Tuesday, June 20, 2017

MS - 13 GANGS IN AMERICA

Down in Central America, El Salvador is getting ready for the return of MS-13 gang members.  It is indeed complicated, as Joshua Partlow reports:      The Trump administration's push to deport more Central American g...

The other MS-13 story


Down in Central America, El Salvador is getting ready for the return of MS-13 gang members.  It is indeed complicated, as Joshua Partlow reports:     
The Trump administration's push to deport more Central American gang membershas alarmed officials here who fear that the returning gangsters could exacerbate violence in one of the deadliest countries in the hemisphere.
This year the U.S. government has deported 398 gang members to this country, compared with 534 in all of 2016, according to Salvadoran government statistics. 
This sharp increase in the rate of gang deportations – and the prospect of more gang roundups in the United States – has prompted Salvadoran authorities to hold emergency meetings and propose new legislation to monitor suspected criminals who are being sent home.
"This clearly affects El Salvador. We already have a climate of violence in the country that we are combating," said Héctor Antonio Rodríguez, the director of the country's immigration agency. "If gang members return, of course this worries us."
In tweets and speeches, President Trump has made MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, the leading symbol of the dangers of illegal immigration and the need for more and faster deportations. He has compared the gang's "meanness" with that of al-Qaeda. He promised last week that the organization will be "gone from our streets very soon, believe me." Recent high-profile killings, such as that of a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl in Springfield, Va., and a string of slayings on Long Island, have fueled concerns of an MS-13 resurgence in the United States.
A bit complicated, to say the least.   
We cannot criticize President Trump's efforts.  He is looking out for U.S. citizens, especially Hispanics, who are the ones living in the communities MS-13 terrorizes.
At the same time, El Salvador is facing its own violence problems.   
My recommendation to the U.S. Congress is to provide El Salvador with the funds or assistance to lock up some of the MS-13 leaders or more violent gang members.   
This is not a pretty situation.  Let's remember that all of this chaos and violence in El Salvador is driving people to the U.S. through Mexico.  Sadly, most of them are reaching the U.S. because Mexico can't stop the flow.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk), (YouTube) and follow me on Twitter.



SOMEDAY IS HERE TODAY… but now it’s too late!

How America surrendered to Mexico’s invasion, occupation and looting.


The Mexican drug cartels now control most of America’s southern borders as LA RAZA “The Race” fascist party expands Mexico’s anchor baby welfare state from border to open border.


HEROIN: are you addicted yet? 1 in 7 Legals are!

Mexico’s Gift to Occupied Aztlan America!


The LA RAZA drug cartels haul back $100 BILLION from heroin sales.

*

AMERICA: WALL STREET, THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, THE GOP and LA RAZA SAY NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!

“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the last four decades and while the U.S. represents just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according to a new report.”


Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.

Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground. 


CAMPAIGN TO DESTROY AMERICA and take a THIRD TERM FOR LIFE….

Barack Obama’s 8 year sabotage of Homeland Security: His Crony Banksters, La Raza Drug Cartels and MS-13 are right behind his sabotage of U.S. borders!



“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant 

Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States. Mexican drug cartels

are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually

every community across this country.” JUDICIAL WATCH


June 22, 2017

Government says 30% of children caught at border have ties to violent drug gangs

Government officials revealed during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that 30% of children captured at the border have ties to M-13 and other violent drug gangs.
The Obama administration knew of the problem but claimed by law, they had to admit the refugees regardless of their ties to violent criminal gangs.
Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem with MS-13 and other gangs.

Federal officials refused even to guess at the true scope of the problem, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that they can give only small snapshots of what they see. But they said the devastation on communities across the country is clear: killings and chaos, particularly among other immigrants — both legal and illegal.


The Border Patrol identified 160 teens who were known or suspected gang members when they first showed up at the border, but whom the Obama administration said it had to admit under U.S. law.

