Friday, November 18, 2011

Why the Jobs Go To ILLEGALS

DO A SEARCH ON THE BLOG FOR OBAMA'S LA RAZA SEC. OF LABOR, HILDA SOLIS!

THERE ARE ONLY EIGHT (8) STATES WITH A POPULATION GREATER THAN LOS ANGELES COUNTY WHERE HALF THE JOBS ARE HELD BY ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS! THIS SAME COUNTY PAYS OUT $600 MILLION IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS, AND CALCULATES THE MEXICAN TAX-FREE ECONOMY TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION PER YEAR.
VIVA LA RAZA?
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS MORE! HIS SEC. OF (ILLEGAL) LABOR IS A LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS.
LOS ANGELES MAYOR ANTONIO “TACO RUNT” VILLARAIGOSA IS A MEXICAN SEPARATIST (M.E.Ch.A.) AND RACIST LA RAZA SUPREMACIST!
*
IT IS CALCULATED THAT THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION DEPRESSED WAGES FOR LEGALS, IN PARTICULAR BLACK AMERICANS, FROM $300 TO $400 BILLION PER YEAR!
AND THEN WHO ENDS UP PAYING FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE?
*
“What employers really want in many cases by hiring immigrants is to hold down wage costs, experts say.”


*
 “Democratic Party executives from President Obama to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have said that their priority for the year ahead is to create good jobs that pay decent wages. As the experience of this deceitful decade demonstrates, the need never has been more urgent.”

latimes.com
Opinion
It was the worst of times

The first decade of the 21st century saw the American dream slip further away from most Americans.

Tim Rutten
January 2, 2010
Looking back over the last 10 years, it's hard not to feel as W.H. Auden did one dreary September day in 1939:

"I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade."



Still, if we're looking for a literary progenitor for the era now past, it would not be Auden but Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man," for these were the years of the great con and the sweeping swindle. From Bernie Ebbers and WorldCom to Jeff Skilling and the Enron boys, to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, to the bait-and-switch that Bush and Cheney used to take the country into war, this was the decade of deception.

No deceit was more malevolently corrosive than the fiction that this was a period of expansive prosperity in which significant numbers of our people were able to share in the American dream of financial security. All the triumphalist rhetoric emanating from Wall Street and the White House notwithstanding, this was -- materially speaking -- a disastrous decade for U.S. families.

For the first time since World War II, according to the departments of Commerce and Labor, an average American's net worth actually fell -- by a whopping 13%. By way of comparison, and to demonstrate just how anomalous such a decline is, consider that net worth grew 44% in the 1990s; 35% in the 1980s; 12% in the 1970s (even with the Carter administration's "stagflation"); 25% in the 1960s; and 26% in the 1950s.

The employment picture was no better. Though the U.S. population has grown by 35 million since 2000, employment has increased just 0.5% over the last 10 years. For the first time since the federal government began keeping such statistics, the number of private sector jobs actually declined. (In both the 1980s and 1990s, employment grew by 20%, and in the 1960s it climbed by 31%.)

Meanwhile, as the private sector's flight from its pension obligations became virtually general, tens of millions of Americans were compelled to trust their retirements to the equity markets through 401(k) accounts. It was a bonanza for Wall Street, which raked in commissions and fees, and a disaster for working families, because the decade ended without any gains in the stock averages.

A tiny minority of insiders and the privileged, on the other hand, did very well for themselves. According to economists Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, the highest-earning 0.1% of Americans accounted for 8.2% of the country's total pretax income. That's the highest concentration of wealth since 1917.

Former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently pointed out that all these factors combined to play a major, but largely unrecognized, role in the current financial crisis. Even though most American families had two working adults throughout the last decade, many had to borrow simply to maintain their standard of living. People maxed out their credit cards and tapped their home's equity -- something that proved catastrophic when the value of houses collapsed.

With incomes and employment stagnant, families had nowhere to turn. Not so employers. While most lacked the managerial creativity to grow their businesses, they found a way to keep profits up by laying off huge numbers of people and simply working those who remained -- too frightened to protest -- harder. That accounts for the striking productivity gains recorded over the past several quarters. The sputtering economic recovery now underway essentially is a 21st century version of the old-fashioned speedup.

Democratic Party executives from President Obama to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have said that their priority for the year ahead is to create good jobs that pay decent wages. As the experience of this deceitful decade demonstrates, the need never has been more urgent.

*
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Why the new jobs go to immigrants

By David R. Francis

Wall Street cheered and stock prices rose when the US Labor Department announced last Friday that employers had expanded their payrolls by 262,000 positions in February.
But it wasn't entirely good news. The statisticians also indicated that the share of the adult population holding jobs had slipped slightly from January to 62.3 percent. That's now two full percentage points below the level in the brief recession that began in March 2001.

Why the apparent contradiction? Reasons abound: population growth, rising retirements. But one factor that gets little attention is immigration.

In the past four years, the number of immigrants into the US, legal and illegal, has closely matched the number of new jobs. That suggests newcomers have, in effect, snapped up all of the new jobs.

