Former Bill Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who also served as Director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, is tacitly admitting that the federal government and state governments tolerate illegal immigration because it suppresses the wages of American workers. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the Democrat economist and former President of Harvard University argued that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plans to deport illegal immigrants en masse would tighten the labor market. Summers contends the subsequent rising wages would be inflationary.
“I think every sensible American thinks we need to do more to secure our border. But if you’re talking about deporting millions of people, that is an invitation to labor shortage and bottlenecks,” Summers wrote on Thursday. He added: “I hope Trump will get the message from this election and adjust his program so that it is not inflationary. I certainly hope that if his program is inflationary, it will not be accommodated by the Federal Reserve.”
Summers’s post exemplifies the likely line of attack corporate lobbyists and Democrats on Capitol Hill will take against Trump’s immigration crackdown. However, his argument belies the fact that rising wages would cause the inflationary pressures he is referring to—an acknowledgment that mass immigration, and especially illegal immigration, is used to artificially keep the cost of labor lower than its actual market value.
The National Pulse previously reported that the unchecked flow of cheap illegal immigrant labor likely had a deflationary effect in late 2023. Even more concerning, government data suggests a large swath of the native-born American workforce has been replaced by foreign-born labor under Joe Biden, potentially increasing the downward pressure on wages further.
No comments:
Post a Comment