Meanwhile, a spot check this month of 138 teens being held by the federal Health and Human Services Department identified 39 with gang ties. Four of them were forced into cooperating with the gangs and 35 joined voluntarily, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“It is well-known that MS-13 actively targets and recruits children as young as 8 years old,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee who called Wednesday’s hearing.
“While their illegal status and Central American heritage are a key factor in MS-13’s targeting, without a doubt the failures of the current system for handling these children is also to blame,” he said. “The current system is fraught with abuse, systematic errors and a lack of effective cooperation.”
He was stunned that no agency could say how many “UAC,” as the government dubs unaccompanied alien children, have been recruited.
The agencies point to one another and to federal laws, saying their hands are tied.
Agencies are reviewing Obama-era interpretations of the law, but it seems incomprehensible that this loophole can exist. It seems clear that M-13 and other gangs are using the children and US policy on dealing with unaccompanied minors at the border to engage in gang activity on American soil.
Officials said MS-13 is involved in some drug dealing and does engage in human trafficking, but its real money-making operation is extortion. The gang threatens families — including American citizens — with violence against relatives back in Central America unless those in the U.S. pay them off.
Gang members in the U.S. take directions directly from gang commanders in El Salvador, authorities say.
Kenneth A. Blanco, acting assistant attorney general in the criminal division at the Justice Department, also said immigrants who fail to report crimes to local police are often not afraid of being deported by federal authorities, but rather fear retaliation from the gang members and other criminals who live in their neighborhoods.
He said witnesses’ names become public, making them targets for retribution.
“That really, in my 28 years, has been the fear they have of calling the police. Not so much the other way around,” he said. “They’re really scared of these people.”
That runs counter to the argument made by Democrats and some local police chiefs that illegal immigrants refuse to report crimes because they fear entanglement with federal deportation agents.
These kinds of "below the radar" policies cost lives. That should be the bottom line in creating and implementing any immigration and refugee policy regardless whether it affects adults or children. That 30% of children who we've been told only want to come to America to get away from gang violence, are themselves, engaged in gang activity is a clear and present danger to Americans and illegal immigrants alike. 
That the government has known of this problem for years and allowed it to continue is the height of stupidity and bureaucratic incompetence.

MANHUNT: Previously Deported MS-13 Gang Member Allegedly Murdered Girlfriend


http://media.breitbart.com/media/2017/06/Carlos-Gonzalez-HCSO-Mugshot-640x480.png


Photo: Harris County Sheriff's Office

by BOB PRICE24 Jun 2017Houston, TX157

HOUSTON, Texas — Law enforcement officials in the Houston area are searching for a previously deported MS-13 gang member wanted in connection with the murder of his female companion. The murder victim is also the mother of the suspect’s child.

