NYC’s booming underground migrant economy exposes the true disaster of Biden’s open border

Immigration policies that admit vast numbers of low-skilled workers are a plague on Americans in low-skill jobs, warned the late, great Barbara Jordan — the Texas congresswoman who chaired President Bill Clinton’s immigration commission back in the 1990s.

Open borders make a welfare state unworkable, warned America’s leading socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders — before he started toeing the new Democratic Party line amid his 2016 presidential run.

Warnings fully vindicated by The Post’s Isabel Vincent’s deep dive into the city’s cash-based underground migrant economy.

Migrants from Africa and Latin America, many if not most with little English, are taking underground jobs as food delivery drivers, construction day laborers, cooks and cleaners.

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Some illegally use others’ work papers, or fake IDs, to work “legally”; others find employers willing to hire off the books so they can pay less.

And some run illegal businesses as street vendors, selling to other “asylum seekers” — or as quasi-beggars vending candy on the subway.

Not to mention those dealing drugs, shoplifting and so on: In the wake of the migrant attack on cops in Times Square, it’s plain the city is hosting some new migrant criminal gangs .

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With a wink from the Biden administration, they broke the law to come here; how surprising is it that they’d keep breaking laws now that they’ve arrived?

Especially when prosecutors like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg can’t even manage to enforce the law against migrants who assault police officers.

Let’s be clear here: Even getting them all the right to work legally won’t do much.

Fine, a few thousand can to do farm work upstate, and Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to lower job qualifications to let migrants fill up to 4,000 state jobs, such as caring for disabled individuals, custodial work, etc.

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But that’s a drop in the bucket of the 160,000 or so migrants — and, again, comes at the expense of low-skilled longtime New Yorkers who’d take those jobs.

Heck, working well-paid construction jobs here requires all manner of certificates — and how many migrants are worth hiring for New York’s ever-rising minimum wage?

Overwhelmingly, these migrants come to America because they can earn more here than back home, even working illegally: If they can’t find legal work even with the right papers, many will still work underground.

And with a ready supply of workers willing to work off the books, the underground economy will grow a demand for them, just as New York’s legal non-union construction industry already outstrips the unionized one.

“It is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest,” said Barbara Jordan.

That’s a responsibility the current leaders of our democratic society plainly aren’t willing to face.

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