"Particularly since the 2008 economic crisis,
the ruling class and its two parties have slashed
social spending while cutting taxes for
corporations and the rich."
"Between 2005 and 2015, the total payroll cost for the top 10 percent of UC wages grew from 22 to 31 percent, while that of the bottom 50 percent dropped from 24 to 22 percent."
More than 50,000 UC workers on
strike
For
a political movement of the entire working class against inequality and
capitalism!
By
David Moore
9 May 2018
David Moore is the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for senate
in the California June 5 mid-term elections. You can find out more and get
involved in the campaign at socialequality.com/2018.
Tens of thousands of service workers at the University of
California (UC) are concluding their three-day strike against deteriorating pay
and conditions today.
The widespread support for the strike of services workers,
including from nurses and technical workers who have engaged in sympathy
strikes, is part of a growing wave of opposition from workers throughout the
United States and internationally. However, the unions involved have worked to
limit and contain the struggle and ensure its defeat.
In April, the UC system unilaterally imposed a contract on service
workers that increased the retirement age by five years, included a paltry two
percent wage increase, and allowed the university to outsource more jobs as
well as raise health care premiums.
The UC system is the state’s third largest employer, and the
conditions there are immediately familiar to workers across the country. Just
in the past two months there have been strikes of public school teachers and
support staff in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona.
In each of these strikes, the role of the unions—the American
Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—was to smother
opposition and shut it down. The strikes were not initiated by the unions, but
by rank-and-file teachers. The unions intervened to end the strikes and prevent
them from developing into a nationwide movement against the Democratic and
Republican parties and the capitalist system.
The teachers unions were operating under the principle articulated
by a lawyer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME) in the pending case of Janus vs. AFSCME on union agency fees: “Union
security is the tradeoff for no strikes.” The AFSMCE lawyer was telling the
high court justices: You need us, because without us there will be “an untold
specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”
The main union involved in the UC strike is AFSCME, and it—along
with the University Professional and Technical Employees and California Nurses
Association—is putting this statement into practice. The three-day strike is
intended to let off steam, while doing nothing to resolve the conditions facing
service and other workers in the UC system.
AFSCME has a long history of calling short-term strikes and making
empty strike threats to demoralize members and force through sellout contracts.
In 2014, it cancelled planned strikes of two different sections of workers and
imposed contracts that included increases in pension contributions from
workers. In this strike, AFSCME is seeking to block widespread opposition to
the bipartisan attack on public education and workers compensation by focusing
almost entirely on racial and gender pay discrepancies that they claim can be
fixed at the university level.
The unions want to prevent any discussion of the political
background to the conditions facing UC workers. Particularly since the 2008
economic crisis, the ruling class and its two parties have slashed social
spending while cutting taxes for corporations and the rich.
BLOG: CA IS A STATE THAT HANDS OUT $30 BILLION FOR SOCIAL SERVICES AND WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS BUT CUTS EVERYTHING HAVING TO DO WITH LEGALS!
Within California,
the UC system’s budget has been cut by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and the
former Republican Governor Schwarzenegger.
In 2017 the state of California provided nearly two-thirds less in
per pupil funding than it did in 1990, from $19,100 down to $7,160, after inflation.
State funding now only accounts for roughly 10 percent of the UC budget. More
than three times that amount comes from UC-run medical centers.
Those cuts have increasingly shaped every aspect of work and study
in the UC system. Custodians, groundskeepers and office staff workers are
overworked, and their departments are understaffed. University lecturers find
themselves on food stamps with no prospect of advancement. Students have seen
their tuition and debts soar.
As part of the UC’s transformation from being funded by the state
to making profits from medical and research businesses, well-heeled
administrators were brought in. Between 2005 and 2015, the total payroll cost
for the top 10 percent of UC wages grew from 22 to 31 percent, while that of the
bottom 50 percent dropped from 24 to 22 percent.
UC workers in the medical centers are doubly squeezed by the
attacks on health care that were carried out under the Affordable Care Act
(ACA), or Obamacare. Hailed by the unions and Democrats as a great reform, the
ACA has provided record profits to insurance companies while forcing low-income
workers to ration their care in overpriced plans with prohibitively high
deductibles and co-pays.
Within the medical centers and hospitals, health care workers have
been subjected to particularly sharp understaffing and speedup.
These attacks on the working class have been combined with tax
breaks, bailouts and giveaways to the ultra-rich. Nationwide, the three richest
billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest half of Americans combined.
This immense social gulf grew precipitously under the Obama administration and
continues to accelerate with the Trump tax cuts.
BLOG: THE ENTIRE REASON FOR OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. THERE IS NO BILLIONAIRE THAT DOES NOT PUSH FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY and NO E-VERIFY!
Both parties of big business have worked closely to funnel money
from the working class to the rich. While being run by Democrats from top to
bottom, California has grown to be the fourth most unequal state in the US,
with the largest number of billionaires and the largest homeless population.
When the cost of living is taken into account, California has the highest
poverty rate in the country, at just over 20 percent.
The unions promote the lie that Democrats are allies of workers.
Yet the Democrats voted for a record $700 billion military budget, found room
in the budget for Trump’s border wall and bailed out the banks in 2008, but
claim there is no money for education, health care and retirement.
The three-day strike will resolve nothing. I call on UC workers to
form rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to unite their fight
for wages and benefits with the struggles of the entire working class against
inequality and war. The conditions facing striking workers are the same as
those facing teachers, auto workers, Amazon workers, telecommunication workers,
and all sections of the working class—in the United States and internationally.
The building of rank-and-file factory and workplace committees
must be connected to a political counteroffensive against the two big-business
parties and the entire capitalist system. The resources exist to ensure
everyone the right to a high-paying job, quality health care and a secure
retirement. The problem is capitalism, a social and economic system based on
the exploitation of the working class to secure the profits of the ruling
class.
The resurgence of class struggle:
More strikes in the US so far in 2018 than all of last year
By Jerry White
The resurgence of class struggle:
More strikes in the US so far in 2018 than all of last year
By Jerry White
11 May 2018
There have already been more major work stoppages this year in the US than in all of 2017, as teachers and other sections of workers have begun to break through the grip of the unions and express their opposition.
There were only seven work stoppages of 1,000 or more workers in 2017, the second lowest number since 1947, and the fewest since 2009, when there were only five such strikes. Already this year, there have been at least 10 major work stoppages, and many more are brewing.
“Waves of workers are hitting picket lines in 2018,” CBS News headlined a May 8 story. “From teachers walking out of classrooms in several states to hospital workers manning picket lines in California, a surge in strikes is happening in 2018… The first three months of 2018 have seen revived activity on the labor front, and the second quarter is suiting up to be active as well, as workers strike over issues including pay, benefits—and in the case of some educators—distress over lack of funds for equipment and supplies.”
The strikes so far this year have included:
* The nine-day strike of 33,000 West Virginia teachers and school employees in late February and March.
* A one-day strike on March 19 by teachers on the US territory of Puerto Rico
* A 12-day strike by 2,700 University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign graduate workers and teaching assistants in February and March.
* A three-week-long strike by 1,400 Frontier telecommunications workers in Virginia and West Virginia.
* A one-day strike by 4,000 teachers in Jersey City, New Jersey on March 17
* The nine-day walkout of 30,000 Oklahoma teachers in April
* A week-long strike by 3,000 teaching and research assistants at Columbia University in April and May.
* The April 26-May 3 strike by 60,000 Arizona teachers
* A three-day strike by 53,000 University of California food service, groundskeepers, janitorial staff and nurses at university campuses and medical centers.
* The ongoing lockout of 1,400 Charter Communications workers in New York City
Around 900 teachers are currently on strike in Pueblo, Colorado, in a state where thousands conducted sickouts last month to demand higher wages and restored school funding. Earlier this year, school bus drivers walked out in Seattle and Pasedena, California, and 350 faculty members struck at the Loyola University in Chicago. New strikes have just begun by 600 aerospace workers at United Launch Alliance worksites in Alabama, California and Florida, and electrical linemen in New Hampshire.
The struggles so far are an initial expression of what is to come. In the next few weeks, teacher protests are planned in North and South Carolina; grad students are threatening to strike at the University of Washington; and 50,000 casino and hospitality workers are voting on strike action. Educators in Dallas could strike in September when school reopens.
There is widespread rank-and-file opposition to a deal being prepared by the Teamsters for 280,000 United Parcel Service (UPS) workers when their current agreement ends on July 31. According to news reports, the Teamsters and UPS are discussing a two-tier wage system that would allow the company to hire lower-paid workers to deliver packages on weekends, including Sundays, to compete with US Post Office deliveries for Amazon.
The Atlanta-based company, which blazed the trail for low-paid, part-time warehouse workers, accepted by the Teamsters in the 1970s, now wants to create a “hybrid driver” position that would start at $15 an hour so that the company does not have to pay overtime to higher paid workers for working weekends.
A labor agreement covering 200,000 US Postal Service workers also expires September 20, and opposition is growing among hundreds of thousands of non-union Amazon workers who are paid low wages and subjected to sweatshop conditions.
There is also an incipient rebellion brewing among workers against the United Auto Workers (UAW) more than a year before the contract expires for 140,000 workers at General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler. Earlier this month, workers at the Flat Rock Assembly outside Detroit walked off the job when management attempted to resume production after a worker’s legs were crushed in an industrial accident.
