“Liberal governing has transformed beautiful California into the poverty capital of America with the worst quality of life. Crazy taxes, crazy high cost of living, and crazy overreaching regulations have crushed the middle class, forcing the middle class to exit the Sunshine State. All that is left in California are illegals feeding at the breast of the state, rapidly growing massive homeless tent cities, and the mega-rich.” LLOYD MARCUS
Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, author of the new best-selling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, joined SiriusXM host Rebecca Mansour on Monday’sBreitbart News Tonight to discuss his research into the deep business ties between the Chinese communist government and the family of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife, President Trump’s Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao.
“This is unprecedented to have a Senate majority leader and a Cabinet officer in a federal government position to have a family that is this closely tied to a foreign rival,” Schweizer said.
In a Monday article for Breitbart News, Schweizer revealed details of the latest business deal involved the family of McConnell’s wife, Trump’s Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. “They bought ten massive ships from the Chinese government since Elaine Chao became our transportation secretary. This would appear to be a conflict of interest,” said Mansour.
Foremost Group, which is owned by Sec. Elaine Chao’s father and Sen. McConnell’s father-in-law James S.C. Chao, signed contracts with a subsidiary of the state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) for four bulk cargo ships in June and September 2017. In December 2017, Chao’s company signed another contract with state-owned CSSC at Foremost’s New York office for two massive 210,000-ton ships. James S.C. Chao and two of Elaine’s sisters were in attendance. So, too, was the Consul General of China in New York, as well as representatives from the CSSC. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Then on January 31, 2018, Foremost Group ordered four more 210,000-ton ships from CSSC. Angela Chao, sister to Sec. Elaine Chao and Foremost’s Deputy Chairman, said she expects cooperation between the two entities to extend into the future. In January 2017, Angela Chao joined the board of the state-owned Bank of China.
Schweizer told Breitbart News Tonight that the terms of the Chao family’s business deal with China remain largely mysterious. The ships are massive dry-goods carriers capable of transporting large quantities of raw materials.
“The Chao family has rather extensive contracts with the Chinese government,” he noted. “These ten ships were purchased. We don’t know the purchase price. They could have gotten a sweetheart deal for them. We don’t know how the ships were paid for. We know in the past that when the Chaos have purchased ships from the Chinese government, the Chinese government has often financed the purchase of those ships, which is a pretty rare development.”
“We don’t really know any of the terms related to these vessels, other than the fact that they announced them, and that these ten ships will increase the fleet of the Chao family’s shipping company by 50 percent,” Schweizer continued.
The signing ceremony between the Chao family’s Foremost Group and the state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC)
“This is a major expansion of the company. This company goes back decades, but it’s during the first year of the Trump administration with Elaine as the transportation secretary that the Chinese government has decided to do this deal with the Chao family. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions about the financial ties between the McConnell-Chao family and the Chinese government, and what that might mean for policies or potential votes that might take place in the U.S. Senate,” he said.
Schweizer cited the globalist belief that robust trade brings countries closer together politically, and said that lofty principle applies in a much less healthy fashion to political elites as well.
“That’s one of the main contentions I make in Secret Empires, that the Chinese government is seeking commercial ties, lucrative deals for the families of American politicians precisely because they believe it will lead those politicians to be less critical of the Chinese government,” he said.
“In the case of Mitch McConnell, that is absolutely true,” he charged. “He came into the U.S. Senate in the 1980s from Kentucky. We had, of course, the Tiananmen Square massacre that took place. Mitch McConnell was probably the most critical U.S. senator on China in the midst of that massive human rights violation.”
“And yet, in 1993 his family began very lucrative ties with the Chinese government. In December of 1993 he traveled to Beijing, China with his father-in-law – that would be Elaine Chao’s father James Chao – as guests of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. As the name implies, that is a company owned by the Chinese government. They are, in fact, one of the biggest military contractors in China,” he noted.
Schweizer said the Chao’s shipping business grew so rapidly after the 1993 deal that by 2008, the Chao family was able to gift their son-in-law Mitch McConnell with a sum of between $5 and $25 million, which “massively increased his net worth overnight.”
