Fed chair Powell says illegals are why unemployment is rising

If you import 20 million people into an economy that doesn't have room for them, don't be surprised if unemployment goes up.

That's not Donald Trump speaking, it's what Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, a guy who tends to side with Joe Biden, found when he cut interest rates 50 basis points yesterday. It's also basic economics.

According to the New York Post:

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell blamed the migrant crisis for the nation's growing unemployment after cutting the benchmark interest rate by 0.5 percentage point on Wednesday for the first time since early days of COVID-19.

"If you're having millions of people come into the labor force, then — and you're creating 100,000 jobs — you're going to see unemployment go up," Powell told reporters, answering a question about the nation's current monthly job creation.

Many of the millions being let in by Joe Biden through his open-border policies really are just flat out taking American jobs, leaving the native-born job-hunters in the unemployment figures. Biden, after all, has stapled work permits onto the applications of many kinds of so-called asylum-seekers, so they are perfectly free to work legally in the states. Many more without them purchase Americans' stolen identity documents and work under those, or else work under the table in the shadow economy, meaning, those who hire in the shadow economy don't need to hire authentic permitted American workers instead.

Net result: Americans are pushed out. Replacement theory, anyone? They are indeed being replaced.

What's more, recent data seen elsewhere show that all jobs created in the past year have gone to foreign-born workers.

According to Steve Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, writing in the New York Post last February:

We keep hearing that the US economy is strong, especially the job market.

At first glance, this perspective seems to be spot-on. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2019, right before COVID-19 hit, the fourth quarter of 2023 shows 2.7 million more people working.

Except all those gains are among immigrants.

The number of immigrants working over this period is up by 2.9 million, while 183,000 fewer US-born Americans are working.

Put simply, compared to 2019, all the net job growth has gone to immigrants.

To be clear, employment for both groups has rebounded significantly since the depths of the COVID-19 recession in 2020. But the number of US-born workers has not returned to the level it was before the pandemic, while immigrant employment (legal and illegal together) has ballooned.

And why not? Migrants work for cheaper than American workers, driving down wages, and giving towns that run-down look as much of the earned money by migrants goes into remittances instead of the local community. That gets them and their political sponsors, the open-borders advocates, what they want, but it leaves American workers out in the dust, stuck on public assistance, discouraged and not looking for work anymore, and even homeless.

Net result, higher unemployment, and that's before the inevitable "revisions" come in, indicating fudged figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a bid to boost Joe Biden's claims that all's great in the economy.

Powell can see the problem through the unemployment numbers and recognizes that a whole lot of people have been added very suddenly to the workforce in what are anything but boomtown conditions, which is what normally will bring large numbers of workers into a workforce.

These aren't boomtoon conditions and the economy is barely growing in many areas, leaving a lot of American workers on the outside looking in, not even being counted in the unemployment figures if they've been out of work for more than four weeks, even as the borders have been open to migrants for three and a half years.

That makes American workers surplus workers without a place for them even in their own country.

What's creepy here is that many measures have gone in to discourage "outsourcing" of American jobs to foreign countries.

Now we are seeing a perverse flip side: "Insourcing" of American jobs to foreign workers inside the U.S., which includes major benefit packages to these foreign workers to subsidize them even more. That's why Springfield, Ohio residents have complained about highly subsidized Haitian migrants pushing them out of housing (never mind the jobs) as higher paying prospects to the landlord class. Too bad about the locals.

Not only are Americans pushed out of jobs, they're pushed out of even housing and other things by overly subsidized foreign migrants who when they get a chance to vote, will vote Democrat every time to preserve their status and privilege over the others.

Sound like illegal immigration is a victimless crime? Sound like there was any planning to allowing 20 million illegal migrants to roll into the U.S.?

Not with Jerome Powell cutting interest rates 50 basis points (which could unleash some extra inflation on us, and will definitely help Kamala Harris's presidential campaign) in addition to the stagflational zero-growth economy whose only dynamism is in the employment and subsidization of foreign migrants.

Image: Federalreserve, via Flickr // public domain