Thursday, May 10, 2018

Senator Dianne Feinstein, looking to buy California's illegals' votes declares that illegals steal American jobs and tens of billions in welfare.... SO, GIVE THEM AMNESTY AND THEY WON'T BE ILLEGALS ANYMORE!

Senator Dianne Feinstein warned, at the time, they had to solve this crisis now—of immigrants coming in illegally and getting these jobs.” BLOG: FEINSTEIN IS AN ADVOCATE OF AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. THERE ARE 15 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS IN HER STATE OF CA.


National Public Radio’s This American Life promotes anti-immigrant propaganda

By Eric London 
On December 8, National Public Radio (NPR) ran an episode of This American Life titled “Our Town,” which legitimized workplace raids against immigrants and justified tougher sanctions for employing undocumented workers.
The program’s host, Ira Glass, is not a far-right talk show host, but a favorite of affluent Democrats. His show has 2.2 million listeners.
The episode titled “Our Town” could very well have been aired on Breitbart Radio. Couched in the language of nationalist populism, the episode advanced an anti-immigrant agenda by blaming corporations for giving jobs to immigrants instead of US citizens.
In the episode, Glass describes Albertville, Alabama, a small town that is home to poultry processing plants, as having been overrun by immigrants. It “got a flood of outsiders,” Glass says, using the language of nativists to describe the influx of Latino workers seeking employment in the poultry plants as “immigrants pouring in,” “a ton of immigrants” and “tons of Mexican workers.”
Toward the beginning of the episode, Glass gives airspace to Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has denounced as part of the “nativist lobby.” Beck has spoken before the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and is the protégé of the fascist anti-immigrant advocate John Tanton. Glass uncritically quotes Beck while introducing him simply as “the founder of a group called NumbersUSA.”
Glass then references the massive “SouthPAW” workplace immigration raids during which hundreds of agents descended on small southern towns in 1995 and deported 4,000 workers. PAW stands for “Protecting American Workers.” During the raids, immigration police dragged people out of their workplaces, split them from their families and summarily deported them to violent, war-torn Central American countries.
“The goal was to create job openings for American workers by arresting lots of people at work sites,” Glass says. “At the Gold Kist plant outside of town, workers cheered when [immigration agents] arrived.”
This reactionary effort to present deportations as “pro-worker” echoes the line of Bernie Sanders and the trade union bureaucracy. During the Democratic primary election campaign, in an interview with Vox ’s Ezra Klein, Sanders attacked open borders and free migration as “a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.” He added, “It would make everybody in America poorer.”
This American Life’s producer, Miki Meek, then interviews the immigration agent responsible for leading the SouthPAW raids, Bart Szafnicki. This American Life uncritically repeats his claim that the raids did not go far enough.
Meek says: “Bart pointed out, there’s never been a serious crackdown on employers. These raids were short-lived. The fines were low. The chances of getting caught were small. Bart found it frustrating. Congress never had the political will to go after the companies that hire undocumented workers. There are congressmen who talk tough on immigration, but when INS went after worksites in their districts, they told them to back off.”
Meek and Glass criticize the corporations for being insufficiently tough on hiring immigrants, citing a 1986 immigration reform law that prohibited companies from interrogating their employees to discover their nationality.
Glass says these laws were too lax on employers who hire immigrants: “In 1995, Congress, in a very practical, bipartisan way that we almost never see any more, decided that it had to fix the problem and come up with a simple way for employers to tell who is legal to work in the United States and who isn’t, to figure out who they could hire… Senator Dianne Feinstein warned, at the time, they had to solve this crisis now—of immigrants coming in illegally and getting these jobs.” BLOG: FEINSTEIN IS AN ADVOCATE OF AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. THERE ARE 15 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS IN HER STATE OF CA.
But these efforts, Glass says, did not go far enough. “Obviously, they didn’t solve it. And here we are today. A bipartisan commission called the Jordan commission considered a bunch of solutions. One of the things they ended up proposing was a national computerized system to check people’s IDs, and make sure they were valid, and their social security numbers are real. This is the system we’ve come to know as E-Verify.”
The reference to the Jordan Commission, led by Texas Democratic Representative Barbara Jordan, is significant. The commission’s findings are well known among immigrant rights advocates as the wish list of the extreme right. Breitbart praised Jordan in an August 2017 article as “one of the few Democratic politicians that believed in a pro-American legal immigration system that ceased on inundating working class neighborhoods with low-skilled immigrants.” The same article noted that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant program, including calls for expanding E-Verify, “has the same tenets as Jordan’s recommendations.”
The Jordan commission called for militarizing the border, massively increasing the size of the border patrol, and blocking immigrants from receiving benefits and work permits in the US. It is frequently cited by NumbersUSA and white supremacy groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies as a model for mass deportation.
This American Life criticizes E-Verify as insufficiently strict in stopping undocumented people from seeking employment. Miki Meek says, “A study commissioned by the government in 2009 found that over half of undocumented workers with fake papers—people E-Verify should have caught—got a clean bill of health… So by the early 2000s, you have all these undocumented workers not getting caught by E-Verify working in the Albertville plants, which raises the central question you come to when we talk about immigration—did Americans end up out of work because of it?”
NPR then gives space to bureaucrats from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to air their dirty xenophobic laundry. One shop steward, Martha, denounces immigrants for poisoning the atmosphere at the plant:
ZOGBY

“In Mexico, a recent Zogby poll declared that the vast majority of Mexican citizens hate Americans. [22.2] Mexico is a country  saturated with racism, yet in denial, having never endured the social development of a Civil Rights movement like in the US--Blacks are harshly treated while foreign Whites are often seen as the enemy. [22.3] In fact, racism as workplace discrimination can be seen across the US anywhere the illegal alien Latino works--the vast majority of the workforce is usually strictly Latino, excluding Blacks, Whites, Asians, and others.”

“[A]fter they’d [the immigrant workers] been there a while, they kind of thought they owned it. And there was more of them. You know, they kind of stay with their group, the family, you know, like aunts and cousins. And just about all of them’s kin somehow, you know? They started changing their attitude… You know, and it started causing problems. We had quite a few fights in the break rooms. Then we had them carried out to the parking lot, you know.”
NPR also interviews the UFCW local president at the time, Joe Ellis. Ellis blames the immigrant workers for reducing the bargaining power of the union because of their unwillingness to pay union dues:
“And then when the Latinos come in, that changed. And when that changed, then the bargaining unit changed. Because we didn’t have any bargaining power.”
Though NPR presents this as legitimate, in actual fact the unions’ bargaining power was reduced not because of immigrants, but because the unions are rotten, corrupt institutions that police the workforce in collusion with the corporations. A 2004 press release from Kroger supermarkets cites Ellis as praising a deal that the company boasted “will provide wages and benefits that will allow Kroger to compete with other retailers in the market.” Ellis praised the sellout as the product of the union and the company “working together.”
Glass says there are many factors behind the decline of wages for US-born workers, including shareholder wealth, automation, lower unionization rates and trade with China. While Glass concludes that immigration is not the biggest factor overall, he claims that immigration is to blame for declining wages for undereducated workers in the region. He cites an economist who “found that after 20 years of immigrants pouring into the area around Albertville,” wages dropped “up to $1,200 per year, per worker. So it’s real money.”
Meek then confronts a white worker with these figures, telling her that she would be thousands of dollars richer if it weren’t for the immigrants.
This American Life concludes the show by referencing Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, Glass says, is “always talking about working people” when he “explains what he’s trying to achieve by limitation.”
Implicitly backing the fascistic propaganda portraying attacks on immigrants as a struggle against the corporations in defense of American workers, Glass adds, “He barely sounds like a Republican… says our system’s too biased toward corporations.” He includes a sound bite of Sessions defending his mass deportation plans with arguments about benefiting native-born workers.
On this final note, Glass previews part two:
“Next week on our show, we go into town to see what 6,000 newcomers cost taxpayers, and what it was like to have all these immigrants who’d never driven cars before suddenly on the roads not understanding what a stop sign is, and why a Latino business owner told his friend to run for mayor on the platform of kicking out all the immigrants.”

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com

LAMBAST

Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering - by Joshua Frank - Antiwar.com

www.antiwar.com/frank/?articleid=8609

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Feb 28, 2006 - Dianne Feinstein and her husband are also making tons of money off the ... It's a disgusting display of war profiteering, and just like Cheney, the ...

Army contract for Feinstein's husband / Blum is a director of firm that ...

www.sfgate.com/.../Army-contract-for-Feinstein-s-husband-Blum-is-a-2621196.php

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Apr 22, 2003 - URS Corp., a San Francisco planning and engineering firm partially owned by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband, landed an Army ...

War brings business to Feinstein spouse / Blum's firms win multimillion ...

www.sfgate.com/.../War-brings-business-to-Feinstein-spouse-Blum-s-2652085.php

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Apr 27, 2003 - When it comes to scoring mega-military-related contracts, Sen. Dianne Feinstein's multimillionaire husband, Richard Blum, is right in the thick ...

War profiteering - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering

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war profiteer is any person or organization that profits from warfare or by selling weapons and .... The Center for Public Integrity has reported that US Senator Dianne Feinstein, who voted in favor of the Iraq Resolution, and her husband, ...

# 23 Feinstein's Conflict of Interest in Iraq – Top 25 of 2008

projectcensored.org/23-feinsteins-conflict-of-interest-in-iraq/

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Apr 28, 2010 - Dianne Feinstein—the ninth wealthiest member of congress—has been ... With Blum's financial backing, Klein, a war contractor, operates a ...

Unacceptable! Senator Profits from War and Post Office - Roots Action

act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7309

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Senator Dianne Feinstein's numerous apparent conflicts of interest are clear grounds for an Ethics Committee investigation.

Dianne Feinstein: War profiteer and war criminal | Freepress.org

freepress.org/article/dianne-feinstein-war-profiteer-and-war-criminal

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Dianne FeinsteinWar profiteer and war criminal. by Gerry Bello. July 5, 2013. Somewhere in northwest Pakistan Tuesday a sound was heard. Hellfire missiles ...