The UAW is currently embroiled in a corruption scandal after it was exposed that union executives accepted millions in bribes for signing company-friendly contracts, which halved the wages of new hires, lengthened the workday and expanded the use of temporary part-time workers who pay union dues and have no rights.
The 10-year period between 2007 to 2016 saw the lowest number of major work stoppages since the US Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting data in 1947, with an average of only 14 per year. This compares to an average of 145 per year in 1977-1986, 332 in 1967-1976 and 344 in 1947-1956.
The suppression of class struggle by the unions gave a freehand to the American ruling elite to restructure class relations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. With the assistance of the unions, corporate profitability was restored through a relentless drive to cut wages and shift the cost of health care and pensions onto the backs workers, and the stock market bubble was re-inflated by providing virtually free credit to financial speculators. The “quantitative easing” program of the Obama administration depended on containing “inflation,” the code word for rising wages.
The historic redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top that occurred under Obama has continued under Trump, who has slashed corporate taxes and sought to lift every regulation on big business, from health and safety to environmental laws. The administration is currently planning to overturn prohibitions on employing young workers under the age of 18 in hazardous occupations.
US corporations are sitting on a cash hoard estimated to be over $2 trillion and are squandering record amounts on dividends and stock buybacks for their richest investors and corporate executives. At the same time, despite supposed “full employment” in the US—with the official jobless rate at the lowest level since 1969—wages only rose about 2.6 percent year-over-year, according to last week’s jobs report, barely above the official rate of inflation of 2.1 percent.
The unions have sought to block any strikes, and, where unable, to isolate them, wear down strikers and then shut down the walkouts before they have a chance to spread. In West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their state affiliates accepted deals with state governments that ignored teachers’ demands and funded meager pay increases by cutting other essential services and supporting regressive taxes that will hit workers the hardest.
Allied with the Democratic Party, the pro-capitalist unions and the affluent executives that run them fear that that these individual sectional struggles could coalesce into a broader movement of the working class. However, the discredited and corrupt unions are finding it increasingly difficult to suppress opposition to their decades-long collusion with the state and the employers.
The strikes that have erupted, particularly among the teachers, have been largely initiated by rank-and-file workers, using social media, in opposition to the strikebreaking unions. This has struck fear in the entire corporate and political establishment. Responding to this challenge from below, the Democrats are trying to do everything they can to prop up the discredited unions and reassert their domination over workers.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and a group of Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Sherrod Brown, introduced the Workplace Democracy Act Wednesday, to shore up the financial and institutional interests of the anti-working class unions by making it easier for unions to sign up new workers with card checks and banning “right to work” laws that allow workers to opt of joining and paying dues as a condition of employment.
“You could make the argument that right now the trade union movement, as weak as it is, is the last line of defense against a corporate agenda that not only wants tax breaks for billionaires but wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid,” Sanders said.
In fact, the unions are the “last line of defense” of the Democratic Party and the capitalist system that it defends. Far from opposing the relentless attacks by the corporations and both big business parties on workers’ living standards and essential services like public education, the unions have been partners in these attacks.
The growing wave of strikes is only the initial stage of a powerful upsurge of the class struggle that is coming in the United States and internationally. Workers require new forms of organization, rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, independent of the nationalist and pro-capitalist unions, to wage these coming battles. All these separate struggles must be combined in a general strike to fight for the social rights of the working class, including the right to a good paying and secure job, fully funded health care and pensions, and a vast expansion of funding for public education and other essential programs.
The resurgence of class struggle must be connected to a political movement of the working class, in the US and internationally, against the capitalist system and its state. All efforts to implement desperately needed social reforms require the expropriation of the fortunes of the capitalist oligarchy and a frontal assault on the dictatorship of the banks and giant corporations. This requires a struggle by the working class to take political power in its own hands and replace capitalism with socialism.
NYC New School
worker-students strike against poverty wages
By Alan Whyte
9 May 2018
Some 850 worker-students at the New School for Social Research in
New York City went on strike Tuesday to protest the lack of a contract. The
strikers, teaching assistants (TAs) and research assistants (RAs), set up
picket lines at three entrances to the school, which is located in lower
Manhattan’s Union Square. The workers are members of the Student Employees at
the New School union (SENS), an affiliate of the United Auto Workers (UAW).
In addition to taking classes as students, they have an exhausting
workload as teachers and researchers, for which they are paid poverty pages in
one of the least affordable cities in the world. RAs and TAs are paid for 20
hours of work per week, while the actual hours they log may be far more than
that. A worker-student may receive a stipend of only $6,000 a year.
It is virtually impossible to live on these wages. In the most
unequal of American cities, the New School pays its president, David Van Zandt,
a base salary of $696,681, with total compensation reaching $2,081,584.
Although no details have been released, the union announced in a
leaflet that the university administration, after much delay, made an offer
that fails to address the worker-students’ demands for increases in wages,
tuition remission, health care and childcare benefits.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled last May that the
New School worker-students had the right to unionize. Following a legal
challenge to the decision filed by the university, the students took a vote in
July 2017 and by a margin of 502 to 2 decided to join the union.
The UAW deliberately limited the impact of the strike by timing it
for the period after classes had finished and finals had begun. With the
support of more than 300 faculty members, the union is seeking to apply
pressure on the administration by disrupting grading.
The strike follows a similar action last month by worker-students
at Columbia University in New York, members of Graduate Workers of
Columbia-United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW) Local 2110. The Columbia strikers were
protesting the failure of the university to recognize the union. That strike
was also timed for the final days of classes and the union called if off before
final exams began.
The UAW made sure that the two strikes took place at different
times so as to prevent the two sections of worker-students from uniting in a
broader action.
The UAW has for years been forcing through concessions contracts
over widespread opposition from autoworkers and enforcing the hated two-tier
and three-tier wage and benefit systems. In recent months it has been revealed
that union bureaucrats who negotiated contracts were paid off by the auto
companies to ram through sellout agreements.
The walkouts at the two universities coincide with strikes by
teachers and other school workers throughout the country who are fighting
against poverty wages, the lack of benefits and the defunding of public
education. These struggles were initiated by rank-and-file teachers in
opposition to the teachers unions, which were then able to get control and
isolate and suppress them.
The New School is also laying off dozens of its cafeteria staff and
planning to replace them with low-wage worker-students. The union to which
these workers belong, UNITE-HERE Local 100, has done nothing to fight the
layoffs, merely circulating a petition to the administration in a pathetic
effort to disguise its complicity.
As with the mass teachers’ strikes across the country, the unions
at the universities are seeking to defuse anger, disarm workers with empty
promises and channel their anger into support for the Democratic Party.
Various pseudo-left groups in New York such as the Democratic
Socialists of America have intervened in the Columbia and New School strikes to
bolster the authority of the unions and the Democrats.
At the New School cafeteria, a small group of Maoists has occupied
the facility in protest against the layoff of the workers. It is using this
action, nothing more than a protest stunt, to conceal the reactionary role of
the unions while promoting race and gender politics to divide the workers and
students. The Maoists are keeping silent on the Democratic Party’s anti-working
class role locally (Democrats control both the city and state governments) and
nationally, and its complicity with the Republicans in attacking public
education.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke
to strikers and supporters at one of the picket lines.
Na, a PHD student in politics, told the WSWS: “I work for the
minimum wage of $15. I support the cafeteria workers. The conditions here are
outrageous and I want to do as much as I can to help change them.
“The conditions facing teachers are insane, and now Trump proposes
to give them guns. That’s really not what they need. They need equipment.
“I definitely agree that all these struggles should be more
united. Those questions are ultimately political. There are no discussions
about how to balance the budget in America. They just keep raising the military
budget.”
Nick, an undergraduate student in media studies, said, “I support
the strike just because I tend to stand with whatever advances student welfare.
The New School has not been on top of it in terms of job security. I think it’s
disappointing that such an institution would not help students who work to
study as hard as they can. I think people who study and work deserve more
respect.”
Aaron, a graduate student in philosophy who expects to become a
teaching assistant in several months, came to join the picketing. He explained
that the TA and RA strike is one of three labor struggles at the New School.
“The student advisers, who play an essential role in supporting students, are
being hit with massive benefit cuts,” he said, “and the cafeteria workers are
being threatened with losing their jobs.”
He added, “In addition to the teachers’ strikes in the US, there
is a wave of strikes and occupations internationally, like at the Sorbonne and
the faculty-student occupation at York University in Toronto. We should all be
together. There ought to be solidarity in these struggles.”
Maybe if California and New York Cared as Much about the Middle Class as
They Do About Illegal Alien…
TWEET
Economists Arthur Laffer (the guy with the famous curve) and Stephen Moore, a leading libertarian voice for mass
immigration, predict that some 800,000 people will pack up and
leave California and New York over
the next three years. The reason they cite for the exodus in their Wall Street Journal op-ed is that the new federal tax law, which eliminates
deductions for state income taxes, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s
back.
Implicit in their assignment of blame to the federal tax
overhaul is that the people who will be leaving are the ones who pay taxes –
the sort of folks that state and local governments rely to provide a revenue
stream. As such, one would think that these would be the people whose concerns
would get a lot of interest in Sacramento and Albany. But clearly that is not
the case.
