"Congress must prioritize
four repairs for the immigration system before contemplating any
DACA-style amnesty negotiation, said Brat: 1. Ending chain migration and the
visa lottery; 2. Mandating employer use of E-Verify; 3. Construction of a southern border wall;
and 4. Interior enforcement of immigration law." REP. DAVE BRAT
"Congress must prioritize
four repairs for the immigration system before contemplating any
DACA-style amnesty negotiation, said Brat: 1. Ending chain migration and the
visa lottery; 2. Mandating employer use of E-Verify; 3. Construction of a southern border wall;
and 4. Interior enforcement of immigration law." REP. DAVE BRAT
AMERICAN POVERTY and the LA RAZA MEXICAN WELFARE STATE on AMERICA’S BACKS.
STAGNANT WAGES and
the Dem Party’s obsession with open borders, amnesty and no damned legal need
apply!
THE LA RAZA
SUPREMACY PARTY for OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY,
NON-ENFORCEMENT, NO E-VERIFY and no
Legal need apply!!!
The Democratic Party used to be the party of blue
collar America- supporting laws and policies that benefited that segment of the
U.S. population. Their leaders may still claim to be advocates for
American working families, however their duplicitous actions that betray
American workers and their families, while undermining national security and
public safety, provide clear and incontrovertible evidence of their lies…. MICHAEL
CUTLER …FRONTPAGE mag
In the July/August version of the Atlantic,
columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their
Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate
should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must
abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented
population to zero.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to
the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz,
and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for
deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed
“costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals
want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom
immigrants compete.”
llustration by Lincoln Agnew*
The myth, which liberals like myself find
tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves,
Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a
feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full
story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A
decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock
many progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to
listen to more titles.
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration
wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the
rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006,
a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic
workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage
immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the
inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote,
“When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes
feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to
communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator
was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged
its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to
citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that
low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and
strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals
today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely
painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform
called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot
continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented,
and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally,
and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such
language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system
as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost
entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its
immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering
the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t
use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or
two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of
Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees
and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How
did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’
shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground
has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades
preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented
population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The
number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down
significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic
concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.
What’s
Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political.
Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the
country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win
the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure
white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino
base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward
the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s
2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of
wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they
were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for
reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the
administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June
2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the
administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented
immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various
other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing
growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of
his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who
could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate
America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B
visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and
News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly
immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped
found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for
Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard
way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for
president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox.
Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider
“sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open
borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he
scoffed. He went on to insist that
“right-wing people in this country would
love
… an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of
people, work for $2 or $3
an hour, that would
be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I
think we have
to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among
economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate
attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant
labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the
sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away
from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post
titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The
senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S.
are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven
incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016,
FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this
issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually
been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006,
Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of
low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable
that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today.
To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a
near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by
Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty;
Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There
isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in
terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of
immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes
de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and
politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for,
or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations.
Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops
up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New
York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the
Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading
scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend
to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed
a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into
high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his
research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa
program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their
cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which
questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like
those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to
his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic
research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus,
Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their
“desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists
have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George
Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s,
his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes
its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social
scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his
perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who
takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s
claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of
policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion
in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong
conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose
immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants
and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be
valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too.
Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working
age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs
like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to
boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’
incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the
extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants
compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even
a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the
least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the
most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups
liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against
each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which
allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the
country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based”
approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with
this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many
immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones.
And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of
Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to
wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration
harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and
service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the
money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately,
while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it
also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates,
immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have
larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes.
According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with
children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and
12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children.
In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the
money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in
the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to
expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants
compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and
others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less
willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when
large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s
research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation
just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and
cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that
if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans
would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of
community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our
politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he
declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we
will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously
Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and
greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white
Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This
means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting
immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the
barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating
America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review,
Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis,
examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants.
Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often
assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal
immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the
U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for
undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from
receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant
to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting
people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a
separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by
many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require
immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars
believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation.
And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity
between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not
equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again
and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his
or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For
liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to
citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States.
The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential
run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship
doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S.
illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto.
Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented
themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to
be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and
verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would
presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able
to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as
a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s
research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward
immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because,
according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning
English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton
proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she
rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying,
among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”
The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by
Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the
center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently,
native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more
likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will
also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who
consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam
Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a
voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People
living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been
heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner,
then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and
applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to
aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased
expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and
behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit
intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our
sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those
words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004
Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a
conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and
Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is
among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity.
They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to
effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man
with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote
than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting
pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary
Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she
had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and
globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing
rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve?
What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and
then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on
what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be
president today.