The suspect, 26-year-old Carlos Gonzalez, bragged about killing people and being a member of the hyper-violent MS-13 gang. Just two weeks earlier, the girlfriend’s sister saw the man “playing” with or “handling” an assault rifle that she said she thought was an AR-15, according to a criminal complaint obtained by Breitbart Texas. The preliminary autopsy report indicates she died from a  wound to the head consistent with a rifle round.
Law enforcement officials stated that Gonzalez had been deported in the past. The victim’s mother said he was from El Salvador. El Salvador is the home of the MS-13 transnational criminal gang.
Maritza Blanca Lopez sustained a shot to her left front forehead near the hairline.
“The amount of extensive damage it caused to the skull, and the trail of fragments and jacketing in the skull was consistent with a rifle round,” reported the doctor who performed the autopsy at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston.
Law enforcement officials discovered Lopez’ partially nude body after dispatchers received a 911 call from an unknown male “who stated that his girlfriend was either playing with a gun or checking the gun and accidentally shot herself.” The man immediately hung up the phone.
Harris County Dispatch called the phone number back, and the unknown caller said he did not know the exact address but gave them an intersection in northwest Harris County. He also said he left to take his baby to the hospital but then decided to take the child to his aunt’s house. He hung up the phone and did not subsequently answer the phone or call authorities back.
Patrol deputies went to the scene and found a residence with the door unlocked. A deputy found an adult Hispanic female in the closet of the bedroom. She was wearing only panties and a bra. Blood and brain matter was splattered on hanging clothes, and the walls and the fuse box in the closet. No weapon, spent-casing, or projectile was found in the closet according to court documents.
After an investigation, officials determined that Lopez and Gonzalez were the listed residents on the apartment. A neighbor told officers that she heard yelling and screaming from two voices in the apartment and then a “loud boom.”
The murdered woman’s mother, Blanca Garcia said Maritza Lopez was involved in a domestic disturbance with her daughter the previous night and has been violent towards Lopez in the past. She said Gonzalez is the father of her granddaughter and an MS-13 gang member.
Investigators found bloody footprints on the floors and a balled-up men’s collared shirt on the floor with a lot of blood stains on it.
Lopez first started dating Gonzalez when she was 14-years-old said her sister, Jessica Lopez. She also told officials that the family had encouraged her sister to leave Gonzalez.
The dead woman’s sister said her sister told her that the couple had a fight and she had kicked out Gonzalez and was planning to leave the apartment. She decided to stay.
Anyone with information about the 5’10” 170 lb. Gonzalez should call Crime Stoppers Houston at 713-222-TIPS. Officials issued a warrant, but Gonzalez has not been arrested. There is a $200,000 bond.
Court records obtained from the Harris County District Clerk’s Officer revealed Gonzalez has a 2010 felony conviction in Harris County for burglary of a habitation. He also has two pending felony charges for endangering a child from June 3.
Sheriff’s Office offials and officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed Gonzalez has not been in custody since his release from prison on the burglary charge.
In March, two MS-13 gang members appeared in a Harris County courtroom laughing and waving at news cameras after being charged with the kidnapping and rape of one 14-year-old girl, and the kidnapping, rape, and murder of another young girl in Jersey Village – a city within the Houston metropolitan area. The murdered girl was allegedly killed as part of a satanic ritual.
Last Tuesday, William F. Sweeney, Jr., the assistant director in charge of the FBI in New York told the House Homeland Security Committee Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, “MS-13 is not the largest street gang in the United States; it is increasingly the most violent and well-organized,” reported Breitbart Texas.
The FBI assistant director added that MS-13 members are “typically much younger than those connected to other street gangs.” They take “cues from the gang instead of relying on a productive family structure. Also, those emigrating from El Salvador to the United States are known to be exposed and desensitized to extreme violence at an early age.” MS-13 members frequently recruit children who are illegal immigrants.
Breitbart Texas reported that the State of Texas considers the MS-13 gang to be a Tier 1 level or the “most significant” threat level. The rise of horrific violence from the gang based in El Salvador and Honduras has also decidedly affected crime levels in the fourth-largest city in the United States. Houston is one of the five cities that the FBI has identified to have a large MS-13 presence. Despite the threat of MS-13 in Houston and Dallas, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings have joined other Democrat mayors in Texas in trying to get the law blocked.
Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump told the crowd gathered in Iowa that MS-13 was like al-Qaida and stressed again his commitment to building a border wall, reported The Daily Caller.
In late April Breitbart News reported that President Trump tweeted, “The Democrats don’t want money from budget going to border wall despite the fact that it will stop drugs and very bad MS 13 gang members.” 

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.

93% of all murders in Mex-occupied Los Angeles are by Mexicans.

OPEN BORDERS: The Democrat Party’s Weapon of Mass Destruction on the American Worker



http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-la-raza-mexican-crime-tidal-wave.html



"Los Angeles saw all crime rise in 2015: violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent," Landry said.”


Although MS-13 started out in Salvadoran communities in Los Angeles sometime during the 1980’s, lax immigration policies and weak border security helped the gang explode in size as MS-13 originated from illegal immigrants, Breitbart Texas reported.

CRYSTAL FOREMAN BROWN - BEING LEGAL IN NEW MEXICO............. Viva La Raza Supremacy and Looting?

I was in town recently, trying for the fifth time to renew my driver’s license. Rejected, again. On the first attempt, I learned that NM has decided to up the ante for regular folks, and you can no longer go into the NM MVD offic...