For the privilege of living in places like the Bay Area, Los
Angeles, or New York City, you must bear some of the most ridiculous housing
costs in the nation, along with crushing state and local taxes. In California, be prepared to turn over as much as 13.3
percent of your income to the state. High-earning New Yorkers fork over a more
modest 8.82 percent, but if you live in the five boroughs you can tack on an
additional 3.87 percent in city income
taxes. California and New York also have
some of the highest sales tax rates in the country at 8.54 percent and 8.49 percent
respectively (and higher in many cities). And now, as Laffer and Moore point
out, you can’t even deduct those costs on your federal taxes.
One might also think that for all these state and local taxes,
residents could expect the most modern infrastructure, efficient public
transportation, world class public schools, affordable housing, and other
amenities. Ha. No, in Sacramento and Albany they prioritize an ever-growing
list of public benefits and services to immigration law violators; subsidies
and grants to go to college, and legal aid for illegal aliens in deportation
proceedings. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is even threatening to sue the federal
government (with taxpayer money, of
course) for even trying to enforce immigration laws.
Some $23 billion of California
taxpayers’ money and $7.5 billion of New York taxpayers’ money is expended on illegal aliens and their dependent
children. For the benefit of the trolls at the Southern Poverty
Law Center, the problems of California and New
York cannot entirely be blamed on illegal aliens. Many, many factors have led
to the middle class flight from these states. But one has to wonder why states
wouldn’t want to do as much to woo their tax base into staying as they are
doing to attract, protect, and reward illegal aliens.
Cutting back on benefits and protections for illegal aliens
would not solve all of these states’ problems, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
In the meantime, every U-Haul packing up a middle or upper-middle class family
headed out of California and New York represents a loss of vital revenue
necessary to address myriad needs of both citizens and legal immigrants.
Steinle’s
murderer, Jose Zarate and been deported 5xs!
California Goes Rogue
By Mark Krikorian
National Review
Online, April 26, 2018
How the Golden State defies immigration law
‘I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” That was President Andrew Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s intention to prevent enforcement of a federal law within the state. Despite his admiration for Jackson, President Trump hasn’t yet threatened to start hanging California politicians. But that state’s “sanctuary” policies protecting illegal immigrants and obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law echo the long-ago fight over nullification and states’ rights.
The passage of three sanctuary bills last year by the state legislature in Sacramento is now the subject of a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the culmination of a decades-long process, as mass immigration transformed California’s politics from reddish purple to deep blue.
The first measure that could be described as a sanctuary provision was the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 40, enacted in 1979, which prohibited officers from arresting a person for the federal crime of illegal entry and, unless he was arrested for another crime, from even inquiring as to legal status. But that order merely instructed police to abstain from involving themselves in immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, a more proactive conception of illegal-alien sanctuary spread, as Central Americans fleeing war in their homelands snuck into the U.S. but did not qualify for asylum.
At first, only some pro-Sandinista churches postured as sanctuaries for these illegal aliens. But in late 1985, Mayor (now Senator) Dianne Feinstein signed a resolution declaring San Francisco a “city of refuge” for illegals. She ordered that “City Departments shall not discriminate against Salvadorans and Guatemalan refugees because of their immigration status, and shall not jeopardize the safety and welfare of law-abiding refugees by acting in a way that may cause their deportation.” The declaration was followed four years later by a city law formally prohibiting city employees from assisting federal immigration authorities.
Even measures such as this, which were adopted by other big cities over the years, were of largely local interest until a new system, developed at the end of the Bush administration and completed in 2013, went online. The fingerprints of every person booked by police throughout the country have long been sent to the FBI. But under the new system, dubbed Secure Communities, those fingerprints now also go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). So while in the past the feds didn’t necessarily know whether cops in San Francisco arrested an illegal alien for, say, a drug offense, now they do. Every time.
There will still be some illegal aliens who elude detection if ICE has no record of them because they’ve never interacted with the immigration authorities. But if police arrest anyone who’s in the Department of Homeland Security database — who was deported previously, got turned down for asylum, was picked up by the Border Patrol, overstayed a visa, or appeared before an immigration judge — ICE learns about it.
There are only so many hours in the day, so not every arrested illegal alien can be taken into custody. But if ICE wants the alien because, for instance, he has previously been deported or is a fugitive from a deportation order, it notifies the local authorities to hold him, as they would for any other state or federal law-enforcement agency, up to 48 hours after they would otherwise have released him, so that agents can collect and deport him.
With this new fingerprint-matching system in place, instead of receiving the occasional hold notice, or “detainer,” cities and counties with large numbers of immigrants started hearing from ICE constantly. In some states where large-scale immigration was a recent development, the political culture had not yet shifted to the left to such a degree that this new level of cooperation with ICE met objections. But immigration, legal and illegal, has transformed California’s population and political culture so profoundly that the pushback there was inevitable.
Of California’s 40 million people, about 15 million are in immigrant households (immigrants and their children under 18), accounting for more than 37 percent of the state’s population. Not only is that by far the highest percentage in any state, but the increase in people in immigrant households in California from 1970 to today — just the increase — is nearly twice as large as today’s total population in immigrant households in Texas, the state in second place.
Survey after survey shows that immigrants are disproportionately big-government liberals. As one overview of the data concluded, “solid and persistent majorities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their children share the policy preferences of the modern American Left.” As a result, as University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel has demonstrated, in the nation’s largest counties (which are where immigrants tend to settle), “Republicans have lost 0.58 percentage points in presidential elections for every one percentage-point increase in the size of the local immigrant population.”
The results in California are plain to see. There hasn’t been a Republican in statewide or federal office since Arnold Schwarzenegger (and he was only nominally Republican). Only 13 of 40 state senators and 25 of 80 state assemblymen are Republicans. This has enabled leftist maximalism on a wide range of issues, including immigration.
Even in this environment, the effects of Secure Communities in identifying deportable aliens were blunted for a time by the Obama administration’s lax policies. Despite the anti-borders Left and its kabuki protests that Obama was the deporter in chief, his administration effectively exempted most of the resident illegal population from immigration law. Even though ICE continued to be notified of arrested illegals, administration policy was to ignore all but the worst cases. In the words of John Sandweg, who headed ICE during part of Obama’s term, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen.”
Then came Donald Trump.
It wasn’t just that Trump pledged tough immigration enforcement in his raw and often coarse manner. It wasn’t just that Hillary Clinton, who said publicly that she would not deport anyone who hadn’t first been convicted of a violent felony, won California by 30 points. It was the whiplash from Obama to Trump that supercharged the sanctuary push in the state legislature. Democratic politicians, their activist allies, and illegal aliens themselves had gotten used to Obama’s arrangements and had come to think that was the way things were going to be from now on. Trump’s reversal of Obama’s laxity fell on them like a bucket of ice water.
The state took a variety of steps in response to the return of immigration enforcement. Lawmakers appropriated $45 million for a fund to help illegals fight deportation. And the state senate appointed an illegal alien to a state education commission.
But most consequential were three laws designed to limit the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration law. The best known is Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, the most sweeping measure of its kind in the nation, making the entire state a sanctuary for illegal aliens. It prohibits state and local law enforcement from complying with ICE detainers in most cases. It prohibits notification to ICE about an alien unless in the past 15 years he’s been convicted of one of a list of the most serious crimes. It prohibits state and local authorities from allowing ICE to use space in their jails and from providing ICE any non-public information on suspects. It restricts state and local participation in any multi-agency task force that includes ICE.
The second of the three measures attempts to impose state oversight on any facility ICE uses to detain deportable aliens. And the final law seeks to shield illegal-alien workers from detection by, among other things, prohibiting private employers from voluntarily allowing ICE agents into any non-public area of their business.
The Trump administration has pushed back. The first step was to threaten to cut off certain Justice Department grants to sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide; longstanding doctrine limiting the withholding of federal funds to coerce states makes a broader cutoff unlikely. A few jurisdictions outside California have changed their sanctuary policies in response to the funding threat, but the administration’s initiative is tied up in litigation and, in any case, is unlikely to hurt sufficiently to persuade hard cases such as California to mend their ways.
That’s why in March the Justice Department filed suit against California to strike down all or parts of the three sanctuary laws, claiming that they were preempted by federal law and that they violate the supremacy clause of the Constitution. (Interestingly, the complaint cites, among other things, the Supreme Court ruling overturning parts of Arizona’s SB 1070, which was intended to assist in enforcement of federal immigration laws, on the same grounds of federal preemption.) But it will be a long time before the case reaches the Supreme Court; the defendants no doubt hope to drag things out long enough that President Maxine Waters or Dennis Kucinich can reverse the policy.
But change may come sooner than that. The legislature’s overreach has sparked a rebellion of communities seeking sanctuary from the sanctuary law. The small Orange County city of Los Alamitos got things rolling by voting to opt out of SB 54 and join the federal lawsuit. A growing list of other cities has joined the suit as well, as have Orange and San Diego counties. More cities and counties are likely to join them.
In an attempt to harness this political energy, two people whose children were killed by illegal aliens have launched a ballot initiative to repeal the sanctuary laws. Don Rosenberg, one of the parents, told the Washington Times , “This will be David versus Goliath. We’re clearly David on this side. But there are millions of Davids here.”
While the steady stream of preventable crimes by illegal immigrants protected by sanctuary policies keeps the issue before the public, the very extremism of the Left may supply the five smooth stones this army of Davids will need to slay the sanctuary Goliath. In February, for example, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf warned illegals that an ICE raid was planned for the Bay Area. Such brazen acts delegitimize sanctuary policies in the eyes even of moderate voters.