The Greatest Threat to Campus Free Speech is Coming From Dianne ...

https://theintercept.com/.../dianne-feinstein-husband-threaten-univ-calif-demanding-b...

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Sep 25, 2015 - But none of that seems to matter to Dianne Feinstein and her war-profiteering husband, Richard Blum. Not only is Blum demanding adoption of ...

Feinstein quits committee under war-profiteer cloud - WND.com

www.wnd.com/2007/03/40845/

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Mar 28, 2007 - Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has abruptly walked away from her responsibilities with the Senate Military Construction Appropriations ...

Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering- Democratic Blood Money By ...

www.countercurrents.org/frank050407.htm

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Apr 5, 2007 - Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California silently resigned from her post on the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee ...

Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering



Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering



by Joshua Frank
It happens all the time. If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings, a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush instead. It doesn't even have to be an election year to get the progressives fired up. They just don't seem to get it. "How can you attack the Democrats when we have such a bulletproof administration ruling the roost in Washington?" somebody recently e-mailed me. "Don't you have something better to do than write this trash?!"

Well, not really. It's too cold in upstate New York right now to do anything other than fume over the liberal villains in Washington. "Why do I write about the putrid Democratic Party?" I responded, "I'll tell you, there's a reason this Republican administration is so damn bulletproof – nobody from the opposition party is taking aim and pulling the trigger."

And that's why the Dems are just as culpable in all that has transpired since Bush took office in 2000. They aren't just a part of the problem – the Democrats are the problem.
I mean, who is really all that surprised Bush and his boys wanted to conquer the Middle East? Not me. That's just what unreasonable neocons do: they stomp out the little guy, kill off the weak, and suffocate the voiceless. They only care about the girth of their wallets and the number of scalps they can tack above their mantles.

The Democrats aren't just letting the Republicans get away with murder, however: some of them are also reaping the benefits of the Bush wars. We constantly hear about Dick Cheney's ties to Halliburton and how his ex-company is making bundles off U.S. contracts in Iraq. But what we don't hear about is how Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband are also making tons of money off the "war on terror."

The wishy-washy senator now claims Bush misled her prior to the invasion of Iraq. I don't think she's being honest with us, though. There may have been other reasons she helped sell Bush's lies. According to the Center for Public Integrity, Feinstein's husband Richard Blum has racked in millions of dollars from Perini, a civil infrastructure construction company, of which the billionaire investor wields a 75 percent voting share.

In April 2003, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave $500 million to Perini to provide services for Iraq's Central Command. A   month earlier in March 2003, Perini was awarded $25 million to design and construct a facility to support the Afghan National Army near Kabul. And in March 2004, Perini was awarded a hefty contract worth up to $500 million for "electrical power distribution and transmission" in southern Iraq.

Feinstein, who sits on the Senate

 Appropriations Committee as well as the

 Select Committee on Intelligence, is reaping

 the benefits of her husband's investments.

 The Democratic royal family recently

 purchased a $16.5 million mansion in the

 flush Pacific Heights neighborhood of San

 Francisco. It's a disgusting display of war

profiteering, and just like Cheney, the leading

 Democrat should be called out for her

 offense.

And that's exactly why the Bush

 administration is so darn bulletproof.

 The Democratic leadership in

Washington is just as crooked and just

as callous.

War profiteering

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
war profiteer is any person or organization that profits from warfare or by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war. The term can have strong, negative connotations. General profiteering may also occur in peace time. An example of war profiteers were the "shoddy" millionaires who allegedly sold recycled wool and cardboard shoes to soldiers during the American Civil War. The ten highest war profiteers are Lockheed MartinBoeingBAE SystemsGeneral DynamicsRaytheonNorthrop Grumman, European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company EADSFinmeccanicaL-3 Communications, and United Technologies.[1] These corporations are all directly connected with production of weapons, machinery, vehicles, aircraft, electronics and artillery(including missiles) and as such have significant political influence given their lobbying efforts and campaign contributions to members of the United States Congress in the promotion of war efforts. In 2010, the defense industry spent $144 million on lobbying and donated over $22.6 million to congressional candidates.[2]

In the United States[edit]

Companies such as Halliburton have been criticized in the context of the Iraq War for their perceived war profiteering.[24]
Steven Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank, has accused former CIA Director James Woolseyof both profiting from and promoting the Iraq War.[25]
The Center for Public Integrity has reported that US Senator Dianne Feinstein, who voted in favor of the Iraq Resolution, and her husband, Richard Blum, are making millions of dollars from Iraq and Afghanistan contracts through his company, Tutor Perini Corporation.[26][27]
Indicted defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes was reported to be ecstatic when hearing that the United States was going to go to war with Iraq. "He and some of his top executives were really gung-ho about the war," said a former employee. "Brent said this would create new opportunities for the company. He was really excited about doing business in the Middle East."[28]
The War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007 intended to create criminal penalties for war profiteers and others who exploit taxpayer-funded efforts in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.[29] This act was introduced first on April 25, 2007, but was never enacted into law.[30] War profiteering cases are often brought under the Civil False Claims Act, which was enacted in 1863 to combat war profiteering during the Civil War.[31]
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, criticized war profiteering of US companies during World War I in War Is a Racket. He wrote about how some companies and corporations increase their earnings and profits by up to 1,700 percent and how many companies willingly sold equipment and supplies to the US that had no relevant use in the war effort. In the book, Butler stated that "It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits."[32]
In the American Civil War, concerns about war profiteering were not limited to the activities of a few "shoddy" millionaires in the North. In the Confederacy, where supplies were severely limited, and hardships common, the mere suggestion of profiteering was considered a scurrilous charge. Georgia Quartermaster General Ira Roe Foster attempted to increase the supply of material to the troops by urging the women of his state to knit 50,000 pairs of socks. Foster's sock campaign stimulated the supply of the much needed item, but it also met with a certain amount of suspicion and backlash. Either the result of a Union disinformation campaign, or the work of suspicious minds, rumors, which Foster denied as a "malicious falsehood!",[33] began to spread that Foster and others were profiteering from the socks.[33] It was alleged that contributed socks were being sold, rather than given freely to the troops. The charge was not without precedent. The historian Jeanie Attie notes that in 1861, an "especially damaging rumor" (later found to be true) had circulated in the North, alleging that the Union Army had purchased 5,000 pairs of socks which had been donated, and intended for the troops, from a private relief agency, the United States Sanitary Commission.[34] As the Sanitary Commission had done in the North, Foster undertook a propaganda campaign in Georgia newspapers to combat the damaging rumors and to encourage the continued contribution of socks.[35] He offered $1,000.00 to any "citizen or soldier who will come forward and prove that he ever bought a sock from this Department that was either knit by the ladies or purchased for issue to said troops."[33]

Unacceptable! Senator Profits from War and Post Office

Shortly after San Francisco's then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein married private equity financier Richard C. Blum in 1980, those who knew them called theirs "a marriage of the public and private sectors."

Although Feinstein lost a gubernatorial bid to Republican Pete Wilson, she soon took his seat in the U.S. Senate. Working across the aisle, her power rapidly grew along with her husband's diversified investments and their mutual wealth.1

• As Chair and ranking member of the Military Construction and Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Feinstein appears to have steered contracts to companies controlled by her husband.2  Blum has profited handsomely from military contracts.

• In 2009, Senator Feinstein introduced legislation to provide $25 billion in taxpayer money to the FDIC after it gave Blum's CBRE real estate company a contract to sell foreclosed properties at unusually high rates.4

• As a Regent of the University of California, Blum appears to have profited from contracts with the UC-run nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos.5

• In the summer of 2012, the U.S. Postal Service awarded Blum's CBRE company the exclusive contract to sell its portfolio of public properties. Feinstein's office denies any influence in the awarding of the contract. 
Ask your Senators to request an Ethics Committee investigation of Senator Dianne Feinstein now.
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CITY JOURNAL

