The Democrats’ Wage-Suppression Campaign
The Democrats’ Wage-Suppression Campaign
The blue team wants to keep up the flow of cheap foreign labor for corporate interests.
A controversy erupted this week over Rep. Brittany Pettersen’s defense of the J-1 visa program. Her claim that Colorado’s ski resorts rely on cheap imported labor to staff their slopes exposes once again how the Democratic Party, completely untethered from its working class roots, deploys social-justice rhetoric to defend the interests of multinational corporations and private equity firms.
“Trump’s attacks on legal immigration are hurting Colorado’s economy,” wrote Pettersen. “60% of ski resorts rely on workers with J-1 visas, and many are now scrambling as they are unable to fill the positions needed. When we shut immigrants out, we hurt our local businesses, our tourism industry, and our economy.”
X users were quick to point out how ridiculous and insulting her argument was: Americans are somehow incapable of filling those roles, and low-wage foreign workers are needed instead. Colorado’s ski resorts are just one of various industries now dominated by private equity firms like Leon Black’s Apollo Global Management. These continue to replace their locally staffed workforces with foreign temp labor, what the Institute for Sound Public Policy called “a cheap labor pipeline with minimal wage enforcement and exemptions from FICA taxes.”
As this helpful guide for J-1 employers by August Network explains, “Employers who hire J-1 visitors may also save up on payroll taxes. When J-1 visitors do not pay Social Security, Medicare or Federal Unemployment taxes, employers do not have to match these taxes. A typical employer who hires 5 Work/Travel J-1 visitors and pays $8/ hour each may save over $2317 in a typical 4-months season.”
The industry has become mired in accusations of outright labor trafficking. Multiple lawsuits, including those against the St. Regis Aspen and Vail Resorts, describe conditions amounting to coercion and wage theft in which foreign workers brought in under J-1 visas are housed in poor conditions, threatened with deportation, and often denied their full paycheck. A New York Times investigation of the J-1 program released in September described the industry as “ripe for exploitation” and documented dozens of cases of abuse and mistreatment.
Recently announced rules from the Trump administration tightening oversight of the J-1 visa program—ending open-ended “duration of status” stays and imposing stricter renewal limits—sparked alarm across the resort industry, which depends on a steady influx of low-wage foreign labor to staff its slopes. Ski Area Management, a mountain resort industry publication, highlights growing concern among park owners over the administration’s scrutiny of their hiring practices, which has materialized into a nationwide lobbying effort to keep the stream of cheap foreign labor flowing in through the J-1 program, which they continue to market as a “cultural exchange:”
“National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) director of risk and regulatory affairs Dave Byrd told SAM that the association is individually lobbying members of Congress, especially Republicans and newly elected members. It is also joining other stakeholders outside the ski industry in lobbying Congress to keep the program fully funded and alive.
Further, NSAA plans to recruit Republican governors in ski states to send a letter of support for the program to Rubio, emphasizing how valuable the program is for businesses in their states and especially for rural economies.”
This lobbying effort comes amid an ongoing debate over H-1B visas, another issue where there used to be left-wing support for immigration restrictions to guard against race-to-the-bottom economic engineering from corporate interests.
Research from the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates how the H-1B visa program is exploited to depress wages, with a majority of H-1B recipients receiving below market wages, and widespread wage theft reported throughout the tech industry, with at least $95 million underpaid to thousands of workers in 2020. “The cumulative loss of wages to workers in the United States—including both migrant workers and workers who are U.S. citizens—likely totals in the billions of dollars, just from the abuses of the H-1B program by one company,” HCL, which “contract[s] workers to such U.S. employers as Cisco, Disney, Google,” among other major corporations.
Opposing that system of indentured servitude is “racist” against Indians, said the Washington Post in January. Washington’s paper of record sided with Elon Musk, who argued similarly that opponents of the program were “hateful, unrepentant racists.” Yet those who want greater guest worker restrictions—though branded as bigots by a coalition of corporate and liberal interests—are merely presenting classic left-wing arguments articulated by people like Bernie Sanders for decades.
As Sanders argued more than 17 years ago in a CNN interview with Lou Dobbs, “if poverty is increasing, and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than Americans workers and drive wages down.”
Sanders singled out “people coming into this country are coming in as lifeguards” and “ the H1B program has teachers, elementary school teachers.” He reiterated that position this past January when he posted on X that “the main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”
While the Trump administration pursues the Sanders plan for guest workers and fulfills his democratic mandate to restrict the flow of new temporary worker visas, corporate media and politicians like Pettersen will continue to insist that, without a steady stream of imported labor, America’s businesses simply can’t fill jobs. The left–right alliance that marched against the WTO recognized that argument for the wage-suppressing scam it is. Trump’s success in politics demonstrates that an increasing number of Americans see it the same way.
The post The Democrats’ Wage-Suppression Campaign appeared first on The American Conservative.