An unprecedented 88% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. And, no matter how many times President Joe Biden might say it, it’s not all Vladimir Putin’s fault. Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine has certainly added to the woes faced by Americans and people all across the globe, but most of the mess we’re in is self-inflicted, much of it by Biden himself.
Forty-year-high inflation is primarily the predictable outcome of reckless fiscal policies that saw the government print trillions of dollars and pump it into the economy even after it had begun to recover from the COVID shutdown on its own. These stimulus payments also discouraged many Americans from returning to work as the economy reopened. And only the principled stubbornness of Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona prevented even higher rates of inflation.
The surge in energy costs began before Putin invaded Ukraine, which led most Western nations to curtail imports of Russian oil, gas, and coal (much of which has found willing markets in China and India). It began with the Biden administration shutting down energy pipelines, most notably from Canada, and making it more difficult, or impossible, for energy companies to drill, refine, or finance domestic production. The doubling of energy costs under President Biden has not just been felt at the gas pump, but has affected the cost of everything from the production of food to basic consumer products that need to be transported, at much higher costs, to their final destinations.
This perfect, albeit self-induced economic storm has created another problem. Many employers are having trouble filling jobs that are essential to getting the economy back on track, even though there are around 14 million available American workers to fill some 11 million job vacancies. In many cases, available workers can no longer afford to commute to where jobs might be, while inflation continues to rob them of their purchasing power each month.
Other workers are reluctant to return to jobs in major U.S. cities for fear of their own safety. Many American urban areas are ravaged by homelessness and a surge in random violent crime, created by progressive policies aimed at defunding the police, no-bail laws that put criminals back onto the streets, and prosecutors who refuse to prosecute.
Rather than reverse engineer the policies that created conditions that nearly nine in 10 Americans believe have the country headed in the wrong direction, the social engineers in Washington, elitist think tanks and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have seized on another hare-brained scheme they claim will turn things around. That idea entails flooding an already saturated U.S. labor market with more foreign workers.
Pumping in millions more immigrants, they claim, will not only help U.S. companies fill vacant jobs, but also tame the raging inflation that, just a year ago, they told us was transitory. This proposal rests on the fallacious assertion that it is a dearth of workers that prevents many jobs from being filled, and that inflation can be cured by bringing in more lower wage foreign workers (on top the more than 2 million who have entered the country since President Biden took office) when there are nearly 15 million available workers already here.
Far from being the silver bullet that the advocates claim, a significant increase in immigration is a loaded gun pointed squarely at the most vulnerable American workers. Adding millions of new foreign workers would only drive down wages for American workers whose wages are already failing to keep up the cost of living, and further widen the gap between the haves and have-nots.
While employers may enjoy easier access to lower wage workers — an idea promoted by the Chamber of Commerce in good times and in bad — it would do nothing to address the failed fiscal and social policies that are at the root of rampant inflation or boost labor force participation rates. Oh, and needless to say, it would have no effect on Putin’s designs on Ukraine.
Clearly getting the economy turned around is key to getting the country pointed in the right direction. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say it should be the top priority for the Biden administration. But equally as clear — or at least it should be — is a massive expansion of current immigration policies that are supported by a mere 35% of the American public is not the fix the nation is looking for.
Ira Mehlman is Media Director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).