By now it should come as no surprise to anyone that, as regards Trump and Company, conservative Americans have been sold a bill of goods. The empty Make America Great Again slogan has been shown to be nothing more than shorthand for Make A Lot Of Money For Donors and Big Business, or Make Israel Great Again. Take your pick. To facilitate this, it is important that the American people remain distracted so that they cannot see what the left-hand is doing while the right-hand is stabbing them in the back.

The recent ICE sideshow is an example. Smoke, mirrors, and loud noises. In the end, Trump caves to the well-heeled lobbyists whispering in his ear. What gives? Two words: cheap labor.

A recent article on Counter-Currents titled Trump Isn’t Working For Americans by writer Greg Johnson caught my eye. It is worth reading in its entirety and does a fine job of explaining Trump’s real agenda and motivation, calling attention to the Israeli puppet masters pulling his strings. But there was one section or comment that gave me pause.

It goes like this: after explaining how Trump has caved in Minneapolis specifically, and on the removal of illegal immigrants generally, the article points out that only complete removal of all of them will make a difference, and the that is never going to happen. And he has a point: The paltry numbers the Trump administration bandies about will do nothing to reverse the estimated 14 million illegal immigrants already here (the lowest number I could find): Approximately 378,590 people have been deported in Trump’s first year. That sounds great until you do the math and realize it is only 2.7% of the illegal population. And the number of removals is declining. At that rate, by the end of his term, 92% of illegals in this country will still be here.

From the article:

No matter how you conceive of the United States—as a white man’s country, or as a multiracial society held together by “values” and “dreams”—having borders is pro-American. The Biden administration allowed some 20 million illegal migrants to enter the United States, joining tens of millions who were already here. Enough is enough. America simply will not exist unless all these people are removed. It was possible for them to come here. So of course it is possible to send them back. We simply need to muster up the will.

But Donald Trump lacks that will. He has done good things to prevent new immigrants and refugees from entering America. But he doesn’t have the will to remove the tens of millions who are already here. I’ve lost track of the number of times he has sold out to the cheap labor lobby.”

It was the expression “cheap labor lobby” that caught my eye. We all know that different sectors of the economy have their lobbyists: agriculture, construction, tech, energy, weapons production, etc. But it never occurred to me that, taken as a whole, these groups are advocating outside of their specific lanes together for, at the least, one common goal: cheap labor. File my naiveté under “Duh.”

It is common knowledge that the middle-class is struggling, hell, disappearing in this country. The American worker is fighting simply to make a living wage. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one obvious reason is that Americans must compete with new arrivals who will work for pennies on the dollar.

I often hear liberals say, “If it weren’t for migrants (illegal mostly), we would starve! Who would work our farms, pick our crops, and do the jobs Americans don’t want to do?!”

To which the correct reply is: Bullshit.

First, it is true Americans won’t do the jobs illegals and migrants are doing- for the same paltry pay. But if employers had to actually compete in the labor market for American workers, they would have to increase their wages to the point that Americans would be willing to do the work. Yes, the price of goods would likely go up. But the whole point of this is that with higher wages, Americans would be able to afford the fruits of their own labor.

Real wages in the United States have been stagnant for five decades. Since 2021, inflation has been outstripping real wage growth, driving down living standards for many American workers. But mainstream economists and political commentators on both the libertarian Right and much of the liberal Left treat low wages as an unfortunate but necessary part of the modern globalized economy. Low wages, it is said, are the price we pay for free trade, efficient markets, and low prices. In other words, the cheap crap in our stores.

Except, it’s not. It’s the price we pay so CEOs, fund managers, and other do-nothings can make obscene amounts of money as the stock market bounces around all-time highs, while the average American worker, with no retirement savings and little in the bank, can no longer afford to live on a single income, buy a house, or pay for food.

A report published last year by the Institute for Policy Studies examined the 100 companies in the United States that pay the lowest wages (examples include: Amazon, Walmart, Starbucks, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Public Storage, Best Buy, Tyson Foods, and, of course, Nike) and found:

From 2019 to 2024, average CEO pay at the Low-Wage 100 firms climbed 34.7%, compared to a 16.3% rise for their average median worker pay, which was less than the cumulative 22.6% rise in U.S. inflation over the same period. The average CEO now earns $17.2 million, while the typical worker receives only $35,570 a year. The average national CEO-to-worker pay ratio rose during that same period 12.9%: from 560:1 in 2019 to 632:1 in 2024—more than double the S&P 500 average. The poster-child for this, Starbucks, set a new record with a CEO-to-worker pay ration of 6,666:1, reflecting CEO Brian Niccol’s $95.8 million pay package versus $14,674 for the median employee. Indeed, at least 32 U.S. billionaires owe their wealth to these low-wage companies, and have a combined net worth of $827 billion. As a point of comparison, back in 1965, CEOs earned 21 times as much as the average worker.

I could go on and on with numbers and examples, but the take-away is clear: money that could and should be used to improve the wages and living standards of American workers is being used to make a select few extremely wealthy. American mega-business thrives on keeping worker pay as low as possible. The use of migrant and illegal immigrant labor is one of the ways this is done. Because of this, true immigration reform, and the meaningful removal of those illegals already here, isn’t going to happen until companies are forced to employ Americans and pay American wages. This is not something Trump and Company are willing to do: it would have too deep of an impact on their own portfolios and compensation packages, to say nothing of the cost to their donors.

Second, Americans are subsidizing the low wages these grifting companies are willing to pay. Employers suppress wages by reducing worker bargaining power through union-busting, offshoring, bringing in low-wage foreign workers, or outright ignoring immigration law and hiring undocumented workers. The result is that many legitimate American workers are no longer able to survive without some form of public assistance: Employers need only pay sub-living wages because the government offers food stamps, subsidized housing, the Earned Income Tax credit, and other means-tested benefits. In essence, the taxpayer is left picking up the bill to keep low-wage workers alive. Again, this lifts the burden from the employer. Increasingly, welfare in this country is actually corporate welfare, enabling large corporations to pay as little as possible to their workers so their executives can make ungodly amounts of money.

We all know that Trump, like many- if not most- politicians is prone to flip-flopping. But Trump’s acrobatics are becoming increasingly predictable: after waving his hands and making some noise, he will do what Big Business and the Donor Class tell him to do, every time. The cheap labor lobby, using a two-pronged approach of White House access and well-funded lemmings on the street, is calling for a deescalation of the ICE action. Right on cue, Trump is drawing down enforcement operations in Minnesota and Maine, with more to follow.

And once again, the American worker is left holding the bag.

In truth, we may as well take the ill-trained ICE folks off the street. While they wave their wangs and do the shimmy-shake in the middle of the road with the purple-haired social-justice-warriors funded by Soros and other billionaires, arresting the odd brown-person here or there, mega-corporations continue to hire illegals and bolster their bottom-line by paying easily replaced workers as little as feasibly possible. Until they are stopped, nothing is going to change.

We need to demand that our immigration laws be enforced at the employer level first. If you are willing to be “on the radar”, you can report employers using illegal workers. Simply web search “how to report illegal immigrant employers” and you will find the resources- but be forewarned, you will be accessing US Government websites. In fact, we probably should start with who is mowing the lawns and staffing the homes of our politicians.

But we have to start somewhere, and we are long past the time when employers need to be paying American wages to real Americans, and held accountable for not doing so while they game our welfare system. Demand change. When the lemmings tell you we need the immigrants and illegals to survive, tell them “No!”: We need a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Amerika Erwache!

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