Phony Populist Josh Hawley Blames Immigrants For Why Construction Workers, Hotel Staff Don’t Make $10 Million A Year

The new Great Replacement!

Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri enabled Donald Trump’s 2020 coup attempt but lost out on the VP slot to someone who’d served in the Senate barely long enough to learn where the cafeteria is. However, Hawley hasn’t abandoned his personal fight for relevance.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Hawley attacked what his YouTube channel falsely describes as “Democrats’ pro-illegal immigration agenda.” Democrats attempted to pass a sweeping border security bill, which Republicans — including Hawley — killed on Trump’s orders. They apparently believed the border crisis could keep until after Trump won the election. Democrats have drastically changed their approach to immigration during Biden’s term and have adopted many of Trump’s own positions, especially regarding border enforcement and immigration, just slightly more humane. They’ve obviously received little credit for their rightward shift, and Hawley’s post-election tirade seems like an exercise in dead-horse kicking.

The subject of Hawley’s grandstanding was Aaron Reichlin-Melnik, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. (Watch below.)

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“Why would you want American citizens and those who are here lawfully to have to compete against illegal immigrants,” he asked, “who by the way are often not paid minimum wage, who are not given the federally mandated benefits, precisely because they are here illegally. Why would you want to drive down the wages of millions of working Americans who can’t get those jobs in construction, agriculture, and hospitality because illegal immigrants are getting them?”

It’s one thing to suggest that “American citizens” should have the jobs Hawley mentions but claiming illegal immigrants are why a white woman in Missouri with just a high school diploma can’t get a job cleaning hotel rooms at $30 an hour is laughably dishonest.

Hawley echoes similar remarks from JD Vance, the nation’s next vice president, who has framed his anti-immigrant rhetoric as a response to “the threats of globalism that hold our nation and its workers back, namely our open border with Mexico and our open wallet to China.” He posted on Labor Day 2023, “American workers deserve an immigration policy that upholds the rule of law and doesn’t undercut their wages.” His impassioned gibberish has proven a cynical yet effective strategy.

JD Vance, A Comic Book Villain Without Enough Shame To Wear A Scary Mask

When Vance began his smear campaign against Haitian migrants in Ohio, he grilled Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a Senate Banking Committee hearing about what he considered immigration’s detrimental impact on the economy.

“Why do we see [immigration] as a good thing?” Vance said. “Or maybe that’s wrong, maybe that premise is fundamentally incorrect. But why do so many economists treat an influx of new labor as a good thing? If labor is constrained, labor supply is constrained, doesn’t that lead to rising wages for American workers?”

No, it does not, and if labor costs did increase, it would inevitably lead to the very inflation that Republicans leveraged against Democrats in the 2024 election.

However, facts rarely prevail against entitled Americans’ feelings.

“I think specifically of the 7 million prime age men that have dropped out of the labor force,” he told Powell. “Why isn’t that more the focus of policy makers rather than — you see labor shortage, rather than bringing in a large number of new immigrants, why not try to boost wages in a way that brings some of those workers off the sidelines?”

Republicans have long opposed raising the federal minimum wage and claimed that providing decent health care benefits to employees was bad for small businesses. Now both Vance and Hawley pretend that illegal immigrants are all that’s standing in the way of a 1950s (white) American lifestyle for the working class.

Centrists too often celebrate slave labor

It doesn’t help when immigration defenders argue from their own privileged position. When they claim that illegal immigrants in particular “do the jobs that Americans won’t,” it can sound like elitists knocking the work ethic of average Americans.

Last month, The View co-host Ana Navarro pointed out that Trump’s anti-immigration policies could prove inconvenient for many of his wealthy supporters.

“In the last few days, I got a call from a couple of people, friends of mine, people very close to me in Miami, big Trumpers, who are worried now about what’s going to happen to their undocumented nannies that help them raise their children,” she said. “So I told them that I suggested they learn how to clean their kid’s ass.”

This isn’t the most compelling argument, obviously, on humanitarian grounds, and it’s unlikely to move the millions of working-class Trump voters of all races who raise their kids without hired assistance.

The average hourly rate for a nanny in Florida is about $16, possibly as much as $25 if your kid’s ass requires extra cleaning. So, even at the top end, that’s about $50,000 a year. Florida’s current minimum wage is $12, so that’s less than $25,000 at the lowest legal level. Chris Rock once said that a minimum wage salary was your employer’s way of saying “I’d pay you less but it’s against the law.” It’s not that hard for JD Vance or Josh Hawley to take the populist high ground and demand that Navarro’s rich-ass friends don’t break the law when hiring the people who care for their own children.

America was built on slave labor, which is not some woke guilt trip statement. It just helps put our current consumer-driven economy into perspective. Americans demand a certain standard of living at the lowest possible price. This isn’t limited to Miami millionaires and their nannies but middle-class people who want cheap DoorDash delivery. The average American demands a clean hotel room but would complain if daily rates increased.

Illegal immigrants, including the “Dreamers” Barack Obama protected, aren’t illegible for most welfare programs. It’s employers who willingly break the law when they hire anyone, regardless of status, at less than minimum wage. Asylum seekers greatly contributed to the pandemic recovery during a labor shortfall. They were in fact “taking jobs Americans didn’t want,” but they weren’t deliberately undermining American workers. However, “underbidding” someone else for work is still capitalism. The whole concept of an accepted salary “floor” is progressive in origin. Republicans are the ones who want to bring back child labor.

The Same Old Great Replacement Theory

JD Vance and Josh Hawley are putting a populist sheen on the racist Great Replacement theory, which the GOP has fully embraced as part of its platform. The big MAGA lie is that Democrats want to fundamentally alter the electorate (i.e. make it less white) with an influx of illegal (non-white) immigrants.

Trump recently tailored his anti-immigrant rhetoric to working-class people of all races. Trump frequently and falsely claimed on the campaign trail that illegal immigrants were taking “Black and Hispanic jobs.” Democrats were shocked and appalled, but Trump doubled his 2024 numbers among Black men and almost won half — 48 percent — of Latino men. Both groups said the economy and jobs were why they’d voted for the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.

In Keri Leigh Merritt’s book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, she details how poor white men had become an economic underclass during the height of the Antebellum South. They couldn’t find jobs that paid anything close to a living wage while wealthy Southerners profited off slave labor, so they were forced to accept the most dangerous jobs, such as ditching and mining, that were considered “too hazardous for Negro property.”

She writes:

With their labor rendered almost unnecessary, some poor whites chose to drop out of society altogether, living off the land and often running afoul of the law. Others struggled to make ends meet with occasional odd jobs. Yet the prevalence of slave hiring in the 1840s and 50s further exacerbated class tensions, just as an influx of impoverished white immigrants into southern cities intensified racial tensions.

As poor whites became increasingly upset — and more confrontational — about their exclusion from the southern economy, they occasionally threatened to withdraw their support for slavery altogether, making overt threats about the stability of the institution, and the necessity of poor white support for that stability.

Secession was clearly in the exclusive interest of wealthy white Southerners, yet poor white men fought to preserve the very institution that kept them impoverished. The answer is obvious, and probably illegal to teach in Florida. Race in the Antebellum South was a fixed class, but a poor white Southerner could imagine he might someday become a white plantation owner. Today’s version of Thomas Sutpen fancies himself the next Elon Musk.

Unfortunately, MAGA’s phony populist, anti-immigrant messaging resonates with Americans who want the enslaved’s jobs only without the chains. They don’t realize it’s a package deal.