“He benefits when the Chao family does well financially. It helps his bottom line,” Schweizer emphasized.
He contended that a review of McConnell’s voting record on China over the past 25 years reveals “he has become increasingly less hostile to Beijing.”
“It only stands to reason because if you look at how the Chao family business is set up, if the Chinese government were upset with something that Senator Mitch McConnell did, they could literally destroy the Chao family business overnight. Mitch McConnell knows that,” said Schweizer.
“This growing economic dependence between McConnell’s family and the Chinese government has served to, in a sense, encourage him to be far less critical of China,” he said. “Whatever the issue – the South China Sea, currency manipulation, trade issues – he is far more pliable to Chinese interests than he was five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. I think it has everything to do with the fact that he recognizes and knows that the Chinese government is making his family very wealthy.”
Schweizer warned that deep financial ties between the American political class and Beijing are particularly dangerous at a time when our national security apparatus has identified Communist China as the greatest long-term threat faced by the United States.
“It gets even worse because James Chao – that would be Elaine Chao’s father – and her sister Angela Chao a couple of years ago served on the board of directors of a Chinese company called CSSC Holdings. ‘CSSC’ stands for China State Shipbuilding Corporation. This is the financial arm of one of the largest military contractors in Beijing,” he said.
“When the Pentagon talks about the fact that China is a rising military power, they are talking about, in part, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation,” he elaborated. “They build a lot of the navy ships that the Chinese navy is building to challenge U.S. naval supremacy. According to current projections by the Naval Academy and other outlets, they believe by 2030 if current trends continue that the Chinese navy will surpass the U.S. Navy as the preeminent naval power. A central player in that is the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, of which Elaine Chao’s sister and father served on the board of directors.”
Schweizer also referenced China’s massive “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure project, which stretches across the developing world and includes naval facilities, roads, and other resources of interest to the Chinese military. Both the Obama and Trump administrations agree that One Belt, One Road represents a “geostrategic challenge to the United States and the Western allies.”
“Elaine Chao’s sister Angela Chao has been on record saying One Belt, One Road is a wonderful thing,” he noted. “That yes, it’s going to be good for China, but it’s also going to be good for the developing world. She explicitly says, ‘I want to be part of seeing this be a successful Chinese initiative.’”
“The problems don’t begin and end with the financial ties to the shipbuilding corporation. It goes far deeper than that. This is a very serious challenge to our strategic balance with the Chinese government,” he cautioned.
Schweizer pointed out that McConnell has not attempted to refute the facts of his family’s commercial ties to the Chinese government, but instead insisted those ties will not influence his votes in the Senate.
“My response is just, give me a break,” he sighed. “The Chinese government has been very explicit about this, that they believe the way they can deal with the American challenge to their strategic goals and plans is basically by buying off our political class. They’re doing that with Mitch McConnell. As I highlight in the book, they also did this in the Obama administration with Joe Biden’s family.”
“There have been reports in Canada, the head of the Canadian intelligence service issued a statement a couple of years ago that Canadian members of parliament and their families were being offered sweetheart deals by the Chinese government,” he continued. “There are growing scandals in Australia, in New Zealand relating to political parties and politicians who had financial ties to the Chinese government that were exposed.”
“There is no debate. This is their strategy. And there is also no debate that they look to supplant the United States as the major world economic, political, and military power. That is not subject to dispute. The question is, are we going to be aware of it, and are going to actually do something about it?” Schweizer contended.
“The problem is, when you have political figures in the United States, of whatever party, who are financially beholden to the Chinese government, they are not going to represent their constituents back home, because their ultimate constituents are these foreign entities – in this case, China,” he lamented.
Schweizer called on McConnell to “come clean and be honest about the financial ties that exist, and the fact that they are vulnerable to the Chinese government deciding tomorrow to shut down their business if they want to, if they’re unhappy with anything that Mitch McConnell does.”
According to Schweizer, the Chinese were “freaked out” by President Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election.
