News

How Mass Migration Undermined Men

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)

October 17, 2024

Compact

…When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a generation of elites embraced the international flow of goods, assets, and labor as an unalloyed benefit to the nation. They established one-sided “free trade” with Communist China, rewarded offshoring, and spread an open-borders philosophy that captured both major parties, as well as much of Big Labor. Millions of American blue-collar jobs disappeared, and the foreign-born share of the population ballooned out of proportion…. 

A White House news release in July claimed that the administration has revitalized domestic production and boosted the male labor-force participation rate. But the reality is that manufacturing employment is decreasing, manufacturing job quality is down, and U.S.-born men were less likely to participate in the labor force at the end of 2023 than they were before the pandemic…. The Biden-Harris administration is factoring in the employment of illegal immigrants to skew the topline economic numbers in its favor.

A more accurate picture of our national trajectory can be seen in Charleroi, PA…. [U]nder the Biden-Harris administration, Charleroi is fraught by an influx of thousands of illegally admitted migrants, whose expansion of the labor supply is almost certainly affecting the local blue-collar job market. Over the last 12 months alone, more than 800,000 native-born Americans have lost employment, but more than 1 million foreign-born workers have gained employment. What are the chances this trend isn’t reflected in Charleroi?

To be clear, this isn’t the migrants’ fault…. [T]his is the fault of the Biden-Harris administration’s unauthorized expansion of humanitarian parole, under which existing parolees—not American citizens—can “sponsor” more migrants for illegal admission into the country. The government then partners with nonprofits to settle these migrants across America, and the nonprofits partner with “staffing agencies” that connect migrants with local employers hungry for cheap labor.

At no point in this process is there a checkpoint that requires nonprofits, government officials, or employers to consider the welfare of American workers…. [A] basic understanding of supply and demand predicts the upshot of this dynamic: fewer and lower-quality blue-collar jobs for U.S.-born men. And yet elites loyal to the post-Cold War consensus, including labor organizations like the AFL-CIO, refuse to consider constraining mass migration in response. Some are even dusting off the old line that migrants are necessary to fill “jobs Americans won’t do”….

Charleroi native Andy Armbruster exposed the flaw in that logic in an interview: “…There’s people who would work if you paid them the going wage for the work. But they want to pay less, and so, they ended up getting involved with these agencies that bring in these workers.” It’s a case study in how free markets don’t always align with the national interest. When companies gain access to an endless supply of cheap foreign labor, they lose the incentive to invest in technology and processes that make American blue-collar jobs more efficient and valuable….

The relentless exportation of blue-collar jobs and importation of cheap labor have left countless U.S.-born men without dignified work, sapping their opportunity and their strength—and no society can long thrive without strong men. Time is running out to chart a new course. We must abandon the post-Cold War consensus, break multinational corporations’ tariff taboo, reinvest in domestic production, and—crucially—regain control of our borders….

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