June 20, 2017

Being Legal in New Mexico

I was in town recently, trying for the fifth time to renew my driver’s license. Rejected, again. On the first attempt, I learned that NM has decided to up the ante for regular folks, and you can no longer go into the NM MVD office and get a driver’s license based on the fact that you simply needed to renew the old one. New Mexico was one of the states, in a frenzy of political correctness and deference to illegal aliens, that passed a new law to give driver’s licenses to people they knew were in the state illegally. 
But in the aftermath, they had fights about it in the state legislature about how to make up for the debacle they had created by causing all New Mexico drivers licenses to be suspect – because the TSA would no longer recognize them as legal identification for purposes of boarding a plane. These legislators, in an even more brilliant move, decided to fix it by making all of the legal citizens of New Mexico prove to them that we are legal citizens. They still give our old licenses to illegals, but now us regular citizens have to prove our citizenship, and that we are not criminals, in order to get a driver’s license that will qualify for identification so we can ride on planes, trains, and other public conveyance. And apparently, the illegals do not have to prove squat to get a driver’s license.
I came home from that unsuccessful but informative mission, and dug through my files, using the information sheet the lady gave me, and collected even more stuff than she needed to prove who I was. Then I made three empty trips with papers in hand, on weekdays, during business hours, to get my nearly expired license replaced, with her out of the office for no explained reason – just papers posted on the door saying the office was closed on that day and several other dates, some in print from a printer, some added by hand with a sharpie, as if in afterthought. I managed to hit three of those days, as it turned out, and the three trips were each 70 miles. Oh well, we are used to that in these parts. 
On my fifth foray I took the following information about myself:
  • U. S. passport
  • Social Security card
  • Birth Certificate
  • Marriage License (this, as she explained, was to legitimize my social security card if my name had changed, and it had)
  • A bank statement (required)
  • A utility bill
  • Property tax bill from my county
  • Current driver’s license
Upon presentation of said documents I was rejected. Reasons:
  • My old social security card did not have the same legal name as the passport, and even though I had the marriage license to show legal reason for it –- she said I would have to go get a new social security card.  As if it is easy to get a new social security card. When I remarried in 1996 my husband took it upon himself to get me a new social security card. They misspelled my name, and it took me five years to get it cleared up – the social security people did not notice there were two of me with the same number and remarkably similar names. It took several phone calls and two trips to their office, 150 miles away to finally get it straightened out. So, where is that new card?  I don’t know and have been afraid to start the process over. In my experience, it is not easy to get a new social security card.
  • I tried to switch from the passport to the birth certificate for one of my documents. She said it would not work now that I had already used the passport.  She was not interested in the birth certificate. Admittedly, I could have misunderstood this part of the lady’s explanation, but she said that since I first handed her my passport for ID instead of the birth certificate, the social security card had to match it exactly.  Still scratching my head about that. I suppose this only happens to women, since we are the ones who change our names – so I guess this only happens to half of us. 
  • The utility bill did not have my street address, just my mailing address, so it did not qualify, (street addresses in rural NM did not exist until the big push to give everyone a street address in the wake of 9/11). So none of my old accounts include my street address, and my street address is not my legal mailing address (the local post office pushed back when street addresses started showing up instead of the PO box numbers, and refused to deliver mail that did not have the legal mailing address). She suggested I contact my electric company and have them change my address, so she could use it for purposes of identification – as if that would be no problem and was a reasonable suggestion.
  • My old driver’s license, which could have been my ID, also did not qualify, since it could have been given to an illegal.
  • At this point, my head was beginning to throb. 
  • My bank statement also did not have my street address, same reason as the utility bill. In fact, my bank and electric company have been the same since 1972, and my accounts with them active the whole time. My street address did not exist until 2005. 
  • The tax bill also did not have my street address in the mailing address, but did have a legal description of my land, along with my street address in the description -- that does not count, she said. It must include the street address in the mailing address that was used to send it to me to be valid as proof that I live in New Mexico.
  • According to her, I had nothing to prove I lived in New Mexico. I cannot help but wonder if it would be okay for me to not file and pay taxes here.
At each explanation, and each rejection, she swallowed hard and apologized, and I knew it was not her fault. But I admit to a bit of a meltdown, telling her I was livid, that I knew it was not her fault, but that I had been in Hidalgo County for 45 years now, and in New Mexico my whole life, and that I was being asked to prove it to an agency that knows it full well already. She said she understood, but there was nothing she could do. Perhaps I could have been kinder. She is not my enemy. 
It occurred to me when I left, steaming, that she could also have looked on her MVD records and found that my first driver’s license was given to me in Las Cruces, NM, at age 15. Pretty unlikely that same license number, with all my names, under the same number, for the last forty-eight years, did not belong to the same old, tired New Mexico citizen -- they probably even have all the lousy pictures of me through all the years on file. I’d like to see the terrorist that could pull that off…

On a happier note, I have remembered that she explained, the first time I went in, that just to operate a car, I can get a regular license that will not get me on a plane, but is legal to drive with -- just like the illegals use!  Just like my old one.  So that is what I will get!  I have a passport for other stuff, and I do not think I will travel by public conveyance much anymore anyway. The business of proving I am not a criminal everywhere I go is getting too annoying. 