AMERICA’S CRISIS OF WORK

AUDIO

Amica’s Crisis of Work


May 9, 2018 


  
Long-term, persistent joblessness is the great American domestic crisis of our generation. In our 2017 special issue, “The Shape of Work to Come,” City Journal grappled with the problem, and our writers continue to explore it.
City Journal recently convened a panel of experts to talk about the future of work. Audio from their discussion is featured in this episode of 10 Blocks.
The panel consisted of Ryan Avant, a senior editor and economics columnist at The EconomistEdward L. Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and contributing editor of City Journal; and Kay S. Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. The discussion was moderated by Steve LeVine, the Future Editor of Axios and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast, this is your host, Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal. First off -- we’d like to take a moment to thank all of you for tuning-in. Since we launched the podcast a couple years ago, the feedback has been tremendous, and we thank all of you for your interest or support. We made a few changes we think you’ll appreciate: We have a snazzier musical intro, and henceforth we’ll be posting episodes little more frequently.
Coming up on the latest podcast, we have an exceptional show forlisteners: Last year, City Journal published a special issue called, “The Shape of Work to Come”, featuring articles on the great American domestic crisis of our time, long-term joblessness. It’s a topic that our many of our writers are thinking about, and we will continue to revisit it for the foreseeable future. Last week, City Journal hosted a panel discussion in New York City with some of our own writers and other experts thinking about the future of work. You’ll be able to listen to that on this 10 Blocks. On the panel we have Edward Glaeser: Harvard professor, Manhattan Institute fellow, and contributing editor here at City Journal, and author of the great book on urbanism, Triumph of the City. Then there’s Kay Hymowitz, also a long-time contributing editor to City Journal and fellow at the Manhattan institute, and author most-recently of The New Brooklyn. They we were joined by Ryan Avent, senior editor and the free exchange columnist at The Economist. But the next voice you’ll here on the podcast is Steve LeVine, “Future Editor” at Axios, who moderated the discussion.
We hope you enjoy!
Steve LeVine: Good morning.  Thanks very much for joining us here.  That was an amazing understatement.  This panel is a fantastic panel and I’m really looking forward to the discussion this morning to digging in.  We are in the midst of a debate about the future of work, the underlying forces that are creating a crisis of stagnant wages and an uncertainty about jobs in the future.  Among the elements in the debate, a main question: Is this time different?  Is the technological cycle that we are in right now, the revolution in AI and the new age of automation, is it different from prior technological cycles over the last two centuries in which a normal economic turn has produced enough jobs to employ everyone displaced by the new technology?  Why are wages stuck?  How long will the disruption that we are in last?  Prior disruptions have lasted decades.  What will our society look like when the transition has been spent?  And, finally, pivoting off of a piece that was in The New York Times a couple of days ago: What we are watching in the heartland that led to our current politics, did it start with an economic malaise or a status malaise?  So, to tee off this conversation we are going to start with Ryan.  And my question for you: What do past technological revolutions, past cycles, tell us about the current one we are in?  Are they useful?  Is it a useful roadmap?
Ryan Avent: Thank you, Steve, and it is great to be here with what is a pretty fantastic panel.  It is an excellent question.  I think that past technological revolutions really are probably a good guide to what we are going through.  There is a possibility at some point that as AI becomes capable of doing just about anything humans can do, that this will start to look a lot different from what we have seen in the past.  But I think that is decades away, at least.  So, for now we’ve got a disruption that’s sort of built around a general purpose technology, information technology, and machine learning that can be used in lots of different places across the economy and that consequently is affecting lots of different industries, lots of different job categories.  What I think the past tells us, first of all, is as you said, that this sort of thing can cause quite significant disruption over a long period of time.  I think that part of what we have seen in terms of the malfunctioning of different institutions, different parts of the economy over the past few decades is linked to technological change.  That is going to intensify for several decades to come.  So, we are in the middle of a very long process of social change.  I think that there is often the perspective looking back on how these things play out that everything ends up okay.  That, you know, jobs are destroyed but jobs are also created.  And then we all end up better off.  And that does tend to be true over long periods of time, but if sort of look in on shorter periods of time there can be quite a lot of pain for established workers.  There can be whole generations where wages don’t go up.  And so I think we need to be, you know, we need to be hopeful but not necessarily too optimistic that the problems are going to solve themselves.  And then I think the other big thing that these revolutions teach us is that there has to be quite a lot of evolution in terms of institutions and norms and in governmental policies in order to accommodate society to new technologies to make sure that the benefits in the technologies are broadly shared, to make sure that society is kind of okay with the way new technologies are being deployed.  And we are already sort of seeing, I think, a lot of backlash now and a lot of pressure to start changing institutions, not just in terms of the economic effects but also thinking about Facebook’s role in our political cycle, thinking about how driverless cars are going to be used.  There is going to be a lot of pressure to overhaul our institutions and that is usually not a very neat process, either.  So, I think those are the sorts of things we can look forward to, so to speak, in the decades to come.
Steve LeVine: Thank you very much.  That’s great.  I want to dig in a little bit in our modern age.  Let’s say from the ‘70s forward, Ed.  So, you define the problem as a war on work.  Can we dig a little bit in that thesis and also can you talk a little bit about your work on the Eastern heartland?
Edward Glaeser: Sure.  So, when we take – and I couldn’t agree more with Ryan’s sentiments that you know, long-term joblessness is the defining and dire social problem of our age.  When we try and understand how we got here, that 50-year evolution that he described, there is a steady and running academic debate which concerns is it from purely labor demand?  Is it the changes in the technology, the decline in deindustrialization of the US?  Or is it in labor supply, which can include two versions, one of which is it’s about the welfare state.  It’s about the dis-incentives for working created by things like disability or the 30% tax on earnings created by food stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers?  Or is it about the cultural side, that I think Kay will get into, that we are not training the next generation to actually want to work.  As an economist I am uniquely disadvantaged in talking about cultural issues.  So, I will leave that one completely on the plate for right now.  And say that no matter how important one believes the labor demand side is going on, the labor supply issues, the welfare state issues, don’t help.  And they are particularly badly designed for the most troubled parts of America.  One way to see this, and I think we really do have to rethink our you know, having place-based policies in this country, and by place-based policies like me make it clear I am not talking about the Appalachian Regional Commission or building people-mover monorails.  I’m talking about policies that actually recognize that labor markets are very different in different parts of the country.  So, a point that I have often made, often to my audiences in fact, that having a national housing policy is kind of mad.  That any housing policy that is appropriate for New York is not going to be appropriate for Detroit, and that is not going to be appropriate for Houston.  These are very different conditions.  Similarly, an employment policy that is targeted for Seattle or San Francisco Bay, right, you know, is going to be a nightmare in Eastern Tennessee or West Virginia.  So, let me be really concrete about this, right, so the minimum wage in Seattle, not something that, like many economists, I am not a big fan of minimum wages, but to make the claim that it is somehow or other catastrophic is a mistake.  That Seattle is an incredibly robust economy filled with highly skilled people.  If anyone thinks that you know, imposing a $15 minimum wage on West Virginia would be sensible, they are out of their mind, right?  That would be an absolutely catastrophic thing.  Similarly, it’s only slightly more complicated to take the view that this long diagonal line of despair in the United States which starts in Louisiana and Mississippi and runs through Appalachia and up through Northern Michigan, right, this area which is the heartland of deindustrialization, of former parts of the Jim Crow South, is particularly low in education and also particularly problematic in terms of its political institutions as well.  You know I often have sort of a two-variable model of economic growth, that it’s about rules and schools and unfortunately the Eastern heartland is weak on both fronts.  This is an area in which routinely you see a quarter of the prime-age males were jobless.  And this is an area in which having a welfare state that discourages work is deeply problematic.  Will it necessarily bring, you know, will reforming that welfare state necessary bring you back to 5% joblessness rates in these areas?  No, it won’t, right?  We may need stronger medicine and we also have to count on some form of out migration.  But we sure as heck need to rethink our policies today.  And it is the most sensible thing that we can do, is to recognize that discouraging work, right, or failing to encourage it, is a big mistake in Eastern Tennessee, in Eastern Kentucky, in West Virginia, in Mississippi.  And just to be concrete about this, you can either think about what you need is being a tilt, meaning that you are going to reduce the size of some payments which go to the jobless and use that money to reduce the tax on work.  So, for example, you could reduce the level of disability payments but then enable the disabled to keep more of their earnings at a higher level.  Norway has experimented with this, enabling the disabled to keep more of their earnings, and it has worked.  And people who were on disability have actually earned more and have been more connected to the workforce.  Or you can just say what we need is a national earned income tax credit that is actually targeted in a simpler way towards men who are out of the labor force.  And then there is at least an argument for saying, look if I have a limited number of dollars to throw on that, let’s target it towards the areas where joblessness is higher.  Because in fact we do have evidence that suggests that things that induce labor demand to go up in these areas do more to reduce joblessness.  So, we really do have to recognize that this evolution and this change in terms of our working in America is not something that has afflicted America uniformly.  There are particular areas, and the Eastern heartland is its core, where joblessness has risen most and accompanying joblessness has been misery, opioid abuse, suicide, the breakdown of the family.  All of these things have gone together in a terrifying cocktail.  And even though we may not know how to use economic policies to fix all of them, we know that dis-incentivizing work, having policies that stop work from paying, certainly aren’t making things any better and we should start by trying to reform those policies.
Steve LeVine: Okay great.  Before we get into digging in further in the present, I didn’t want to leave history completely behind and so I want to ask both of you if there is a period, a past period that informs what you are thinking or the audience can think about something that we can look at that helps to understand where we are, where we are going, what is it?  When is that time?
Ryan Avent: Well, I think you can think about sort of the late 19th century.  And it was obviously very different in a lot of ways, but what we faced then was a pretty dramatic technological and economic shift, a pretty dramatic shift in the geography of the country in terms of where people lived and worked, and it was one that kind of left people much better off, but it was also a pretty tumultuous political period and it was the beginning of a period in which we started to construct this welfare state.  And we did it for good reasons, I think, recognizing that in an industrial economy and an urban economy you were often going to have downturns.  You were going to have, you know, people who through whatever, you know, no fault of their own could not find good work.  And we didn’t want those people to die in the streets.  And so there was the recognition that there was a need for institutional change.  In order to get that institutional change there were different groups in society who had to mobilize, and so you had the rise of trade unions, you had social reform movements, you had the rise of new political interest groups.  And I think that’s the sort of pattern we are going to be looking at here.  I mean I don’t think in terms of the interaction between work and the welfare state and technology it looked the same then as it does now because of how different the institutional environment is now.  But I think that pattern in which we see, as Ed did a very good job of pointing out, that current institutions are not working in which people become very unhappy and begin mobilizing for institutional change.  That’s exactly the sort of set of steps we are going to be working through over the next few decades. 
Steve LeVine: And we are talking 1890 to the beginning of World War I.
Ryan Avent: I think, well, and thereafter.  I mean, I think you could include the inner war period, the Depression, and the sort of intense pressure we faced there to create Social Security, to begin building a lot of these basic welfare state policies.  That whole period is really the one we are thinking about.  It was quite a, you know – it’s not a short amount of time, but that’s how long it takes, I think, to arrive at a consensus about what actually should happen, you know, what sort of institutions do need to be in place, to develop the political movements to get those things in place, and actually to enact them and unveil them.
Steve LeVine: Ed.
