The Washington Post continues to outdo itself in generating downright idiotic takes to defend President Joe Biden’s trashy economic record, even if it means whitewashing the worsening border crisis.
“The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason,” celebrated The Post in a nutty Feb. 27 headline. The leftist rag doubled down by claiming that “[i]mmigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world.” Of course, the paper glossed over the fact that “all” the job gains in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone (compared to Q4 2019) were among immigrants, according to Center for Immigration Studies Research Director Steven Camarota in a Feb. 13 op-ed. “The number of immigrants working over this period is up by 2.9 million, while 183,000 fewer US-born Americans are working,” Camarota continued. Earth to The Post! [Emphasis added.]
Camarota surmised that it was “very possible that half the net increase in jobs went to illegal immigrants.” The Heritage Foundation also revealed that the surge in illegal immigration was costing U.S. taxpayers “billions” per year. For border states like California and Texas, for example, the crisis was costing both states $21.76 billion and $8.88 billion respectively per year “in education, health care, law enforcement and criminal justice system costs, welfare expenditures, and more.” But The Post still wielded its distorted talking points to make Biden look like he’s somehow playing economic 4-D chess by capitalizing on a horrendous national security crisis to buoy the economy. The newspaper even ended up committing a humiliating error in trying to sell its ludicrous angle. [Emphasis added.]
In fact, The Post didn’t even mention the word “illegal” once throughout its 1,843-word piece of propaganda. The only allusion to “illegality” was made in the last paragraph and was simply included as part of a quote by a rug company owner justifying illegal border crossings: “‘If I was a poor Mexican, I would be the first one to cross the Rio Grande illegally myself.’”
Talk about tone-deaf. Fox News reported in January that the U.S. Border Patrol had nearly a daunting 302,0000 encounters at the southern border in December alone, “the highest total for a single month ever recorded. It is also the first time migrant encounters have exceeded 300,000.” There have been nearly 7.3 million illegal crossings since Biden took office, as Fox News also reported Feb. 27. But it gets worse.
The Post wound up overplaying its hand and blatantly butchered the facts. The newspaper twisted the findings from a Congressional Budget Office report to falsely claim that “the U.S. labor force in 2023 had grown by 5.2 million people, thanks especially to net immigration.” But that’s not what the CBO report stated at all, as The Post conceded in an embarrassing “correction” posted later:
A previous version of this article incorrectly described a Congressional Budget Office projection on the effects of immigration on the economy. The report said the labor force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, not that it had grown by that number in 2023, [emphasis added.]
That’s what happens when a media publication is more concerned with bending itself into a pretzel to turn a crisis into a boon to defend Biden as opposed to telling the straight truth about the disastrous effects such an influx of illegal migrants poses to U.S. national security. “Whoever wins the election will take the helm of an economy that immigrant workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for years to come,” read The Post Pravda.
The irony is that The Post even mentioned the “crisis” at the border, but dodged and danced around ever directly conceding that what illegal immigrants were doing was — illegal:
“But for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy,” [emphasis added.]
The Post even went as far as to suggest that the immigration crisis helped desperate companies fill in the gaps in their work forces left by American citizens post-pandemic:
Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.
Talk about dizzying. And this spike in foreigner employment was reportedly all thanks to Biden repealing Trump-era border restrictions, according to The Post. Yes, the newspaper actually tried to spin the very actions that contributed to the border crisis in the first place as a stroke of genius on Biden’s part: “At the same time [as companies scrambled to find labor to deal with exploding demand], the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back Trump-era restrictions.”
Make it stop.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Washington Post at 202-334-6000 and demand it stop gaslighting Americans on the immigration crisis.