Bezos’ Newspaper Hides Pocketbook Gains from ICE Raids

Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is commiserating with wealthy restaurant owners who are trying to shield their lower-wage, illegal migrant workers from President Donald Trump’s crackdown on legal migration.

“Owners or operators of four restaurants confirmed to the Washington Post that they had lost employees, whether permanently or temporarily, since DHS agents visited last week,” the newspaper reported.

“If they want to go by the [law] book, there is not many restaurants left in D.C.,” said Luis Reyes, a former illegal migrant from El Salvador who is now the co-owner of a restaurant visited by ICE. He added:

Who will wash dishes? Nobody wants to do that. Only the hard workers, the people who come from Honduras and El Salvador, they happily do that … They want to make money and send [it] to their family.

“Why is DHS focusing on D.C. restaurants?” complained Geoff Tracy, a restaurateur for 25 years.

Most of the article focused on the owners’ opposition to any loss of migrant workers. For example, the article quotes one executive’s letter to the Department of Homeland Security after ICE inspected workers’ records in restaurants:

My hope is to avoid the unnecessary fear-mongering that took place this morning … Our employees have rights, they have been notified of these rights and any further questions or needs should be addressed directly to me.

Since January, the Post has dramatically increased its coverage of immigration and has posted hundreds of articles. But those articles focus on the preferences of employers and the worries of illegal workers — while ignoring the hopes and needs of ordinary Americans for better wages and cheaper housing.

For example, the newspaper has largely ignored the massive damage caused to U.S. graduates and innovation by the inflow of mixed-skill H-1B white collar migrants into Fortune 500 jobs.

Notably, Bezos’ Amazon corporation is the leading user of H-1B workers, and also of the foreign graduates who get work permits via the Occupational Practical Training program.

Overall, at least 1.5 million foreign graduates hold white-collar jobs that otherwise would be held by American graduates.

Many of those jobs are denied to American graduates because of hiring kickbacks and discrimination within networks of foreign workers and hiring managers. “Hiring managers [in major companies] show bias to hiring [Indian] contractors on h1 b,” instead of hiring Americans, one former India visa worker told Breitbart News.”So if a manager places 5 [H-1B] contractors [with a major company] they get rate [$7-$20] x 2000 hrs per year per contractor,” he said.

But 17 paragraphs into the restaurant article, the Post‘s reporters smuggled in a reference to the pocketbook gains that Americans will gain as Trump’s deputies make it difficult for restaurant operators to hire hard-working and submissive illegal migrants:

“If you’ve got fewer of them [illegals], everybody else gets more expensive” to pay,  said Josh Phillips, the co-owner of a restaurant in Shaw. “You’re going to start seeing bidding wars [by employers for good employees]. You’re going to see people hopping from restaurant to restaurant again.”

There is vast evidence that the government’s delivery of hard-working young migrants drives down wages and productivity, and also pushes up housing costs for ordinary Americans.

That economic loss is especially felt by working-class Americans who cannot afford decent family-friendly housing close to major cities because available housing is rented by rent-sharing groups of migrants, many of whom are rationally sending wages back to their home-country families.

RELATED: Karoline Leavitt: Illegals Are Heading Back Home on Their Own Because of Trump Crackdown

For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland recently reported that lower-income workers in the leisure and hospitality industry gained the most pay gains in the brief period between Trump’s immigration curbs and President Joe Biden’s engineered migrant flood:

The COVID-19 pandemic caused changes for business across all industries, though the effects were unequal. As lockdown restrictions aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19 were relaxed, nominal wage growth rose sharply in leisure and hospitality and in trade and transportation, the two industries with the highest concentration of low-wage workers. In fact, wage growth was most pronounced for workers in the bottom 50 percent of the wage distribution who changed jobs into one of these industries.

The left-wing Economic Policy Institute reported similar findings in March 2024:

 In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023, but many workers continue to suffer from grossly inadequate wages and middle-wage workers face significant gaps across demographic groups.

However, Bezos’ newspaper hides migration’s pocketbook damage to white-collar and blue-collar Americans. Still, some brave reporters and editors manage to smuggle the reality into print.