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian
laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving
the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens,
now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The
Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22
billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare,
education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals
claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true.
It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute
only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6
billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark
Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little
evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies
has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with
few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting
them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If
illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way,
California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens
has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who
entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of
the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in
2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for
illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were
illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the
18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those
statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer,
they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown
administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes.
That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a
“sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the
border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner
Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil
disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with
the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements
to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming
of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and
that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to
attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that
cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor
Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With
over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt
compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the
DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University
of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for
illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations
all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers
hear about this program. I can’t afford college
education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a
college education.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
America builds the La Raza “The Race” Mexican welfare state
STAGNANT WAGES and
the Dem Party’s obsession with open borders, amnesty and no damned legal need
apply!
THE LA RAZA
SUPREMACY PARTY for OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY,
NON-ENFORCEMENT, NO E-VERIFY and no
Legal need apply!!!
The Democratic Party used to be the party of blue
collar America- supporting laws and policies that benefited that segment of the
U.S. population. Their leaders may still claim to be advocates for
American working families, however their duplicitous actions that betray
American workers and their families, while undermining national security and
public safety, provide clear and incontrovertible evidence of their lies…. MICHAEL
CUTLER …FRONTPAGE mag
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to
listen to more titles.
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that
“right-wing people in this country would love
… an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of
people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would
be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I
think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner
Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil
disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with
the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements
to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming
of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and
that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
America builds the La Raza “The Race” Mexican welfare state
Illegal
Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year
PEW
MAP OF MUSLIM OCCUPATION OF EUROPE
MAP OF MEXICAN OCCUPATION of U.S.
THE ENDLESSLY
HISPANDERING DEMOCRAT PARTY funded by Wall Street’s biggest criminals says it
is “ALL NEW”…. Meaning open borders to keep wages depressed and no regulation
of plundering banks!
It’s Obama’s wet
dream!
August 11, 2017
PEW
MAP OF MUSLIM OCCUPATION OF EUROPE
MAP OF MEXICAN OCCUPATION of U.S.
THE ENDLESSLY
HISPANDERING DEMOCRAT PARTY funded by Wall Street’s biggest criminals says it
is “ALL NEW”…. Meaning open borders to keep wages depressed and no regulation
of plundering banks!
It’s Obama’s wet
dream!
Russian Collusion in Democrat Inner Circle?
There
has been enthusiastic collusion by the leadership of the Democratic Party with
the Russian disinformation campaign to destroy President Donald Trump. (See "A Brief History of 'Fake
News'" on AT.) The Democrat willingness to collude with Russia to
overturn our democratically elected president is unprecedented. There is the
infamous case of Ted Kennedy approaching the Kremlin to help Democrats defeat
Reagan, but never before has collusion with our enemies by a non-communist
party been sustained and widespread.
What
has changed? We are reaping the results of a multi-decade effort by the
communist and socialist left. Leftists have finally dominated and transformed the Democratic
Party – into something vicious and dangerous to our republic.
Obama
openly boasted that radicalized and mostly
non-white Millennials will soon give leftists a permanent majority. Our
Constitution and two-party system were to be thrown in the dustbin of
history. When Trump destroyed their plans by winning the
2016 election, hard-left Democrats weren't willing to give up power.
The niceties of democracy, where the voters get to chose their leaders, do not
fit the communist credo Obama and his inner circle were raised on.
As
I wrote previously, Obama's
entire innermost circle were children of communists. That does not happen
by coincidence.
With the help of a partisan, unethical press, the
Democrats normalized Obama's every aberrant trait. But Obama is
aberrant. He is a Democrat in name only – in reality, he is a hard left
"red diaper baby" – as were Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod. Obama has had
literally lifelong radical ties, starting with his grandfather and mother, as
well as his Kenyan father, and Obama's beloved teenage mentor, child
molester Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the
Communist Party. According to Paul Kengor,
Frank Davis's political work for the Soviets got him placed on the FBI's
Security Index, so he could be immediately arrested in a national emergency –
the Cold War equivalent of our terrorist watchlist.
In
the White House, President Obama surrounded himself with more red diaper babies
and communist-supporters. CIA director John Brennan voted for the
Communist Party candidate in the 1976 presidential election. Obama
biographerDavid Maraniss was a red diaper
baby. So was Obama's pick to head Homeland Security, Jeh
Johnson.
Cold
War historian Paul Kengor goes deeply into Obama's communistbackground
in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby
President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview. Another Kengor articledescribes the Chicago
communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and
Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put
Obama into power.
Axelrod
himself was discovered and launched in his career by Stalinists in Chicago, the
Cantor family.
Harry was active in the old Industrial Workers of
the World and had been secretary of the Boston Communist Party. ... In 1930, he
ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Communist Party ticket. After that, he
sojourned to the Motherland, taking his entire family to Moscow with him,
including his son David, who one day would come know David Axelrod. ...
