreign workforce:
Today, current flow in legal immigration have greatly normalized, and the numbers of immigrant workers in the United States have more than reawakened. You can see this in the labor market data: Employment [number, not share] levels for native-born Americans are just a little higher than in February 2020, when the pandemic recession started (up on net by 0.3 percent); among foreign-born workers, employment has shot up by 9.3 percent.
Rampell also celebrated the pressured movement of more women into the low-wage labor market, regardless of the resulting decline in births, writing:
Some commentators (myself included) worried that these [coronavirus] disruptions might set working women back a generation or more by knocking them off the career trajectories they had been on.
… as a group, rather than being economically scarred by covid, female workers seemed to have emerged stronger than ever.
Rampell’s column inadvertently reveals how the wage-cutting, rent-spiking inflow of foreign workers curtails the stimulus for establishment figures — such as herself — to take the difficult political choices that are needed to get sidelined people back to work, or to raise all-important productivity growth above the current rate of just 1.1. percent:
Productivity growth is crucial because it permits ordinary Americans to do more work each day and so earn more money each day. Overall, productivity elevates ordinary people’s wages — and without generating the inflation that is now being expanded by migration.
Rising prices continue to take a bite out of workers' pay — average hourly earnings have roughly broken even with inflation over the past few months. Big change from the large real wage gains workers were getting earlier in the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/0ofs2LQi6k
— Ben Casselman (@bencasselman) March 14, 2023
Capacity also aids U.S. companies to enlarge the U.S. economy via trade. Such trade diminishes elites’ pressure for migration and also allows foreign countries to modernize their societies without their young being removed to the U.S. economy.
But the U.S. establishment wishes for the easy option of permitting illegal migration over the hard task of promoting productivity.
Rampell celebrates Biden’s preference for poverty migration, blue-collar migration, and white-collar migration — even though Biden could pressure companies to grow productivity and pull sidelined American men back to marketplace work with offers of more wages, training, and respect.
Biden’s policy also demonstrates the motivation of his deputies to reinflate President George H.W. Bush’s post-1990 cheap-labor bubble. The labor bubble allowed investors to increase stock market profits via a bigger consumer economy after the export of many high-wage manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico.
Biden’s administration’s preference for more migration also means that wealthy investors do not face marketplace pressure to help reduce early “deaths of despair,” help people get off drugs, push Mexico on the drug trade, or reduce crime.
California approves policy giving illegal immigrants up to $300 a week unemployment without being able to ask about immigration status or contact former employers. California politicians are the model for fiscal ignorance pic.twitter.com/vBcDTZ64PF
— • ᗰISᑕᕼIᗴᖴ ™ • (@4Mischief) June 4, 2023
Trump’s policies:
Americans first
No foreign wars
Close the border
Clean up our elections
Stand up to Chinese aggression
Free speech on social media
Grow American families instead of immigration
GOP Establishment: Stop this man at all costs!
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) June 1, 2023
“They just opened the door for immigration”: Local Embera Tribal Leader, Fransisco Agapi, talks about the differences in illegal immigration under Biden compared to Trump
Watch LIVE https://t.co/aeKhZCtVbe
Watch Part 4 of Law & Border #RootOfTheInvasion: https://t.co/xlJ940kUKu pic.twitter.com/LGi5Khzit6
— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) June 5, 2023
Alex Jones going off at the Southern Border:
"You're running criminal activity, don't do your color of law with us buddy. This isn't private property and you're smuggling children. This is illegal. This is illegal and you're outside your jurisdiction."pic.twitter.com/qF00wcDJz0
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 5, 2023
