DACA for the rich

American males — the people who put Trump in the White House — have lost ground in their wages over decades, according to a study just released by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1973, a fully employed male earned $54,030, compared to just $51,600 last year (all in 2016 U.S. dollars).

These workers hoped — perhaps foolishly given Trump’s recent flip-flops — that he would reverse their fortunes by ending illegal immigration, including people protected by DACA, the Obama amnesty program, which provides work permits to some 800,000 illegal immigrants, driving down blue-collar wages. Pitted against America’s native-born workers is the U.S. business lobby, which lobbies not only for DACA but also for other schemes to import low-wage workers.

For U.S. corporate interests, America’s current immigration policy is a sweet deal; for native-born workers, it couldn’t be more bitter. They lose a staggering $500 billion per year in lowered wages, a “wealth transfer from workers to firms” according to George Borjas of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a contributor to The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine study published earlier this year.

A century and more ago when the captains of American industry imported European workers for their mines, mills and factories, labour wasn’t cheap — American workers then earned the highest wages in the world — and it wasn’t subsidized. America’s industrialists would finance their recruits’ voyage by sea, and also provide the necessities of life welfare costs. The National Academies study pegs the annual cost to state and local governments at US$57 billion, or US$1,600 a year per new unskilled immigrant, and estimates that it will take 75 years before this immigrant stops being a net loss to society. The native-born American worker not only shoulders much of this cost through his taxes, he also suffers a wage hit. The $500 billion per year in lost