South Carolina eventually repealed its Ordinance of Nullification. The state’s subsequent acts of resistance against legitimate federal authority also failed. It’s too early to tell whether California will succeed where South Carolina did not.
Coming soon: Mass exodus from NY, CA due to high taxes
Arthur Laffer and Steven
Moore have penned an interesting article in the Wall Street
Journal that gauges the impact of the cap on state tax deductions in
high tax states.
Their conclusions should
frighten high-tax, big-spending liberals in blue states across the country.
In
the years to come, millions of people, thousands of businesses, and tens of
billions of dollars of net income will flee high-tax blue states for low-tax
red states. This migration has been happening for
years. But the Trump tax bill's cap on the deduction for state and
local taxes, or SALT, will accelerate the pace. The losers will be
most of the Northeast, along with California. The winners are likely
to be states like Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
For
years blue states have exported a third or more of their tax burden to
residents of other states. In places like California, where the top
income-tax rate exceeds 13%, that tax could be deducted on a federal
return. Now that deduction for state and local taxes will be capped
at $10,000 per family.
Consider
what this means if you're a high-income earner in Silicon Valley or
Hollywood. The top tax rate that you actually pay just jumped from
about 8.5% to 13%. Similar figures hold if you live in Manhattan,
once New York City's income tax is factored in. If you earn $10
million or more, your taxes might increase a whopping 50%.
About
90% of taxpayers are unaffected by the change. But high earners in
places with hefty income taxes – not just California and New York, but also
Minnesota and New Jersey – will bear more of the true cost of their state
government. Also in big trouble are Connecticut and Illinois, where
the overall state and local tax burden (especially property taxes) is so
onerous that high-income residents will feel the burn now that they can't
deduct these costs on their federal returns. On the other side are
nine states – including Florida, Nevada, Texas and Washington – that impose no
tax at all on earned income.
The authors put their finger
on the real meaning of SALT: it prevents the rest of us from subsidizing the
blue state model. By making rich taxpayers in blue states bear the
true cost of all those goodies given out by their state governments, those
living in low-tax red states will no longer subsidize the irresponsible
spending habits in blue states.
Now
that the SALT subsidy is gone, how bad will it get for high-tax blue
states? Very bad. We estimate, based on the historical
relationship between tax rates and migration patterns, that both California and
New York will lose on net about 800,000 residents over the next three years –
roughly twice the number that left from 2014-16. Our calculations
suggest that Connecticut, New Jersey and Minnesota combined will hemorrhage
another roughly 500,000 people in the same period.
Red
states ought to brace themselves: The Yankees are coming, and they are bringing
their money with them. Meanwhile, the exodus could puncture large
and unexpected holes in blue-state budgets. Lawmakers in Hartford
and Trenton have gotten a small taste of this in recent years as billionaire
financiers have flown the coop and relocated to Florida. As the
migration speeds up, it will raise real-estate values in low-tax states and
hurt them in high-tax states.
We are the most mobile
society in the history of industrialized civilization. The fact that we
are a federal republic with fifty individual state governments makes choosing a
place to live more than just a preference for climate or
scenery. High taxes generally bring with them a higher cost of
living, urban decay, crime, and a lack of economic opportunity.
So Americans are voting with
their feet. And in this competition, it's no contest.
California’s Rich May Leave to Avoid $12 Billion in SALT Tax Hit
President Donald Trump’s new tax cut, which limiting state and local
tax deductions, will cost rich Californians $12 billion more in federal taxes,
with $9 billion coming from those making $1 million or more.
Recently,
the California Department of Finance reported good news for Sacramento
politicians: thanks largely to having the top state income tax bracket in the
nation at 13.3 percent, California collected about $3.3 billion more in state
taxes than forecast in the first three months of 2018, with 67 percent coming
from higher than expected personal income taxes.
But
the California Franchise Tax Board also warned that
the Trump tax cut, which
limits state and local tax (SALT) deductions to a maximum of $10,000, will cost
same high income earners $12 billion a year more in federal tax.
The
bigger tax bite could also be strong motivation for California’s highest income
earners to vote with their feet and leave California to save big bucks in a low
tax state.
Maine
is second to California with a top income tax rate of 10.15 percent, followed
by Oregon’s 9.9 percent. But Nevada, Washington, Texas and Florida have no
state income tax.
Only
about 61,000 households, or 0.4 percent, of the 16 million households in
California reported an income of more than $1 million in 2014. But the
CalMatters blog commented
that of the 40 million residents in California, the top 150,000 that are in
the top 1 percent of income earners pay about half of all state income
taxes.
California
taxpayers may already be voting with their feet, according to an analysis by
CNBC. The business news team found that from 2016 to 2017, California saw a net
138,000 people leave the state, while Texas grew by 79,000 people, Arizona
added 63,000 residents, and Nevada saw a 38,000 gain.
The
Republican Governors’ Association was quick to observe: “California
Democrats imposing massive tax hikes on middle-class families, driving up their
state’s cost of living, residents are packing their bags and leaving for states
run by GOP governors like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas with lower tax burdens and
friendlier business climates.”
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.
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.
BLOG:
MANY DISPUTE CALIFORNIA’S EXPENDITURES FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN
MEXIFORNIA JUST AS THEY DISPUTE THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. APPROXIMATELY HALF THE
POPULATION OF CA IS NOW MEXICAN AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE LIKE
BUNNIES. THE $22 BILLION IS STATE EXPENDITURE ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH
LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING AT OVER A BILLION DOLLARS PAID OUT YEARLY TO
MEXICO’S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS. NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY THE NUMBER OF COUNTIES IN
CA AND YOU START TO GET AN IDEA OF THE STAGGERING WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE
DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE ERECTED SANS ANY LEGALS VOTES. ADD TO THIS THE FREE
ENTERPRISE HOSPITAL AND CLINIC COST FOR LA RAZA’S “FREE” MEDICAL WHICH IS
ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR.
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.
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.
If Immigration Creates
Wealth, Why Is California America's Poverty Capital?
California used to be home to America's
largest and most affluent middle class. Today, it is
America's poverty capital. What went
wrong? In a word: immigration. According to the
U.S. Census Bureau'...: The
Golden State is peddling fool's gold lately.
California used to be
home to America's largest and most affluent middle class. Today, it
is America's poverty capital. What went wrong? In a
word: immigration.
According to the U.S. Census
Bureau's Official Poverty Measure, California's poverty rate hovers
around 15 percent. But this figure is misleading: the Census Bureau
measures poverty relative to a uniform national standard, which doesn't account
for differences in living costs between states – the cost of taxes, housing,
and health care are higher in California than in Oklahoma, for
example. Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is
20.6 percent –
the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7
percent.
Likewise, income inequality in California is
the second-highest in America, behind only New York. In fact, if California
were an independent country, it would be the 17th most unequal country on
Earth, nestled comfortably between Honduras and Guatemala. Mexico is
slightly more egalitarian. California is far more unequal than the
"social democracies" it emulates: Canada is the 111th most
unequal nation, while Norway is far down the list at number 153 (out of 176
countries). In terms of income inequality, California has more in
common with banana republics than other "social democracies."
More Government, More Poverty
High taxes, excessive regulations,
and a lavish welfare state – these are the standard explanations for
California's poverty epidemic. They have some merit. For
example, California has both the highest personal income tax rate and the
highest sales tax in America, according to Politifact.
Not only are California's taxes high,
but successive "progressive" governments have swamped the state in a
sea of red tape. Onerous regulations cripple small businesses and
retard economic growth. Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific
Research Institute, gives a few specific examples of how excessive government
regulation hurts California's poor. He writes in a recent op-ed for
the Los Angeles Times:
Extensive environmental regulations
aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also
hurting the poor. By some estimates, California energy costs are as
much as 50% higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of
Continental Economics ... found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California
households faced ... energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household
income."
Some government regulation is
necessary and desirable, but most of California's is not. There is
virtue in governing with a "light touch."
Finally, California's welfare state
is, perhaps paradoxically, a source of poverty in the
state. The Orange Country Register reports that California's
social safety net is comparable in scale to those found in Europe:
In California a mother
with two children under the age of 5 who participates in these major welfare
programs – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (food stamps), housing assistance, home energy assistance,
Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – would
receive a benefits package worth $30,828 per year.
... [Similar] benefits
in Europe ranged from $38,588 per year in Denmark to just $1,112 in
Romania. The California benefits package is higher than in
well-known welfare states as France ($17,324), Germany ($23,257) and even
Sweden ($22,111).
Although welfare states ideally help the poor, reality
is messy. There are three main problems with the welfare
state. First, it incentivizes poverty by rewardingthe poor with government
handouts that are often far more valuable than a job. This can be
ameliorated to some degree by imposing work requirements on welfare recipients,
but in practice, such requirements are rarely imposed. Second,
welfare states are expensive. This means
higher taxes and therefore slower economic growth and fewer job opportunities
for everyone – including the poor.
Finally, welfare states are magnets
for the poor. Whether through domestic migration or foreign
immigration, poor people flock to places with generous welfare
states. This is logical from the immigrant's perspective, but it
makes little sense from the taxpayer's. This fact is why socialism
and open borders arefundamentally incompatible.
Why Big Government?
Since 1960, California's population exploded from 15.9 to 39 million
people. The growth was almost entirely due to immigration – many
people came from other states, but the majority came from
abroad. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that 10 million
immigrants currently reside in California. This works out to 26
percent of the state's population.
