President Donald Trump cannot end President Joe Biden’s award of the quasi-amnesty Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to migrants because they expand U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), says an appeal to the Supreme Court for an April 29 hearing.
The legal brief by pro-migration economists says Biden’s 1.4 million TPS migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador, and other countries now use their quasi-amnesty status to annually earn $30.9 billion in wages and create $20 billion in profits for investors. The economists wrote:
The economic record therefore refutes the Government’s claimed justifications [for ending TPS] and reinforces the conclusion of the two district courts that the agency likely acted without reasoned basis. [Emphasis added].
But the economists are wrong to claim that GDP — and investor gains — are the nation’s top economic priorities, responded Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
The fundamental problem here is that it is saying that the overall size of the economy is smaller without mentioning that the number of people will also be significantly smaller, and [so] the per capita GDP would be higher [after deportations. The brief] ignores decades of consensus that the way a society becomes richer and more prosperous is by increasing per capita GDP, not aggregate GDP.
“If all that mattered was the aggregate size of the GDP, then you would say Bangladesh is richer than New Zealand because its economy’s GDP is larger — but nobody thinks that,” Camarota told Breitbart News.
But even if GDP is the top priority, the $30.9 billion in wages for TPS workers comprises a tiny 0.1 percent share of GDP, which can be dwarfed by random fluctuations in economic growth.
The income per illegal TPS worker is 29 percent lower than that of other illegal migrants, the brief admits. “The annual average wage income for [660,000] employed TPS beneficiaries … is $36,039,” the brief said, without mentioning that their low wages are supplemented by their large-scale use of taxpayer-funded aid programs.
“It is quite a thing that the analysis itself [claims that] low wage workers who need a lot of [welfare] assistance from taxpayers are a benefit for the country,” said Camarota. “It may be a benefit for the employers who receive all this indirect [wage] subsidy, but it’s very hard to see how it is a benefit for the rest of the country.”
Also, the $20 billion in capital gains claimed by the legal brief is only 0.03 percent of the $69 trillion U.S. stock market.
The report admits that the poor migrants generate more profits for investors than do ordinary citizens, saying, “Immigrants doing low skill work tend to receive as wages a lower share [emphasis added] of the additional firm revenue caused by their labor, relative to the average U.S. worker.”
On April 29, the court is expected to hear from pro-migration groups that claim Trump cannot end TPS for roughly 330,000 Haitian migrants.
Productivity
The GDP-focused legal brief hides the greater importance of growing per-person productivity, Camarota said:
If you’re constantly substituting [migrant] labor for capital [investments, such as training and machines], then over time, your sector may well become less productive. We see some evidence of that in areas where immigrants are concentrated, such as meatpacking. Obviously this is not the approach that rivals like China are adopting, which is using machinery to make [employees] be as productive as possible.
Deported migrants do not disappear from the global economy, but can raise productivity in developing nations, partly via trade with the United States, Camarota added:
A lot of these countries could really use these workers. They are unskilled in the U.S. context, but it could be that they might be considered higher skill in their home countries. This kind of [legal] analysis doesn’t take into account the benefits if they’re sent back.
Breitbart News has repeatedly reported on the damage done to poor countries by the U.S. government’s policy of extracting migrants from unstable countries to serve the U.S. consumer economy. The U.S. Department of State’s “2024 Trafficking in Persons Report: Haiti” report admitted:
[Haiti’s] Law enforcement experienced a significant reduction in its [9,000 person] workforce as police officers fled the country; media reported 3,000 police officers departed Haiti since 2022, the majority of whom anecdotally left on the U.S. government’s [visa] processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, a humanitarian parole program [created by Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas] that included Haitians as of January 2023.
Once TPS migrants are sent home, U.S. employers in Trump’s low-migration economy will face greater competitive pressure to redirect profits toward higher wages and productivity-boosting workplace technology.
Unsurprisingly, U.S. investors and companies want to keep Haiti’s low-wage workers, apartment-sharing renters, and welfare-funded consumers inside the U.S. economy.
This week, their D.C.-based lobbyists worked with House Democrats and a handful of GOP legislators to vote against ending TPS for 330,000 Haitian migrants.
“Many of the low-wage TPS Haitians work for elder-care operations, whose owners and operators have been lobbying Washington to keep their Haitian TPS workers. On April 14, the Washington Post reported on one nursing home business:
“The fate of so many people lies in their hands,” said Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of Sinai Residences, a nonprofit senior community in Boca Raton, Florida, and co-filer of the amicus brief … Blumberg said 9 percent of the community’s workforce of more than 450 people are Haitians facing deportation under the Trump administration’s order.
In her submission to the Supreme Court, however, Blumberg admitted that the departure of the Haitians would raise wages for similar workers:
According to Rachel Blumberg, CEO and President of amicus Sinai Residences, the wage adjustments and recruitment efforts needed to attract replacement workers could cost the organization roughly $600,000 annually, if not more.
There is no labor shortage in the United States. Many reports show that at least 10 million working-age men have fallen out of the workforce and are living on welfare, partly because of migration and wage cuts.
The mass dropout by “infantilized” young men is a “continuing calamity,” demographer Nicholas Eberstadt told the Washington Post in January 2023, adding, “The United States cannot prosper unless its prime-age males do.”
In a separate article on April 9, the Washington Post noted that some elder-care centers are using technology to raise employees’ productivity:
[Grace] Brown first launched Abi in Australia, where as many as 40 percent of residents in aging care facilities, by some estimates, do not receive visitors. Last month, the company announced plans to expand to the United States, with a limited rollout to select senior living facilities. It also has a wait list for those interested in participating.
Democrats also favor low-wage migration because it fuels their unproductive urban political machines in Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, Denver, and many other cities. For example, TPS migrants generate $9 billion in extra annual taxes for federal agencies, says the legal brief. Those extra funds help pay for the Democrats’ urban political machines, such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Black and Brown” machine.
The authors of the legal brief have repeatedly opposed Trump’s low-migration/high-wage economic policy.
They include Michael Clemens, who is an advocate at the business-backed Peterson Institute for International Economics, Leah Boustan, who has celebrated the replacement of Americans by migrants, and Stan Veuger, at the investor-backed American Enterprise Institute.
The group also included Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The brief’s authors, said Camarota, “are acting as if the illegal immigrants losing out means we’re all losing out … but the fundamental problem here is they’re saying that the overall size of the economy is smaller without mentioning that the number of people will be significantly smaller and the per capita GDP would be higher.”
“The media is just not going to point that out,” he added.
All of the economists lived through the four years of President Joe Biden, when a massive inflow of migrants flatlined wages, inflated housing costs, muffled productivity gains, and generated massive capital gains for investors.
The economists are now watching Trump’s low-migration policies deflate that bubble of cheap labor, so forcing investors to both raise wages and grow productivity via workplace investment.
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