The Quote Below—More Misinformation form the Media
“Postcards from the great American labor shortage: A couple arrives at the Seattle airport after a five-hour flight and stands in line at the car rental desk. People are angry. At the desk sits a harassed employee explaining that he simply has no cars of any kind to rent. Nothing. Why? There aren’t enough employees on hand to vacuum, wash, fuel and process the cars. . . .
“But the one factor we discuss too little is immigration — or rather, we emphasize the wrong aspect. Republicans are obsessed with the southern border and the dreaded waves of people (or sometimes “caravans”) attempting entry. But we’ve long had people thronging the Mexican border. . . .
“Trump began his squeeze on immigrants in 2017 with a ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and followed up with drastic reductions in the number of green cards issued, the number of refugees admitted (a shameful policy choice) and the number of legal immigrants processed. A Government Accountability Office review found the Citizenship and Immigration Service increased its processing time for immigration applications sixfold between 2015 and 2020. . . .
“Before Trump, Republicans used to stress they were all for legal immigration but only opposed the illegal variety, but that’s all changed now. In fact, as Alex Nowrasteh at the CATO Institute argues, Trump failed to budge the number of illegal immigrants in the United States but radically diminished the number of legal immigrants.
“Sen. Tom Cotton and other Republicans are now on the record as favoring less legal immigration. According to some estimates, if the immigration rate had remained unchanged during Trump’s term, we would now have nearly 2 million more prime-age workers. . . .
“But Trump distorted the Republican party into a xenophobic, blinkered cult that wrongly sees immigrants as a drain instead of a boon.
“So the question Republicans must answer today is: How do you like this immigrant-starved America? How do you like the shortages, the inflation and the poor service? Because this is what comes of nativism.” – A Real ‘America First’ Immigration Policy, Chicago Sun Times, Mona Charen, 8/4/22 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: Mona Charen seems to be under the delusion that Donald Trump is still president and that his immigration policies are still in effect. In reality, he’s been out of office for more than a year-and-a-half. During that time Joe Biden has repealed those policies and re-opened the immigration floodgates. Trump only provided a brief slowdown of the flood, and now mass immigration is surging forward just as massively as ever. If Charen really thinks we’re “immigrant starved,” she needs to learn that we now have 46 million foreign-born people in our country, by far the highest total ever.
If we have a worker shortage, it is not for lack of immigrants. A more plausible explanation is that many Americans of working age have simply dropped out of the workforce, a situation recently made worse by the economic dislocations caused by the COVID pandemic. Since 2008, four million working-age American men have ceased working, many because of low wages and bad working conditions. Interestingly, Trump’s immigration policies were encouraging them to seek employment, as those policies pushed wages upward. Unfortunately, Biden’s policies have erased those gains.
Posing as a conservative, Charen seems primarily interested in conserving the profits of businesses seeking cheap labor. In any case, she can afford to ignore the problems that immigration causes most native workers. Her “nativeaphobic” indifference speaks of one who doesn’t have to worry about immigrants depressing her wages.