BLOG: COME TO
MEXIFORNIA! HALF OF LOS ANGELES 15 MILLION ARE ILLEGALS!
This figure includes
2.4 million illegal aliens, although a recent study from Yale University suggests that the
true number of aliens is at least double that. Modifying the initial figure implies that
nearly one in three Californians is an immigrant. This
is not to disparage California's immigrant population, but it is madness to
deny that such a large influx of people has changed California's society and
economy.
Importantly, immigrants vote
Democrat by a ratio higher than 2:1, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies. In California,
immigration has increased the pool of likely Democrat voters by nearly 5
million people, compared to just 2.4 million additional likely Republican
voters. Not only does this almost guarantee Democratic victories,
but it also shifts California's political midpoint to the left. This
means that to remain competitive in elections, the Republicans must abandon or soften many
conservative positions so as to cater to the center.
California became a
Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because
millions of socialists moved there. Immigration turned California
blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.
March 23, 2018
Is California Governor
Jerry Brown Mentally Ill?
Leftists are relentlessly
selling their bogus narrative that Trump is insane. Here are samples
of leftists' headlines: "Lawmakers Met With Psychiatrist About Trump's
Mental Health," "President Trump's Mental State An 'Enormous Present
Danger,'" "The Awkward Debate Around Trump's Mental Fitness,"
"The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists Assess."
So what has Trump done to
convince leftists that he must be crazy? Unlike Republicans, Trump
fearlessly confronts fake news media, calling them out when they
lie. Unlike Obama's punish-evil-America-first presidency, Trump has
America's best interest at heart. Unlike leftists seeking to
dissolve our borders, Trump plans to build a wall to protect our people and our
economy. Insanely, leftists cheered when Obama allowed
Ebola into America, claiming it was racist and unfair for Americans not to be
subjected to the disease. Unlike Obama, Hillary, Democrats, and fake
news media's war on Christianity (forcing a 100-year-old order of Catholic
nuns to fund contraception and forcing Christian businesses to service
same-sex ceremonies), Trump vows to defend religious liberty.
So I guess, according to
leftists' perverse way of thinking, that Trump must be crazy, along with the 63
million Americans who voted for him.
Governor Brown signed a
new law making California a sanctuary state, doubling down on his bizarre quest
to undermine American citizens. In essence, Brown gave federal law,
President Trump, and legal California residents his middle
finger. Numerous California families have suffered devastating
losses of family members killed by illegals with long felony records who have
been deported several times and welcomed back with open arms by
Brown. One mom whose son was killed by an illegal with two DUIs and
two felonies said Brown should be arrested for treason. Isn't it
reasonable to question Brown's sanity?
Liberal governing has
transformed beautiful California into the poverty
capital of America with the worst quality of life. Crazy
taxes,
crazy high cost of living, and crazy overreaching
regulations have crushed the middle class, forcing the middle class to
exit the Sunshine State. All that is left in California are illegals
feeding at the breast of the state, rapidly growing massive
homeless tent cities, and the mega-rich. Would a sane governor take pride
in causing this to happen to his state?
Headline: "San
Francisco Is A Literal [s-]hole, Public Defecation Map Reveals." Can
you imagine homeless people pooping on the streets being so pervasive that an
interactive map was created to help citizens avoid the piles of
poop? Human feces carries infectious
diseases. What
kind of irrational logic deems posing such health risks to constituents an act
of compassion? Is Governor Brown crazy?
Insanely, three fourths
of California's taxpayer dollars – more than $30 billion – is spent on
illegal aliens. Meanwhile, despite the highest taxes in the nation,
California is $1.3 trillion in debt – unemployment is at a staggering
11%. California's wacko giveaways to illegals include in-state
tuition, amounting to $25 million of financial aid. Nearly a million
illegals have California driver's licenses. L.A. County has 144% more registered voters than there are
residents of legal voting age. Clearly, illegals are illegally
voting.
Get this, folks:
Americans are spending almost a billion dollars a year on auto insurance for
illegals. Brown is gifting illegals billions in welfare and housing
while his constituents cannot find a place to live.
Ten years ago, a buddy of
mine excitedly moved his family from Maryland to California to accept the
highest-paying job of his career. Despite his lucrative salary, he
was forced to move back east due to the outrageously high cost of
living. My buddy said if he were an illegal, practically everything
would be free. His story inspired me to write and record a Beach
Boys-style song titled "Can't Afford the Sunshine."
Once again, I ask you,
folks: would a rational governor do what Brown is doing to his
constituents? Is Governor Jerry Brown mentally ill?
Laura Ingraham: ‘California Is Almost Acting Like It’s a Separate Country’
Earlier this
week on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham slammed
California and its leaders for its sanctuary city policies and its open
defiance of the federal government seeking to uphold existing immigration law.
Transcript as follows:
INGRAHAM: The radical takeover of California, that’s the focus
of tonight’s ANGLE.
I still remember the first time I traveled to Southern
California, it was the summer of 1984 and Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics.
Reagan was president and Republican George (inaudible) was the state’s
governor. Now, he was a moderate conservative, a law and order kind of guy.
The whole place, to me at least, felt like a Beach Boy song, the
weather, the people, the lifestyle was all, you know, beautiful stuff. But
today, the sunshine not with understanding, California is a very different
place. It’s now a place where state officials actively thwart federal
authorities trying to stop violent criminal offenders.
Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, went so far as to issue a warning
to immigrant communities that an ICE raid was forthcoming. Well, the president
sounded off on that today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What the mayor of
Oakland did the other day was a disgrace where they had close to 1,000 people
ready to be gotten, ready to be taken off the streets. Many of them, they say
85 percent of them were criminals and had criminal records, and the mayor of
Oakland went out and she went out and warned them all, scatter.
So instead of taking in a thousand, they took in a fraction of
that. She said get out of here. She is telling that to criminals and it’s
certainly something that we are looking at with respect to her individually.
What she did is incredible and very dangerous from the standpoint of ICE and
Border Patrol, very dangerous. She really made law enforcement much more
dangerous.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Now, for her part, Mayor Schaaf is deflecting that
criticism and she is going straight to the r-word.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR LIBBY SCHAAF, OAKLAND: The attorney general is trying to
distract the American people from a failed immigration system by painting a
racist, broad brush of our immigrant community as dangerous criminals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Now who is mentioning skin color or ethnicity or where
people are from. That’s just pathetic. California, the way you see this playing
out, is almost acting like it’s a separate country all together, not a separate
state. Well, I think Attorney General Jeff Sessions was 100 percent correct
yesterday when he labeled state officials radical extremists for perpetuating
the lawlessness.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JFFF SESSIONS, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Federal law determines
immigration policy. State of California is not entitled to block that activity.
Somebody needs to stand up and say no, you’ve gone too far. You cannot do this.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: But California AG Javier Becerra shot back. He argued
that the state sanctuary laws are constitutional adding our folks are very busy
doing public safety around the state. We don’t have to do the immigration work
for immigration officials. Excuse me. Public safety?
Well, that’s what we are supposed to believe when your own
Oakland mayor warned the illegal aliens ahead of time when she got wind of the
ice raid that was about to happen? Today, the White House released a partial
list of the crimes committed set free despite the lawful request of immigration
authorities. Check it out.
There is a Guatemalan citizen who was arrested last august for
injuring his spouse. While the Sonoma County jail provided ice with a whopping
24 minutes in the before it released the alien. A few weeks later, the Santa
Rosa Police Department in California arrested that same individual as a suspect
in the murder of his girlfriend.
Another Guatemalan, an alleged gang member was arrested by the
San Francisco police more than 10 times between 2013 and 2017 for charges
including rape, domestic battery, second degree robbery, assault, vehicle
theft, and on each occasion, what happened was ice requested notification of
his release so then ice could take him into custody.
Each time ICE’s request was declined by California. And then a
citizen of Mexico was arrested by Santa Clara County for drug possession on
January 11th, 2017. He was later convicted of child cruelty, felony possession
purchase of controlled substances and, of course, possession of marijuana. He
was released from local custody.
The list goes on and on. And we could literally do an entire
show just on the myriad ways that California sanctuary policies have endangered
the lives of innocent, law abiding citizens. And, of course, law enforcement
and, of course, legal immigrants.
California AG Becerra and Governor Moon Beam Brown are living in
alternative universe. They deny that they even have sanctuary laws in place.
Yet, here’s what their new statutes stipulate. In violation of federal
statutes, local officials cannot tell the feds when illegals in custody are
about to be released.
And they are banned under this law from transferring criminal
immigrants to federal officials. Now, we are talking about undocumented
criminals here. And the state of California is also so concerned about the
welfare of the illegal immigrants, that they imposed a state-run inspection of
immigrants detained by the federal government.
So, basically, they are trying to regulate federal immigration
detention and, perhaps most outrageously, one California law now requires
private business owners to — they can’t voluntarily cooperate with ICE agents.
Now, in fact, they have to notify illegal employees before any workplace
inspections take place or those private business owners face heavy fines.
Now, you cannot get more radical and rapidly open borders than
that. Though California officials are triggered over the sessions’ lawsuit, it
may be, may be the beginning of restoring some sanity to this state.
Republicans, let’s face it, largely have been shut out of
California politics now for years u and we are a very long way from the days
when Pete Wilson was governor back in the 1990s. Permissive liberal social
welfare policies and the embrace of illegal immigrants have plunged the state
into a spiral of homelessness.
