Oklahoma’s Republican governor wants to help import low-wage migrants for local work that would otherwise provide decent wages and salaries needed by Oklahomans and their children.
“I want to create opportunities to bring the best [foreign] talent to Oklahoma,” Gov. Kevin Stitt said Thursday on Twitter, just before Labor Day weekend, after a state-funded task force recommended the state legislature pass legislation to help employers hire migrants instead of Americans:
We need the best nurses, the best engineers, the best accountants, the best construction workers & the best teachers. If they’re willing to come here and work hard, let’s match the employer with the employee.
I hope the legislature will pursue the recommendations that reflect that intention.
Oklahoma’s establishment media provided muted, passive, favorable, or gushing coverage of Stitt’s outsourcing report.
But the voters’ reaction to Stitt’s Mike Bloomberg-like declaration was prompt, direct, and hostile:
Many business groups say they need migrants to fill jobs. However, there is no wage-related evidence of a labor shortage in Oklahoma because there is no evidence that the desirable competition among employers has escalated into fistfights or other violence.
In a national labor market, employers compete to hire citizen workers with offers of wage gains. In exchange, the voters protect risk-taking employers with bankruptcy laws, tax breaks, and strong property rights. This self-contained market allows quick feedback between employers, employees, voters, and politicians, so helping to democratically balance the rival interests of each group.
The absence of a labor shortage is proved by slow wage gains in Oklahoma. Only “two counties [in Oklahoma] had rates of wage gains above the national rate of 3.2 percent … Average weekly wages in the three largest counties in Oklahoma were below the national average of $1,332 in the second quarter of 2023,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The lack of good opportunities is also fueling Oklahoma’s rising drug deaths. The state’s health department says:
From 2019 to 2022, the number of fentanyl overdose deaths increased 12-fold, from 50 deaths in 2019 to 609 in 2022. Fentanyl was involved in more than four out of five opioid-related overdose deaths in 2022, compared to approximately 10-20% annually prior to 2020.
Large inflows of migrants can impose deep damage on residents, for example, in Canada. When small numbers of migrants move into local jobs, they do not usually replace Americans one-for-one.
But even small numbers of migrants reduce average wages because employers no longer have to compete for new hires. Also, migrants will work long hours at low wages, even for abusive employers, rather than be forced to return themselves and their children to poor countries.
New migrants also prevent labor shortages that pressure employers to invest in productivity tools — such as software, farm machinery, or robots. Those tools allow Americans to be more productive amid a changing economy, and to earn more money, buy homes, and start families.
Any migrant inflow will also help bigger cities more than small towns because most migrants prefer to settle with other migrants in the largest urban areas. That concentration drives up housing costs for Americans in the bigger towns.
The inflow of cheap labor in Oklahoma would be good for company owners and investors because it expands the size of the local economy and the pool of profits, even as wages drop. For example, Stitt is the owner of a mortgage company that would gain from a greater number of renters and homebuyers in Oklahoma.
When he was running for election in 2018, Stitt’s company came under sharp criticism. “Gateway’s performance may have been worse than average but nowhere extreme enough to be considered shady,” company CEO Stephen Curry said in a 2018 interview with the Associated Press. Stitt was reelected in 2022.
The Stitt report suggests steps that the Republican-dominated legislature should take to attract foreign migrants for both blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs.
“Oklahoma can lead the way in empowering employers as well as internationally trained talent with tools and resources to help navigate visa types, legal requirements, costs, and the credentialing process,” said the report, titled “Oklahoma State Work Permits and Visas Task Force.”
The report urges a welcome for legal migrants and for migrants with contested legal status, such as illegal migrants who are applying for asylum, migrants with temporary visas, and economic migrants imported via Biden’s parole programs.
The report does not offer plans to help Oklahoma businesses hire Americans from other states. Nationwide, several million Americans have fallen out of the workforce because of migration, alienation, drugs, and mass layoffs.
Stitt appointed three members to the 11-member panel, which also included a representative of the Mexican government, which has a policy of moving Mexicans into the United States. KOCO reported August 27:
Task force member and Mexican Consul Edurne Pineda says the recommendations could make a difference. “To continue working with immigrants and to continue building up public policy and recommendations to the different authorities in the state to address the immigration reality in the best way possible,” Pineda said.
The panel urged the state legislature to make it easier for blue-collar migrants to get occupational licenses for skilled jobs, such as plumbing and electrical work, nursing, and medical jobs. It said:
expanding access to occupational licenses to non-citizens can provide pathways to students with DACA status otherwise known as “Dreamers.” Federal law prohibits issuing occupational licenses to non-citizens but does allow states to pass laws to make them eligible.
Business lobbyists have persuaded multiple states to help provide illegal migrants with occupational licenses, so forcing down wages for skilled Americans in a wide variety of jobs.
The Oklahoma panel called for increased use of foreign graduates — via the expanding J-1 and H-1B visa programs — in the white-collar jobs needed by Oklahoma graduates. The plan would force down salaries for a wide variety of jobs — including media jobs — because it would reduce the market power of every American graduate:
Collaborate with community-based organizations, higher education institutions and other relevant agencies to increase the number of cap-exempt H1B visas in high-demand sectors.
Promote a J-1 intracompany exchange program between international locations where the State of Oklahoma has developed relationships (or can develop them) and where there are talent sources for in-demand occupations (whether it be teachers, STEM research scholars, nurses, etc.). According to Bridge USA, in 2022, Oklahoma had 1,069 J-1 visas compared to 11,435 in Texas.
The plan could be a boon for local universities. In many states, migrants pay tuition to universities to get temporary work permits.
The panel called for the award of driver’s licenses to migrants. Many business groups lobby for that goal because it allows migrants to work in a larger variety of jobs once reserved for Americans.
A national immigration reform group slammed Stitt’s report, saying, “Gov. Stitt’s attempt to turn Oklahoma into a sanctuary state mirrors U.S. Sen. Lankford’s (R-Okla.) attempt via the Senate border bill to turn the entire country into a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.”
“You want cheap labor,” tweeted an X user named Nene.
“Wow. Replacing the population with immigrants, huh?” said Twitter user Dan Jay.
Migration is increasingly unpopular among Republicans and Democrats.
The report cited by Stitt was drafted with help from business-backed advocacy groups, such as the American Immigration Council. The council is a spin-off of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and it works closely with FWD.us, a lobby group for West Coast consumer-economy investors who make much of their wealth on Wall Street. The FWD.us group was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy investors.
Many Republican politicians welcome migrant workers, consumers, and renters because they are a huge subsidy for employers, retailers, and landlords.
Progressives also support migration because it shifts wealth and opportunities to foreigners, but because it helps their allies in business.
Progressive politicians also welcome migrants because they carry the chaotic diversity needed to fracture the political and cultural power of middle-class Americans. “No nation, no society has ever tried to build a democracy as big and as diverse as ours before, one that includes people that, over decades, have come from every corner of the globe … The rest of the world is watching to see if we can actually pull this off,” former President Barack Obama told the Democratic convention in August.
Since January 2021, President Joe Biden and his deputies have successfully imported or accepted roughly 10 million legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and temporary migrants for economic purposes.
That Extraction Migration policy is an economic strategy that has helped investors by inflating real estate prices and reducing Americans’ wages.
That flood is welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. It also reduces marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, in heartland states, and in overseas markets.
Biden’s easy-migration policies are lengthening the list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.
Amid the swell of protests about his outsourcing plan, Stitt’s tweets sought to change the subject to possible tax cuts.
