Migrant caravans – refugees or job-seekers?

Many newspapers portray the migrant caravans as refugees escaping rampant crime and corruption in their home countries.   But are these migrants truly refugees?   Here’s a more realistic report from the Dallas News, with commentary from Neil Munro, one the most knowledgeable writers on immigration issues.  The article shows that most of the migrants are job-seekers and will be competing with citizens for jobs, undercutting wage levels in the U.S. and adding to the already-unsustainable population growth that is triggered primarily by immigration.

Dallas News: U.S. Job Offers Pull Caravan Migrants to the Border

By Neil Munro, Breitbart.com, November 14, 2018

https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2018/11/14/dallas-news-u-s-job-offers-pull-caravan-migrants-to-the-border/

Caravan migrants in Mexico told the Dallas News they are migrating towards blue-collar jobs in the United States.

The economic explanations contradict the claims by pro-migration lawyers, progressives and by most reporters that the migrants are helplessly fleeing from crime in their homelands. …

[Following are the concluding 6 paragraphs of the article]

Americans have long assumed that companies and investors who are trying to fill lower-wage jobs in a tight national labor-market would be pressured to offer higher wages and to invest in labor-saving machinery.

But investors do not need to offer higher wages or raise productivity if the government allows them to employ mobile workers from outside the national labor market and also supplements the migrants’ low wages with hidden taxpayer subsidies of aid, welfare and free schooling for their children. Also, the extra inflow of migrants provides investors and government agencies with many extra customers for food, autos, apartments, and government services.

A tacit alliance of progressives and investors, Democrats and Republicans, has largely blocked Trump’s efforts to help ordinary Americans by curbing migration into U.S. workplaces and neighborhoods.

Washington’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees.

The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and manage the large immigrant populations living in the coastal states.