The New York Times is admitting illegal migration has a big pocketbook impact on Americans and their politics, just two weeks after Donald Trump used the issue to win the 2024 election.
“Border concerns, driven as much by real challenges as manufactured ones — and wrapped up with voters’ other worries about the economy, housing prices, and crime — … fueled rightward shifts across the country, pollsters and strategists said,” admitted a November 15 article by Jazmine Ulloa, who usually ignores Americans’ views in her sympathetic coverage of migrants.
The admission is a win for ordinary Americans because the newspaper’s reluctant and late admission may open the way for many establishment outlets to show how migration shifts wealth and power from ordinary Americans to coastal elites.
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The pocketbook impact of migration has been hidden by media-magnified claims of “xenophobia” or “racism.”
On Sunday, the newspaper posted a long article on the predatory, fly-by-night staffing agencies that allow respectable companies to pretend they are not using cheap migrant labor to avoid paying decent wages to Americans:
On any given day, Mr. [Luis] Perez’s agencies had upward of 8,000 workers at partner locations, according to a 2021 deposition by a former top executive. Over more than a decade, they provided staffing for at least 800 companies large and small, publicly traded and privately held, client lists and other records obtained by The Times show. In addition to Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas, the companies included well-known giants like TJX — the parent of T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods and Marshalls — and Keurig Dr Pepper, the beverage maker.
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Federal, state and local regulators have pursued at least 80 investigations of agencies over possible violations involving immigrants, including many who are in the United States illegally, according to records from the Department of Homeland Security obtained through public records requests. They were compiled during the Biden administration but document accusations stretching back at least as far as the Trump era. They do not indicate the status of the investigations, and a department spokesperson did not provide more information.
The result is a huge workforce of poor illegal migrants who must be rescued by taxpayers’ aid and drag down Americans’ wages and wealth:
Elizeth Peláez, a migrant from Mexico, earned $400 a week as a domestic employee in Florida, before landing work with BaronHR in Nevada. At first, she packed potato chips and vitamins for $10 an hour, and welded wires for casino machines for $11. Eventually, she said, she drove a forklift for $18 an hour. But her BaronHR paychecks bounced so often, she couldn’t reliably make rent. She slept in an office at a building she cleaned on the side.
“If you create an environment where essentially you’re allowing some businesses to compete on the basis of wage theft, it starts pulling down the standards,” David Weil, a former official at the U.S. Labor Department, told the newspaper.
The newspaper’s post-election recognition that migration impacts Americans’ pocketbooks may fade away amid pressure from the newspaper’s mix of pro-migration progressives and business interests.
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For example, in 2023, the top editors quickly lost interest in migration and economics after they pushed a shocking series about the massive rise in child labor caused by easy migration rules.
The articles described some of the youth workers and the death of several youths, saying.
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.
However, the editors did not ask the reporter to write additional articles about how Congress and President Joe Biden’s deputies encouraged and ignored the exploitation.
The elite slant is to be expected, partly because the newspaper’s national editor is an ideological advocate for non-European migration into the United States. In her 2020 pro-migration book, titled “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide,” editor Jia Lyn Yang wrote:
For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [immigrants] do not [act], their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong.
Unsurprisingly, much of the newspaper’s post-election coverage of migration showcases poorly argued claims that President Donald Trump’s pro-American migration policy will be bad for the U.S. economy.
“Trump’s Immigration Plans Could Bring an Economic Toll,” said the headline on a November 13 article by Lydia DePillis, which continued:
“That gargantuan shock will cost trillions of dollars in economic growth, eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs held by U.S. natives,” said Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who focuses on migration. “It will quickly raise inflation, by reducing the capacity of U.S. firms to supply goods and services faster than it reduces demand.”
The article ignores the impact of technology, productivity gains, and the existence of more than 5 million- working-age men who have been pushed out of the workforce by eager, cheaper, and compliant migrants.
Those major factors were also absent from a November 11 op-ed by economist Paul Krugman:
Trump, with mass deportations, would degrade productive capacity, balloon deficits and — yes — bring inflation roaring back, keeping a grim pledge on punitive immigration policy while breaking one on providing relief to American consumers.
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And let’s not lose sight of the human component. The prospect of millions of people who’ve come to America to make a better life for themselves being rounded up and shipped out is ghastly. To borrow a phrase, the cruelty of Trump’s proposed deportations is part of the point.
But the primary concern for voters is not whether migration expands the size of the economy.
The concern is whether migration is good for American graduates, blue-collar Americans, and their families.
Migration’s pocketbook impact on families and individuals rarely gets mentioned by the reporters at the New York Times or any establishment media outlet.
This passivity is enforced by elite support for wealth-shifting migration. For example, the white-collar professionals in the media are so powerless that they cannot even cover the massive white-collar migration that is pushing many of their university peers — and their children — out of careers, homes, and respectable social status.
But those microeconomic questions are intensively covered by Breitbart News — and are now widely recognized by American voters who put Donald Trump back into the White House.
For example, the Democratic Mayor of Athens, Ga., Kelly Girtz, told the NY Times that he was rejected by many voters when he knocked on their doors:
He also found it difficult to counter many claims echoed on right-wing media that were not based on facts, including contentions that migrants were coming to take jobs that would otherwise be held by American citizens or that they would degrade communities.
“I would try to correct them, but I would be one voice trying to correct things that they would hear day in and day out,” Girtz said.
