Once again, the United States Chamber of Commerce has proven to the American public that their loyalties lie solely with large corporations, the investor class, and a commitment to infinite GDP growth - no matter the cost.
This time, the Chamber of Commerce has started a lobbying campaign to massively increase legal immigration into the United States, specifically a momentous increase in foreign visa workers to further stagnate and even lower prevailing wages in the American job market.
Disingenuously labeled the "American Works Agenda," the Chamber of Commerce intends to lobby federal lawmakers and state lawmakers to do what they can to greatly expand the rate of legal immigration.
For context, approximately 1.2 million legal immigrants are given green cards (legal permanent resident status) annually in the U.S. This is in addition to the roughly 1.4 million foreign nationals given visas to take U.S. jobs despite a U6 unemployment rate still over 10%.
The Chamber of Commerce, through their new lobbying effort, is demanding that lawmakers:
- At least double employment-based green cards to 280,000 admissions a year
- Eliminate per-country caps, allowing India and China to monopolize employment-based green card categories
- Double the annual number of H-1B visas awarded to foreign workers
- Double the annual number of H-2B visas awarded to foreign workers
- Expand the H-2A visa program to allow non-seasonal agricultural businesses to import foreign workers
- Allow foreign students to more easily secure employment-based green cards after graduation
- Provide amnesty to illegal aliens enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program
- Provide amnesty to foreign nationals enrolled in Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
- Allow local politicians to import foreign workers to take American jobs in their local economy and to drive up population growth
Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Suzanne Clark is attempting to peddle the campaign as an effort to address some mythical "worker shortage" threatening "the business community" (America's largest corporations) - again, despite the facts that 16.4 million Americans remain jobless, 5.2 million remain underemployed, and tens of millions more who are marginally attached to the labor force.
Truthfully, the lobbying campaign is nothing more than the usual attempt, this time by the Chamber of Commerce, to create a boon for Big Business by unnaturally inflating the U.S. labor market - allowing unscrupulous employers to cut Americans' wages, reduce the cost of labor, and increase profit margins. For this reason, American wages have been effectively stagnant for over 40 years.
In what appears to be an emerging pattern, the Chamber of Commerce's lobbying goals, like most of Washington's current ideas, are vastly out of step with what a majority of Americans see as a positive direction for the nation.
Just this week, the most recent Rasmussen Reports survey "revealed that 72 percent of likely U.S. voters want to cut legal immigration levels, 62 percent want businesses to recruit jobless Americans for jobs over importing foreign workers, 58 percent say the U.S. has enough skilled Americans and does not need more foreign H-1B visa workers, and a plurality of 44 percent want immigration slowed down to stabilize the nation's population growth."
It does not take an advanced degree in economics to understand the microeconomic benefits the average citizen enjoys due to a tightened labor market. In situations like these, employees - being in high demand - hold more substantial negotiating power over their employers, allowing them to demand higher wages and better working conditions.
In situations when the labor market is loosened, in this case unnaturally, jobs are in higher demand than workers, negating any negotiating power employees may have had and allowing corporations to auction off jobs to the lowest bidders - keeping wages low and working conditions miserable.
Obviously, the robber barons of America's largest corporations all the way down to even the most furtive members of the investor class prefer incredibly loose labor markets as much as the average working American prefers tight labor markets. But a difference arises, as average Americans can not fall back on droves of lobbyists to protect their livelihoods and create artificial changes to labor markets like Big Business has successfully done for decades and is attempting to do again.
The benefits of a tightened labor market can be seen in November of 2019, for example, as the bottom 25% of wage earners in the country saw their largest increase in pay due to tightened labor markets and depleted foreign competition. On top of that, Americans in the construction, mining, finance, hospitality, and manufacturing industries enjoyed some of the highest wage growth at the time.
One particular study by the Center for Immigration Studies' Steven Camarota revealed that for every one percent increase in the immigrant portion of an American workers' occupation, their weekly wages are cut by approximately 0.5 percent.
For the complete article, please visit Breitbart News.