It’s now at a crisis point declared by San Francisco and Los
Angeles and even Orange County. We reported on this before is grappling with
homeless encampments and the crime and health issues that come along with them.
This is not what the people of California want. How do I know that?
Well, a UC Berkeley poll just found that 74 percent of
Californians wanted to end sanctuary cities including 55 percent of Hispanics,
and 73 percent of Democrats. Now, if that’s not a cry for sanity or a cry for
help, I do not know what is.
Sessions and the Trump administration are throwing the golden
state a lifeline with these sanctuary lawsuits because if they’re successful,
perhaps the good vibrations, political and otherwise, can roll through
California once again. And that’s THE ANGLE.
California. Sh*thole.
By Wayne Allyn Root
Gateway Pundit,
California
is Exhibit A. It’s filled with immigrants. Ten million to be exact. Many of
them illegal. Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country?
Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California- where nearly one
out of five residents is poor. That’s according to the Census Bureau.
While California accounts for 12% of America’s population, it accounts for one third of America’s welfare checks. California leads the country in food stamp use. California has more people on welfare than most countries around the world.
. . .
If immigration is so great for our country and illegal aliens “contribute a net positive” to society…how do you explain what’s happening in California?
I haven’t even gotten to the taxes. The income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes and gas taxes are all the highest in the nation. Why do you think that is? To pay the enormous costs of illegal immigration. To pay for the education costs, healthcare costs, police, courts, lawyers, prisons, and hundreds of different welfare programs for millions of California’s illegal aliens and struggling legal immigrants too.
But you haven’t heard the worst yet. California- the immigrant capital of America- is filthy. Perhaps the filthiest place on earth. Filthier than the slums of Calcutta. Filthier than the poorest slums of Brazil and Africa.
NBC journalists recently conducted a survey of San Francisco. They found piles of smelly garbage on the streets, used needles, gallons of urine and piles of feces- all near famous tourist attractions, fancy hotels, government buildings and children’s playgrounds.
While California accounts for 12% of America’s population, it accounts for one third of America’s welfare checks. California leads the country in food stamp use. California has more people on welfare than most countries around the world.
. . .
If immigration is so great for our country and illegal aliens “contribute a net positive” to society…how do you explain what’s happening in California?
I haven’t even gotten to the taxes. The income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes and gas taxes are all the highest in the nation. Why do you think that is? To pay the enormous costs of illegal immigration. To pay for the education costs, healthcare costs, police, courts, lawyers, prisons, and hundreds of different welfare programs for millions of California’s illegal aliens and struggling legal immigrants too.
But you haven’t heard the worst yet. California- the immigrant capital of America- is filthy. Perhaps the filthiest place on earth. Filthier than the slums of Calcutta. Filthier than the poorest slums of Brazil and Africa.
NBC journalists recently conducted a survey of San Francisco. They found piles of smelly garbage on the streets, used needles, gallons of urine and piles of feces- all near famous tourist attractions, fancy hotels, government buildings and children’s playgrounds.
Zuckerberg’s
Investor Group Pushes for Pre-Election Amnesty
http://www.breitbart.com/2018-elections/2018/04/19/zuckerberg-lobby-joins-pre-election-amnesty-push/
Getty/Saul Loeb
Silicon Valley investors, including Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg, are
joining the Koch network’s push for a quick amnesty that would also keep the
issue of cheap-labor immigration out of the November election.
But
the push by Zuckerberg’s FWD.us investor group quickly hit a roadblock Thursday when Majority Leader
Rep. Kevin McCarthy denounced the “discharge petition” amnesty plan, which is
fronted by California GOP Rep. Jeff Denham.
“I
don’t believe discharge petitions are the way to legislate,” McCarthy said
to The Hill. “I don’t believe members in the [GOP] conference believe that,
either.”
McCarthy’s
opposition — and the growing pressure for a quick exit by retiring House
Speaker Paul Ryan — opens up room for GOP legislators to make the November
election all about rising wages vs. cheap-labor immigration. Numerous
polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans want
companies to hire Americans before importing more cheap-labor immigrants, and
numerous business groups say they need more imported labor as wages begin to
rise.
But
a quick Zuckerberg amnesty would prevent President Donald Trump or GOP leaders
from running on an immigration reform platform in November — and would
also deflate economic pressure that is delivering higher wages before the
2018 election. “It would be the dumbest thing possible for
Republicans to do coming election which they already think they may lose — they
would for sure lose with this,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of
governmental affairs at NumbersUSA. She continued:
I
don’t think they will [shift to immigration, but] … it would be a surefire way
to keep the majority. People in Washington talk about [election-winning] ’70
percent issues’ … [and] this is it, this is the 70 percent issue.
Backed by Zuckerberg’s
FWD.us, Denham is collecting GOP signatures for a resolution that would urge a
so-called “Queen of the Hill” debate on the House floor. In that very rare
form of debate, legislators could debate several alternative
immigration bills, and the most popular proposal would be sent to the Senate
Those rules would almost
guarantee a big win for Zuckerberg and his allies because nearly all Democrats
and many business-first Republicans — including many who are retiring this year
— will support a no-strings “Clean Dream Act” amnesty for at least 1.8 million
younger ‘DACA’ illegals.
Denham
claims to have 50 GOP legislators backing his resolution, but those
GOP members have not signed the needed “discharge petition” which allows 218
cooperating legislators to force the debate despite opposition from the Speaker
of the House. Many of Denham’s supporters don’t recognize the impact of
Denham’s plan, said Jenks, and “when they find out, they are
not going to be happy and will certainly not sign the discharge.”’
Denham’s office did not
respond to questions from Breitbart News.
McCarthy’s quick opposition
to Denham’s push is critical because he is the likely replacement for
exiting House Speaker Paul Ryan. Without McCarthy’s support for the
immigration push, few of the GOP legislators on Denham’s resolution will
sign the needed discharge petition — even though many will use their support
for the resolution to ingratiate themselves with their donors and pro-amnesty
voters.
Denham’s
resolution is getting expensive media support from the various donors who are
working under cover of the Koch advocacy network, which has at least 550
business donors.
On April 17. Daniel Garza, the president of the Koch-funded LIBRE
Initiative, told Business Insider:
The American people deserve a
government that is effective and efficient in solving our nation’s problems.
Congress and the White House
have spent a lot of time talking about DACA, but today our elected officials have
yet to approve a permanent legislative solution. The Dreamers are among
our best and brightest. They are students, workers, and men and women
risking their lives in the Armed Forces. Washington must come together and
approve a bipartisan solution that provides certainty for Dreamers and
security improvements along our border.
Zuckerberg’s
FWD.us advocacy group is also providing direct support for the Denham
push, and it touted Wednesday’s press conference where Denham was flanked by a
few other cheap-labor Republicans — Texas Rep. Will Hurd, Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman and
California Rep. David Valadao – as
well as the Democratic head of the Hispanic ethnic lobby, new Mexico
Democrat Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
NOW and NEW: 50
Republicans join over 180 Republicans for the “Queen of the Hill” Rule to try
to force a debate/series of votes for Dreamers.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group was
founded a by a slew of information-technology investors who gain from cheap white-collar labor.
The
group has endorsed multiple bills and amnesties which would raise
the supply of white-collar labor and also block Donald
Trump’s populist “Buy American, Hire American” policies, all of which will tend
to raise Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. In February,
FWD.us joined with many other business groups to help the Senate block Trump’s
popular immigration reforms.
Since
Trump’s election, the FWD.us group has used the relatively few college-grad ‘DACA’ illegals to
shift the political focus from Trump’s very popular wages-for-Americans pitch.
That diversionary tactic has worked, partly because most establishment
reporters prefer to focus on the concerns of foreign migrants rather than the
concerns of fellow Americans.
However,
Republicans are facing a tough 2018 election and may decide to pick
up the issue up the popular issue of immigration and wages, especially if
McCarthy replacesHouse Speaker Paul Ryan before the election.
That
shift to wages and immigration is made likelier by the spreading benefits of
Trump’s anti-amnesty policies which is delivering higher wages and overtime to many employees,
including black bakers in Chicago, Latino restaurant workers in Monterey,
Calif., disabled people in Missouri, high-schoolers, the construction industry, Superbowl workers, the garment industry, and workers
employed at small businesses.
Higher
wages are strongly resisted by business groups,
partly because they threaten to lower investors’ returns and
stock values on
Wall Street, including the founders of FWD.us.
Zuckerberg’s
group has funded polls which tout the supposed
popularity of immigration. These “Nation of Immigrants” polls pressure Americans to
say they welcome migrants.
In
contrast, polls which ask people to pick a priority, or to decide which
options are fair, show that voters
in the polling booth put a high priority on helping their families and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a
high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy.
Also,
a series of 2018 polls and surveys show that GOP voters believe the immigration
issue is far more important than celebrating tax
cuts.
Four million Americans turn
18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market. But the
federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting
roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to
roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the
employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The
Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration
shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street
values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled
labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives
up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least
5 million marginalized Americans and their families,
including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
HALF THE POPULATION OF CALIFORNIA WAS BORN IN MEXICO!
California
Passes UK to Become World’s 5th Largest Economy
California zipped
past the United Kingdom to become the 5thlargest economy in the world in 2017.
The
U.S. Commerce Department reported that California with a population of 39.54
million has a larger Gross State Product at $2.75 trillion, versus the United
Kingdom with a population of 65.64 million and a Gross Domestic Product of
$2.62 trillion.
