It was a horrible thing to say, but Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) might have been right about immigrant labor. Nadler’s inartful statements about who would pick our vegetables deserved criticism, but the latest labor charts show that foreign workers are, for lack of a better term, taking American jobs away:
How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024
The trend wasn’t some iceberg that popped out of nowhere in the dark. In May 2023, the share of foreign workers in the American workforce reached record highs. It was the same story in 2022.
I’ll let you comment on this trend below, but it seems there are two pathways for Democrats to create a generation of Donald Trump-like candidates for the next generation. The first was this cockamamie ploy to forgive mountains of student loan debt, which Joe Biden idiotically made a top domestic agenda item. The blowback was well-deserved, as less than a quarter of the population has a college degree. That means those paying the tab for the relief effort would be America’s working class, forgiving the loans of whiny, condescending Gen Z students who wasted four years earning woke ‘whine like a little b*tch’ degrees that don’t pay. It also turns off those who just paid off their loans or worked through college to make things more manageable. It’s policies like that that could create a line of Donald Trumps, something that even Democratic Party strategist James Carville concluded was a loser. No one wants to hear about these kids’ loan troubles.
The second is this deluge of illegal immigration that’s begun to incense those in reliably Democratic bastions. New York City and Chicago, especially, have had scores of residents voice their outrage at having their community centers and schools taken over by illegal aliens, along with tens of millions of dollars allocated to assisting them instead of American citizens. Illegal immigration was a critical issue that led to Trump’s upset win in 2016. It allowed him to create the distance needed in the primaries to clinch the nomination.
In this debate, I wouldn’t bank on ‘these people pick our vegetables’ to be a political lifeboat. If this southern border crisis continues, even the most ardent liberal might be enticed to vote for someone more heavy-handed on immigration, even though they’re the ones who created this problem when they voted for Joe in 2020.
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