The Atlantic Magazine: The Feds Use Migration to Cut Wages

The federal government uses immigration to suppress Americans’ salaries and wages, according to an article in the Atlantic, which is a very pro-migration and establishment magazine.

The federal policymakers believe that “labor is just another commodity, like wood or oil, and Americans are best off when it is plentiful and cheap,” the June 2 article says.


Author Oren Cass, the founder of the mainstream American Compass think-tank, wrote:

American public policy has largely managed to keep things that way. Over the past 50 years, as both parties supported the entry of millions of unskilled immigrants and the offshoring of entire industries, America’s per capita gross domestic product more than doubled after adjusting for inflation. Productivity of labor rose by a similar amount, and corporate profits per capita nearly tripled. Yet over the same time period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly earnings of the typical worker rose by less than 1 percent.

The massive distortion is revealed by the declining share of new wealth that goes to employees since about 1970.

Amid migration, technological centralization, and outsourcing to China, U.S. employees’ share of new wealth dropped 10 points from 1970 to 2014 — from 51.6 percent to 41.9 percent — according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis



Employees’ share jumped 1 point up under President Donald Trump’s lower-migration policy. But their share seems to be declining again under President Joe Biden’s easy migration rules.


A May 4 report from Cass’ American Compass showed how migration allows investors to minimize pay to workers:

From 1972 to 2022, real corporate profits per capita rose 185%. GDP per capita rose 141%. Productivity rose 135%. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers rose 1%. How is that even possible?

It is possible because employers will tend to raise wages under one, and only one, condition: when they cannot hire the workers they need at the existing wage. All of labor economics turns on that simple fact.

This post-1970 economic shift has moved many trillions of dollars from wage earners to investors from 1970 to 2023, thrilling investors and their allies.

The establishment’s cheap-labor bubble burst in 2020 when the coronavirus crash blocked the supply of new migrant workers. The resulting shortfall allowed many Americans to change jobs in search of higher wages.

Cass wrote:

In the coronavirus pandemic’s aftermath, for the first time in a long time, many employers are discovering that they can’t fill jobs at the low wages they’re accustomed to offering. “We hear from businesses every day that the worker shortage is their top challenge,” Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said last May. This is the precise circumstance under which wages might finally rise. Instead, the business community is looking to government to get them out of a jam, and leaders on both sides of the aisle seem only too eager to help.

The article carried an online headline, “A Labor Shortage is a Great Problem to Have.”



[link to www.breitbart.com (secure)]