“Trump has been talking about China for the last three decades – issues of the trade deficit, military expansion, you name it, Trump has talked about it,” he observed. “Whether one agrees with Trump or not, there is no question that he views China as a rival power.”
“China saw that immediately, so when Donald Trump won, they basically decided on two things. Number One, that they needed to cozy up further to the powers-that-be in Washington, DC,” he said.
“Ten days after Donald Trump won his election, what did the Chinese government decide to do? They decided to appoint Elaine Chao’s sister Angela Chao to the board of directors of the government-owned Bank of China,” he recalled, noting that Angela Chao is “the first foreign national other than a Dutch banker to serve in that position.”
Number Two on China’s post-election agenda was getting Trump to weaken his positions on China, which Schweizer said was accomplished by offering “sweetheart deals to his kids.”
“I don’t have any evidence that any of those deals have taken place,” he disclaimed. “I have no doubt that they’ve been offered. What I’ve counseled is, don’t take those deals. Those deals are going to come with strings attached, and they are going to do it to weaken the United States.”
Schweizer complained that current disclosure rules for foreign business connections fall short of the transparency standard Americans should demand from their political leaders.
“If you look at Mitch McConnell’s financial disclosure form in the U.S. Senate, there is no mention of any of the cheap deals with the Chinese government,” he pointed out. “They purposely do these deals through family members, parents or siblings or adult children, because they don’t have to disclose those kinds of transactions.”
“We need to demand that they disclose these transactions,” he urged. “We need to demand that they end these kinds of financial relationships, because look, we’re not stupid. We recognize that if these are making our political leaders rich, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, they are going to get access and they are going to hold sway with our political leaders.”
“We want our leaders attuned to American interests, not to Chinese interests. As long as these lucrative ties exist, we cannot be guaranteed at all that they aren’t more interested in pleasing those making them rich in Beijing than pleasing those that are in their home districts that are putting them in office,” Schweizer declared.
Mansour asked if there is any precedent for a powerful politician such as Senate Majority Leader McConnell having such deep financial ties with a foreign power identified as a top strategic adversary by the Pentagon and White House.
“None,” Schweizer replied. “This is unprecedented. This did not exist during the Cold War. It didn’t exist during World War 2. I don’t know any examples from the 19th Century. This is unprecedented, to have a Senate majority leader and a Cabinet officer in a federal government position, to have a family that is this closely tied to a foreign rival.”
“We’re not talking about the British government, or the French government, or the German government,” he added. “We are talking about a rival power in China which wants to unseat the United States to be the supreme global power. That is their goal over the next couple of decades. They’ve been very explicit about that.”
“If we bury our head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening, we’re only going to make the situation worse,” Schweizer warned. “We need to compete with China in a way in which we know that our leaders are interested in our best interests, not in their best interests – especially when their best interests align with a foreign government, as they seem to in this case.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 9 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific).
REVEALED: Mitch McConnell’s In-Laws Bought 10 Massive Ships from the Chinese Government Since His Wife Elaine Chao Became Transportation Secretary
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) in-laws have ordered 10 massive cargo ships from the Chinese government since the senator’s wife Elaine Chao became Secretary of Transportation. The deep financial ties between the Chao family’s shipping business Foremost Group and the Chinese regime were first revealed in the #1 New York Times bestseller Secret Empires.
Foremost Group, which is owned by Sec. Elaine Chao’s father and Sen. McConnell’s father-in-law James S.C. Chao, signed contracts with a subsidiary of the state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) for four bulk cargo ships in June and September 2017. In December 2017, Chao’s company signed another contract with state-owned CSSC at Foremost’s New York office for two massive 210,000-ton ships. James S.C. Chao and two of Elaine’s sisters were in attendance. So, too, was the Consul General of China in New York, as well as representatives from the CSSC. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Foremost Group-CSSC Signing Ceremony
Then on January 31, 2018, Foremost Group ordered four more 210,000-ton ships from CSSC. Angela Chao, sister to Sec. Elaine Chao and Foremost’s Deputy Chairman, said she expects cooperation between the two entities to extend into the future. In January 2017, Angela Chao joined the board of the state-owned Bank of China.
