Let's ring in 2023 by restoring hope to Essential American workers

If Congress and their billionaire corporate donors really valued what is "essential" about American workers, they would reduce immigration by passing mandatory E-Verify, ending chain migration, and reforming birthright citizenship.

These are real actions that give true value to the otherwise hollow pandemic-era use by some members of Congress and their corporate donors of the words "essential" worker. Offering false accolades while pushing for more immigration further denies economic justice in fair wage and labor conditions to American workers.

Railway worker, Charles Stallworth recently expressed his frustrations with illegal immigration's impacts on frontline workers just before the midterms:

"My biggest issue is illegal immigration. It's estimated that we have over 10 million people in this country illegally, and 2 million who came just last year. That is not democracy. We cannot truly assess the needs of the American people while we have millions of people who are not supposed to be here. It affects all Americans but blue-collar workers like me most of all because illegal immigrants will work for less money than American citizens."--Newsweek, October 31, 2022

Wage and opportunity arbitrage is impacted by mass legal immigration as well.

Across the spectrum of "essential" industries, over 55 million people are employed in frontline jobs in the U.S. according to the Economic Policy Institute (2019) . The majority of these jobs are in service industries such as health care (30%), agriculture (20%), and in industrial, commercial and residential facilities and services (12%).

Bottom line, the brave and hard-working Americans and their families deserve better from a country they serve tirelessly. They ensure that so many of the rest of us sitting at home with our laptops receive and have access to the most important and basic necessities of food, shelter and life-saving medical services. The number of immigrants we welcome to the U.S. should not be so high as to undermine the American worker who should always be first in the hiring line, and first in our hearts as essential human beings, not just essential to the service of excessive greed and consumption that feed the inequality engine instead of our workers' children.