Trump-Vance Must Restore Fairness To Betrayed American Workers
By Joe Guzzardi
The Donald J. Trump-J.D. Vance ticket gives promise to working Americans who the Biden administration has maligned through its open border agenda, and improper granting of parole with work authorization to millions of illegal immigrants. The legal and illegal immigrants that have arrived since President Joe Biden’s first days in the White House have dominated job creation in the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Center for Immigration Studies Steve Camarota’s research into jobs data found that since 2019’s fourth quarter, the period just before COVID-19 devastated the U.S. economy, 2.7 million more people are working. The raw statistics give false credence to the Biden administration’s boast that the U.S. economy is strong.
But immigrants, not U.S. workers, led in job gains totals, an important fact omitted from the White House’s glowing economic press releases. Simply stated, since 2019, all the net job growth has gone to immigrants. The number of working immigrants since 2019 is up by 2.9 million, while 183,000 fewer U.S. citizens were employed during the same period.
The GOP ticket—Trump and Vance—have an opportunity to right three decades of wrongs perpetrated against American workers. Low-skilled Americans are forced to compete with under-educated illegal aliens for entry level jobs that would help them support their families and get a foot in the labor market, essential for moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Black American workers are the biggest victims of mass immigration, and not only on the hiring line. Kathleen Wells, Black America for Immigration Reform’ s Executive Director, observed that in New York City, America’s most expensive city in which to rent a hotel room, 135 of its 700 hotels provide taxpayer funded housing to illegal immigrants. Prepaid debit cards add to the generous benefits package available to illegal immigrants, but not to black Americans. Similar injustices play out across America—in Chicago, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Portland.
Skilled U.S. workers are not immune from foreign labor job displacement. A wide variety of employment-based visas provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of professional employees that will work in tech, accounting, and education. The most commonly used visas are the H-1B, the J-1, and the L-1. The overseas employees—read, cheaper— take well-paying, white-collar jobs from more experienced American workers.
The time is overdue for American workers’ resumes that reflect their skills and experiences to return to their rightful position at the top of employers’ inboxes and not be cast aside in favor of candidates that unscrupulous employers will hire for the lowest wage. Trump and Vance are aware that new jobs must be filled by U.S. citizens. In his GOP convention address, Vance reminded the audience that he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, “a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
Continuing, Vance said:” When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico. When I was a sophomore in high school that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class jobs.” For more than a quarter of a century, the craven, D.C. privileged has done the bidding of donors and consistently spurned working Americans in pursuit of their own narrow self-interests. Biden may be gone but whoever replaces him at the top of the Democratic ticket will have the same global agenda. Trump and Vance can end the harm done to American workers; reversing the anti-American sentiment must be their first priority.
Monday, January 20, 2025, Inauguration Day, is the time to for Trump and Vance to begin to keep their campaign pledges to U.S. workers.
Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more thirty years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org
Trump-Vance Must Restore Fairness To Betrayed American Workers