Edward Glaeser: So, I think if you are looking at a historical period to model ourselves on, I would actually go to the major periods of reform in the social welfare state that both Germany and Scandinavia went through in the last thirty years.  So, these are places that had extremely generous welfare states in the postwar period.  They realized that many of their rules, many of their policies, were being deeply harmful in terms of the employment situation, and they quite sensibly reformed in ways that promoted work and did less to discourage employment.  And in some sense, if you want to think about the divide in Europe between its relatively prosperous North and its you know, deeply troubled South, a lot of that divide owes much to the fact that the North was able to look at its labor market policies and say these are screwed up and we are going to fix them.  Okay?  And the South, many people have been looking at their labor market policies and saying these are screwed up and, you know, fixing them has proven too hard.  And Macron is trying right now very hard in France, but I think very much, you know, we have to ask ourselves if the future of America is going to look more like Germany or Sweden or whether it’s going to look more like Greece.  And we have got that choice ahead of us.
Steve LeVine: Great.  Kay, so, Charles Murray famously wrote Coming Apart.  You have written quite a bit on the subject of losing status, losing family, an amazing statistic that you cite unmarried and divorced people make up 32% of the population and 71% of opioid deaths.
Kay Hymowitz: I believe that’s men.
Steve LeVine: That’s men.  Okay.  Can you unpack when we are translating what Ryan and Ed are talking about into how this has affected humans, people?
Kay Hymowitz: Okay.  So, some of you know I have been writing about family breakdown for a long time, and I hope to convince you by the end of today’s discussion that that actually has a lot of relevance to the discussion we are having today about these technological changes.  When I first started writing about the family breakdown I was mostly talking about the difference between the way upper income, educated people were doing.  Steve says, this is what Charles Murray was right about too, of course, how the people were doing at the top and how people were doing at the very bottom.  I was mostly talking about the poor.  And this was in the early ‘90s, mid-90s, it looked like the white working class, or the working class more generally, was doing okay, was hanging on there, at least in family terms.  But since then there has been a massive catastrophe to the family and community structures of these places where we are seeing a lot of joblessness.  What I think we have to keep in mind is that the implications are for the future of these places and of these people.  Because what happens, we have begun to learn, is that boys who are growing up in families where there are no fathers or erratic fathers, father figures, really suffer, even more than girls.  That evidence is becoming more and more clear, especially with a recent study that just came out from Raj Chetty about black children and mobility.  And what he found was that the boys were having a lot more trouble than girls.  What we now know is that the boys who are growing up in these homes are in very unstable fluid homes, and these are not – we are not just talking about a marriage breaks up and the child goes on to have a good relationship with both parents.  Many of us in this room have seen many examples of that.  We are talking about much more chaos.  And J.D. Vance describes this, by the way, in his book Hillbilly Elegy.  A lot of chaos, a lot of coming and going of various adult figures.  And the reason that matters is because children, particularly boys, tend not to do well in school, or emotionally, when they are going up under those circumstances.  So, we have increasing dysfunction among boys, younger boys, and as they grow up, but they become exactly the jobless men that we are talking about today.  A lot of the boys, a lot of these young men actually who were – of the jobless young men, when you talk to them they often came from very chaotic homes themselves and were not able to learn and absorb any sense of agency over their lives.  They instead have this sense that things just sort of happen and don’t have much self-control for themselves.  So, they are not doing well in school, they are far less likely to go to college than girls.  Well, okay, what happens when the time comes for having a baby?  You are not going to marry – women do not marry men who make a lot less money than them and who can’t keep a job.  That’s just a reality.  It remains that way, even fifty, sixty years after the feminist movement.
Steve LeVine: Thanks.  Let’s dig in just a little bit on that.  So, two things go hand in hand.  One is unemployment, but also employment at a low wage…
Kay Hymowitz: Yes.
Steve LeVine: …or uncertain, unstable employment.  I am super interested in this dichotomy of sort of the malaise that we are in now, and that other countries are too, and this debate, is it this economic question, joblessness, low wage, or it is loss of status?
Kay Hymowitz: Right.  So, it is impossible to really answer the question of whether – how much economics plays a role in what is happening to the family and how much it is a cultural thing, but I can tell you this, that we still know that married couples have a better chance, not just of making more money, but of providing more stability for their kids.  And the kids are going to do better, tend to do better.  This is what many decades of research has shown.  So, if you look at, for instance, non-college-educated men, actually no, if you look at high school dropouts who are married, they are doing better than men with a little bit of college in some of these communities that we are describing.  So, there is, we don’t know why that is, is there something about the personality, the social strengths of the person who is married?  But it isn’t just income.  Clearly, there is something more involved.
Edward Glaeser: So, can I just interject two facts which seem relevant?
Steve LeVine: Yes.
Edward Glaeser: First of all, we have now reached a point where fully 50% of the long-term jobless men, right, so that’s over 12 years, have never been married.  Have never been married.  Second fact, about 85% of the long-term jobless men are not living alone.  That’s part of how the economics works.  Of them, more than 30% are actually, more than 30% of jobless men are living with their parents.  So, in fact, you have this sort of infant, it is you know, men who are not growing up.  And then you have another 55%, a small number which are living with their lawful spouses, but a lot of them are living with other people who are somehow or other making that household work.
Kay Hymowitz: Right.  Well I assume there is a great deal of moving around in and out of arrangements and not much stability.  A lot of these guys, by the way just so we have a bigger picture about this, it’s not that they are thoughtless about their kids.  A lot of them are really devoted to their kids, or think they are when the kids come, but what happens is that the relationship with the child’s mother, and the mother tends to be the custody parent, becomes very complex.  Maybe there is a new man in the picture or a new woman in the picture, a new child in the picture, and gradually the father kind of backs off.  And this has happened in the black community as well.  So, fatherlessness is – it is not just that a father is not living in the house, although that is a key part of this picture, it’s that it is very difficult to maintain any kind of contact and loving and stable relationship with a father who is not married to mother.  That’s just the reality.
Edward Glaeser: Parenting is hard in the best of circumstances, right?
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah.  And mothers are the gatekeepers still, you know?
Steve LeVine: Ed finds at least partial causation in public policy are economic incentives or economic disincentives to work.  What do you think about that?  Do you have a causation hypothesis?
Kay Hymowitz: I, you know, again, I don’t think there is a way to think about this without talking about the changes in social and cultural norms.  When you think about why men in the past have held jobs that were not particularly appealing, you don’t hear well, they may not have been paid much, I mean we often talk about the ‘50s and the period where, you know, the great industrial period of our history as if that was always the norm.  It was not.  And many times these jobs that men were working were really horrible.  I had a quotation I wanted to bring in from a writer named Connie Schultz who is a columnist at TheCleveland Plain Dealer.  Or she was, I don’t know if she is still there.  And she described growing up in the Cleveland area.  Her father worked at a factory in the boiler room.  And she said that when she would go, she went to visit this place and it was some kind of hell.  The temperatures were going up to 140, the filth was unbelievable, the fatigue that her father experienced, but she said her father would come home every day looking like he had just come back from Hades, which he had, and would say you four kids, he had four kids, you kids are going to college.  In other words, the reason he was willing to put up with those jobs was because he had people that were really relying on him and to whom he was devoted.  And so, when I think about the joblessness, it is hard for you know, and the question of how much this is an economic or cultural problem, these men don’t feel, for very complicated reasons, some of them true, that they are needed.  Nobody is relying on them.  They can hang out on the couch and play videogames.  It doesn’t really matter.  The kids are going to be okay, sort of.
Steve LeVine: Yeah.  Ed, you have an interesting statistic in one of your writings.  Only 41% of high school dropouts, maybe this is also men, only 41% of high school dropouts are working.  That’s an amazing statistic.
Edward Glaeser: So, that’s not prime age.  So, that is going to include the whole population, but that’s right.
Steve LeVine: Okay.  So, two questions.  One is this suggests, and you do suggest, that we need to, we need, in terms of a prescription, education, skilling up.  So, I want to ask you about, you know, to make that argument.  But also, I want to do, then, Ryan, if you will follow up right after that, you make the argument you trot out you know, the history of the workforce gaining more skill over time as the technological cycles evolved, unfolded.  But then you say we may have reached skilled saturation in the workforce.  Can you talk about that?  So, Ed, you first.
Edward Glaeser: Okay, although you’ve got me so interested in the question you asked Ryan, I don’t want to – so, certainly I am a bit of a human capital determinist, right?  I believe that skills are the bedrock on which individual, urban and national success rests.  The differences in jobless numbers between the educated and the less educated are enormous, and I think, very clearly, America needs to do a better job in terms of educating its children.  Some of that probably does continue to go through traditional educational institutions, some of it should be more entrepreneurial and more tied to the actual needs of the labor force.  We should certainly do things that feel more like competitively sourced vocational ed that supplements traditional schooling, hopefully bypassing the teacher’s unions while doing so, maybe going to actually people who know something about, you know, the skills that are needed in the modern environment, you know, do it with constant use of randomized, controlled trials around this stuff, be innovative around it and invest in skills.  The reason why I tend not to be emphasizing skills as much as I have in the past, though, in this recent work is that our traditional recipe, both for inequality and for any dislocations that came through trade, was skills, skills, skills.  And that’s not wrong, but it is not enough, right?  Telling a 50-year-old displaced worker in West Virginia that yeah, you have lost your job and will have no other foreseeable job in the next thirty years, but boy I’ve got a great Pre-K for your granddaughter, right?  That’s not so satisfying for that guy, right?  And that’s why we need to have more.  We need to be able to say that we have a better solution, and what we do know about skills for the 50-year-old worker is we also have fifty years of work on job retraining programs for displaced workers, and almost uniformly the track record is dismal.  Okay, which leads me to the view that by far the best thing we can do for that 50-year-old worker is get him back at work somewhere.  Find some employer with some degree of government help who is going to actually give this guy a job producing something that somebody else wants.  Give him something that provides structure to his life, give him something that gives him some degree of dignity, a sense that he is actually producing something the world wants.  We can’t do it all with Pre-K.  It’s not, it just isn’t there, and we have to do something that actually encourages entrepreneurs to find some form of work for this person, because in some sense every unemployed or underemployed American is a failure of entrepreneurial imagination.
Kay Hymowitz: Can we…
Steve LeVine: Yes.
Kay Hymowitz: …interject a question here?  Are there other countries that do a better job at job training?  Retraining?
Ed Glaeser: Retraining.  I think there is some sense in which the Scandinavian countries do a bit better, but, you know, the educational systems in those areas are so much stronger in lots of different dimensions, and also in terms of the vocational ed, I mean, there is a lot to admire in terms of Germany’s system.  I mean I think most of us would have trouble with a tracking system that basically looks at a person at the age of 13 and says, okay your job is you are going to be a tree for the rest of your life, or a garage mechanic, or whatever it is.  So, doing things that allow the traditional American optimism about finding something, but combine that with, you know, serious vocational training on top of that would be a plus.  You know, like I have got no problem with asking our kids to spend more time doing schooling, especially in the fact of what she is describing.  In a world in which families work less, I think we should, you know, have other programs that work more.
Steve LeVine: One second.  I just wanted to follow up.  Ed, okay.  Janesville, Amy Goldstein’s book, so she – one of the most interesting parts is the reskilling section and her survey of these workers who had been laid off from the GM factory and after six years those who went through reskilling and those who did not, and those who did not were on a much higher percentage employed and comparing those employed with skilled and did not reskill, they were earning a lot more.  And her answer to that is that reskilling is not an answer totally in itself, there also have to be jobs to go into.  Do you have any sort of observation there?
Edward Glaeser: It lines with fifty years of research on failed reskilling programs.  I mean, it’s in line with what we have.  And the point that you need to get these guys back at work, I think, is the central point.  I mean most of us – it’s also true in terms of teaching.  I mean, most successful teaching is about learning by doing.  Most of it is sort of inspiring kids by what you tell them, to actually go and do work themselves, and that’s how you learn, right?  It’s even more so for a 50-year-old.  And you know, it’s very hard to get people with demographics like mine to learn new tricks and, you know, it is helpful if you are in a structured job environment to induce them to do so.
