in World News Wealthy Americans, specifically corporates elites — like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, the GOP billionaire megadonors the Koch brothers, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — are determined to continue the wage-crushing mass legal immigration levels of the past few decades.
Cook, most recently, revealed that he is lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill to pass an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.
In an interview with MSNBC, Cook attempted to shame America’s working and middle class into supporting an amnesty for illegal aliens, calling it a “moral issue.”
“I talked to a lot of folks in our company,” Cook said. “The DACA situation is one that I am truthfully, as an American, deeply offended by.”
“This is one that goes to the core of who we are as Americans,” Cook continued.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post lobbied for mass immigration to the U.S. in the newspaper’s editorial pages this week, as Breitbart News noted.
advertisement
Even though a slight uptick in immigration under President Trump has secured history-making wage growth for American workers in the construction industry, the garment industry, for workers employed at small businesses, and for black Americans, Bezos’ Washington Post demanded foreign workers pour into the country to help big business.
Disenfranchised Americans have benefited greatly from Trump’s tight labor market, an outcome that not even the Washington Post ignored, noting how companies have turned to hiring ex-convicts to fill jobs. https://t.co/ru3wGarGeQ
— John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) April 10, 2018
Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, through his mass immigration lobbying group “FWD.us,” continues routinely pushing for not only amnesty for illegal aliens, but for wage-cutting legal immigration levels to remain the same.
Six months ago, Zuckerberg’s open borders group bused illegal aliens into Washington, D.C. to lobby vulnerable lawmakers on an amnesty plan that would have the potential to expand legal immigration levels beyond the already more than 1.5 million legal immigrants who enter the U.S. every year.
The Koch brothers, friends to many in the Republican establishment who rely on the big business billionaires for campaign cash, have taken an even more liberal stance on mass immigration in the era of Trump.
For example, in February, the Koch brothers’ spokesperson said the billionaires would oppose any legislation pushed by the Trump administration that sought to reduce immigration levels to raise the wages of America’s working and middle class.
“We just need to know there’s going to be no reduction to legal immigration,” a spokesperson for the Kochs said at the time.
This month, a spokesperson for the Koch brothers called the ditching of an amnesty plan a “grave injustice,” Breitbart News reported.
Every year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the vast majority deriving from the process known as “chain migration,” an immigration avenue that is supported by the Koch brothers, as it allows newly naturalized citizens to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S.
While the working and middle class remain supportive of cutting legal immigration levels in at least half, wealthy Americans, earning $200,000 or more, continue to be the most supportive of amnesty and mass immigration in nearly every recent poll on the issue.
A poll out last week revealed that 60 percent of wealthy Americans are opposed to Trump’s economic nationalist agenda on immigration. Last month, a similar poll showed that wealthy Americans were the most supportive of any demographic group for prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens.
The wealthy have the most to gain with mass immigration.
For example, when in 1998 Steven Camarotta of the Center for Immigration Studies studied how mass immigration impacts the working-class versus the wealthy, his accumulation of research found net benefits for the rich and net negatives for America’s workers:
Recent work on the growth of income inequality between highand low-income families has found a connection between immigration and the widening income gap. Topel (1994) found that inequality increased more rapidly in the western United States because of the high concentration of immigrants in that region. Partridge, Rickman and Levernier (1996), using a panel of states, also concluded that the level of income inequality increases in high immigrant states. Both of these studies indicate that immigration seems to be driving down wages for those at the bottom of the economic scale, thereby increasing the gap between rich and poor. [Emphasis added]
Harvard Kennedy School professor George Borjas has noted in his recent research how immigration is a drain on American workers, while redistributing billions in wealth to businesses and employers.
But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about $50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated. [Emphasis added]
…
What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program.[Emphasis added]
Wealthy Americans and corporate America benefit greatly from not only continued illegal immigration to the U.S., but also mass legal immigration whereby more than one million immigrants are admitted to the U.S., the vast majority of which are low-skilled workers.
Mass immigration translates to a wage-crushing economy for American workers, who are forced to compete with floods of illegal and legal immigrants, while high-earners enjoy the benefits of cheap labor.
Blue-collar American workers have had to endure not only stagnant wages, but in many cases decreased wages because of mass immigration, as Breitbart News reported. In California, blue-collar construction workers have had to endure wage-crushing mass immigration that dropped hourly pay from $45 an hour to just $11 an hour.
In 2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants. Should mass legal immigration continue for the next two decades, the U.S. is set to add about 15 million new foreign-born voters to the country, an electoral change that is likely to have a lasting imapct on regional, statewide, and national elections.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.