The finances of Sec. Elaine Chao and her husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell, are closely tied to the Foremost Group. In 2008, James Chao gave a $5 million-$25 million “gift” to Sen. McConnell, more than tripling his net worth. Contracts with other Chinese state-owned enterprises make up a significant portion of Foremost’s business. James and Angela Chao previously served on the board of CSSC Holdings, a major contractor for the Chinese military and a key supporter of the PLA Navy.
Despite increasing threats of a trade war between the Trump Administration and the Chinese government, the Chao family’s ties to the Chinese government do not seem to have cooled. To the contrary, as the 10-ship order suggests, they have accelerated. Moreover, James Chao was recently in China for an event promoting his new Chinese-language biography. The event was sponsored by Xinhua, the Chinese state-owned media outlet, and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), a branch of the Communist Party known to be active in foreign influence operations. Sponsors praised James Chao as a great promoter of China abroad, referring to him as “vanguard of China-US exchanges.”
The Chao’s Chinese counterparties are often closely aligned with China’s foreign policy elite. CPAFFC President Li Xiaolin, attended the book event with the Chao’s. She is the daughter of a former Chinese president and wife of a former Major General in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Another official in attendance now serves as Deputy Director of the United Front Work Department, a division of the Communist Party involved in managing foreign relationships.
Trade and infrastructure deals around the globe have become a centerpiece of China’s foreign policy in recent years. These deals are part of the strategic “One Belt, One Road” initiative, a massive plan to expand China’s sphere of influence across Asia and Africa. U.S. analysts view OBOR as both a military and economic challenge to the United States. One detailed study regards it as a “state-directed effort to bolster Chinese political influence and extend its military reach from Indonesia to East Africa.”
But the Chao family describes it in much more benign terms. In a March 2017 statement, Angela Chao called OBOR “very important not only to China’s development, but for the many surrounding and neighboring countries, and thus the world….I hope to also be able to contribute to this important initiative that has the potential to raise the standard of living for so many.”
The United States has so far declined to participate directly in OBOR or join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). However, the Trump Administration sent a delegation to the 2017 Belt & Road Forum in a notable deviation from previous policy. Elaine Chao’s position as Transportation Secretary gives her great influence over U.S. policy regarding central components of the plan. Secretary Chao is spearheadingthe Trump administration’s $200 billion infrastructure proposal.
Foremost has yet to disclose the financial details of its latest deals with CSSC. Similar transactions with CSSC have recently cost over $47 million per vessel, a price that would place the total value of the Foremost deals at nearly half a billion dollars. Under current federal disclosure laws, which do not apply to adult relatives, Secretary Chao and Senator McConnell are not required to report their family’s dealings with a major foreign military contractor. Secretary Chao is known to be extremely close with her father, who claims that she calls him nightly and involves him in official administration events “as often as she can.”
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 report, NY 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.
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!
PARTNER 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.”
WATCH: Whistleblower Says Illegal Aliens Have ‘Taken Over Every Trade’ in CA Construction, Driven Down U.S. Wages
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?
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:
There aren’t enough Americans who are educationally qualified to enter nursing programs?
There aren’t enough qualified Americans who want to be nurses?
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.
"Congress must prioritize four repairs for the
immigration system before contemplating any DACA-style amnesty negotiation,
said Brat: 1. Ending chain migration and the visa lottery; 2. Mandating
employer use of E-Verify; 3. Construction of a
southern border wall; and 4. Interior enforcement of immigration law."
REP. DAVE BRAT
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The signing ceremony between the Chao family’s Foremost Group and the state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC)
“This is a major expansion of the company. This company goes back decades, but it’s during the first year of the Trump administration with Elaine as the transportation secretary that the Chinese government has decided to do this deal with the Chao family. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions about the financial ties between the McConnell-Chao family and the Chinese government, and what that might mean for policies or potential votes that might take place in the U.S. Senate,” he said.