Ryan Avent: All right.  So much to talk about.  So, I think to get to the skill saturation point, I mean, it’s important to know that, you know, a huge part of our response to the Industrial Revolution was to increase educational attainment.  You know, at the start of it most people could not read and write.  By the end of it, you know, the vast majority of the working-age population had a secondary school degree of some sort, and 40% or so had a tertiary degree.  That’s just a huge increase in educational attainment and so I think, you know, Ed gives us some very good reasons to think that education is not going to be the entirety of the solution this time around.  And I think that is – the difficulty in trying to replicate that feat is another reason why we shouldn’t say that we can educate our way out of this problem.  But I think it, you know, we also ought to look at the fact that while it is true that you get a big bump to income going from a high school degree to a college degree, it used to be the case that that premium was constantly rising.  And since 2000 or so it has not been rising.  The premium to getting an advanced degree does continue to rise and there is still intense demand for people with advanced degrees.  But then that sort of raises that bar there.  And if we are talking about someone who is coming from a troubled background who, you know, who perhaps doesn’t have the best primary education, how realistic is it to get them into a you know, an advanced degree program in computer engineering or something of that sort?  And I think it’s, to sort of add to Kay’s point about people working to get their kids into college, since around 2000 or so real wages for college graduates have also been stagnant.  And there has been to some extent growth in underemployment among college graduates where a growing share of college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a degree.  And that sort of then has a trickledown effect where you are displacing people with less education into jobs even farther does the ladder.  But I think the sense that college is less of a guarantee of a significantly better life is perhaps something that is playing into psychology here.
Kay Hymowitz: I often think when I’m looking at the data on college, the college premium, that there is such a wide range of college status that you know, we forget, I think, a lot of people in this room probably think in terms of what college is, you know, an elite college, but most Americans who go to college are, it’s not just that they are at state universities, there are often at community satellite parts of that university.
Steve LeVine: Ryan, but your thesis, if you still hold – this is 2016 when you wrote this, when you published that book – that the actual percentage of the population that is college-educated, that we have reached – that’s your saturation point.  And you actually use the phrase that the other part of the population is not cognitively capable.
Ryan Avent: Well, I think – no, I mean I think that – so, if you look at countries like Korea which have managed to raise completion rates for you know, university-level schooling significantly above the rest of kind of the OECD, what we do see is that there was a significant reduction in kind of the quality of education those people were getting.  And it’s not – I don’t think it’s a sort of disparaging remark.  I mean college is hard, you know?
Edward Glaeser: Not hard enough.  Not hard enough.
Ryan Avent: And, I mean, you know, calculus is hard, linear algebra, these things are not easy and not everyone can do them.  That does not mean that they are less valuable or, you know, or less worthy of respect than anyone else, but it does mean that we need to be realistic about how we are going to find employment for everyone.
Steve LeVine: Okay.  So, let’s move.  We are going to wind down in this part of the conversation, but before we shift to questions, so, in terms of solutions.  So, we know now that skilling, reskilling is a hard thing.  And, Ed, 50 years of failed or partly failed experiments, let’s talk first about the wages.  Ed, you talk about incentivizing joblessness.  Are we incentivizing stuck wages?
Edward Glaeser: Oh, maybe.  I mean I think the most important thing is working on straight employment subsidies.  So, you know, I think something like a flat-wage subsidy targeted towards the bottom end of the labor market is the right answer.  Make it clear, make it a per-hour subsidy so it is not complex like the EITC.  I am fine if you want to say that those dollars are going to be larger in West Virginia then they are going to be in New York.  I am also fine if what you say is a $3.00 wage bump is just going to have much more of an impact in West Virginia than it is in New York.  And so, it’s going to have a place-based impact regardless.  There is a question as to whether or not you want to give the subsidy directly to the workers, which has a certain political appeal, or you want to give it directly to the firms which will probably be cheaper to implement, and also more effective in places that have a binding minimum wage.  So, if your goal is to bump up wages, then giving it in those areas to the worker will achieve that, given that I’m more focused on joblessness rather than raising wages.  I think giving it to the firm has a certain amount of sense to it.
Steve LeVine: Okay.  Ryan, did you have something on that?
Ryan Avent: Well, so I think I have a particular view of sort of how this is all playing out.  And I guess I share Ed’s diagnosis of what’s going on, but I think it’s probably going to be quite a bit harder to generate the kind of outcomes we want.  My sense is that what has happened over the past decade or two, and what’s going to happen to an increasing extent as technology improves, is that the substitutability of domestic workers for either foreign workers or technology is increasing.  It is easier than ever to take a domestic worker here working in a factory or a warehouse or whatever and have that job that they are doing be done either by someone in a different country or by a machine.  And that substitutability is going to go up and up and up as technology improves.  To me what that means is that we are stuck in a place where workers are essentially in kind of a wage competition, with a lot of the – either with machines or with the foreign workers.  And the way that we maintain high employment is by allowing wages to stagnate or fall in real terms.  Now, we run into trouble because we have these social safety net programs which mean that if wages get low enough people say it’s not worth it to work and drop out, and we don’t want that to happen.  The alternative, or an alternative, would be to make those programs less generous and then to subsidize wages.  And I think that is what Ed is proposing, and that should address the issue of joblessness but I’m not sure it really solves our problem in a few ways.  One, I think if we wind up in a world where the government is essentially subsidizing the very rich to have massive household staffs, it is not clear to me that from a kind of status perspective or a cultural perspective that’s a desirable place to be or a politically sustainable place to be.  The other thing I worry about is that we have, if we maintain this massive pool of very cheap labor, that dramatically reduces the incentive to use a lot of new technologies that are going to – that ought to raise productivity.  I mean you are not going to automate the warehouse if you have, you know, massive numbers of cheap subsidized labor to keep using there.  We want to automate the warehouse.  Those are bad jobs.  Automating the warehouse raises productivity, raises output.  And so, I worry that we are stuck in a trap where we are not taking full advantage of the technologies available to us, we are not getting the productivity growth that we want because workers are so cheap.  And solving that problem is very difficult, indeed.
Edward Glaeser: So, I don’t really disagree with that much of what Ryan just said.  I do agree that it’s certainly possible to be very pessimistic about the future now.  A lack of hope has never deterred me from taking on policy challenges, that’s part of the job of the academic and policy exchanges.  Remember I have been, you know, at least for 15 years I have been arguing for a need to reform land use regulations in this country.  And you know, I’m at a point where a 6-4 loss of the Wiener Bill looks like an incredible success over those 16 years.  So, I don’t disagree.  It’s just you know, I believe in taking on lost causes.  That being said, I actually don’t think this is completely a lost cause.  I do believe that regardless of what you think about the possibility of the future that there are, in fact, what we as economists wonkily call externalities associated with not working.  Some part of that are the physical externalities associated with the payment and some part of it is social externalities which create broader problems as a whole.  Now, the way we know how to fight externalities is to, you know, subsidize good behaviors and tax bad behaviors.  And that’s basically what I am in favor of, is doing more to subsidize people to work and do less to subsidize them from not working, and some combination of the two.  And I’m not sure that it is going to solve everything.  Yes, it probably will deter a little bit of labor-saving technology, but I guess I’m just not that worried that we are going to underinvest in those.  I mean, the past thirty years has seen a fair amount of that.  And I think the other point that is floating around here that we probably haven’t made, and let me just say this, historically we have – historically in the U.S., when places became less productive we moved, right?  We are a mobile nation.  When the farmers of New England looked out you know, looked out my neighbor’s backyard and saw the rocky soil of Massachusetts and heard there was some place in the Ohio River Valley that was better, they moved.  And they had neighbors who helped them raise a barn and they had balloon-frame houses to make their housing cheap.  And when the farmers you know, in the late 19th century, thought that their agricultural incomes were low and saw an opportunity in Chicago or New York City, the tenement builders were there erecting homes by the thousands and hundreds of thousands to make space for them.  When the Okies were hit by the Dust Bowl they packed up their car and moved to California, and again homes were made for them.  The difference now is that we have parts of America that are wildly productive, including New York City, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, and we don’t allow any building, right?  And that is part of the problem.  And the consequence is for forty years prior to 1992, American mobility rates never dropped below 6% across counties.  Over the past ten years they have never risen above 4%.  Income convergence across areas, which was abetted by the mobility of both people and firms, has completely stalled, right?  From 1860 to 1980 this was the norm.  Poor places got richer, rich places had less income growth.  Over the past thirty years that has been completely flat.  We have ceased to see it.  Partially because migration historically has moved from poor areas to rich areas.  Think about the great migration North of African Americans fleeing the desperate poverty and degradation of the Jim Crow South to find a brighter opportunity in Detroit or Chicago.  Well, today, you know, we’d say you know, we want you to leave Detroit or Chicago and move to Silicon Valley.  And they are going to ask you, where are they going to pay for that three-million-dollar starter home that occurs there.  So as we know it at M.I., everything comes down to NYCHA, and at least part of the answer is allowing more migration.  And you know, that service economy that you mentioned, I mean, that’s a particularly bleak version, is the vast household staff of the gilded age.  But, you know, there is a lot to like in the service economy.  And we think about, you know, a world where we are going to have a brighter world for less-skilled people and I think a lot of the answers do come in services and not all that’s wrong.
Steve LeVine: Okay.  We are going to do a lightning round.  Do you want to say some…
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah.  I wanted to add two things.  One, in terms of policies, I think we need to look at the schools and how they are doing with dealing with boys because we know they are having a lot of trouble.  And we need to get to these kids before they drop out, before they have the kind of failure that leads to joblessness and/or low skills and becoming part of what they call the precariat, very precarious jobs that take you in and out of, you know, that are not reliable.  Ed, one question about this mobility issue that I find so interesting is if you look historically, people, when they move, it’s generally due to social networks of some sort.  That is, their neighbors moved, or their uncle moved and said oh, there are real opportunities here.  And it is curious in a place like Brooklyn that I’ve studied, you have neighborhoods all over of different kinds of social groups.  So, they are generally ethnic groups, but we can have a Bangladeshi neighborhood, or a Pakistani neighborhood, or Chinese, obviously, but we never get an Eastern heartland neighborhood.  So, and I wonder what it is that makes people not see that as a possibility.
Steve LeVine: Okay.  We have got just a few more minutes here.  And so, I wanted to do a lightning round.  What is the big – why are we having this discussion?  Why is it important?  There is a sense that the society is under threat.  That how do you support an advanced democracy with the growth of jobs, $10-an-hour jobs, and the uncertainty about jobs period?  So, my question for each of you, starting with you, Kay, is are we under – is our society under threat?  Do you believe it is?  And if you could do one thing, what would it be?
Kay Hymowitz: So, I think that it is under threat.  I think the education-based meritocracy is failing a lot of people and also creating class divisions in so many respects.  So, we are divided not just in terms of income, not just in terms of education, but in everything from the coffee we drink, the places we live, the way we think about families and marriage and children.  And I think that that division, that polarization, has created just enormous anger at the lower end and that we are going to have more and more pressure, and this is an important point for conservatives, I think, to deal with, a lot of pressure for redistribution or some kinds of programs that can say that this system can work for people at the bottom.  We talk a lot about the jobless men, but it is also people who are living and who are really actually working pretty hard and still not doing that well.  And, with very few hopes for their children.
Steve LeVine: Thanks.  Ed?
Edward Glaeser: Wage subsidies.
Steve LeVine: Well, wait.  First answer the question.
Edward Glaeser: Oh, is it a major – yeah.  It is a big problem and wage subsidies.
Kay Hymowitz: I like that.
Steve LeVine: Ryan.
Edward Glaeser: Fix NYCHA first.
Ryan Avent: Well, you know, I like listening to Ed because Ed is optimistic about things.  I am sort of all the way on the other end of the scale.  The main thing I look forward to is kind of we finally get to see which dystopia we are going to end up in.  I think, I am sort of very concerned.  If you look back at industrial history, it all worked out okay but there were a lot of points in which it might not have.  There were, you know, there were serious revolutions.  There was basically a century-long ideological conflict that nearly led to nuclear war.  And that ideological conflict had its roots in kind of the inequities generated by industrialization.  So, there is a lot of ways things could go wrong and there is not really anyone in control kind of saying here is what we are going to do so that the worst outcomes don’t occur.  So, I think it is, you know, we need to be aware of kind of the difficulties that are ahead of us, and the more we kind of talk about and realize that we are going to have some radical solutions probably the better prepared we will be and the better able we will be to avoid the worst outcomes.
Steve LeVine: I feel a lot better now.

