In a letter to the joint House and Senate committee, which is drafting a 2019 budget for the Department of Homeland Security, the Democrat-aligned Internet investors and the GOP-aligned retail, real estate, and industrial investors jointly declared:
The two unified blocs of investors and lobbyists, however, face a huge political hurdle — politicians learned from the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty that the vast majority of Americans want to welcome some inflow of legal immigrants, but really do not want to be crowded out of their careers and communities by a flood of cheap workers and welfare-funded consumers.
The DACA amnesty is sought by the investors because it would provide them with firm legal access to roughly three million DACA-eligible domestic consumers and workers. Also, the amnesty would sharply reduce the president’s bargaining power as he tries to get Democrats to reform the nation’s border laws and to reduce the annual inflow of legal immigrants. Also, by pushing for the amnesty, the business groups are distracting media outlets from the economic impact of their economic policies.
The federal subsidy would aid investors, spur sales, spike housing rents, and suppress wage growth for millions of blue-collar Americans.
In contrast, President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy has boosted wages by an average of three percent in 2018, with greater gains going to some categories of blue-collar Americans. Productivity is also rising as companies buy American-made labor-saving technology. The “Hire American” policy has worked by trimming the inflow of refugees and by denying investors’ pleas for amnesties and more visa workers, and it is raising public hopes for more wage growth before the 2020 election.
White-collar Americans have not done as well in Trump’s economy partly because business and Congress oppose any cutbacks in the population of white-collar outsourcing workers, such as H-1B workers. The resident population of 1.5 million college graduate visa workers aids investors by suppressing salaries for Americans who graduate from college with degrees in science, healthcare, business, engineering, design, and software.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group, for example, has strongly opposed reforms to the H-1B visa program. It also supports the “country caps” bill that would offer the government-granted prize of citizenship to more Indian and Chinese visa workers who agree to take Americans’ white-collar jobs.
Zuckerberg’s lobbying group was founded by a group of Internet investors, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Most of the founders are relatively unknown investors, such as John Doerr, a partner at the investment firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, but they have great influence over Democratic legislators.
The Koch network keeps its membership list secret, but it reportedly includes investors in consumer companies, real estate, and manufacturing. The group has a huge influence over GOP legislators.
The joint lobbying push also includes a series of advocacy groups that seem independent of business donations. But many of these groups, including the Libre Initiative and the National Immigration Forum, receive funding from businesses which are eager for more consumers and cheaper workers.
The Republicans on the committee include Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, Texas Rep. Kay Granger, Tennesee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, and Mississippi Rep. Steven Palazzo.
Committee members are also being pushed to endorse the “country caps” legislation pushed by Rep. Kevin Yoder in 2018. Yoder lost his election in November, partly because American graduates publicly slammed his bill. The legislation would provide the federal reward of fast-track citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese graduates who agree to take jobs from new American graduates and middle-aged American graduates.
The Democrats are Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, New York Rep. Nita Lowey, California Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, North Carolina Rep. David Price, California Rep. Barbara Lee, Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, and California Rep. Pete Aguilar.
Billionaire Kochs Unite Plutocrats for Amnesty, Vow Not to Back Trump in 2020
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The pro-mass immigration Koch brothers’ network of billionaire, donor class organizations is uniting plutocrats, corporations, and the open borders lobby to push an amnesty this year, all while vowing not to back President Trump in his 2020 re-election bid.
This week, the Koch network — which includes Americans for Prosperity, the Libre Initiative, and Freedom Partners — hosted more than 630 millionaire and billionaire donors who give hundreds of thousands to the network of organizations every year.
The Koch network at the elite winter gathering in California reiterated that they would provide no financial backing for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
The Kochs and their libertarian donors have launched campaigns over the last two yearsopposing the president’s pro-American immigration reform agenda that seeks to reduce all immigration to the U.S. as well as his economic nationalist platform that includes using tariffs to protect American jobs and U.S. industry.
Additionally, Koch spokespeople at the donors’ conference said the network has its sights set on pushing amnesty for millions of illegal aliens this year.