Schweizer cited the globalist belief that robust trade brings countries closer together politically, and said that lofty principle applies in a much less healthy fashion to political elites as well.
“That’s one of the main contentions I make in Secret Empires, that the Chinese government is seeking commercial ties, lucrative deals for the families of American politicians precisely because they believe it will lead those politicians to be less critical of the Chinese government,” he said.
“In the case of Mitch McConnell, that is absolutely true,” he charged. “He came into the U.S. Senate in the 1980s from Kentucky. We had, of course, the Tiananmen Square massacre that took place. Mitch McConnell was probably the most critical U.S. senator on China in the midst of that massive human rights violation.”
“And yet, in 1993 his family began very lucrative ties with the Chinese government. In December of 1993 he traveled to Beijing, China with his father-in-law – that would be Elaine Chao’s father James Chao – as guests of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. As the name implies, that is a company owned by the Chinese government. They are, in fact, one of the biggest military contractors in China,” he noted.
Schweizer said the Chao’s shipping business grew so rapidly after the 1993 deal that by 2008, the Chao family was able to gift their son-in-law Mitch McConnell with a sum of between $5 and $25 million, which “massively increased his net worth overnight.”
“He benefits when the Chao family does well financially. It helps his bottom line,” Schweizer emphasized.
He contended that a review of McConnell’s voting record on China over the past 25 years reveals “he has become increasingly less hostile to Beijing.”
“It only stands to reason because if you look at how the Chao family business is set up, if the Chinese government were upset with something that Senator Mitch McConnell did, they could literally destroy the Chao family business overnight. Mitch McConnell knows that,” said Schweizer.
“This growing economic dependence between McConnell’s family and the Chinese government has served to, in a sense, encourage him to be far less critical of China,” he said. “Whatever the issue – the South China Sea, currency manipulation, trade issues – he is far more pliable to Chinese interests than he was five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. I think it has everything to do with the fact that he recognizes and knows that the Chinese government is making his family very wealthy.”
Schweizer warned that deep financial ties between the American political class and Beijing are particularly dangerous at a time when our national security apparatus has identified Communist China as the greatest long-term threat faced by the United States.
“It gets even worse because James Chao – that would be Elaine Chao’s father – and her sister Angela Chao a couple of years ago served on the board of directors of a Chinese company called CSSC Holdings. ‘CSSC’ stands for China State Shipbuilding Corporation. This is the financial arm of one of the largest military contractors in Beijing,” he said.
“When the Pentagon talks about the fact that China is a rising military power, they are talking about, in part, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation,” he elaborated. “They build a lot of the navy ships that the Chinese navy is building to challenge U.S. naval supremacy. According to current projections by the Naval Academy and other outlets, they believe by 2030 if current trends continue that the Chinese navy will surpass the U.S. Navy as the preeminent naval power. A central player in that is the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, of which Elaine Chao’s sister and father served on the board of directors.”
Schweizer also referenced China’s massive “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure project, which stretches across the developing world and includes naval facilities, roads, and other resources of interest to the Chinese military. Both the Obama and Trump administrations agree that One Belt, One Road represents a “geostrategic challenge to the United States and the Western allies.”
“Elaine Chao’s sister Angela Chao has been on record saying One Belt, One Road is a wonderful thing,” he noted. “That yes, it’s going to be good for China, but it’s also going to be good for the developing world. She explicitly says, ‘I want to be part of seeing this be a successful Chinese initiative.’”
“The problems don’t begin and end with the financial ties to the shipbuilding corporation. It goes far deeper than that. This is a very serious challenge to our strategic balance with the Chinese government,” he cautioned.
Schweizer pointed out that McConnell has not attempted to refute the facts of his family’s commercial ties to the Chinese government, but instead insisted those ties will not influence his votes in the Senate.
“My response is just, give me a break,” he sighed. “The Chinese government has been very explicit about this, that they believe the way they can deal with the American challenge to their strategic goals and plans is basically by buying off our political class. They’re doing that with Mitch McConnell. As I highlight in the book, they also did this in the Obama administration with Joe Biden’s family.”
