President Joe Biden’s deputies have welcomed more than 9 million migrants into the United States, including roughly 6.5 million illegal and quasi-legal migrants, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The tripled inflow of migrants by early 2024 does not include migrants turned away at the border, but still “is nearly as many as the number that came in the previous decade,” says the Journal, whose article is based on recent reports by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The continued inflow of new workers, consumers, and renters allows Biden — and Kamala Harris — to claim their economy is growing because companies are creating jobs for the low-wage migrants, but not for better-paid Americans.
The Journal noted that the inflow may be higher, saying, “The House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee estimates at least two million have slipped through the border undetected since late 2020.”
Also, the administration is keeping the door open for more than 170,000 southern migrants each month and is accelerating the inflow of white-collar visa workers.
The inflow is roughly equivalent to three migrants for every four babies born in the United States.
Biden’s migrants are cutting ordinary Americans’ wages, productivity, and wealth.
Almost 23 percent of Biden’s migrants do not have high-school diplomas, compared to just 10 percent of the adult U.S. population.
Yet the inflow also includes a higher-than-average share of college graduates, according to the newspaper.
Thirty-six percent of the new legal and illegal migrants claim to hold bachelor’s degrees from foreign universities of uncertain quality, the Journal said. That share is slightly higher than the 35 percent of Americans who have earned a four-year college degree.
For example, 2.5 percent of the Biden arrivals work as software developers, compared to 1 percent of Americans.
The inflow of desperate foreign graduates is helping to keep the salaries of U.S. graduates stuck at 2008 levels.
The Wall Street Journal’s report is a cautious summary of the CBO data described in July by Breitbart News, and it only briefly mentions some of the economic impact on Americans.
The migrants “compete with existing workers with less education and put downward pressure on their wages,” the Journal explained. “The surge in immigration could weigh slightly on overall wages and productivity.”
There is much evidence that the mass inflow helps investors to hire cheap and desperate migrant workers and pushes ordinary blue-collar and white-collar Americans out of jobs and careers, housing, and retirement wealth.
The New York Times reported on September 5:
A spring survey of employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that hiring projections for this year’s college graduating class were below last year’s. And it showed that finance, insurance and real estate organizations were planning a 14.5 percent decrease in hiring this year, a sharp U-turn from its 16.7 percent increase last year.
Separately, the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the overall pace of hiring in professional and business services — a go-to for many young graduates — is down to levels not seen since 2009.
The Times cited the experience of Baily Hays, a 2023 graduate of California’s Pepperdine University, who had great difficulty finding a job in Biden’s expanding economy:
But even after [an unpaid internship] ended, Ms. Hays spent four months of this year unemployed, in what she called a “grueling process.” And she wasn’t alone, she said: Other new graduates she knew spent “six to nine months” searching for a job, or are still looking. “I could say for probably almost 100 percent of my friends, it was pretty horrible,” she said.
Nonetheless, recent polls by the New York Times show that Harris has a huge 21-point lead with white graduates in battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those voters are 39 percent of the states’ electorates.
NBC News reported on September 4:
Harris receives robust support from college graduates, besting Trump by 26 points among this group (56% to 30%). Additionally, only 5% of college graduates say they won’t vote for president in November.
The massive inflow of foreign workers also helps to reduce the wealth-generating productivity of the U.S. economy.
The Wall Street Journal reported that 6.5 percent of the Biden migrants now work in construction, compared to just 1 percent of Americans. However, the productivity of construction workers has plummeted since 1970, which was a few years after Congress passed the 1954 immigration law that triggered a vast wave of legal and illegal immigration.
“The value added per worker in the construction sector was about 40 percent lower in 2020 than in 1970,” according to a January 2023 report by the University of Chicago. The productivity drop has caused huge damage to Americans’ wealth, the report noted:
Had construction labor productivity grown over the last five decades at the (relatively modest) rate of 1 percent per year, annual aggregate labor productivity growth would have been roughly 0.18 percent higher, resulting in about 10 percent higher aggregate labor productivity (and, plausibly, income per capita) today.
The report was co-written by Austan Goolsbee, who worked as the chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
The Wall Street Journal article did not mention the alternative low-migration economic strategy pushed in April by BlackRock founder Larry Fink
“We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a pro-globalist event in April hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:
But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology.
“If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” Fink concluded.