This effort will be a unity pact between Silicon Valley tech executives — who profit from a never-ending flow of cheaper, foreign labor and more consumers to buy products — as well as the open borders, billionaire George Soros-funded ACLU and multinational corporations, according to National Review:
Brian Hooks, chairman of the Koch Seminar Network, told assembled attendees of the Koch network’s winter meeting on Monday that the network’s effort to unite a broad coalition to push Congress and the White House had already begun. [Emphasis added]
“We just got the longest government shutdown in the history of our country, and this issue was at the core,” Hooks said. “When you read the headlines saying this is impossible, it’s understandable. But we see an opportunity to bring the same approach that this network brought to criminal-justice reform, to unite a broad-based policy coalition with groups from the ACLU to people in Silicon Valley, to Fortune 500 companies, to members of the religious community, and a whole lot of people in between. This isn’t wishful thinking; this is already underway.” [Emphasis added]
The Koch network’s economic libertarian, anti-populist agenda of free trade, mass legal immigration, and entitlement reform has little-to-no support among the American electorate. The economic libertarian agenda, once fronted by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, failed to sway voters in the 2018 midterm elections.
Koch donor Art Pope, who heads Variety Wholesalers, said that while he wants merit-based legal immigration, he supports expanding legal immigration levels beyond the more than 1.5 million that are admitted to the U.S. every year already.
Every year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million immigrants, with the vast majority deriving from family-based chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. In 2016, the legal and illegal immigrant population reached a record high of 44.5 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Grassroots Immigration Group: Amnesty Is Worse than No Wall
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President Donald Trump should not offer a combined “DACA-Dreamer” amnesty to win “one-tenth of a border fence,” says William Gheen, founder of the grassroots Americans for Legal Immigration PAC group.
“Every single amnesty bill we’ve seen for 15 years has been filled with all sorts of restrictions and enforcement promises designed to garner votes in Congress and give lawmakers things to cover their asses with angry constituents,” Gheen told Breitbart News. He continued:
Each time we have found language in the bill that allows all enforcement to be skipped or ignored or they will just pass it and ignore the enforcement restrictions like the ’86 Amnesty. It is completely offensive and wrong that the U.S. Senate is even considering anything like Dreamer or DACA Amnesty considering the way the nation voted in 2016 to try to go in a different direction.
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The statement was made after Trump announced his support for a deal in which he would get $5.7 billion for border wall funding in exchange for endorsing three-year work permit amnesties for one million people in the DACA and Temporary Protected Status programs. The exchange is supported by business groups who are clamoring for more imported workers to help suppress wage raises before the 2020 election.
Gheen said Trump’s deputies are planning to offer more giveaways to Democrats and business-first Republicans in exchange for a “DACA-Dreamer amnesty.”
Trump “is only hearing from CEOs,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Numbers USA group, which favors reduced migration. Trump should not give up on his wage-raising “Hire American” policy, especially for white-collar professionals threated by the H-1B program, she said, adding:
The people he campaigned with, the [H-1B-] displaced workers, are just distraught. If he helps wages and job opportunities grow for Americans, he will turn out voters in 2020. If he helps put in place more policies that harm American workers and wages, he will not turn out voters.
In a press statement, ALIPAC said:
ALIPAC calls on Amnesty Trump to end his “Trump Wall Pretense” now that it is clear he’s using the issue to promote border destroying Amnesty for illegal immigrants.
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While originally supportive of a massive new wall on the southern border, ALIPAC is dropping support for Trump’s wall efforts because he is only building fencing and he is only seeking a small fraction of funding needed for border structures in exchange for Amnesty for illegal immigrants which will render any borders and defenses moot.
From this point forward, ALIPAC will refer to the President as Amnesty Trumpand to his deceptive bait and switch promises of a border wall as “Trump’s Wall Pretense” now that President Trump is using the wall issue to advance DACA and Immigration Reform Amnesty for illegals.
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ALIPAC also feels that Trump’s chances of reelection in 2020 are now very low because Trump will never be able to rally and mobilize millions of American voters, like those at ALIPAC, who responded to his campaign promises about border security and illegal immigration.
Gheen’s ALIPAC does not have an office in Washington D.C., but it played major roles in defeating the 2006 and 2007 would-be amnesties, and the 2010 push to amnesty the large population of “Dreamer” young illegals. In 2014, the group also helped to kill off the 2013 “Gang of Eight” cheap labor amnesty by helping ensure the primary defeat of GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Other pro-American advocates are growing concerned about the pro-amnesty push among officials in Trump’s White House. Breitbart News reported:
Co-host of the “Red Pilled America” podcast Patrick Courrielche told Breitbart News that while amnesty would be a boon to DACA illegal aliens, it would hurt the very Americans who supported Trump.
“Trump promised us no amnesty,” Courrielche said. “Passing DACA amnesty knowing the devastating results of Reagan’s amnesty on American workers and families would be an unforgivable betrayal. I’d prefer no wall deal if it includes legalizing DACA.”
A DACA amnesty would put more U.S.-born children of illegal aliens — commonly known as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported, while American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill.
