President Donald Trump has successfully stopped the inflow of economic migrants via the southern border, so he should invite more economic migrants via the nation’s airports, says the Wall Street Journal.
The political “question is whether Mr. Trump can use the political capital from his border victory to achieve a more lasting immigration success,” the newspaper’s pro-migration editors declared. According to WSJ-owner Rupert Murdoch’s editors, Trump’s “opportunity” for “immigration success” should:
include more pathways for legal immigration to address the labor needs of a growing economy. Half of small businesses say one of their largest problems is finding workers. If Mr. Trump wants more fruits and vegetables grown at home, who’s going to pick them?
… If Mr. Trump wants Silicon Valley to win the AI race, why are H-1B skilled visas capped at a low number and handed out by lottery?
The newspaper’s illegal=bad/legal=good message comes as Trump’s deputies are charting a course back to a lower-migration, high-productivity United States, away from the post-1990 cheap-labor economy that transfers ordinary Americans’ wages into profits for quarterly CEOs and Wall Street investors.
The promise of cheap labor is “a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vice President JD Vance told his audience of investors in March:
Real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers. It boosts our standard of living. It strengthens our workforce and the relative value of its labor.
Breitbart News has posted many articles about migration’s harmful impact on productivity and innovation — and also how tight labor markets help pressure companies to invest in wage-boosting automation and productivity.
In the white-collar sector, Breitbart News has shown how visa programs created by Congress and executives — such as the H-1B, J-1, L-1, CPT, and other visa programs — have imported debilitating Indian-style office politics into a wide range of critical U.S. companies, including Intel, IBM, Twitter, and Boeing. The damage was recently spotlighted by Citibank, which announced it would sharply reduce its reliance on foreign contractors after the contractors cost the company at least $600 million in routine operations and regulatory incompetence. The decision means Citibank will begin hiring at least 10,000 American technology professionals for jobs held by supposedly cheaper Indian visa workers.
The economic damage of migration has been noted by some business leaders who face competing temptations to either raise short-term profit via migration or raise long-term productivity and innovation via investment in American employees.
“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a 2024 pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:
That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
“If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” Fink said.