For the record, as I've noted separately, Davis – again, Obama's
mentor – also knew and worked with Valerie Jarrett's grandfather and
father-in-law in Communist Party/left-wing circles in Chicago in the
1940s.
Being
the child of communists clearly does not make you a communist when you grow
up. It can make you a savvy fighter of communists, as David Horowitz
exemplifies. But when did Obama reject the radical Marxist beliefs he
once openly espoused? In college, he tells us he sought out Marxist
professors and radical students (think the creepy SDS students you knew in
college). A Marxist student at Occidental College confirms that Obama was an
outright Marxist. When he graduated from Columbia, Obama tells us, he
attended radical socialist conferences, which gave him his road map in life, with their plan to put
a stealth black candidate in the White House.
After
law school, Obama's success in Chicago was based on the help of self-avowed communist Bill Ayers. Obama's start
in politics was as the anointed successor of an openly socialist state rep who
was active in communist circles.
Obama joined the socialist New Party, which rejected the Democratic
Party. Obama's calling in life, to which he vows to return
post-presidency, was work as a hard-left Alinskyite radical agitator
("community organizer"). Obama was a 20-year member of an
openly Marxist church whose members had to take a pledge against the middle
class. So when did this man become a pragmatic centrist? The day
his Marxist backers decided to make him president?
Chief
among these backers was Valerie Jarrett, whom Judicial Watch uncovered as
another scion of a hardcore multi-generation communist family on the FBI watch
list as a possible security threat to America.
Jarrett's dad ... Dr. James Bowman, had extensive
ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows ... "has
long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line" and engages in
un-American activities. ... The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a
business partnership between Jarrett's maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor,
and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.
Jarrett's father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett ...
appeared on the FBI's Security Index and was considered a potential Communist
saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he
was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago
that would "disseminate the Communist Party line among ... the middle
class."
It's been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a
Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields
tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has
connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim
Brotherhood.
Paul
Kengor summarizes the political
import of a Democratic Party headed by a president and his two closest
advisers, and the head of Homeland Security, all from communist families:
I've suffered ... a mix of amazement, agony, and
despair for what has happened in this country. They are at once disturbing and
depressing, yet further confirmation that the most politically extreme
individuals who once agitated and propagandized in our blessed country were
able to place their political children as high as the White House in the
21st century. For the old comrades, it simply took time for the seeds to
root and flourish – and only then with the harvest made possible by really
oblivious American voters who don't understand the ash-heap of ideological
baggage they've permitted to be brought into the country's first house.
There
is collusion with Russia going on in American politics today. It has
actually been going on for a long time. (See Victor David Hanson on
Obama'scollusion in the 2012
elections.) President Trump is the target of the collusion. So are
we all, all his voters, all Americans who believe in our constitutional
republic.
The
great mistake of the colluders is they cannot hide behind lies and media
corruption, as the hardcore American left has done all these years. It is
all out in the open now. The stink of the Mueller witch hunt is in our
nostrils. It is sickening, but the stench strengthens our resolve.
We are not going to let them annul our victory in the 2017 election with dirty
tricks.
The author served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, was a
clinical social worker and psychotherapist, and is an author whose a mystery
novels highlight the wildlife and peoples of Kenya. She currently writes
for American Thinker.
As teachers face new battles against Trump
Lessons of the fight against Obama’s “school reform”—Part 1
By Nancy Hanover and Jerry White
4 January 2018
The new year
will see a growth of the class struggle throughout the world and within the US,
as the corporate and financial elites demand more austerity from the working
class even as they wallow in levels of personal wealth not seen since the
Gilded Age.
After
overseeing the largest tax cut for the rich in
US history, the Trump administration is gearing up
to destroy longstanding social benefits, including
Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. It will
make America, already the most unequal
advanced economy in the world, far more unequal.
US history, the Trump administration is gearing up
to destroy longstanding social benefits, including
Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. It will
make America, already the most unequal
advanced economy in the world, far more unequal.
Trump’s tax
legislation will have massive implications for public education. By capping
state and local tax deductions for individuals, it will likely result in the
loss of up to a quarter of a million public education jobs, as
municipalities—which provide 90 percent of school funding—are unable to raise
revenues. Governors, mayors and school district officials from both parties
will announce that there is no money left to maintain quality schools, let
alone decent salaries, classroom conditions and pensions.
Federally-funded
education programs, including Title I, Special Education and Head Start, which
provide benefits to poor or disadvantaged students, will be targeted to pay for
the handouts to the wealthy and giant corporations.
On the other
hand, the Trump measure provides, for the first time, the ability for wealthy
families to invest in tax-free plans for private K-12 schooling, and continues
the lucrative policy allowing charter schools to utilize tax-free Private Activity
Bonds. These changes significantly shift the education tax structure in line
with the privatization policies advocated by Trump’s education secretary Betsy
DeVos.