Mickey Kaus is also urging Trump to preserve his wage-raising “Hire American” policy by trading non-immigration policies to win the wall:
Ann Coulter is the strongest advocate for a wall, and she argues that Trump should anti – offer to swap support some Democratic priorities, such as “a higher federal minimum wage, an infrastructure bill, a solar panel bill.”
Gheen’s opposition to the pending amnesty-for-wall trade was ridiculed by Todd Schulte, the D.C. director of a pro-migration advocacy group funded by Silicon Valley investors:
Schulte’s investors want more H-1B visa workers to cut their payroll costs, and they want more immigrant customers for their new companies. The group’s investors include Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-billionaire founder of Facebook.
The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The 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 U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.
GOP/Dems Consider DACA Amnesty-for-Wall Deal Backed by Billionaire Donors
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A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Democrats such as Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Debbie Dingell (D-MI) have signaled that they are at least open to granting amnesty to at least 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program if it meant receiving a fifth of wall funding.
In an interview with Yahoo News, Meadows said he has had multiple conversations with Graham about a DACA amnesty-for-wall funding deal:
“Compromise and finding common ground are not void from the conversations that he and I have had, as well as some of the conversations I’ve had with some of my Democratic colleagues,” Meadows said. [Emphasis added]
Though the Freedom Caucus has previously opposed extending protections from deportation for the children of undocumented immigrants, Meadows suggested he would be open to a deal to preserve such concessions in exchange for wall funding. [Emphasis added]
Graham has touted an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens for months as part of a deal on funding at least a portion of Trump’s proposed wall.
Coincidentally, the DACA amnesty deal is supported by the billionaire donor class that delivers campaign funds every election cycle to Republicans and Democrats who support the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy of importing about 1.5 million mostly low-skilled foreign workers every year to compete against America’s working and middle class.
As Breitbart News most recently reported, the billionaire Koch brothers and their network of organizations have made passing an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens their goal for the new year.
Similarly, billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s cheap labor lobbying group FWD.us is asking Republicans, Democrats, and the Trump administration to reach a deal whereby DACA illegal aliens are allowed to permanently remain in the U.S.
The organization, founded and funded by Silicon Valley’s tech plutocrats, has been demanding an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens since at least 2017.
So here is what @FWDus would like to see happen with the incoming Congress, this harmful shutdown and urgently needed immigration policy changes...
Billionaires Demand Fast-Track Green Cards for 400,000 Visa Workers
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Internet billionaire Marc Benioff is urging the GOP Congress and President Donald Trump to fast-track 400,000 foreign visa-workers — plus 400,000 family members — to green cards, the U.S. job market, and the ballot box.
“This is good for our economy,” Benioff said in a Tuesday tweet that was applauded by Silicon Valley lobbyists. “We need to grow our workers to grow our economy.”
Benioff’s comment is a tautology: Expanding the population by importing more than 800,000 people would obviously grow the nation’s economy, retail sales, government taxes, company profits, and Wall Street stock options.
But Benioff’s cheap-labor importation plan would also shrink the income and careers sought by millions of American college graduates, many of whom will vote in 2020 for or against Trump.
The planned giveaway is in a pending House bill, dubbed H.R. 392. It is also hidden in the House version of the 2019 funding package for the Department of Homeland Security. If Trump accepts that funding package, he will help companies import more cheap visa-workers from India and China an inflict more economic and career damage to the nation’s professional-status workforce of at least 55 million American college-graduates.
The nation’s workforce now includes roughly 1.5 million foreign college-graduate contract-workers who are imported via the H-1B, L-1, OPT, O-1, J-1, and other visa programs. These outsourcing workers are not immigrants, but instead, they are contract workers hired for one to six years, at lower wages, to take jobs that would otherwise go to American graduates.
GOP Reps. are still pushing Rep. Yoder's middle-class outsourcing bill to put 600K Indian visa-workers & families on fast-track to US jobs/voting. It would help CEOs import more Indians for US college-grad jobs - w/o any benefit for US workers or even GOP. http://bit.ly/2QzuoDJ
This massive level of middle-class outsourcing has suppressed the wage growth needed by many American graduates to repay their college debts, get married, buy homes, and raise children. For example, the salaries for 21 million “professional and business services” employees rose by just roughly one percent after inflation from the second quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their after-inflation pay was flat from 2o15 to 2016.
The Americans’ salary loss, however, would be a gain for the CEOs who see their profits rise and their stock options spike as middle-class salaries decline.
The MyVisaJobs.com site shows that Benioff’s company asked for 1,063 H-1B visa workers in 2018, up from 880 in 2017. The site also shows job titles and work locations.