Ryan Avent: Yeah.


JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL
Here’s how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!

THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY!


Staggering expensive "cheap" Mexican labor did not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to Mexico. It's all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost of the invasion, their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the American people!

‘Roseanne’ Tackles Illegal Immigration’s Disastrous Impact on Working, Middle-Class Americans


ABC
by JOHN BINDER10 May 2018Cleveland, OH1,939

The latest episode of the hit rebooted ABC sitcom Roseanne admirably takes on the issue of illegal immigration and its negative impact on America’s working families and the middle-class.

The episode entitled, Meet the Neighbors finds Connor family patriarch Dan lose out on a job for which illegal immigrants had been hired to do for less money.
In a post, Roseanne Barr — an avid supporter of President Donald Trump on and off the show — hinted that the episode would deal with immigration.

tonight's show is about the impact of legal and illegal immigration on our family.
·        ·        
“I got underbid on Al’s job. He’s using illegals,” Dan explains to a disappointed Roseanne, who’s worried about the family’s ability to make ends meat. “It ain’t Rosie. Those guys are so desperate they’ll work for nothing and we’re getting screwed in the process. All I know is we can’t pay our bills.”
Illegal immigration, where now more than 12 to 30 million illegal aliens live in the U.S., continues to impact America’s working and middle class more than any other communities.
As Breitbart News has reported, illegal immigration costs the American taxpayer approximately $8,075 each, totaling a burden of roughly $116 billion annually.
Every year, the federal government shells out approximately $45.8 billion in costs on illegal aliens and their children – including expenditures for public education, healthcare, justice enforcement initiatives and welfare programs.
 Likewise, if illegal aliens were given amnesty to permanently remain in the U.S., it would cost American taxpayers about $2 trillion, Breitbart News noted.
Mass illegal and legal immigration to the U.S. has contributed to poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter 



Mass Immigration Eats Away at Wages


 By BOB DANE

TWEET





The latest glowing U.S. jobs report was tarnished by more depressing news on wages. They continue to flat-line.

One reason for the phenomenon of low unemployment and low wage growth is the corrosive effects of mass immigration.

In case you hadn’t noticed, wages in America have been stagnating since the early 1970s. Not coincidentally, U.S. immigration policy was liberalized during this period, bringing a record 59 million newcomers into this country (plus untold millions of illegal aliens).
The era of mass immigration also coincided with other factors that have served to undermine U.S. workers, such as globalization and automation.
With the nation’s jobless rate at its lowest level in nearly 18 years, and employers complaining that workers are hard to find, U.S. wages continue to defy the law of supply and demand.
While mass immigration may not be solely to blame for the job-wage disconnect, it is the single most controllable factor suppressing wage growth. We have very limited control over matters of globalization and the increasing use of automation and artificial intelligence. We do have enormous control over how many new workers we admit or allow to enter our country, if we choose to exercise it.
Constituting a near-record 14 percent of the U.S. population, immigrants “grow the economy” with their presence, but the economic benefits are not shared by workers whose paychecks lose ground to inflation.
From high-tech companies to the service industry, U.S. employers demand evermore immigrant labor. H-1B (skilled) and H-2B (lower-skilled) visas are used to hire millions of foreigners and suppress wages. The Trump administration, with congressional approval, has signaled its intent to raise the annual quotas yet again.
Recent research shows workers already are available for many jobs.
“If such workers really were in short supply, wages should be rising rapidly as employers struggle to recruit new workers or retain the ones they have. In economics, the price of anything — steel, wheat or workers — rises if demand outstrips supply. The price of workers is primarily wages,” notes Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Salary data that continue to show little or no wage gains – or even outright declines – suggest mass immigration is a key factor driving the “structural” economic changes vaguely alluded to in media reports. They just won’t tell you that.
Between now and 2065, immigrants are projected to account for a whopping 88 percent of the U.S. population increase, or 103 million people, as the nation grows to 441 million. Any wagers on how that growth will trickle down to your children’s paychecks?


SANCTUARY CITIES PROTECT CROOKED EMPLOYERS AND HUMAN TRAFFICKERS



Exploitation of the vulnerable is anything but “compassionate.”

