Declining migration and the resulting wage gains are bad because they create “affordability” problems, Democrat Rep. Tom Suozzi (NY) told News Nation on Tuesday.
“We have to expand the Affordability Agenda beyond just health insurance,” said Suozzi, adding:
We have to look at all the different factors, even the immigration policy, where we have a million and a half less [migrant] people in the workforce right now, it’s causing more overtime and having to hire people at higher wages. These are all upward pressure[s] on people’s prices.
Suozzi is being touted by establishment media outlets as a leading moderate in the Democrat party. He’s also a leading voice for the Democrats’ 2026 campaign theme of “affordability.”
Suozzi’s complaints come as Americans’ wages have begun rising, and as the cost of housing, autos, and groceries is dropping under President Donald Trump’s low-migration, low-inflation, pro-American policies.
Democrats and their media allies have been touting their “Affordability Agenda” strategy since their disastrous loss in November to Trump. The vague term helps paper over deep splits in the Democratic Party, such as elite support for the H-1B visa worker program that has damaged millions of Democratic-leaning college graduates.
The vague term also allows Democrats to hide their policy plans from skeptical voters in the 2026 midterm elections.
But Suozzi’s comments suggest that the Democrats’ Affordability Agenda does not include higher wages or prosperous and independent families in a national labor-market.
Instead, the Affordability Agenda is a hidden excuse for Democrats to act as centralized economic managers who use government power to redistribute economic benefits to citizens, investors, managers, and migrants, all in exchange for votes at the next election.
Suozzi’s comments also imply that he wants to revive the cheap-labor Extraction Migration economic policy overseen by President Joe Biden. That low-wage, high-inflation policy was devised and managed by Biden’s zealously pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
In September 2024, Mayorkas doubled down on his business-first extraction migration economic policy at the Texas Tribune event while he lamented public opposition to more cheap immigrant labor. He said:
We look to the north, with Canada. Canada takes a look at its market needs, and it says, “You know what? We need 700,000 foreign workers to address our labor needs domestically.” And, so, they build a visa system for that year to address the current market condition. And they say, “We’re going to bring in a million people.” And it’s market sensitive.
We [in the United States] are dealing with numerical caps on labor-driven visas that were set in 1996. It’s 2024. The world has changed. It is remarkable how there can be [elite] agreement that [the visas system] is broken and not have an agreement on a solution. The country is suffering as a result of it.
Canada’s migration policy has been a civic disaster for Canadians, partly because it inflated a massive housing bubble and shrank the ability of Canadians to earn decent wages.
In the United States, Mayorkas’s migration policy helped investors by pushing up the stock market. But it hurt ordinary Americans by raising housing prices and inflation, and by cutting wages, opportunities, and corporate investment.
In contrast, Trump’s policies are choking off the flows of wage-cutting migrants, much to the distress of investors, business groups, and their allies. For example, the Washington Post broadcast those concerns on January 14:
For the first time in at least half a century, more immigrants left the United States than entered last year, according to new estimates released Tuesday by economists at the Brookings Institution.
Net migration to the U.S. was between negative 10,000 and negative 295,000 in 2025, according to an update of estimates first released in the summer by economists Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, of center-left think tank Brookings, and Stan Veuger, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
The loss of cheap labor is pressuring companies to invest in wealth-generating technology, such as robots.
Trump’s policies are having a big impact on the construction CEOs and real estate investors, who gained enormously as Mayorkas welcomed roughly 14 million new migrants. That flood of migrants spiked rents, housing prices, and new construction.
GOP politicians face huge and constant pressure from local business leaders to import more government-aided migrant consumers, apartment-sharing renters, and cheap labor, especially for construction companies.
“We can have immigrants who are interested in working in [construction] come here legally in order to fill that gap,” Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-TX) said, according to Spectrum News:
De La Cruz said she believes Congress, where both chambers are dominated by Republican majorities, can pass some immigration expansion legislation. But she would not commit to it happening before the November midterm elections, saying only: “We’ve been able to do amazing things with a very slim majority.”
“I know how important legal immigration and legal work authorization are in deep South Texas, and that’s why I’ve made it a priority,” she said.
But American construction crews are doing well when the migrants go home:
Meanwhile, foreign-born Democrats insist that Americans — and their adult children — are helpless and useless without migrants:
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