Benioff also sought 1,071 green cards for his contract workers in from 2016 to 2018.
The company’s stock price has doubled since Trump’s election, but Benioff and most of his employees have strongly supported Democrats, including Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. For example, only 5.2 percent of employee donations to candidates went to GOP candidates in 2018.
Now Benioff and his fellow executives as asking Trump to raise their stock portfolios by fast-tracking green cards to roughly 400,000 foreign contract-workers — plus 400,000 family members — who sidelined hundreds of thousands of American college graduates.
Benioff’s support for the visa workers was echoed by Todd Schulte, who is the director of a pro-migration lobbying group. The Democratic-aligned group, FWD.us, was formed and funded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and numerous other CEOs and investors who prefer to import visa-workers instead of hiring Americans.
This from @Benioff is really important. A really important fix to our immigration system that would help so many people stuck in the green card backlog because of discriminatory country caps.
Without irony, Schulte’s website declares that “We believe that when every person has the opportunity to achieve their full potential, our families, communities, and economy thrive.”
Amazon is also urging Trump to approve the green-card giveaway. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, also runs the Washington Post and supported Clinton.
Amazon applauds @KevinYoder on the passage of his amendment to the @DHSgov appropriations bill, H.R. 392, that would remove the per-country limit on green cards. This is an important step towards green card reform, and Amazonians thank you for your leadership on this issue.
In 2018, Amazon asked the government for almost 6,000 H-1B visa workers and almost 5,000 green cards. Facebook asked for almost 2,400 H-1B workers and 1,400 green cards. Those outsourcing requests add up to 15,000 white-collar jobs sought by U.S. graduates.
Business lobbyists are trying to minimize publicity about their demand for a green-card giveaway and they are pressing GOP leaders behind closed doors to keep the giveaway in the 2019 DHS budget.
But opposition is rising as Americans graduates have begun organizing to block the giveaway. For example, Protect US Workers helped defeat Rep. Kevin Yoder who used his authority as an appropriations chairman to insert the giveaway into the DHS budget.
The American graduates are also using federal data to show U.S. legislators how many Americans’ middle-class jobs are being outsourced in their districts to the foreign workers.
I clean homes for a living. These kind of policies undercuts my job because of cheap labor. The dems try to make excuses for their policies against American workers. They don’t care about Americans, they just care about non citizens. They need to be voted out on 2020.
Yep, been there, trained my foreign Replacements in '02. Awful experience. Went public with it, told Congress. The worst part was the disregard we got from our 2 Dem senators
The managing director of Thiel Capital, Eric Weinstein, tweeted to Benioff to highlight his report which shows that the federal officials created the H-1B visa program to lower salaries paid to American technology experts:
You know why we developed the H-1B visa Marc? It was to weaken American workers’ bargaining positions so much that they would be *forced* to mitigate their wage demands at your bargaining table. It’s a wage tampering program.
The mass outsourcing also adding pressure to the lives of many American technology workers, many of whom have already lost jobs to cheaper contract-workers. An informal survey of tech workers shows that almost four-in-ten say they are depressed.
One of the leading advocates for the green-card giveaway is Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer who helped Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer pass the disastrous 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty through the Senate. The bill was so unpopular that the GOP gained nine Senate seats in 2014, preventing Schumer from becoming Senate Majority Leader.
On December 6, Fresco suggested there is only a small chance that the giveaway will get into the final DHS bill:
Many Indian contract workers are lobbying to help pass the green-card bill:
Thank you @Benioff for your leadership on ensuring fairness by the removal of national origin discrimination on Employment Based Green Cards #HR392 #S281
In the United States, the establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees offer.
The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in the coastal states.
The stakes are high. Once the treaty is ratified, it will be exponentially harder to roll back internet censorship. Unless you want the tech giants’ right to censor to persist for another 20 years (that’s how long NAFTA lasted), now is the time to make your voice heard.
But not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart News reporting that Silicon Valley has the highest income inequality in the nation and the U.S. News & World Report naming California as the worst state for “quality of life,” due to the high cost of living.
“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”
llustration by Lincoln Agnew*
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Europe Must Resist Third-World Migration
Bill Gates has recently commended Germany for allocating 0.7% of GDP for payments to fight poverty in less developed developing countries (LDDCs). With his infinite browser wisdom, he asserts that the developed world, especially Europe, must increase these contributions or face a flood of migration from the LDDCs that will overwhelm the continent. We all understand that by "overwhelm," he is referring to crime, housing, health care, education, and cultural viability of European identities. In short, the Europe we know will be crushed. Gates's vocabulary includes terms like "unfolding tragedy," "migratory pressure," and "development aid payments." He is fixated on drama ("tragedy"), demography, and the tired category of development that has become a cliché in use for the last 72 years since the end of WWII. These terms out of the business and administrative glossary fail to capture the depth and danger of the situation Gates is referring to.