May 1, 2018

2
We have all heard the bogus claim that “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” protect the “immigrants” from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents and that the mayors of sanctuary cities are being compassionate.
There is no compassion to be found in exploitation
In reality, politicians who create and support sanctuary policies are every bit as disgusting and exploitative of illegal aliens as are human traffickers and unscrupulous employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens and benefit by sanctuary policies and, indeed those human traffickers and employers of illegal aliens are being provided with “sanctuary” and are being shielded from detection by ICE.
Mayors and governors of “sanctuary” jurisdictions are actually “partners in crime” with human traffickers and exploitive employers.
Before we go further, however, it is imperative to lay waste to that the false claim that mayors of sanctuary cities protect immigrants from immigration law enforcement agents.
Lies about sanctuary policies being motivated by “compassion” creates a hostile environment and antipathy for ICE agents and Border Patrol agents that impedes them from locating and arresting aliens who violate our immigration laws, but also makes it far more difficult for ICE and Border Patrol agents to engage with the public to develop actionable intelligence. 
This hostility also endangers their safety (reportedly physical attacks on immigration law enforcement personnel have more than doubled in the past couple of years).
Let’s be clear, Immigrants need no protection from immigration law enforcement authorities. 
Lawful immigrants and nonimmigrant aliens who have been admitted for a temporary visit under the aegis of various forms of visas, need no protection from immigration law enforcement authorities unless they violate the terms of their admission. They were lawfully admitted into the United States by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors in the first place.
Lawful immigrants who were have been granted lawful permanent residence in the United States and/or nonimmigrant (temporary visitors) who abide by their terms of lawful admission need no protection from immigration law enforcement officers.
Lawful immigrants only become subject to deportation (removal) is if they are convicted of committing serious crimes.
However, aliens who evade the inspections process conducted at ports of entry enter the United States without inspection should be fearful of detection, arrest and deportation (removal).
In point of fact, the fundamental law that underlies the decisions made by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors at ports of entry as to whether or not to admit a foreign visitors into the United States is Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182 - Inadmissible aliens.
That section of law is contained within the Immigration and Nationality Act and enumerates the grounds for excluding aliens from the United States and includes aliens infected with dangerous communicable diseases, suffer from extreme mental illness and are prone to violence, aliens who are criminals, human rights violators, war criminals, spies or terrorists.
Finally that list also includes aliens who would likely become public charges or provide unfair competition for American workers and would either displace American workers or cause suppression of wages and have a deleterious impact on working conditions.  
Nothing in that statute that makes any distinctions about the race, religion or ethnicity of aliens.
Aliens who evade the inspection process conducted at ports of entry do so because they know that they fall into one or more categories of aliens who, by law, would be inadmissable.
In the past I have written about how Sanctuary Cities Betray America and Americans and that by shielding illegal aliens from detection by ICE agents prevents those agents from discovering the human traffickers and other criminals who enabled those aliens to gain entry into the United States and perhaps, in the parlance of the 9/11 Commission, embed themselves in communities around the United States.
Sanctuary jurisdictions attract large number of illegal aliens including transnational gang members, international terrorists or fugitives from other countries because they know that local police, in those jurisdictions, will not report them to immigration law enforcement authorities even if they are arrested for committing crimes in those jurisdictions.
Transnational gangs invariably set up shop among immigrants from their home countries who live within the ethnic immigrant communities,  This is not only true for gangs from Latin America but from all over the world.  Human nature is universal and criminals can be found within every ethnic immigrant community.
In point of fact, the most likely victims of the crimes of these pernicious gangs are the members of these ethnic immigrant communities who often immigrated to the United States to get away from these very same criminals, only to find that they are now, once again, forced to live with them.
Sanctuary Cities also attract huge numbers of foreign workers who, because of their desperation, are willing to take whatever risks that they must in order to evade detection from the United States to take jobs in the United States, confident that sanctuary policies will shield them from ICE.
This incentivizes illegal immigration and, consequently, overwhelms Border Patrol resources to secure our borders.  This further undermines national security and public safety in violation of 8 U.S. Code § 1324 which, deems the following actions to constitute felonies:
(iii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation;
(iv) encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law; or
(v)
(I) engages in any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts, or
(II) aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding acts, shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B).
When I was an INS agent, particularly when I was assigned to the Anti-Smuggling Unit in New York City many of the female illegal aliens we encountered told me that they took birth control pills for several months before they made their attempt to run our borders because they anticipated that they would be raped by the smugglers. 
Today the level of violence perpetrated against these smuggled aliens by human traffickers has increased exponentially as the drug cartel and violent gangs became more involved in human trafficking, virtually cornering the market of this pernicious and violent “trade.”
Considering the extreme that these illegal aliens will go to in order to enter the United States, it is clear that they will also endure extreme exploitation by employers who intentionally hire them.
Sanctuary Cities provide a veritable “army” of readily exploitable illegal alien workers who are sought after by unscrupulous employers who eagerly hire alien workers they can exploit, paying them substandard wages under substandard, indeed, dangerous conditions that lawful immigrants and American workers would never tolerate.
The obvious question then, that must be asked, is why would a mayor or governor declare his/her city or state to be a “Sanctuary” given that this runs contrary to law, commonsense, morality and even the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that determined that multiple failures of the immigration system enabled foreign terrorists to enter the United States and then embed themselves in communities around the U.S.
A good place to start looking for the answer to that question can be found in the headline of a February 28, 2018 Breitbart news reportNY City Officials Hide Huge Workforce of Illegal Immigrants from ICE Enforcement.
Clearly sanctuary policies attract huge numbers of illegal aliens who entered the U.S. without inspection and often with the assistance of human traffickers- at great risk and expense, to seek illegal employment. 
Employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens do so, not out of compassion, but out of greed. 
Such unscrupulous employers hire illegal aliens because they know that these aliens will work for significantly substandard wages under substandard, indeed, often illegally hazardous working conditions.  Exploitation is not a demonstration of compassion.
Alan Greenspan included in his prepared testimony at an April 30, 2009 Senate Immigration Subcommittee hearing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform chaired by Sen. Schumer, the following:
Some evidence suggests that unskilled illegal immigrants (almost all from Latin America) marginally suppress wage levels of native-born Americans without a high school diploma, and impose significant costs on some state and local governments.
Greenspan blithely neglected to note that “marginally suppressing wages” of those American workers all too often causes them to become homeless.
Furthermore, as was noted in the Breitbart article which focused on NYC,
The huge labor force of illegals has successfully kept food-industry wages extremely low, according to 2017 state data, despite the high cost of living in the city.
The report went on to state:
The taxpayers’ cost of this illegal immigration is high, partly because of the very low wages. In 2009, New York city’s support for illegal immigrants — including aid, education, housing — cost taxpayers roughly $9.5 billion, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
On December 6, 2007 the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) issued a report, The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments.

Cheap labor is anything but cheap and, as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a “free lunch.”


Staggering expensive "cheap" Mexican labor did not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to Mexico. It's all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost of the invasion, their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the American people!



TRUMP PARTNERNERS WITH MEXICO, the LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY and the PRO-BUSINESS GOP to keep wages for LEGALS depressed (today they are depressed to 1973 levels).




But you will still get the tax bills for the Mex welfare state and crime tidal wave!



“Illegal aliens are not supposed to work, and knowingly providing shelter for illegal aliens can be construed as harboring and shielding, elements of a felony under federal law, Title 8 U.S. Code § 1324.”  

“Where aliens and jobs are concerned, even many categories of nonimmigrant aliens (temporary visitors) including aliens who lawfully enter under the Visa Waiver Program or with tourist visas may not work in the United States and immediately become subject to removal (deportation) if they seek gainful employment.”  ----MICHAEL CUTLER – FRONTPAGE mag

WE COULD END MEXICO’S INVASION IF WE PUT EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IN JAIL

 

NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks:

 

E-Verify Ignored in DACA Negotiations Because ‘Members of Congress Know It Will Work’



Members of Congress broadly oppose a legislative nationwide E-Verify mandate for employers because “they know it will work,” said NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, explaining why E-Verify is not being pushed in congressional negotiations for an amnesty deal for recipients of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Jenks further noted that both parties are beholden to special interests supportive of “mass migration.”

Do We Really Have a “Labor Shortage” in the U.S., or Are We Manufacturing One?

 By IRA MEHLMAN  May 1, 2018 

TWEET


Stethoscope with clipboard and Laptop on desk Doctor working in hospital writing a prescription Healthcare and medical concept test results in background vintage color selective focus.
It seems like there are three kinds of jobs in America: Those that Americans won’t do, those that Americans can’t do, and those that there aren’t enough Americans to do.
Perpetually high on the list of jobs for which there is a claimed shortage of workers is nursing. In one of the countless news reports about the “acute shortage” of nurses in the United States, a 2016 Atlantic article notes, “America’s 3 million nurses make up the largest segment of the health-care workforce in the U.S., and nursing is currently one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country. Despite that growth, demand is outpacing supply. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.2 million vacancies will emerge for registered nurses between 2014 and 2022.”
To fill this so-called void, American health care institutions have been turning to foreign nurses. About 15 percent of nurses currently work in the U.S. are foreign born, and the health care industry is constantly clamoring for more.
So, if we are expecting 1.2 million vacancies in the coming years, there must be a good reason. Is it because:
1.     There aren’t enough Americans who are educationally qualified to enter nursing programs?
2.     There aren’t enough qualified Americans who want to be nurses?
3.     Eager, qualified nursing school applicants are being turned away in droves?
Turns out the answer is C. According to CNN, U.S. nursing schools are cutting admissions and rejecting record numbers of qualified applicants. In 2017, nursing schools in the United States rejected 56,000 applicants who met all the qualifications for admission. And, given that the average salary for a nurse practitioner is $97,000 a year, there are likely many, many more qualified Americans who would consider a career in nursing. But rather than expanding the capacity to train nurses in the United States, schools are reducing the number of slots in nursing programs.
The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from these facts is that the health care industry would rather spend money lobbying for more foreign nurses than invest in training Americans to fill these jobs. Until not that long ago, many hospitals had their own nursing training programs but decided to eliminate them as cost-cutting measures.
It would not be a stretch to insinuate that nursing is not the only sector of the U.S. economy in which there is a labor shortage because we have deliberately created one for the purpose of bringing in foreign workers.


Ira joined the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1986 with experience as a journalist, professor of journalism, special assistant to Gov. Richard Lamm (Colorado), and press secretary of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. His columns have appeared in National Review, LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and more. He is an experienced TV and ra


WATCH: Whistleblower Says Illegal Aliens Have ‘Taken Over Every Trade’ in CA Construction, Driven Down U.S. Wages


SSam Hodgsen/Getty Images
by JOHN BINDER14 Mar 2018Washington, D.C.6,219

A whistleblower in the southern California construction industry says illegal alien workers have “taken over every trade” in the business while driving down wages by an estimated 40 percent.

