President Barack Obama grudgingly admitted Tuesday night that mass-immigration does reduce Americans’ wages.
The admission came in the final year of his eight-year tenure, during which a huge inflow of low-wage workers — who doubles as taxpayer-funded consumers — has kept Americans’ wages flat, but the stock market running hot.
The final official text of his Jan. 12 State of the Union speech said “Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.”
But he departed from the text, and actually said that “immigrants aren’t the principal reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.”
When he said “principal,” he admitted at that immigration have at least a partial impact on wages, even as he tried to pin most of the wage-cutting blame on CEOs who keep pace with their competitors by rationally paying lower wages during a government-imposed glut of native and imported labor.
Obama’s admission that immigration cuts wages is a rare acknowledgement by an establishment politician that the law of supply and demand does operate in the labor market, despite much denial by immigration-boosters.
But it is also a politically awkward admission by Obama — because Obama and his establishment allies in the GOP and business want to increase the annual inflow of foreign workers and consumers into the U.S. economy. House Speaker
is one of those allies — he’s been pushing for years to allow companies to hire “any willing worker” from the U.S. or overseas.In 2013, for example, Obama used existing laws and his presidential power to pump up the inflow to 2 million foreign workers, even as 4 million young Americans began looking for jobs. Unsurprisingly, that year, the extra foreign labor flattened wages, boosted corporate profits and spiked the stock market.
The extra immigration also cuts wages for American white-collar professionals, who are locked out of jobs and good wages by a resident population of at least 1 million foreign college-grad guest-workers, plus millions more immigrant college-grads.