A new stage
of struggle is on the horizon for teachers, working-class parents and students.
Past experience, however, demonstrates that spontaneous expressions of
opposition are not enough. Educators need a new political strategy and
organizations controlled by rank-and-file teachers and school employees
themselves, to mobilize the working class to defend the right to high quality
public education for all.
The period
from 2007 to 2016 saw the fewest major work stoppages in the US of any decade
since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began recording them in 1947. This was not
the result of any complacency among workers, let alone satisfaction with the
historic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top that occurred during the
Obama years.
On the
contrary, it was the outcome of the
deliberate policy of the AFL-CIO and other
unions, which guaranteed the Obama
administration “labor peace” in the aftermath of
2008 financial crash, giving the Democratic
president a free hand to bail out the Wall Street
banks, starve the states and school districts of
funding, and restructure economic and social
relations at the expense of the working class.
deliberate policy of the AFL-CIO and other
unions, which guaranteed the Obama
administration “labor peace” in the aftermath of
2008 financial crash, giving the Democratic
president a free hand to bail out the Wall Street
banks, starve the states and school districts of
funding, and restructure economic and social
relations at the expense of the working class.
In order to
maintain the political straitjacket of the Democratic Party over the working
class and prevent any challenge from below to the financial oligarchy, the
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association
(NEA) worked overtime to smother the opposition of teachers—above all in the
suppression of the powerful strikes and mass protests that exploded in
Wisconsin in 2011, Chicago in 2012 and Detroit in 2015-16.
Each of
these struggles expressed, in their own way, the determination of teachers to
find an independent road of struggle. Their bold actions galvanized popular
support among high school students, parents and broader sections of the working
class and of middle-class people. To prepare the next stage of struggle, it is
necessary to draw the critical political lessons from these experiences.
Lessons of Wisconsin
The struggle
of Wisconsin teachers and public-sector workers nearly seven years ago was
among the most the important class battles in the US in recent years. On
February 14, 2011, Republican Governor Scott Walker introduced Act 10, also
known as the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, into the state legislature,
providing for sweeping cuts to public sector workers’ pensions and health care
benefits, and outlawing strikes and collective bargaining. This included a
massive $1.25 billion in cuts to school aid and local government.
The response
by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME),
the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) and other unions was to
acquiesce to Walker’s budget-cutting demands. At the same time, the union
officials organized token protests aimed solely at defending “collective
bargaining.”
While
workers interpreted this to mean protecting their right to fight for improved
wages and conditions, the union bureaucracy had something very different in
mind. As mass protests were beginning, WEAC President Mary Bell said, “This is
not about protecting our pay and our benefits. It is about protecting our right
to collectively bargain.” For the union apparatus “collective bargaining” means
retaining their dues income and state-sanctioned “seat at the table,” where
they negotiate away workers’ hard-earned wages and benefits.
Independently
of the unions, high school students walked out of their classrooms to defend
their teachers, who then followed with a campaign of sickouts. In a matter of
days, the largest working class movement in the US since the 1980s erupted,
with militant workers and young people occupying the state capitol in Madison,
defying Walker’s threats to call out the National Guard, and teachers rejecting
back-to-work orders by WEAC. Support was building for a general strike.
The unions
were thoroughly opposed to a general strike, which would quickly develop into a
political clash not just with Walker but with the Democratic governors in
Illinois, California, New York and other states, and with the Obama
administration itself. The Democrats were carrying out similar austerity
measures, albeit with the collusion of the unions. Wisconsin Democrats
chastised Walker, boasting that his Democratic predecessor, Governor Jim Doyle,
had imposed the deepest austerity cuts in state history, but had accomplished
this without popular resistance, precisely because he worked with the unions.
The unions
quickly shut down the mass movement and peddled the lie that the only means of
opposing Walker was to support recall campaigns to replace the Republican
governor and state senators with Democrats. In 2012, Walker defeated the
Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a shill for big business in
the mold of Hillary Clinton.
By
demobilizing the working class, the unions paved the way for Walker to
implement his reactionary program. Before Act 10 came into effect, the unions
moved quickly to impose multi-year concession contracts on teachers and other
state workers in a bid to maintain their position as bargaining agents.
For
teachers, this has meant:
· 40 percent
of school districts have moved to performance-based pay.
· Teachers
are considered “free agents” and are bargained for competitively by various
districts, creating chaos and “churn” of teachers, with 75 percent of school
districts saying they have lost teachers because a competitor offered a better
salary or benefits.
· Two-thirds
of districts have cut or ended benefits for retirees.
· Class
sizes have been increased and the workday has been lengthened.
· Sixty
percent of districts surveyed said teachers’ average annual salary growth had
either slowed (50%), stopped (8%) or reversed (3%).
· The divide
between better off and poorer districts has been exacerbated. Rural schools and
low-income schools are routinely losing teachers and are more likely to use
inexperienced teachers or those with “emergency” credentials.
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