In an interview with the group Progressives for Immigration Reform, a whistleblower who was an independent contractor throughout the 1980s and 1990s explains how the California construction industry transformed into one in which American men could make a middle-class living off blue-collar work to a business where wages have plummeted and illegal aliens dominate the field.
Blaine Taylor, the whistleblower, said the construction industry in California once offered a starting wage of about $45 an hour in the late 1980s. Fast-forward to 2018 — nearly two decades into when illegal aliens began flooding the industry — he now says that wages have fallen by more than half, standing at just $11 an hour.
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. [Emphasis added]
For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour.
That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
TAYLOR: The reality is that a person that was hired as a laborer in 1988, I paid $15 an hour and within a month if I could leave him on the job alone, he got $20 an hour. If I hired somebody that already knew how to do certain types of labor or certain types of operations, they would get $20 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Taylor says that the flood of illegal alien workers contributed to wages in the California construction industry plummetting between the 1980s to today.
Between 2008 and 2016, construction wages were actually lower than in 1998, representing a roughly 40 percent drop in pay. At the same time, construction materials, Taylor said, increased by about 50 percent.
INTERVIEWER: It’s really strange because as a young man, of course, just entering your working life, you’re making a living wage, and then as you got middle-aged, the wage dropped, which is like… you know most people don’t expect in their careers that they’re going to start out at the top and they’re actually going to fall below where they are when they start.
TAYLOR: Well, part of it was due to the market, but then there’s the other part that really pulled it down and that was the influx of just a flood of undocumented workers. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, Taylor says that illegal aliens are dominating the blue-collar trades in the California construction industry, with an illegal alien population that potentially exceeds more than three million.
TAYLOR: Unfortunately, what I have found, is that [the construction in California is] overwhelmingly being built by illegal immigrants that have basically taken over every trade. [Emphasis added]
Just to go back for a second, in the 80’s and early 90’s when I was a contractor, it wasn’t unusual to see undocumented workers doing landscaping, demolition, then it became roofing, and concrete work. So the heavier, more difficult, and dirtier sort of trades where you actually got in the ditches were the first trades to be taken over [by illegal aliens], then the rest of them began to fall.
The drywall was next, painting, framing was the last, and now electrical and plumbing has been taken over. All the trades finally went to the illegal immigrants. [Emphasis added]
In a 2017 report by the Los Angeles Times, the left-leaning paper admitted that at the time illegal aliens began flooding the California construction industry, wages drastically dropped.
“You can’t live on a wage of $11 an hour for a construction worker,” Taylor said. “There’s no hope for people. Young people, as a young man growing up in Detroit, you looked forward to hopefully working in the construction industry.”
“That was an attractive career to go into as a young person,” Taylor said.
The big business-preferred cheap labor economic model of importing more than one million new legal immigrants every year to compete mostly for working and middle-class jobs against Americans has resulted in decades of stagnant and even decreased wages for U.S. workers:
                                               Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers, 15 years and older, 1960 to 2016.
For instance, the massive importation of low-skilled foreign nationals to the U.S. has translated to a cheap-labor economy that has aided in keeping American men’s wages stagnant for at least 44 years, as Breitbart News reported. Median earnings for American men working full-time were actually lower in 2016 than they were in 2007.
On the other hand, President Trump’s economic nationalist efforts to tighten the labor market by increasing interior enforcement of illegal immigration has helped secure history-making wage growth for American workers in the construction industry, the garment industry, for workers employed at small businesses, and for black Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Do We Really Have a “Labor Shortage” in the U.S., or Are We Manufacturing One?

 By IRA MEHLMAN  May 1, 2018 

TWEET


Stethoscope with clipboard and Laptop on desk Doctor working in hospital writing a prescription Healthcare and medical concept test results in background vintage color selective focus.
It seems like there are three kinds of jobs in America: Those that Americans won’t do, those that Americans can’t do, and those that there aren’t enough Americans to do.
Perpetually high on the list of jobs for which there is a claimed shortage of workers is nursing. In one of the countless news reports about the “acute shortage” of nurses in the United States, a 2016 Atlantic article notes, “America’s 3 million nurses make up the largest segment of the health-care workforce in the U.S., and nursing is currently one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country. Despite that growth, demand is outpacing supply. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.2 million vacancies will emerge for registered nurses between 2014 and 2022.”
To fill this so-called void, American health care institutions have been turning to foreign nurses. About 15 percent of nurses currently work in the U.S. are foreign born, and the health care industry is constantly clamoring for more.
So, if we are expecting 1.2 million vacancies in the coming years, there must be a good reason. Is it because:
1.     There aren’t enough Americans who are educationally qualified to enter nursing programs?
2.     There aren’t enough qualified Americans who want to be nurses?
3.     Eager, qualified nursing school applicants are being turned away in droves?
Turns out the answer is C. According to CNN, U.S. nursing schools are cutting admissions and rejecting record numbers of qualified applicants. In 2017, nursing schools in the United States rejected 56,000 applicants who met all the qualifications for admission. And, given that the average salary for a nurse practitioner is $97,000 a year, there are likely many, many more qualified Americans who would consider a career in nursing. But rather than expanding the capacity to train nurses in the United States, schools are reducing the number of slots in nursing programs.
The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from these facts is that the health care industry would rather spend money lobbying for more foreign nurses than invest in training Americans to fill these jobs. Until not that long ago, many hospitals had their own nursing training programs but decided to eliminate them as cost-cutting measures.
It would not be a stretch to insinuate that nursing is not the only sector of the U.S. economy in which there is a labor shortage because we have deliberately created one for the purpose of bringing in foreign workers.


Ira joined the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1986 with experience as a journalist, professor of journalism, special assistant to Gov. Richard Lamm (Colorado), and press secretary of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. His columns have appeared in National Review, LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and more. He is an experienced TV and ra


WATCH: Whistleblower Says Illegal Aliens Have ‘Taken Over Every Trade’ in CA Construction, Driven Down U.S. Wages


SSam Hodgsen/Getty Images
by JOHN BINDER14 Mar 2018Washington, D.C.6,219

A whistleblower in the southern California construction industry says illegal alien workers have “taken over every trade” in the business while driving down wages by an estimated 40 percent.

In an interview with the group Progressives for Immigration Reform, a whistleblower who was an independent contractor throughout the 1980s and 1990s explains how the California construction industry transformed into one in which American men could make a middle-class living off blue-collar work to a business where wages have plummeted and illegal aliens dominate the field.
Blaine Taylor, the whistleblower, said the construction industry in California once offered a starting wage of about $45 an hour in the late 1980s. Fast-forward to 2018 — nearly two decades into when illegal aliens began flooding the industry — he now says that wages have fallen by more than half, standing at just $11 an hour.
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. [Emphasis added]
For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour.
That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
TAYLOR: The reality is that a person that was hired as a laborer in 1988, I paid $15 an hour and within a month if I could leave him on the job alone, he got $20 an hour. If I hired somebody that already knew how to do certain types of labor or certain types of operations, they would get $20 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Taylor says that the flood of illegal alien workers contributed to wages in the California construction industry plummetting between the 1980s to today.
Between 2008 and 2016, construction wages were actually lower than in 1998, representing a roughly 40 percent drop in pay. At the same time, construction materials, Taylor said, increased by about 50 percent.
INTERVIEWER: It’s really strange because as a young man, of course, just entering your working life, you’re making a living wage, and then as you got middle-aged, the wage dropped, which is like… you know most people don’t expect in their careers that they’re going to start out at the top and they’re actually going to fall below where they are when they start.
TAYLOR: Well, part of it was due to the market, but then there’s the other part that really pulled it down and that was the influx of just a flood of undocumented workers. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, Taylor says that illegal aliens are dominating the blue-collar trades in the California construction industry, with an illegal alien population that potentially exceeds more than three million.
TAYLOR: Unfortunately, what I have found, is that [the construction in California is] overwhelmingly being built by illegal immigrants that have basically taken over every trade. [Emphasis added]
Just to go back for a second, in the 80’s and early 90’s when I was a contractor, it wasn’t unusual to see undocumented workers doing landscaping, demolition, then it became roofing, and concrete work. So the heavier, more difficult, and dirtier sort of trades where you actually got in the ditches were the first trades to be taken over [by illegal aliens], then the rest of them began to fall.
The drywall was next, painting, framing was the last, and now electrical and plumbing has been taken over. All the trades finally went to the illegal immigrants. [Emphasis added]
In a 2017 report by the Los Angeles Times, the left-leaning paper admitted that at the time illegal aliens began flooding the California construction industry, wages drastically dropped.
“You can’t live on a wage of $11 an hour for a construction worker,” Taylor said. “There’s no hope for people. Young people, as a young man growing up in Detroit, you looked forward to hopefully working in the construction industry.”
“That was an attractive career to go into as a young person,” Taylor said.
The big business-preferred cheap labor economic model of importing more than one million new legal immigrants every year to compete mostly for working and middle-class jobs against Americans has resulted in decades of stagnant and even decreased wages for U.S. workers:
                                               Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers, 15 years and older, 1960 to 2016.
For instance, the massive importation of low-skilled foreign nationals to the U.S. has translated to a cheap-labor economy that has aided in keeping American men’s wages stagnant for at least 44 years, as Breitbart News reported. Median earnings for American men working full-time were actually lower in 2016 than they were in 2007.
On the other hand, President Trump’s economic nationalist efforts to tighten the labor market by increasing interior enforcement of illegal immigration has helped secure history-making wage growth for American workers in the construction industry, the garment industry, for workers employed at small businesses, and for black Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

WHAT DOES MEXICO DO FOR THEIR POOR? THEY EXPORT THEM ALONG WITH THEIR CRIMINAL CLASS TO LOOT AMERICA, AND LOOT THEY DO!

MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORT TO AMERICA… POVERTY, CRIMINALS, ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS FOR WELFARE and HEROIN

Mexico prefers to export its poor, not uplift them

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0330/p09s02-coop.html

1) Mexico ended legal immigration 100 years ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation but pays the 220th lowest minimum wage to force their subjects to invade the USA. The expands territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish language, and culture and genotypes, while earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as Foreign Remittance Income.

 

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