"There has been no net job gain for natives," says Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University.
In the US, President Bush calls for giving millions of illegal immigrants a kind of guest-worker status as a legal path to US citizenship. So far, no specific legislation to implement his suggestion has been put before Congress.

Meanwhile, US border patrols spend millions of dollars a year trying to keep illegals out. And yet, they keep coming, evidently little discouraged by recession or the 9/11 attacks. In the past four years alone, the number of immigrants ran some 2.5 million to 3 million, of which about half were illegal.

They come for jobs, of course. And the Bush administration makes barely any effort to enforce current law. In 2003, a total of 13 employers were fined for hiring undocumented employees.

In fact, neither Republicans nor Democrats have promoted enforcement of immigration law prohibiting the hiring of illegal immigrants, says Mr. Sum, head of Northeastern's Center for Labor Market Studies.
What employers really want in many cases by hiring immigrants is to hold down wage costs, experts say.



*
ARTICLE:


MOST MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS IN NEW STUDY GAVE UP JOBS TO TAKE THEIR CHANCES IN U.S.


By NINA BERNSTEIN  New York

A report about the work lives of recent Mexican immigrants in seven cities across the United States suggests that they typically traded jobs in Mexico for the prospect of work here, despite serious bouts of unemployment, job instability and poor wages.

The report, released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, was based on surveys of nearly 5,000 Mexicans, most of them here illegally.

Those surveyed were seeking identity documents at Mexican consulates in New York, Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C., where recent arrivals have gravitated toward construction, hotel and restaurant jobs, and in Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Fresno, Calif., where they have been more likely to work in agriculture and manufacturing.

Unlike the stereotype of jobless Mexicans heading north, most of the immigrants had been employed in Mexico, the report found.

Once in the United States, they soon found that their illegal status was no barrier to being hired here. And though the jobs they landed, typically with help from relatives, were often unstable and their median earnings only $300 a week, that was enough to keep drawing newcomers because wages here far exceeded those in Mexico.

"We're getting a peek at a segment of the U.S. labor force that is large, that is growing by illegal migration, and that is bringing an entirely new set of issues into the U.S. labor market," said Rakesh Kochhar, associate director for research at the Pew Hispanic Center and author of the study.

The report suggested that policies intended to reduce migration pressures by improving the Mexican economy would have to look beyond employment to wages and perceptions of opportunity.
The survey found that the most recent to arrive were more likely to have worked in construction or commerce, rather than agriculture, in Mexico. Only 5 percent had been unemployed there; they were "drawn not from the fringes, but from the heart of Mexico's labor force," the report said.

After a difficult transition in their first six months in the United States ‑ about 15 percent of the respondents said they did not work during that time ‑ the rate of unemployment plummeted, to an average of 5 percent.
But in one of the most striking findings, 38 percent reported an unemployment spell lasting a month or more in the previous year, regardless of their location, legal status or length of time in the United States.
"These are workers with no safety net," Mr. Kochhar said. "The long‑run implication is a generation of workers without health or pension benefits, without any meaningful asset accumulation."

On the other hand, Mr. Kochhar and Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said the flexibility of this work force was a boon to certain industries like home construction, an important part of the nation's economic growth since the last recession.

Among respondents to the survey, those who settled in Atlanta and Dallas were the best off, with 56 percent in each city receiving a weekly wage higher than the $300‑a‑week median. The worst off were in Fresno, where more than half of the survey respondents worked in agriculture and 60 percent reported earning less than $300 a week. The lowest wages were reported by women, people who spoke little or no English, and those without identification.

To some scholars of immigration, the report underlines the lack of incentives for employers to turn to a guest worker program like the one proposed by President Bush because their needs are met cheaply by illegal workers ‑ and all without paperwork or long‑term commitment.

Guest workers might instead appeal to corporations like Wal‑Mart, the scholars said, where service jobs are now the target of union organizing drives.

"You can't plausibly argue that immigrant‑dominated sectors have a labor shortage," said Robert Courtney Smith, a sociologist and author of "Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants." Instead, he said, the report and evidence of falling wages among Mexican immigrants over time point to an oversupply of vulnerable workers competing with each other.

But Brendan Flanagan, a spokesman for the National Restaurant Association, which supports a guest worker program, disagreed. "In many places it is difficult to fill jobs with domestic workers," Mr. Flanagan said. "We've seen a simple lack of applicants, regardless of what wage is offered."

Although the survey, conducted from July 2004 to January 2005, was not random or weighted to represent all Mexican immigrants, it offers a close look at a usually elusive population.

Those surveyed were not questioned directly about their immigration status, but they were asked whether they had any photo identification issued by a government agency in the United States. Slightly more than half over all, and 75 percent in New York, said they did not.

The migration is part of a historic restructuring of the Mexican economy comparable to America's industrial revolution, said Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization based in Washington.

The institute released its own report on Tuesday, arguing that border enforcement efforts have failed. Workplace enforcement, which has been neglected, would be a crucial part of making a guest worker program successful.

For now, Mexicans keep arriving illegally.

"It doesn't matter if it's winter," said Ricardo Cortes, 23, a construction worker waiting for a friend outside the Mexican consulate in New York on Tuesday. "People are still coming because there's no money over there."







No comments: