THE ONLY THING YOU HEAR THEM HOWLING ABOUT IS AMNESTY, AMNESTY, AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS AND MORE JOBS AND WELFARE TO KEEP THE ILLEGALS COMING!
Feds Report Millennials Face $1 Trillion in Debt, Majority Is Student Loans
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Young Americans are facing the highest debt levels in more than ten years, adding up to $1 trillion among 19 to 29-year-olds at the end of 2018.
That debt is the highest in the youngest adult group since 2007, according to the New York Federal Reserve Consumer Debt Panel.
The majority of that debt for these Millennials is student loans.
Fortune Magazine reported on the debt and explained how it is impacting spending habits of this demographic based on a University of Michigan survey released last week.
Younger adults— those under age 35—have reduced their spending compared with previous generations possibly because of weakened job prospects, delayed marriage, and educational debt.Policy makers have recognized that lower spending limits economic growth. As a result, a number of policies to boost younger adults spending such as forgiving student debt have entered the political arena, according to Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan consumer survey.Student loans make up the majority of the $1,005,000,000,000 owed by this cohort, followed by mortgage debt. New mortgages among young adults today remain quite a bit below levels incurred in the early 2000s.
Although mortgage debt represents the vast majority of overall consumer debt, student loan debt is growing at a faster pace, Fortune reported.
“Since 2009, mortgage debt increased 3.2 percent while student loan debt grew 102 percent,” Fortune reported.
Student loans debt has now surpassed home equity revolving debt, car loans, and credit card debt.
At the end of 2018 “auto loans were the third largest portion of debt composition in the U.S. followed by credit card debt. Overall consumer debt reached a record $13.5 trillion,” Fortune reported.
Another issue facing young Americans is those who become delinquent on student loan payments — the 90-plus days late for student loans is higher than any other loan category.
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Study: Immigrant College
Graduates Score Far
Below U.S. Graduates
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A test shows that immigrant college graduates tend to score far below levels reached by U.S. college graduates, says a report released by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The test data is important because business groups have displaced hundreds of thousands of American college graduates while hiring more than one million foreign graduates via the H-1B and other visa worker programs intended for high-skilled temporary foreign workers.
Business advocates say the migrants are highly skilled. But the test shows that foreign graduates of foreign colleges score just 34 out of 100, while Americans score 67 on the 100 point scale. Foreign graduates of American colleges score at 56, or 16 percent lower than the American score.
“Foreign-educated immigrants with a college or advanced degree perform so poorly that they score at the level of natives who have only a high school diploma,” says the report, which analyzed results from the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies test.
However, the test of 8,000 people in the United States only includes 210 immigrants who received college degrees abroad, said Jason Richwine, the study’s author. But the fuzziness caused by that small number is countered by the huge disparity between the foreigners’ scores and the Americans’ score, he said. “The results are robust,” he said.
The study could be expanded to include more people if the government-funded census and the American Community Survey asked immigrants where they earned their college degrees, he said.
For now, the surveys only ask immigrants how many years of education they have earned, and those answers are unreliable, Richwine said. For example, immigrants may have earned credentials by spending several years in low-quality universities or high-quality universities, he said. There also may be some complicating factors, such as cheating, partly because many migrants come from cultures where academic credentials “make a difference between what they see as failure and success in life,” he added.
Another complication is the distribution of scores, he said. For example, a national survey may hide a successful group of high scorers underneath a larger number of very low scores. Each problem may be more prevalent in some countries than in others, he said, so “an education credential [claimed by an immigrant] does not mean much because of how unreliable it turns into skills across countries.”
Advocates for greater immigration say current immigrants have more credentials than immigrants from several years ago. But “we just don’t know that is true,” said Richwine. “Certainly, the census data shows that recent immigrants say they have more years of education. But to argue that the immigration pool is becoming substantially more skilled is way too premature.”
The English language media in India has repeatedly discussed the skills issue, partly because many college graduate Indians wish to migrate to the United States, either as a visa worker or as legal immigrants. There are at least 500,000 Indian visa workers in U.S college jobs.
The skill issue is also visible on websites created for Indian visa workers in the United States. Some of the sites include advertisements for “job support” services which allow unskilled Indian visa workers in American to do their U.S. jobs with the aid of online advice and work by skilled Indians in India.
In 2016, India’s minister for “Human Resource Development” was transferred to a different job amid evidence that she inflated her educational qualifications.
The difficulty of measuring the skills of “high skilled” immigrants is part of the growing fight over the H-1B outsourcing program, and the bipartisan push to remove “country caps” on the government’s annual allotment of valuable green cards to lower-wage visa workers.
A bill would provide a fast track to green cards for at least 200,000 Indian H-1B workers — plus their spouses and children — and would make it more difficult for young Americans graduates to win starter jobs in the information technology sector.
The authors of the Senate bill — S. 386 — are GOP Sen. Mike Lee and Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris. Their February 7 statement says “the bill has also been endorsed by Immigration Voice, Compete America Coalition, the Information Technology Industry Council, Google, Microsoft, The Heritage Foundation, La Raza, and many others.”
The Senate co-sponsors of the outsourcing bill include Republicans and Democrats:
- Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO)
- Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
- Sen. Jim Moran (R-KS)
- Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE)
- Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR)
- Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
- Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO)
- Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)
- Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
- Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
- Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO)
- Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND)
- Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ)
The matching House bill is numbered H.R. 1044. It is being pushed by Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Busk and California Democratic Rep. Susan Lofgren.
Business groups also say they need to import visa workers because there is a shortage of American professionals.
However, data produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there are 1.3 million Americans employed in telecommunications, data processing, Internet hosting services, and “other information services.” There are also 20 million Americans working in professional and technical services including two million people working in computer systems design, 1.4 million in consulting.
Bush Center to White House: Open Borders for Business Hiring
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The George W. Bush Presidential Center is helping to develop a White House immigration policy, as it is urging the government to help CEOs and investors hire an unlimited number of foreigners in place of white-collar and blue-collar Americans.
Employers should be allowed to freely hire foreign graduates for middle-class jobs, said the center’s recommendations. “Congress and the Administration should eliminate, or at least increase, the visa cap” for foreign college graduates, says the center’srecommendations on immigration.
“Industries like agriculture, construction, landscaping, and hospitality rely on low-skilled foreign workers to fill vacant jobs … A higher cap [on the inflow of workers] tied to labor market demand would better serve the needs of American businesses,” said the recommendations, which would eliminate any future wage-raising labor shortages.
If Americans’ wages and salaries begin to rise, the imported labor will rush in to end the labor shortage, the recommendations suggest. The extra imported labor would spread through the economy when rising “wage levels signal where the most pressing labor needs exist,” the recommendations say.
In sharp contrast, voters’ wages rose by three percent nationwide during 2018 because of Trump’s “Hire American” low-immigration policy. Wages rose by 4.6 percent for people who switched jobs and by 5.2 percent in Minnesota where migrants have increased the labor force by only ten percent. Wages barely climbed during 2018 in states that have a large percentage of imported labor.
The institute’s wage-cutting, open border recommendations are important because the institute has been invited by White House officials to help develop a pro-business immigration policy that would effectively end President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “Hire American.”
The White House process was sketched out by the McClatchy news service:
“What we want to do is kind of figure out what are the things that everyone agrees on,” the official said. “Where are the areas where there is disagreement and then what we can do is take all that to the president and then let him and the vice president, let them make decisions on what our policy will be.”…According to meeting agendas obtained by McClatchy, those invited to sessions with Kushner come from some of Trump’s core constituencies in the worlds of religion, law enforcement, agriculture and business. They include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Heritage Foundation, Association of Builders and Contractors, Faith and Freedom Coalition, Council on National Policy, George W. Bush Center and Select Milk Producers.…One participant described [Trump son-in-law Jared] Kushner as listening a lot and encouraging others to speak. He is less interested in the finer details of immigration policy and focused on reaching a consensus, that participant said. Two people involved said Kushner asks people to talk about what they want instead of what they oppose.
