Politics & Power Quote by Lamar S. Smith

"Nearly every study" is doing the heavy lifting here, less a citation than a rhetorical shield. Lamar S. Smith, speaking as a politician, knows the phrase signals authority while staying conveniently vague: it invites the listener to stop asking which studies, what time frame, which industries, which workers. The certainty is the point. It converts a messy economic debate into a moral emergency.

The intent is to fuse two constituencies that are often pitted against each other: American-born workers and legal immigrants. By pairing them, Smith tries to drain accusations of xenophobia and reposition restrictionism as a pro-worker, even pro-immigrant stance. The subtext is that the real enemy is not employers or policy choices but "cheap foreign labor" itself, a phrase that treats people as a cost category. It shifts attention away from corporate bargaining power, weakened unions, wage theft, and the political decisions that shape labor markets. If wages are "undercut", someone is holding the knife, but the sentence keeps the employer offstage.

Context matters: this line lands in a long U.S. tradition of economic anxiety being translated into immigration enforcement. It echoes earlier nativist arguments, updated with technocratic sheen ("studies") and a careful exemption for "legal immigrants" to create an in-group that can be defended while still justifying crackdown on others. The rhetorical move is compact: blame global labor flows, promise protection, and imply that fairness requires tougher borders, not tougher labor standards.