The GQP’s 2022 midtern election strategy is anti-immigrant hysteria “white fright.” At the same time, the GQP wants to blame Democrats for inflation, but it turns out that it’s their own anti-immigrant hysteria contributing to inflation. Because American business has long relied on the exploitation of immigrant labor to keep costs down. The so-caled “labor shortage” is actually an immigrant labor shortage, of laborers who were recently hailed as “essential workers” during the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The AP reports Less Immigrant Labor Across US Contributing To Price Hikes:
Just 10 miles from the Rio Grande, Mike Helle’s farm is so short of immigrant workers that he’s replaced 450 acres of labor-intensive leafy greens with crops that can be harvested by machinery.
In Houston, Al Flores increased the price of his BBQ restaurant’s brisket plate because the cost of the cut doubled due to meatpacking plants’ inability to fully staff immigrant-heavy production lines. In the Dallas area, Joshua Correa raised prices on the homes his company builds by $150,000 to cover increased costs stemming partly from a lack of immigrant labor.
After immigration to the United States tapered off during the Trump administration — then ground to a near complete halt for 18 months during the coronavirus pandemic — the country is waking up to a labor shortage partly fueled by that slowdown.
The U.S. has, by some estimates, 2 million fewer immigrants than it would have if the pace had stayed the same, helping power a desperate scramble for workers in many sectors, from meatpacking to homebuilding, that is also contributing to supply shortages and price increases.
“These 2 million missing immigrants are part of the reason we have a labor shortage,” said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California at Davis, who calculated the shortfall. “In the short run, we are going to adjust to these shortages in the labor market through an increase in wages and in prices.”
The labor issues are among several contributors to the highest inflation in 40 years in the United States — from supply chains mangled by the pandemic to a surge in energy and commodity prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Steve Camarota, a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, believes a spike in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden will make up whatever shortfall lingers from the pandemic. He also contends wage increases in low-paying sectors like agriculture are minor contributors to inflation.
“I don’t think wages going up is bad for the poor, and I think mathematically it is not possible to drive down inflation by limiting wages at the bottom,” Camarota told The Associated Press.
Immigration is rapidly returning to its pre-pandemic levels, researchers say, but the U.S. would need a significant acceleration to make up its deficit. Given a sharp decline in births in the United States over the past two decades, some economists forecast the overall pool of potential workers will start shrinking by 2025.
The immigrant worker shortage comes as the U.S. political system is showing less of an appetite for increasing immigration. Democrats — who control all branches of the federal government and more recently have been the party more friendly to immigration — haven’t tried to advance major legislation permitting more new residents to the country. A recent Gallup poll showed worries about illegal immigration at a two-decade high [because of Fox News fear mongering.]. With a tough election for their party looming in November, Democrats are increasingly divided about the Biden administration’s attempt to end pandemic-related restrictions on seeking asylum.
“At some point we either decide to become older and smaller or we change our immigration policy,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and former official in President George W. Bush’s administration who is president of the center-right American Action Forum. He acknowledged a change in immigration policy is unlikely: “The bases of both parties are so locked in.”
That’s certainly the case in Republican-dominated Texas, which includes the longest and busiest stretch of the southern border. The Legislature in 2017 forced cities to comply with federal immigration agents seeking people who are in the U.S. illegally. Gov. Greg Abbott sent the Texas National Guard to patrol the border and recently created traffic snarls by ordering more inspections at border ports.
The turn against immigration distresses some Texas business owners. “Immigration is very important for our workforce in the United States,” said Correa. “We just need it.”
He’s seeing delays of two to three months on his projects as he and his subcontractors — from drywallers to plumbers to electricians — struggle to field crews. Correa has raised the standard price of his houses from $500,000 to about $650,000.
“We’re feeling it and, if we’re feeling it at the end of the day as builders and developers, the consumer pays the price,” said Correa, who spoke from Pensacola, Florida, where he brought a construction crew as a favor to a client whose hasn’t been able to find laborers to fix a beach house damaged by Hurricane Sally in 2020.
