Investors are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve a President Joe Biden migration program because it benefits employers and the economy with 530,000 new workers, consumers, and renters.
The “policy brief” by FWD.us, a lobby group for investors, is intended for the U.S. Supreme Court, which is reviewing Biden’s parole pipeline for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) migrants. In April, a Massachusetts judge blocked President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to end the program.
The May 19 claim by the investor group said the four-country CHNV program met the legal test of providing a “significant public benefit”:
The CHNV Parole Processes have been a tremendous benefit to the American economy … FWD.us estimates that as of September 30, 2024, there were 240,000 adult CHNV recipients active in the labor force, including: 40,000 in manufacturing; 30,000 in construction; 30,000 in leisure and hospitality; and 30,000 recipients in health service.
But the report downplays the wealth transfer to the investors caused by Biden’s invitation to millions of foreign workers, consumers, and renters.
For example, the report claims the policy was “curbing inflation.” Left unsaid is that the migration policy helped curb wage inflation by reducing American employees’ ability to earn higher wages in an economy flooded with migrant workers.
The FWD.us report also admits that the program imported 100,000 children into the K-12 classes. But the diverted educational resources are needed by American children, especially as the lower wages and higher housing costs crippled Americans’ ability to have as many children as they prefer. A May 15 legal brief by mostly Democrat-run cities and states said: “immigrant families, including CHNV participants, have added to the rich fabric of our communities by enrolling their children in our schools, engaging in and strengthening our communities, and working across our diverse economies.”
The report also hides the rising rents caused by the huge inflow, saying that “U.S. sponsors who would provide housing [would] reduce burdens on receiving communities.” In reality, the additional migrants helped push up the cost of housing for Americans, including for the millions of unemployed working-age Americans who have been pushed out of the labor market in recent years.
But the report happily touts economic gains by employers:
In the CHNV Parole Processes, the U.S. government made an implicit promise—to CHNV recipients, their U.S. sponsors, and the employers who hired them—and it has paid off … Thousands more employers, from local mom-and-pop shops to multinational corporations, have hired and trained CHNV recipients to fill crucial roles in their companies, delivering the products and services on which Americans rely.
…Dismantling the CHNV Parole Processes midstream would hurt our economy, undermine the investments of employers who hired CHNV recipients in reliance on the government’s implicit promises … On the basis of these promises … countless employers have hired and trained workers.
The FWD.us investors gain additional profits and stock values as migrants force down wages and push up costs.
There is vast evidence that the government’s delivery of hard-working young migrants drives down wages and productivity, and also pushes up housing costs for ordinary Americans. Even the FWD.us investors admitted the link in a November 2024 report, which said, “as immigration decreased before and during the pandemic, these jobs remained largely unfilled, leading to extreme labor shortages and rising wages.”
That economic loss is especially felt by working-class Americans who cannot afford decent family-friendly housing close to major cities because available housing is rented by rent-sharing groups of migrants, many of whom are rationally sending wages back to their home-country families.
For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland recently reported that lower-income workers in the leisure and hospitality industry gained the most pay gains in the brief period between Trump’s immigration curbs and President Joe Biden’s engineered migrant flood:
The COVID-19 pandemic caused changes for business across all industries, though the effects were unequal. As lockdown restrictions aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19 were relaxed, nominal wage growth rose sharply in leisure and hospitality and in trade and transportation, the two industries with the highest concentration of low-wage workers. In fact, wage growth was most pronounced for workers in the bottom 50 percent of the wage distribution who changed jobs into one of these industries.
The left-wing Economic Policy Institute reported similar findings in March 2024:
In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023, but many workers continue to suffer from grossly inadequate wages and middle-wage workers face significant gaps across demographic groups.
The migration programs do huge damage to poor countries by extracting human resources for use by U.S. investors.
FWD.us has been the primary driver of migration policy in the Democratic Party since Trump’s 2016 win.
Mark Zuckerberg and a founding corps of West Coast consumer-economy investors created FWD.us to support the “Gang of Eight” migration expansion bill. Those investors also included Bill Gates, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and Chamath Palihapitiya, who now claims to support Donald Trump.
In 2020, Zuckerberg and his policy adviser, David Plouffe, helped Biden defeat Trump. That helped ensure FWD.us got the pro-migration border chief it wanted, Alejandro Mayorkas. FWD.us worked closely with Mayorkas to expand southern migration under a new narrative of “humane, orderly and safe immigration” via supposedly “legal pathways.” After 22021, Mayorkas imported roughly nine million inadmissible migrants to serve as consumers, renters, and workers for the U.S. consumer economy.
In March 2021, Kamala Harris deferred to Mayorkas’s FWD.us-approved policies when she rejected Biden’s request that she become the “border czar” above Mayorkas.
In 2024, David Plouffe became the campaign manager for the Harris campaign. Also, FWD.us’ top lobbyist, Andrea Flores, joined the Kamala campaign team, according to Vox.com. FWD’s leaders — and their West Coast business partners — provided a huge share of Harris’s funding.
FWD.us — and like-minded progressive foundations — also funded many of the progressive groups in the Democratic Party’s base, ensuring far greater support for migration than in 2012.
Since the election, FWD.us has been pushing the claim that the public will accept more wealth-shifting migration if the border is kept calm. But Mayorkas gambled the party on that PR strategy in 2023 and 2024 and eventually admitted, “I don’t think we prevailed in communicating to the American people successfully the challenges of [invited] migration at a historic level since World War II.”
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