A
big advantage California enjoys is having a surface area of 163,696 square
miles, compared to the UK with just 93,628 square miles of area. Although
almost a third of California is uninhabited, about the
same one-third of the UK is uninhabited.
Setting
a new all-time highest ranking versus the world is a huge change from 2012 when
huge swaths of California real estate was getting foreclosed and thousands of
cars were getting repossessed. This knocked the not-so-golden state to a world
economic ranking of #10.
But
California’s Gross State Product jump by $700 billion and created 2 million
jobs in the last six years. A huge piece of that recovery has been due to
globalism, with the U.S. Commerce Department reporting that
California exported $171.9 billion to 229 foreign economies in 2017.
Outstanding
performing export sectors were Silicon Valley which passed $30 billion, Hollywood
entertainment hitting about $16 billion, and
the state’s agricultural sector recording a near-record $20 billion in exports.
The
chief economist at the California Department of Finance Irena Asmundson told the
Associated Press that California’s economy since the lows in 2012 hit new highs
in 2017 that included $26 billion for financial services and real estate; $20
billion for the information sector; and a decade-high $10 billion in
manufacturing.
Asmundson
added that during the five-year period, California with 12 percent of the U.S.
population created 16 percent of all new domestic jobs and the state’s share of
U.S. Gross Domestic Product grew from 12.8 percent to 14.2 percent.
California’s
unemployment rate was at a 17-year low of 4.8
percent in 2017 and has steadily declined to 4.3 percent at the
end of March to set a 38-year low, according to the state’s Employment
Development Department.
But
not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart News reporting
that Silicon Valley has the highest income inequality in
the nation and the U.S.
News & World Report naming California
as the worst state for “quality of life,” due to the high cost of living.
If
California was a nation, the only countries left to pass would be Germany with
a GDP of $3.69 trillion, Japan with a GDP of $4.87 trillion and China with a
GDP of $12.02 trillion. Then the Golden State could try to pass United States
that has a GDP of $16.64 trillion, without California.
WHY AMERICA CAN’T LOWER
CHILD POVERTY LEVELS
Economy, finance, and budgets
The Social Order
Articles about America’s
high levels of child poverty are a media evergreen. Here’s a typical entry,
courtesy of the New York Times’s Eduardo Porter: “The
percentage of children who are poor is more than three times as high in the
United States as it is in Norway or the Netherlands. America has a larger
proportion of poor children than Russia.” That’s right: Russia.
Outrageous
as they seem, the assertions are true—at least in the sense that they line up
with official statistics from government agencies and reputable nongovernmental
organizations like the OECD and UNICEF. International comparisons of the sort
that Porter makes, though, should be accompanied by a forest of asterisks. Data
limitations, varying definitions of poverty, and other wonky problems are
rampant in these discussions.
The lousy
child-poverty numbers should come with another qualifying asterisk, pointing to
a very American reality. Before Europe’s recent migration crisis, the United
States was the only developed country consistently to import millions of very
poor, low-skilled families, from some of the most destitute places on
earth—especially from undeveloped areas of Latin America—into its communities,
schools, and hospitals. Let’s just say that Russia doesn’t care to do this—and,
until recently, Norway and the Netherlands didn’t, either. Both policymakers
and pundits prefer silence on the relationship between America’s immigration
system and poverty, and it’s easy to see why. The subject pushes us headlong
into the sort of wrenching trade-offs that politicians and advocates prefer to
avoid. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: you can allow mass low-skilled
immigration, which many on the left and the right—and probably most poverty
mavens—consider humane and quintessentially American. But if you do, pursuing
the equally humane goal of substantially reducing child poverty becomes a lot
harder.
In 1964, the federal
government settled on a standard definition of poverty: an income less than
three times the value of a hypothetical basic food basket. (That approach has
its flaws, but it’s the measure used in the United States, so we’ll stick with
it.) Back then, close to 23 percent of American kids were poor. With the
important exception of the years between 1999 and 2007—following the
introduction of welfare reform in 1996—when it declined to 16 percent, child
poverty has bounced within three points of 20 percent since 1980. Currently,
about 18 percent of kids are below the poverty line, amounting to 13,250,000
children. Other Anglo countries have lower child-poverty rates: the OECD puts Canada’s
at 15 percent, with the United Kingdom and Australia lower still, between 11
percent and 13 percent. The lowest levels of all—under 10 percent—are found in
the Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland.
How does
immigration affect those post-1964 American child-poverty figures? Until 1980,
it didn’t. The 1924 Immigration Act sharply reduced the number of immigrants
from poorer Eastern European and southern countries, and it altogether banned
Asians. (Mexicans, who had come to the U.S. as temporary agricultural workers
and generally returned to their home country, weren’t imagined as potential
citizens and thus were not subject to restrictive quotas.) The relatively small
number of immigrants settling in the U.S. tended to be from affluent nations
and had commensurate skills. According to the Migration Policy Institute, in
1970, immigrant children were less likely to be poor than were the children of
native-born Americans.
By 1980,
chiefly because of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the situation
had reversed: immigrant kids were now poorer than native-born ones. That 1965
law, overturning the 1924 restrictions, made “family preference” a cornerstone
of immigration policy—and, as it turned out, that meant a growing number of new
Americans hailing from less-developed countries and lacking skills. The income
gap between immigrant and native children widened. As of 1990, immigrant kids
had poverty rates 50 percent higher than their native counterparts. At the turn
of the millennium, more than one-fifth of immigrant children, compared with
just 9 percent of non-Hispanic white kids, were classified as poor. Today,
according to Center for Immigration Studies estimates, 31.1 percent of the poor
under 18 are either immigrants or the American-born kids of immigrant parents.
Perhaps
the most uncomfortable truth about these figures, and surely one reason they
don’t often show up in media accounts, is that a large majority of America’s
poor immigrant children—and, at this point, a large fraction of all its poor
children—are Hispanic (see chart below). The U.S. started collecting separate
poverty data on Hispanics in 1972. That year, 22.8 percent of those originally
from Spanish-language countries of Latin America were poor. The percentage hasn’t
risen that dramatically since then; it’s now at 25.6 percent. But because the
Hispanic population in America quintupled during those years, these immigrants
substantially expanded the nation’s poverty rolls. Hispanics are now the
largest U.S. immigrant group by far—and the lowest-skilled. Pew estimates that
Hispanics accounted for more than half the 22-million-person rise in the
official poverty numbers between 1972 and 2012. Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post found that, between 1990 and 2016, Hispanics
drove nearly three-quarters of the increase in the nation’s poverty population
from 33.6 million to 40.6 million.
Ironically,
then, at the same time that America’s War on Poverty was putting a spotlight on
poor children, the new immigration system was steadily making the problem
worse. In 1980, only 9 percent of American children were Hispanic. By 2009,
that number had climbed to 22 percent. Almost two-thirds of these children were
first- or second-generation immigrants, most of whose parents were needy.
Nowadays, 31 percent of the country’s Hispanic children are in poverty. That
percentage remains somewhat lower than the 36 percent of black children who are
poor, true; but because the raw number of poor Hispanic kids—5.1 million—is so
much higher (poor black children number 3.7 million), they make up by far the
largest group in the child-poverty statistics. As of 2016, Hispanic children
account for more than one-third of America’s poor children. Between 1999 and
2008 alone, the U.S. added 1.8 million children to the poverty rolls; the
Center for Immigration Studies reports that immigrants accounted for 45 percent
of them.
Let’s be clear: Hispanic
immigration isn’t the only reason that the U.S. has such troubling
child-poverty rates. Other immigrant groups, such as North Africans and
Laotians, add to the ranks of the under-18 poor. And American Indians have the
highest rates of child poverty of all ethnic and racial groups. These are
relatively small populations, however; combine Indians and Laotians, and you
get fewer than a half-million poor children—a small chunk of the 14-plus
million total.
Even if
we were following the immigration quotas set in 1924, the U.S. would be
something of a child-poverty outlier. The nation’s biggest embarrassment is the
alarming percentage of black children living in impoverished homes.
Unsurprisingly, before the civil rights movement, the numbers were higher; in
1966, almost 42 percent of black kids were poor. But those percentages started
to improve in the later 1960s and in the 1970s. Then they soared again. By the
1980s and early 1990s, black child poverty was hovering miserably between 42
percent and almost 47 percent. Researchers attribute the lack of progress to
the explosion in single-parent black families and welfare use. The current
percentage of black kids living with a single mother—66 percent—far surpasses
that of any other demographic group. The 1996 welfare-reform bill and a strong
economy helped bring black child poverty below 40 percent, a public-policy
success—but the numbers remain far too high.
Policymakers and pundits prefer silence on the
relationship between America’s immigration system and poverty.
Immigrant
poverty, though usually lumped within a single “child-poverty” number, belongs
in a different category from black or Native American poverty. After all,
immigrants voluntarily came to the United States, usually seeking opportunity.
And immigrants of the past often found it. The reality of American upward
mobility helps explain why, despite real hardships, poor immigrant childhood
became such a powerful theme in American life and literature. Think of classic
coming-of-age novels like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (about Irish
immigrants), Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (Jewish
immigrants), and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (West Indians), all
set in the first decades of the twentieth century. With low pay, miserable work
conditions, and unreliable hours, the immigrant groups that such novels
depicted so realistically were as poor as—and arguably more openly
discriminated against than—today’s Mexicans or Bangladeshis.