“There have been reports in Canada, the head of the Canadian intelligence service issued a statement a couple of years ago that Canadian members of parliament and their families were being offered sweetheart deals by the Chinese government,” he continued. “There are growing scandals in Australia, in New Zealand relating to political parties and politicians who had financial ties to the Chinese government that were exposed.”
“There is no debate. This is their strategy. And there is also no debate that they look to supplant the United States as the major world economic, political, and military power. That is not subject to dispute. The question is, are we going to be aware of it, and are going to actually do something about it?” Schweizer contended.
“The problem is, when you have political figures in the United States, of whatever party, who are financially beholden to the Chinese government, they are not going to represent their constituents back home, because their ultimate constituents are these foreign entities – in this case, China,” he lamented.
Schweizer called on McConnell to “come clean and be honest about the financial ties that exist, and the fact that they are vulnerable to the Chinese government deciding tomorrow to shut down their business if they want to, if they’re unhappy with anything that Mitch McConnell does.”
According to Schweizer, the Chinese were “freaked out” by President Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election.
“Trump has been talking about China for the last three decades – issues of the trade deficit, military expansion, you name it, Trump has talked about it,” he observed. “Whether one agrees with Trump or not, there is no question that he views China as a rival power.”
“China saw that immediately, so when Donald Trump won, they basically decided on two things. Number One, that they needed to cozy up further to the powers-that-be in Washington, DC,” he said.
“Ten days after Donald Trump won his election, what did the Chinese government decide to do? They decided to appoint Elaine Chao’s sister Angela Chao to the board of directors of the government-owned Bank of China,” he recalled, noting that Angela Chao is “the first foreign national other than a Dutch banker to serve in that position.”
Number Two on China’s post-election agenda was getting Trump to weaken his positions on China, which Schweizer said was accomplished by offering “sweetheart deals to his kids.”
“I don’t have any evidence that any of those deals have taken place,” he disclaimed. “I have no doubt that they’ve been offered. What I’ve counseled is, don’t take those deals. Those deals are going to come with strings attached, and they are going to do it to weaken the United States.”
Schweizer complained that current disclosure rules for foreign business connections fall short of the transparency standard Americans should demand from their political leaders.
“If you look at Mitch McConnell’s financial disclosure form in the U.S. Senate, there is no mention of any of the cheap deals with the Chinese government,” he pointed out. “They purposely do these deals through family members, parents or siblings or adult children, because they don’t have to disclose those kinds of transactions.”
“We need to demand that they disclose these transactions,” he urged. “We need to demand that they end these kinds of financial relationships, because look, we’re not stupid. We recognize that if these are making our political leaders rich, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, they are going to get access and they are going to hold sway with our political leaders.”
“We want our leaders attuned to American interests, not to Chinese interests. As long as these lucrative ties exist, we cannot be guaranteed at all that they aren’t more interested in pleasing those making them rich in Beijing than pleasing those that are in their home districts that are putting them in office,” Schweizer declared.
Mansour asked if there is any precedent for a powerful politician such as Senate Majority Leader McConnell having such deep financial ties with a foreign power identified as a top strategic adversary by the Pentagon and White House.
“None,” Schweizer replied. “This is unprecedented. This did not exist during the Cold War. It didn’t exist during World War 2. I don’t know any examples from the 19th Century. This is unprecedented, to have a Senate majority leader and a Cabinet officer in a federal government position, to have a family that is this closely tied to a foreign rival.”
“We’re not talking about the British government, or the French government, or the German government,” he added. “We are talking about a rival power in China which wants to unseat the United States to be the supreme global power. That is their goal over the next couple of decades. They’ve been very explicit about that.”
“If we bury our head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening, we’re only going to make the situation worse,” Schweizer warned. “We need to compete with China in a way in which we know that our leaders are interested in our best interests, not in their best interests – especially when their best interests align with a foreign government, as they seem to in this case.”
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