Amidst the persistent and shameless media and political propaganda about both the disastrous economy and the equally disastrous illegal migration crisis, TIME covered a slightly more honest but still disturbing prediction: sure, illegal alien workers bring down wages for Americans, but the federal government’s revenues will benefit.
It often seems that Democrats don’t even pretend to care about American citizens anymore. Democrat voters find their buildings and neighborhoods co-opted to house illegals, and migrant criminals are repeatedly re-released onto America’s streets. It’s become so brazen that leftist media is now trying to spin cheap migrant labor as a huge win for the economy, totally ignoring how it hurts American workers (and how a flood of illegals over the last few years hasn’t improved the tanking economy).
The Washington Post wants us to believe that Biden’s economy is “roaring” along and that’s thanks to illegal aliens, as PJ Media’s own Stephen Kruiser highlighted. TIME was less of a nauseating cheerleader, but it approvingly covered two predicted results of the migrant crisis without explaining how much these hurt American workers — and how illegals drain taxpayer resources. And TIME’s source, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), was most enthusiastic about the ever-swelling surge of illegals.
“Increases in the population boost the demand for goods, services, and housing,” CBO declared in its 10-year budget and economic outlook report. “They also expand the productive capacity of the economy by increasing the size of the labor force.” That all sounds very lovely in theory, but TIME and CBO seem unaware of the heavy cost of illegal migration, which exceeds the economic “gain.”
Not only do many migrants not work, but many who do work still receive benefits. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated that, as of the start of 2023 (and we’ve spent many millions since), “the net cost of illegal immigration for the United States – at the federal, state, and local levels – was at least $150.7 billion.”
That, by the way, is just the cost of illegal migration if you subtract the tax revenue gained from illegals; without that tax revenue deduction, the estimated cost was $182 billion. That ought to have been included in TIME’s report, but it wouldn’t fit CBO’s narrative. There was only a brief admission from TIME that CBO did not take into account the state and local costs of caring for illegals.
[TIME] The surge in immigration will help bolster the U.S. economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade by swelling the labor force and increasing demand, the Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday.
The stronger growth will be good for the federal government, lifting revenues by about $1 trillion more than otherwise over the period, according to the non-partisan agency. Wages, however, will rise more slowly, in part reflecting the increase in the number of lower skilled workers, in the CBO’s estimation … The CBO report underscores some of the economic advantages that can be gained from increased immigration — a point that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell made in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview broadcast on Feb. 4.
As of 2022, Powell was actually upset about wage growth, citing worker wages as a barrier to fighting inflation. Not only have real wages been steadily down under Biden, but a flood of cheap migrant labor will bring down wages too. In other words, we are supposed to be excited that Americans are being impoverished to enrich the already wealthy and migrant lawbreakers.
https://t.co/h3FW8pq9Jq Dave Brat Discusses How Productivity Goes Down And The Rich Get Richer
— Catherine Salgado (@CatSalgado32) February 28, 2024
Indeed, there’s the fact that illegal aliens take blue-collar jobs that would otherwise go to Americans, thus harming citizen workers yet again while big corporations benefit from paying lower salaries to migrants. New York Post noted that the number of migrant workers for Q4 2023 was up 2.9 million with up to half of those being illegals, while 183,000 fewer U.S.-born Americans were in the workforce. All of Biden’s boasted job gains went to immigrants while young U.S.-born men are increasingly not finding jobs.
Related: Job ‘Gains’ Are for Migrants as U.S. Men Kept Out of Workforce
Ultimately, TIME and CBO are being deceptive. To defend the Democrat border crisis and Biden’s economy, they are pretending that illegal immigration can be helpful for America when in reality it is catastrophic for most Americans.
