The economic growth director at President George W. Bush’s advocacy center has slammed President Donald Trump’s America First immigration policy.
Collins: ‘We Know Immigrants Are Good For The Economy’
Earlier this week, President Trump signed an executive order that paused the arrival of certain categories of immigrants into the country for 60 days, in order to preserve medical supplies for Americans and immigrants already here, and help preserve jobs for Americans.
In a video posted on the Bush Center’s Twitter account, Laura Collins, the economic growth director of the organization, claimed that the executive order “is not going to accomplish either of those objectives.” Collins argued that the virus “affects all of us equally,” so there’s no need to prevent more people from coming in, “in terms of slowing down viral spread.”
Collins’s main focus, however, was the worry that Trump’s immigration policy may shut down the endless flow of foreign labour that big business loves so much. She argued that immigrants are actually good for the economy, spuriously claiming that immigrants “don’t compete with native-born Americans for jobs,” adding that “we know that before the pandemic there were millions of unfilled jobs in the United States:”
If we assume then that in any recovery, all of those jobs come back, every American that wants a job will have the ability to fill the jobs that were there. We’re still going to have shortages and we’re going to need immigrants there to help fill those jobs. We simply don’t have a labour force at full employment big enough to fill all the jobs in the economy.
“The most important thing to remember in this, is that we don’t want this temporary policy to become permanent immigration policy,” Collins concluded. “We know immigrants are good for the economy. We know they’re good for our culture. We know they’re in this fight with us together, and we’re going to need them working with us side by side in any recovery after the pandemic is over.”
Bush Institute-@SMU Economic Growth Director @LVTCollins explains how immigrants and native-born Americans have always been on the same team driving American innovation and economic growth. #AllOfUs pic.twitter.com/Z1t0nzd4ob
— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) May 3, 2020
The Bush Center Isn’t Conservative!
Collins insistance that immigrants “don’t compete with American workers for jobs” is complete nonsense, and was thoroughly debunked by an article by the Center for Immigration Studies in 2018:
If immigrants “do jobs that Americans won’t do,” we should be able to identify occupations in which the workers are nearly all foreign-born. However, among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, we find only a handful of majority-immigrant occupations, and none completely dominated by immigrants (legal or illegal). Furthermore, in none of the 474 occupations do illegal immigrants constitute a majority of workers.
Many Americans are directly pushed out of their jobs by immigrants, especially those brought in on H1-B (supposedly high-skilled) visas, with the American employees being forced to train their replacements before being fired.
RELATED: Rep. Jim Jordan: Immigration Moratorium ‘Common Sense’ In A Pandemic
It shouldn’t surprise you by now that the big business, neocon RINOs are on the same side as the radical left wingers when it comes to immigration. The Bush Center, their crony capitalist buddies, and anyone else who screams about the economy every time immigration restrictions are brought up, just want to sell you and your country out to get a few more nickels in their pockets. Real America First conservatives, like President Trump, actually care about American citizens. Never forget this difference!