AMAZON - BILLIONAIRE JEFF BEZOS SAYS HE WANTS HIS MULES YOUNG, CHEAP AND OVERWORKED!


AMAZON CEO & BILLIONAIRE JEFF 

BEZOS SAYS HE COULD NOT HAVE DONE

IT BY PAYING LIVING WAGES TO THE 

AMAZON SLAVES!
            


California Amazon worker speaks out:
“Amazon fired me because I complained about age discrimination”
By Evan Blake
20 June 2017
The International Amazon Workers Voice (IAWV) was recently contacted by a former employee at the Amazon distribution center in Patterson, California, who was fired by the company last December after receiving three dubious “write-ups.” The 51-year-old worker, who wished to remain anonymous, asserts that she faced age discrimination and was driven out of her job after filing a complaint.
“I was fired because I filed a complaint against a manager. If it had been just another associate, it probably would have been different... There is age discrimination involved, and there are several people that are being held back from being promoted because of it. I made a stink about it, so I ended up getting fired under false pretenses,” she told the IAWV.
Thousands of workers at Amazon have stories of abuse at the hands of the corporate giant, which treats workers like raw material for exploitation. “It's sickening,” the worker said. “It's crazy. They're making money hand over fist, and they can't take care of their workers? They work us to death and then basically when there's nothing left, they get rid of them and replace them with a new batch. We just carry them on our backs, and when our backs break they kick us to the side and get somebody else.”
Soon after she began working for Amazon in 2013, she became interested in job training to learn the skills for “Problem Solve,” a form of quality control at Amazon warehouses. After being told repeatedly for over a year that she would be trained in the near future, and seeing younger, newly-hired coworkers offered the training, she decided to speak with the “Learning Center,” a precursor to speaking with Human Resources (HR).
In response to her complaint, she says an official at the “Learning Center” responded, “Well, you know, Amazon is a younger company and you would probably feel better if you got a job somewhere else.”
When she filed a complaint, the company ignored her, she said. “As far as I know the person that told me I should work somewhere else never even got reprimanded. None of the managers were reprimanded. I was the one who paid for it. I lost my job, I lost my insurance, I lost everything,” she told the IAWV.
That’s when she says the retribution began.
She explained that she transferred to a new unit but that during her training, the manager who was training her was pulled away and she ended up only receiving an hour-and-a-half of training before being sent to work.
Within her first month of stowing while under-trained, she received her first write-up for a “miscount,” three of which result in firing. While management told her they would send someone to complete her training after her first write-up, she asserts that they didn't do so until after her third write-up, at which point she was already set to be fired.
“What they do, and at least our facility is famous for doing this, is they wait until you're at least halfway through your shift and then pull you off the floor and escort you out the door. It's awful... You have to walk through the warehouse to get to the front of the building, and that warehouse is 1.5 million square feet.”
After she was fired, she was left without healthcare. Shortly after she began working, she suffered a serious wrist injury, and then later a shoulder injury, both of which are now chronic and have kept her from finding work elsewhere since being fired. She noted, “Every chronic injury that I now have happened at Amazon.” Losing her health insurance has hindered her recovery, and she is currently unable to lift her injured arm.
Describing the daily injuries at Amazon, she said, “Somebody's always getting hurt in the warehouse, usually shoulders, elbows, wrists, backs from picking stuff up. They tell you to ask someone to help you, but people don't want to help because you get what's called 'time on task,' and if your 'time on task' isn't right, you can get written up. So they tell us to ask for help with heavy lifting, but then we can't help because if we do we're 'time off task,' and if we're 'time off task' then we're gonna get written up. So it's a catch-22, you're screwed either way.”
She also described a pattern of favoritism among overseers, who she says tend to place older workers in areas that require them to lift heavier items, seemingly in an effort to drive them out of the company. She noted that the Patterson warehouse “works with everything weighing up to 50 pounds. They knew I had a repetitive injury to my shoulder and wrist from lifting the heavy stuff and they still put me on heavy lifting. If they know there's something wrong with you, it's like they purposely set out to worsen the condition.”
“There's a lot of favoritism. They say there isn't, but you ask anybody that works in AFE where we pack multiples, and they'll tell you who gets the best walls. There are nine walls where the items get sent down in trays and the manager controls what size trays go to which wall. If it's all small items, it'll go to Wall 2. If it's larger items like dog food, bottled water or heavier items, it'll go to Wall 8 or 9. And if you're not in good with one of the managers, they'll make sure that you're stuck down on Wall 8 or 9, which are consistently the worst walls to work on.”
Describing the atmosphere at the Patterson facility, she said, “Demoralized is an understatement. The overall feeling is that you have certain people who are the pets, the favored ones, and they tend to walk all over everybody else.”
She added, “It's ridiculous how much they push you, they push you so hard. If you make quota, you would think they'd be happy. But when you make quota, then they start pushing you harder, because they want more... They keep raising the rates and pushing us harder, and it's like, how are we supposed to keep up with that? You're talking about young kids that can't even keep up with that.”
She agreed that the entire working class is under assault, including from the Trump administration in the US. She said, “Everything that Trump has done is not geared toward the general populace at all, and we're the ones who are suffering, we're the ones paying for it, and they're just kind of standing on us saying, 'Whatever.' They don't care, they just don't care, but if you were to put one of them in our shoes and have them deal with what we deal with day-to-day, they would not know what to do. They would not be able to handle it.”

