The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“Maria worked cleaning schools in Florida for $13 an hour. Every two weeks, she’d get a $900 paycheck from her employer, a contractor. Not much — but enough to cover rent in the house that she and her 11-year-old son share with five families, plus electricity, a cellphone and groceries.
“In August, it all ended. When she showed up at the job one morning, her boss told her that she couldn’t work there anymore. The Trump administration had terminated President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole program, which provided legal work permits for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans as well as Nicaraguans like Maria. . . .
“President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration is throwing foreigners like Maria out of work and shaking the American economy and job market. And it’s happening at a time when hiring is already deteriorating amid uncertainty over Trump’s erratic trade policies.
“Immigrants do jobs — cleaning houses, picking tomatoes, painting fences — that most native-born Americans won’t, and for less money. But they also bring the technical skills and entrepreneurial energy that have helped make the United States the world’s economic superpower.
“Trump is attacking immigration at both ends of spectrum, deporting low-wage laborers and discouraging skilled foreigners from bringing their talents to the United States.
“And he is targeting an influx of foreign workers that eased labor shortages and upward pressure on wages and prices at a time when most economists thought that taming inflation would require sky-high interest rates and a recession — a fate the United States escaped in 2023 and 2024. — Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Weighs Heavy on the US Labor Market, Paul Wiseman, AP News, 10/18/25 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: The illegal alien described at the beginning of this article may elicit some sympathy. Focusing on these examples is a common tactic of illegal alien advocates. By highlighting a likeable individual, they promote the idea that we should feel sympathy for illegal immigration in general. Sensible policy-making, however, must focus on the aggregate consequences of illegal immigration, not on particular individuals. Among these consequences the weakening of our rule of law, suppression of wages for American workers (particularly the poorest of them), and the diversion of social service benefits which should go to citizens.
This article echoes the claim of mass immigration supporters that immigrants just do jobs that Americans refuse to do. In reality, as shown by government figures, native-born Americans are the majority of workers in almost every occupation. In those where they are not, such as agriculture, we can use guest workers as a short-term solution, and automation of farming as the long-term solution. In point of fact, automation is proceeding throughout the economy. With machines and AI doing an increasing number of jobs now done by humans, labor shortages will not be a major problem.
The claim that we need more people with technical skills suggests that in a population of 342 million people we can’t find enough of them with the intelligence to master those skills. And with some of the leading educational facilities in the world do we lack the ability to train them? The sad truth is that many U.S. companies avoid hiring skilled Americans because they can get away with paying foreign workers less.
Behind all of the media talk of labor shortages is the motive of acquiring cheap labor. The business interests, and their friends in the media, manipulate sympathy and spread falsehoods to hide that motive.