One of the official narratives from the pro-immigration lobby is that migrants do not take jobs away from locals; in fact, migrants create jobs, and will supply tax money for pensions, so you had better shut up about your replacement! But sometimes cracks appear in the official narrative. Thus, even the Wall Street Journal has admitted that for the US, the job growth crowed about by Joe Biden, has gone to illegal migrants. It is recognised that illegals, being illegal, will work for far below the minimum wage, so naturally they get employed by capitalists wanting to cash in on the open borders travesty.
This US example does refute the mantra that migrants do not take jobs away from locals. Yes, in a labour market, especially illegals, who will not challenge work conditions, will put up with slavery-type conditions, and local businesses love saving the costs of doing a deal on labour. Maximising profits, as always, even if it means bending the law, is the name of the game.
"For much of the past year we had been pounding the table on two very simple facts: not only has the US labor market been appallingly weak, with most of the jobs "gained" in 2023 and meant to signal how strong the Biden "recovery" has been, about to be revised away (as first the Philly Fed and now Bloomberg both admit), but more shockingly, all the job growth in the past few years has gone to illegal aliens.
We first pointed this out more than a year ago, and since then we have routinely repeated - again, again, and again - yet even though we made it abundantly clear what was happening...
... going so far as to point out the specific immigration loophole illegals were using to work in the US for up to 5 years...
... and even fact-checking the senile, ballot-harvesting White House occupant on multiple occasions...
... we were shocked that the topic of most if not all US jobs going to illegals was still not "the biggest political talking point" of all.
That's about to change, however, because with just under 5 months left until the election, and with immigration by far the hottest political topic out there, others are finally starting to connect the dots we laid out more than a year ago.
The first Wall Street analyst daring to point out that the employment emperor is naked, is Standard Chartered's global head of macro, Steve Englander who in a note titled simply enough "Immigration leading to labor-market surge" (and available to pro subscribers in the usual place), writes that according to his estimates "undocumented immigrants account for half of job growth in FY24 so far" (the actual number is far higher but we understand his initial conservatism), and adds that "asylum seekers and humanitarian parolees explain the surge in undocumented immigrants" before concluding that the continued rise in EAD approvals likely will extend strong employment growth in 2024. In other words, "strong employment growth" for American citizens, always was and remains a fabulation, and the only job growth in the US is for illegals, who will work for below minimum wage, which also explains why inflation hasn't spiked in the past year as millions of illegals were hired.
Below we excerpt from the Englander note because we hope that more economists, strategists and politicians will read it and grasp what we have been saying for over a year.
Echoing what we have said for months, Englander writes that immigration, particularly illegal immigration, "is a political flashpoint that has also become an important factor in assessing economic performance. Detailed data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) suggest that half of non-farm payroll (NFP) growth to date for FY24 (started 1 October 2023) has been from undocumented immigrants who have received an Employment Authorization Document (EAD)" (he defines undocumented immigrants as those who entered the US through non-traditional immigration pathways, such as asylum seekers, parolees, and refugees).
The ability to track EAD issuance to undocumented workers is an advantage in estimating how much they have contributed to employment growth. NFP counts workers with an EAD just like any other. Using that data, it is easy to estimate that undocumented workers have added 109k jobs per month to NFP out of the average 231k increase so far in FY24."