House Speaker Paul Ryan last night promised to create a “21st Century” immigration system that lets employers hire an endless supply of cheap foreign workers instead of paying marketplace wages to American employees or to young Americans entering the labor force.
The wage-cutting, salary-slashing promise was delivered, half buried, in a “Town Hall” meeting conducted with Paul Ryan by CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“We need to have an immigration system that is wired for what our economy needs … so let’s find out where those gaps in our labor markets are and have our immigration system wired for that,” Ryan said.
By offering foreign workers to fill so-called “gaps” in the labor market, Ryan would give employers a huge gift — the ability to hire foreign workers whenever American employees or young job-seekers ask for higher wages, and without ever having to train any Americans to take higher-tech, higher-wage jobs. That’s a huge giveaway to employers and to Wall Street, where stock prices rise when wages drop.
Ryan’s wage-cutting promise was ignored by CNN and other media outlets.
The scale of the Ryan giveaway can be measured against the final years of President Bill Clinton’s term, when employers had to offer higher wages to prevent their workers from being lured away by other employers. Wages nudged up briefly during the real-estate bubble, but have largely stalled ever since.
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