Longstanding citizens of the United States spend their earnings close to home. It’s no shock that most of us eat at eat at local restaurants, support local schools, and shop at local markets. Our hard work blesses our communities.
Again and again, we’ve been told that immigration is great for our economy. “Businesses need more immigrants,” scream Democrats, and some well-funded Republicans. And cheap foreign labor certainly benefits big companies like Google and Microsoft. In a 2017 article in Forbes magazine, statistics industry writer Niall McCarthy wrote that “Just over a quarter of people employed in the computer and electronic product sector were born abroad.”
But immigrants are concerned as much about their old homes as their new ones. That’s where remittances come in. Remittance is just a fancy way of saying “sending money home” – in this case internationally. According to the Pew Research Center, a staggering 148 billion dollars left the U.S. economy in the form of remittances in 2017, often in the form of wire transfers through companies like Western Union.
The Pew Research Center, although hardly a conservative organization, is often considered the gold standard for global research. They certainly have no reason to lie about these numbers. Yet, we rarely hear about remittances from the alphabet soup of national news outlets (ABC, NBC, CBS).
What does the loss of 148 billion dollars mean? Well, that’s enough money to give a 50,000 dollar per-year job to 2.96 million Americans. That would be the equivalent of a year of solid employment gains by the U.S. economy (although frankly I think we can do better than what’s currently considered solid). And every one of those jobs would pay enough to vault a family into the middle class, even considering the need to subtract income to pay for health insurance benefits.
Moreover, since all of the job gains would go to U.S. citizens (I favor an immigration freeze until unemployment is at 1.5 percent or less) tax revenue would increase by nearly thirty billion dollars (assuming that federal, state, local, and sales taxes total at least 20 percent of income). That would allow Republican-run areas (like Orange County in California) to make huge strides with their budgets. Democrat-run areas will likely use the money to staff government offices for free-range tofu advocates, but at least the money will stay here.
Another problem is that we don’t know where remittance money ultimately goes. Once it leaves the U.S., it could fund anything, even a Mexican billionaire who quietly controls the liberal lies coming from the New York Times and preys upon Mexico’s poor. According to eleven-time bestselling author Ann Coulter, that’s exactly where a lot of remittance cash ends up.
In 2015, one of the richest men in the world, Carlos Slim, became the top shareholder in the New York Times. Had he not invested, the Times would likely have gone bankrupt, ridding the American people of a huge leftist publication. While Slim has since sold off a significant portion of his shares, he remains one of the Times’ top investors.
According to Coulter’s book Adios America, Slim owes a significant portion of his wealth to remittance money flowing into Mexico from the United States. She notes that immigrants in the United States send around 20 billion dollars to Mexico every year, which helps Slim to charge Mexicans double the going rate for broadband internet connections and sky-high rates for mobile phone plans through his near-monopoly on their telecommunications market. While stopping remittances might not force men like Slim out of business, America would be better off if it didn’t send countless dollars to countries and individuals who don’t exactly have our best interests at heart, who fund globalist propaganda, and who can’t be held accountable for their actions under our system of laws (such as the U.S. laws banning monopolies). It’s worth noting that the Times started really pushing for more immigration right after Slim took it over.
Would reducing immigration be worth it to create millions of U.S. jobs? To adequately fund local governments? To keep money out of the hands of people like Carlos Slim, whose friends at the New York Times do damage to our country every day? Even ignoring other immigration-related problems such as drug and human trafficking, I certainly believe so. Immigration was the top issue in the 2016 election, and it deserves to be again in 2020.
2 Responses
Thoughtful and carefully researched. We cannot ignore the reasons why our economy and government has become controlled from outside of our borders. We need to stand firmly against foreign ownership of our vital industries and informational sources. We have to stand in truth, God’s truth if we expect to stand at all.