Oklahoma’s Republican governor says states should be allowed to provide work permits to migrants — whatever the inevitable damage to citizens and workplace investment.
“We need to match employers with [migrant] employees, and the states need to control those [migrant] workforce permits,” Gov. Kevin Stitt, who also owns a bank that lends to businesses and homebuyers, told NPR’s Steve Inskeep.
Migrants can take jobs in Oklahoma construction, hotels, farming, and in Boeing’s aircraft-upgrade facility, said Stitt, whose banking firm has been penalized by oversight agencies in other states.
If Americans do not like state-run migration programs, Stitt said, “you can choose to move to another state.”
“That’s the kind of stuff [GOP governors] have been pushing for for decades,” said Grant Newsman, the advocacy chief at the Immigration Accountability Project. He added:
They’re just looking at their own self-interests, and their self-interest is for stock prices to go up, for profits to go up … [by reducing] their labor costs … Unfortunately, there is still an establishment section of the Republican Party that feels this way.
Yet the NPR interviewer was more interested in Stitt’s connection to Indian ancestry than in Stitt’s radical corporatist plan to strip American citizens of their ability to earn a decent wage in the job market flooded by young and desperate migrants. “I want people to know, if they don’t, that you’re an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation: What does that identity mean to you personally?” Inskeep instead asked Stitt.
Stitt repeatedly justified his plan to sideline Americans by allowing governors and companies to import replacement workers:
I went down and talked to a rural part of our state. These are Trump-voting Oklahomans from the rural part of our state. And I asked them these questions. I said, “What are you guys thinking about this immigration issue?”… [They] said, “Governor, Trump won, he won on the issue of border security, we absolutely need to vet people coming into our country, we absolutely need to get criminals out.”
But they also whispered to me, and they said, “I run a construction company, I own a comany that does this [or that], I’m a farmer, and I have some illegals that work for me, and they’re like family. They’ve been here for 15 years. They go to church with us. Their kids go to school. They’re great people. They’re trying to get workforce permits, and we can’t figure it out.” That’s why they’re saying, “Governor, you need as the governor to be able to issue these workforce permits so they can pay taxes, they can be here legally, and they can work.”
I’m not saying give the [migrants] citizenship, but let’s figure this out because [deportation] would devastate the different industries across the country. You can talk to the Wisconsin dairy farmers or the Vermont dairy farmers or the fisheries in Louisiana. We all need labor at some level, and workforce is very important for states and for our economy.
“The president needs to tell us: What is the end-game?” of deportations and border controls, Stitt told Inskeep.
Yet Trump has described his popular alternative to mass migration, which echoes President George W. Bush’s 2001 “Any Willing Worker” plan:
We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people … It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
That efficiently would include robot cow-milkers for dairy farmers in Wisconsin and Vermont.
Trump’s 2024 deportation mandate is now shifting wealth back to ordinary Americans. Wages are up, and housing costs are down. Inflation is declining, transport costs are shrinking, crime is dropping, and corporations are spending heavily to help Americans become more productive. The resulting prosperity will likely help to raise birth rates as husbands gain higher wages and wives gain greater confidence in the future.
Many Republicans, including Stitt, “view the country as an economic zone in which the purpose of the economy is to maximize profits for the shareholder class,” Kevin Lynn, founder of the U.S. Tech Workers group, told Breitbart News. Lynn added:
His view is not about an economy that promotes forming households and building household wealth. That’s not what these guys prioritize … [and] the whole purpose of MAGA and the whole purpose of putting Americans first is to make sure that this economy balances the long-term interests of the corporations and employees. Right now, it doesn’t do that …. It prioritizes the short-term interests of the shareholder class.
Breitbart has repeatedly covered Stitt’s pro-migration demands. Those views are common among the GOP’s “Gentry Republicans” in many state legislatures.
In his NPR interview, Stitt kept describing his plan to import more foreign workers to replace Americans in the job market:
We need more [foreign] workers here. We know that. We broadly know that. I mean, if you talk to the dairy industry … big sheep farmers, they already have these, these certain visas, and we have a lot of people, Peruvians, that come in … There are solutions, but the federal government is way too slow, and we would absolutely kill some of these industries if we don’t have some kind of immigration thought process.
A workforce of company-selected migrants would also control public concerns about migrant crime, Stitt said:
Why are we not giving three-year work permits? As long as you’ve got a job and an employer is vouching for you, now we know who’s here legally and they’re paying taxes. If you break the law, you’re out. If you’re on government services or you’re taking care of taking advantage of Medicaid and not working, you’re out. But this is a simple solution that other countries have figured out.
The three-year work permits would also resolve debates over deportation and migration, he said:
If we fix the immigration issue [with work permits], this issue goes away. They’re not a U.S. citizen, but they’re here working, doing a job, whether they’re working for Boeing, working for the local farm, or they’re working for … whatever the employer needs. I just think we’re overthinking that issue … If they were here and had a job, what is wrong with that? Right? … Do I want to take care of and have people on Medicaid here that are [here] illegally, 100 percent not. But if you have a job and you’re working and a company is vouching for you, that’s the difference.
“As [Sen.] Bernie Sanders said, that’s a Koch brothers proposition,” said Newman.
Stitt also waved away evidence that the Democrats use immigration to build their political power over ordinary Americans, saying, “They’re not trying to get illegals here to turn them into voters — I don’t believe that’s what Democrat politicians are trying to do.”
He also argued that the United States is a “melting pot” for the citizens of many nations, not a nation for Americans:
This is a melting pot. It’s been a melting pot for a long, long time. I get those concerns when we see what’s happening in some of those communities. That’s why we need to have workforce permits.
GOP primary voters are now debating who they will pick to replace retiring Stitt.
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