The share of the U.S. population born in another country — 13.5% in the latest census — is the highest it has been since the 19th century. But even before Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election vowing to cut immigration, migration to the United States was slowing. The Great Recession dried up many jobs that drew workers to the country, legally or illegally. Rising standards of living in Latin America have prodded more people to stay put — or to return from the United States.
Flores, who runs a chain of Mexican restaurants as well as his barbecue restaurant, said while the COVID-19 pandemic was a bigger shock to his industry, the immigration slowdown has hit it hard — and not just for meatpackers that supply his restaurant’s brisket. “You’ve got a lot of positions that aren’t being filled,” he said.
He’s steadily raised pay, up to $15 an hour recently. “This is a culmination of years and years,” said Flores, who’s president of the Greater Houston Restaurant Association.
Helle, who raises onion, cabbage, melons and kale just outside the border town of McAllen, Texas, is also paying more to his workers, who are almost exclusively immigrants. People born in the U.S., he says, won’t work the fields regardless of the pay.
Before he could find farmworkers just in the region. Now he’s joined a federal program to bring agricultural workers across the border. It’s more expensive for him, but he said it’s the only way he can keep his crops from spoiling in the ground.
Helle, 60, has farmed the area for decades. “I live 10 miles from the Rio Grande river and I never in my life thought we’d be in this situation.”
Anti-immigrant white nationalists don’t get to complain about the cost of food at the grocery store until I see their white supremacist asses working in the fields picking lettuce, beans and tomatoes for subsistence wages. Not ever going to happen.
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Fascist propagandist Tucker Carlson’s “White Power Hour” on Fox News and his constant repetition of white supremacist “great replacement theory” – think Charlottesville – is poisoning the minds of a large portion of low-information, high prejudice Fox News viewers. “1 in 3 fears immigrants influence US elections: AP-NORC poll”, https://apnews.com/article/immigration-2022-midterm-elections-covid-health-media-2ebbd3849ca35ec76f0f91120639d9d4
With anti-immigrant rhetoric bubbling over in the leadup to this year’s critical midterm elections, about 1 in 3 U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.
About 3 in 10 also worry that more immigration is causing U.S.-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to fear a loss of influence because of immigration, 36% to 27%.
Those views mirror swelling anti-immigrant sentiment espoused on social media and cable TV, with conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson exploiting fears that new arrivals could undermine the native-born population.
“Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions,” Carlson said on the show last year. “In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country.”
In their most extreme manifestation, those increasingly public views in the U.S. and Europe tap into a decades-old conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” a false claim that native-born populations are being overrun by nonwhite immigrants who are eroding, and eventually will erase, their culture and values.
Reminder: only U.S. citizens can vote in state and federal elections, and attaining citizenship typically takes years. Newly arrived immigrants are barred from voting in federal elections because they aren’t citizens, and gaining citizenship is an arduous process that can take a decade or more — if they are successful. In most cases, they must first obtain permanent residency, then wait five more years before they can apply for citizenship.
These views aren’t held by a majority of Americans — in fact, two-thirds feel the country’s diverse population makes the U.S. stronger, and far more favor than oppose a path to legal status for immigrants brought into the U.S. illegally as children. But the deep anxieties expressed by some Americans help explain how the issue energizes those opposed to immigration.
While Republicans worry more than Democrats about immigration, the most intense anxiety was among people with the greatest tendency for conspiratorial thinking [Fox News viewers]. That’s defined as those most likely to agree with a series of statements, like much of people’s lives is “being controlled by plots hatched in secret places” and “big events like wars, recessions, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us.”
In all, 17% in the poll believe both that native-born Americans are losing influence because of the growing population of immigrants and that a group of people in the country is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views. That number rises to 42% among the quarter of Americans most likely to embrace other conspiracy theories.