Their
children, though, didn’t need a ton of education to leave the hard-knocks life
behind. While schools of that era were doubtless more committed to assimilating
young newcomers than are today’s diversity-celebrating institutions, sky-high
dropout rates limited their impact. At the turn of the twentieth century, only
5 percent of the total population graduated from high school; the rate among
immigrants would have been even lower. That doesn’t mean that education brought
no advantages. Though economist George Borjas notes that endemic truancy and
interrupted studies had ripple effects on incomes into following generations,
the pre–World War II industrial economy offered a “range of blue collar
opportunities” for immigrant children, as sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel
Perlman observe, and it required “only modest educations to move a notch or two
above their parents.” It may have taken more than one generation, but most
immigrant families could expect, if not Horatio Alger–style ascents, at least
middle-class stability over time.
America’s
economy has transformed in ways that have blocked many of the avenues to upward
mobility available to the immigrant families of the past. The kind of
middle-skilled jobs that once fed the aspirations of low-income strivers are
withering. “Modest educations” will no longer raise poor immigrant children
above their parents’ station. Drop out of high school, and you’ll be lucky to
be making sandwiches at a local deli or cleaning rooms at a Motel 6. Even a
high school diploma can be a dead end, unless supplemented by the right kind of
technical training. Get a college degree, however, and it is a different,
happier, story.
Yes, some
immigrant groups known for their obsessional devotion to their children’s
educational attainment (Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants come to mind) still
have a good shot at middle-class stability, even though the parents typically
arrive in America with little skill or education and, working in low-wage
occupations, add to poverty numbers in the short term. But researchers have
followed several generations of Hispanics—again, by far the largest immigrant
group—and what they’ve found is much less encouraging. Hispanic immigrants
start off okay. Raised in the U.S., the second generation graduates high school
and goes to college at higher rates than its parents, and it also earns more,
though it continues to lag significantly behind native-born and other immigrant
groups in these outcomes. Unfortunately, the third generation either stalls, or
worse, takes what the Urban Institute calls a “U-turn.” Between the second and
third generation, Hispanic high school dropout rates go up and college-going declines.
The third generation is more often disconnected—that is, neither attending
school nor employed. Its income declines; its health, including obesity levels,
looks worse. Most disturbing, as we look to the future, a third-generation
Hispanic is more likely to be born to a single mother than were his first- or
second-generation predecessors. The children of single mothers not only have
high poverty rates, regardless of ethnic or racial background; they’re also
less likely to experience upward mobility, as a mountain of data shows.
The
Hispanic “U-turn” probably has many causes. Like most parents these days,
Hispanics say that they believe that education is essential for their
children’s success. Cultural norms that prize family and tradition over achievement
and independence often stand in the way. According to a study in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, Hispanic parents don’t
talk and read to their young children as much as typical middle-class parents,
who tend to applaud their children’s attempts at self-expression, do;
differences in verbal ability show up as early as age two. Hispanic parents of
low-achieving students, most of whom also voiced high academic hopes for their
kids, were still “happy with their children’s test scores even when the
children performed poorly.” Their children tended to be similarly satisfied.
Unlike many other aspiring parents, Hispanics are more reluctant to see their
children travel to magnet schools and to college. They also become parents at
younger ages. Though Hispanic teen birthrates have fallen—as they have for all
groups, apart from American Indians—they remain the highest in the nation.
The sheer
size of the Hispanic population hinders the assimilation that might moderate
some of these preferences. Immigrants have always moved into ethnic enclaves in
the United States when they could, but schools and workplaces and street life
inevitably meant mixing with other kinds, even when they couldn’t speak the
same language. In many parts of the country, though, Hispanics are easily able
to stick to their own. In fact, Generations of Exclusion, a longitudinal study of
several generations of Mexican-Americans, found that a majority of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans live in Hispanic neighborhoods and
marry other Hispanics.
Other affluent countries
have lots of immigrants struggling to make it in a postindustrial economy.
Those countries have lower child-poverty rates than we do—some much lower. But
the background of the immigrants they accept is very different. Canada, New
Zealand, and Australia are probably the best points of comparison. Like the
United States, they are part of the Anglosphere and historically multicultural,
with large numbers of foreign-born residents. However, unlike the U.S., they
all use a points system that considers education levels and English ability,
among other skills, to determine who gets immigration visas. The Brookings
Institution’s Hamilton Project calculates that, while 30 percent of American
immigrants have a low level of education—meaning less than a high school
diploma—and 35 percent have a college degree or higher, only 22 percent of
Canadian immigrants lack a high school diploma, while more than 46 percent have
gone to college. (Canada tightened its points system after a government study
found that a rise in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s could be
almost entirely attributed to an influx of poorer immigrants.) Australia and
New Zealand also have a considerably more favorable ratio of college-educated
immigrants than does the United States. The same goes for the U.K.
The
immigration ecosystem of the famously egalitarian Nordic countries also differs
from the U.S.’s in ways that have kept their poverty numbers low. Historically,
the Nordics didn’t welcome large numbers of greenhorns. As of 1940, for
instance, only 1 percent of Sweden’s population was foreign-born, compared with
almost 8.8 percent of Americans. After World War II, Nordic immigration numbers
began rising, with most of the newcomers arriving from developed countries, as
was the case in the U.S. until 1965. In Finland and Iceland, for instance, the
plurality of immigrants today is Swedish and Polish, respectively. In Norway,
the majority of immigrants come from Poland and Lithuania. Note that these groups
have low poverty rates in the U.S., too.
Sweden
presents the most interesting case, since it has been the most welcoming of the
Nordic countries—and it has one of the most generous welfare states, providing
numerous benefits for its immigrants. For a long time, the large majority of
Sweden’s immigrants were from Finland, a country with a similar culture and
economy. By the 1990s, the immigrant population began to change, though, as
refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, Iran, and Iraq—populations with
little in common culturally with Sweden and far more likely to be unskilled
than immigrants from the European Union. By 2011, Sweden, like other European
countries, was seeing an explosion in the number of asylum applicants from
Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa; in 2015 and 2016, there was another spike.
Sweden’s percentage of foreign-born has swelled to 17 percent—higher than the
approximately 13 percent in the United States.
How has
Sweden handled its growing diversity? We don’t have much reliable data from the
most recent surge, but numbers from earlier this decade suggest the limits of
relying on copious state benefits to acclimate cultural outsiders. In the U.S.,
immigrants are still more likely to be employed than are the native-born. In
Sweden, the opposite holds. More than 26 percent of Swedish newcomers have
remained unemployed long-term (for more than a year). Immigrants tend to be
poorer than natives and more likely to fall back into poverty if they do
surmount it. In fact, Sweden has one of the highest poverty rates among
immigrants relative to native-born in the European Union. Most strikingly, a
majority of children living in Sweden classified as poor in 2010 were
immigrants.
Despite
its resolute antipoverty efforts, Sweden has, if anything, been less successful
than the U.S. at bringing its second-generation immigrants up to speed.
According to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
survey, Sweden has “declined over the past decade [between 2005 and 2015] from
around average to significantly below average . . . . No other country taking
part in PISA has seen a steeper fall.” The Swedish Education Agency reports
that immigrant kids were responsible for 85 percent of a decline in school
performance.
Outcomes like these suggest
that immigration optimists have underestimated the difficulty of integrating
the less-educated from undeveloped countries, and their children, into advanced
economies. A more honest accounting raises tough questions. Should the United
States, as the Trump administration is proposing, and as is already the case in
Canada and Australia, pursue a policy favoring higher-skilled immigration? Or
do we accept higher levels of child poverty and lower social mobility as a cost
of giving refuge and opportunity to people with none? If we accept such costs,
does it even make sense to compare our child-poverty numbers with those of
countries like Denmark or Sweden, which have only recently begun to take in
large numbers of low-skilled immigrants?
Recent
events in Denmark and Sweden put another question in stark relief. How many
newcomers—especially from very different cultures—can a country successfully
absorb, and on what timetable? A surge of asylum seekers beginning in 2015
forced both countries to introduce controls at their borders and limits to
asylum acceptances. Their existing social services proved unable to cope with
the swelling ranks of the needy; there was not enough housing, and, well,
citizens weren’t always as welcoming as political leaders might have wished.
The growing power of anti-immigrant political parties has shocked these
legendarily tolerant cultures.
And yet
one more question: How long can generous welfare policies survive large-scale
low-skilled immigration? The beneficent Nordic countries are not the only ones
that need to wonder. The National Academies of Sciences finds that immigration
to America has an overall positive impact on the fiscal health of the federal
government, but not so for the states and localities that must pay for education,
libraries, some social services, and a good chunk of Medicaid. Fifty-five
percent of California’s immigrant families use some kind of means-tested
benefits; for natives, it’s 30 percent. The centrist Hamilton Project observes
that high-immigrant states—California, New York, New Jersey, among others—“may
be burdened with costs that will only be recouped over a number of years, or,
if children move elsewhere within the United States, may never fully be
recovered.”
In short,
confronting honestly the question of child-poverty rates in the United
States—and, increasingly, such rates in other advanced countries—means
acknowledging the reality that a newcomer’s background plays a vital role in
immigrant success. Alternatively, of course, one can always fall back on
damning worries about our current immigration system as evidence of racism.
Remember November 8, 2016, if you want to know how that will play out.
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