President Donald Trump signed an executive order blocking President Joe Biden’s huge inflow of wage-cutting refugees for at least four months.
The shutdown will help Americans because it trims the government’s supply of cheap foreign labor into the nation’s workplaces. The wage benefits will flow mostly to the many citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants who are now working in the nation’s slaughterhouses that normally hire many refugees.
The cutoff of foreign labor will also pressure the meatpacking sector to invest in productivity-boosting robots and to recruit some of the several million American men who have fallen out of the economy.
The news was released on January 20 by the Associated Press:
Trump also intends to suspend refugee resettlement for four months, the official said. That’s a program that for decades has allowed hundreds of thousands of people from around the world fleeing war and persecution to come to the United States.
Trump is “off to a great start,” Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. He added:
Obviously the proof is in the pudding. This is an executive order … It’s just the beginning of a process. But if they follow through on this, it’s going to make a big difference.
In his first term, Trump gradually reduced the refugee program to roughly 12,000 people in 2020. The policy forced meatpacking companies to raise wages and invest in new technology.
Biden expanded the program in 2021, and in 2024, he announced he would import 125,000 picked refugees from countries around the world in 2025. The inflow was expected to include many wives and children of illegal migrants from South America who are now living in the United States.
Biden’s deputies imported 100,000 refugees in 2024, many via the so-called Welcome Corps.
The organization, launched in 2023, combines private grants, government aid, and volunteers to accelerate the inflow of preferred migrants from other countries.
For example, people in the town of Oneonta, New York, signed up to import poor foreigners instead of attracting some of the many millions of disadvantaged Americans living in other towns and states:
“There’s a humanitarian motivation to help refugees foremost, but also a way to bring more people to upstate New York, where we’re losing people,” says Mark “It benefits our community in so many ways and gives us the strength of diversity.”
…
One such refugee is Marlon, who was welcomed by ORRC [Otsego Refugee Resettlement Coalition] earlier this year. Marlon was forced to flee his native Venezuela after being extorted, assaulted, and having his life threatened by government-backed militant groups. Despite the differences in culture and weather between Venezuela and Oneonta, Marlon has taken to his new home with real gusto.
…
Marlon quickly found employment, working in a restaurant during the day and as a janitor at a local school in the evenings. His English is fast improving, thanks to one of the school’s teachers, and his appreciation for Oneonta, and the United States as a whole, is ever growing. Through his day job, he’s learned to make all kinds of American fare and, in exchange, has shared some of his favorite Venezuelan dishes with coworkers. For Marlon, welcoming others the same way that ORRC and Oneonta welcomed him is now one of his main priorities.
In May 2024, the Associated Press described how the program was used to import cheap labor into South Carolina:
Two … sisters from Honduras who had fled their homes and traveled to Mexico, where they lived for about a year until they learned they had been approved to come to South Carolina.
Leliz Bonilla Castro said she didn’t know much about Columbia when she arrived but she liked the warm weather and welcoming people. She said the refugee program had given her and her three children a future.
“For those who want and have the opportunity to come (to this country), it is the best way to save your life and to have a better future for your kids, which are the ones we think about the most as parents,” she said through a translator.
The refugee program is part of the many programs created by the federal government to maximize the inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and renters into the U.S. economy. For example, Biden and his deputies extracted at least 8 million migrants from poor countries.
The refugee program has imported 3 million people into the United States since 1980. The result is more sidelined Americans, lower wages for American families, higher housing costs, and less automation in the nation’s workplaces.
Post a Comment