THE ENTIRE REASON WE HAVE OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

70% OF ALL ILLEGALS END UP ON WELFARE


The Seattle Minimum Wage Study Is Utter B.S.

http://fortune.com/2017/06/27/seattle-minimum-wage-study-results-impact-15-dollar-uw/

4:45 PM ET

For decades, conservative ideologues have insisted that raising the minimum wage will hurt, not help, low-wage workers. Mandating higher wages will cost jobs, the old canard goes, and the obvious solution is to let the free market function unfettered.
This argument received a significant bump from a recent study by the University of Washington (UW) looking at the impact of the minimum wage increase in Seattle, where in 2014 the city council voted to phase in a $15 wage over the next few years.
The UW study appeared to show that the 2015–2016 wage floor increase from $11 to $13 per hour, one phase on that journey to $15, caused low-wage workers’ annual pay to go down, not up, and overall low-wage jobs to also go down.
Free-market fanatics around the country flung praise at the study, and serious publications like the Washington Post deemed it “very credible.” But fortunately for working people, it turns out the study’s findings are far from that.

RELATED

The research has significant flaws—most glaringly that its data excludes 40% of the Seattle workforce. It also stands in contrast to a massive trove of actually credible studies showing that raising the minimum wage is a boon for working class families and the communities they live in.
For instance, a team led by Michael Reich, an economics professor at University of California-Berkeley, looked at the impact of the Seattle wage increase on the food industry over the same period and found that wages did in fact go up for restaurant workers, and that employment wasn't affected. These findings were, they claim, “in line with the lion’s share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies.”
Reich and his colleagues have done a significant portion of this research , recently studying cities with the highest minimum wage laws in the country, including Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. They've consistently found that higher wages boost worker pay and haven't led to either job loss or a slowdown in economic growth.
Employers see big benefits, too. Workers stay on the job longer, reducing turnover and training costs. They’re also significantly more productive, according to researchers studying wage increases in the United Kingdom.
There are big benefits for broader society as well. Poverty goes down, as does reliance on public assistance programs—one of the few things both Democrats and Republicans can agree is a net positive. Also improved are infant health and adult mental health outcomes, including a significant reduction in depression. (At a time when one in six Americans pops an anti-depressant every day, this seems particularly important.)
If so much research shows significantly raising the minimum wage has a major net-positive impact, what’s the story with the UW study?
One of the major limitations of the study, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out, is that the data it analyzed excluded business with multiple locations, such as chain restaurants and big box retailers. So the 40% of employees they left out work at places like McDonald'sBest Buy, and other stores that rely heavily on the low-wage workers who got the actual boost. That is a highly significant oversight.
The UW study also draws what the EPI calls "implausible findings." Since high-paying jobs went up during the period that low-paying jobs went down, the study implies that the minimum wage hike created better jobs for the rich at the expense of the poor. But this explanation fails to take into account the overall robustness and gentrification of Seattle's economy—a much more reasonable explanation for the disparity.
Given these flaws, it's no wonder that UW's findings diverge greatly from the broader body of research on this topic, much of which the UW researchers themselves cite.
Raising the minimum wage—at the city, state, or federal level, where it remains an unlivable $7.25 an hour—is still a reliable solution to the scourge of inequality. Research should continue to look critically at its impact, but so far the only credible research gives the policy a big thumps up.
Josh Hoxie is director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org.