The Bush center’s recommendations do not mention the concerns of Trump’s 2016 voters, such as stagnant wages, the rising student debt owed by American graduates, the rising real estate costs and healthcare bills which Americans must pay, nor the decade-long freeze on Americans’ salaries since legal immigration was tripled by President Geoge H.W. Bush’s 1990 immigration expansion bill.
In fact, the Bush center says immigration policy should be designed to grow the economy first, not salaries or wages. The center’s focus on growth via the importation of consumers, renters, and workers would help investors, real estate owners, employers, and immigrants and undermine Americans who are seeking to raise their wages and to build a better and wealthier society for themselves and their children. The recommendations say:
The objective of immigration policy should be to affirm America as the land of opportunity — where people of any background can work hard, develop ideas, and benefit from the fruits of their labor.
The focus on immigrants echoes the progressives’ claim that America is a “land of immigrants,” not a land of Americans.
The Bush report also suggests that immigrants are more valuable than Americans and their children. “America’s greatest advantage has always been its ability to attract diverse people from all corners of the globe and bring them together to build the American dream,” the report says, ignoring Americans’ world-changing history of solidarity, trust, cooperation, inventiveness, and hard work.
The center also calls for an amnesty of illegals, while noting that deportation of illegals will reduce the labor supply. “Removing all unauthorized immigrants would cause the labor force to shrink by around 4.5 percent and could lead to reductions of GDP up to $4.7 trillion over ten years.”
Any reduction of the labor supply would force investors and employers to raise Americans’ wages if they wanted to keep their existing employees or hire new employees. “A pathway to citizenship is the most reasonable solution,” says the Bush center.
The center’s business-first, society-second, approach is made clear at the center’s web page. “At the George W. Bush Institute, we believe immigration policy should be used as a tool for economic growth and prosperity.”
The center declined to answer questions from Breitbart News.
The center’s open border for business plan echoes the repeated efforts by President George W. Bush to enact a pro-investor “any willing worker” law which would allow employers to hire anyone from around the world. Bush’s “any willing worker” plan was blocked in 2001, so he backed amnesties in Congress in 2006 and 2007 which created the open-ended “Probationary Z Visa.” The Z visa plan offered work permits to all migrants who reached the United States within one year — and gave border officials just 24 hours to prove the migrants’ documents were fakes. The ambitious proposal quickly failed.
In 2013, Bush also backed the huge “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill which sought to flood the middle-class labor market by offering two ways to provide green cards to an unlimited number of foreign graduates. The amnesty bill so skewed the labor market towards investors that the Congressional Budget Office reported, “the rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades.”
In 1990, Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, signed an immigration deal that roughly tripled the legal immigration rate, shifted wealth from wage earners to investors, and spiked stock market values.
The 2006 and 2007 amnesty plans were so unpopular among voters that Bush’s poll ratings sank from roughly 45 percent at the start of 2006 down to roughly 35 percent at the end of 2007, and then-Sen. Barack Obama used his opposition to build his 2008 outsider campaign. After the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty was approved by the Senate, the Senate Democrats lost nine seats, so allowing Trump to have a Senate majority in 2017.
Business groups and Democrats tout skewed polls that prod Americans to declare support for migrants and for the claim that the United States is an economy-expanding “Nation of Immigrants,” not a nation of Americans.
The alternative “priority or fairness” polls — as well as the 2016 election — show that voters put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a globalized, high-immigration economy.
The federal policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That annual inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as the population of two million visa workers and eight million working illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees, especially the wages earned by the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The federal government’s cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.
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