Gates thinks the migration can be stopped by an even greater effort to rehab (read: buy off) the LDDCs under the decades-old rubric of development. Again, according to the guilt-ridden, weakened leftist mindset, it's so sad to see those sub-Saharans and Arabs living in great poverty and under-development that we need to throw more money at the problem, and thereby save ourselves. So Gates is not really changing his tune. He's not worried about obliterating European identities or economies. Rather, he is still singing the old liberal-left song. Throw money at vast social problems, and your peace and stability will be assured.
Building up the LDDC economies is not a new idea. This has been the clichéd response since the end of WWII when the U.N., the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank were founded. Going back to the 1960s, Walter Rostow, one of Harvard's eminent economists, projected his theory of the "take-off stage." With economic development support through the three above-named institutions, the poorest countries would be subsidized and finally move to the take-off stage, where they could generate sufficient surplus capital to manage and grow their own assets and begin to develop viable economic projects and infrastructure without "development funds" and without the currency undergirding of the IMF.
These take-off stages never materialized.
Nevertheless, the United Nations has intensified its commitment to saving the LDDCs from self-destruction. The latest round of this utopian vision is the formulation by the United Nations of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the developing world. For the purposes of this article, it is worth noting that their goal of the elimination or radical reduction of poverty acknowledges that despite the efforts of the United Nations for 72 years, there are 867 million people in the world living in poverty defined as income of less than $1.25 a day.
The implementation of programs in support of the U.N.'s SDGs involves providing the people in the least developed countries with welfare in every area of their lives. It is projected as a global welfare system that will make the welfare systems of the U.S. or even Europe look like child's play. Housing, food, health, employment, childbearing, childrearing, education, gender equality, etc. are areas for dedicated U.N. action. Multiple sectors of third-world economies will be upheld by a vast global welfare bureaucracy. Do you think we as taxpaying Americans (45% do not pay any tax) are burdened now? Wait and see what is moving to the front burner! Obviously, Bill Gates, former boy wonder, and now the richest man in the world, sees a speedup of the SDG implementation as essential for stemming the tide of migration. But instead of talking about an explosion of economic support and world governance beyond anything ever dreamed of on planet Earth, he hides the horrific reality behind abstractions like "increasing the percentage contributions of national GDP by developed countries."
He says nothing about confronting the "small matters" of governmental corruption, governmental waste, and tribal conflict in the LDDCs. Inter-tribal warfare is a norm in sub-Saharan Africa. We give money despite the fact that genocide and civil wars in many countries is the norm. Likewise in the Middle East. We see Muslim against Muslim as well as Muslim against infidels for 1,400 years. All they know is the fight for power.
Instead of increasing the amounts of "developmental assistance," there should be increased resistance to terrible third-world governance and to migration. This resistance must be multi-pronged. There must be pushback against the U.N.'s SDG Programs, there must be pushback against the corrupt World Bank and IMF, and there must be pushback against migration from Africa and the Middle East.
Europe is experiencing an invasion. Powerful segments of political leadership in North America are attempting to open the doors to invasion. What should be done? There should be a lessening of welfare payments to refugees and migrants to Europe, Canada, and the USA as a disincentive to leave the home countries, and as an incentive for refugees and migrants to leave these wealthy areas and go back to their native lands. Additionally, some boats will have to be turned away since the occupants do not have papers. Extreme vetting of refugees from war-torn sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern countries must be instituted.
A massive campaign of literature should be dropped on those countries with high migration telling them that there are no facilities for them in their goal countries, and they will be turned back. Matchbooks should be dropped by the millions (this matchbook technique has been used on other occasions, notably when they were searching worldwide for Ramzi Yousef, the bomber of the World Trade Center in the early 1990s) announcing that the immigration venues have been closed. Get this message to the people. The matchbooks could be in French, English, Arabic, and Swahili.
Let us learn from history. Migration of Germanic tribes was the undoing of the Roman Empire. The Romans could not stem the tide. Various strategies were undertaken, but they failed in the end. The Vandals, Franks, Saxons, Angles, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths just kept coming. Eventually, the migrants, called "barbarians" by the Romans, were brought into the military to help support the Roman defense against border crossing, but the Germanics who were in the Roman army coalesced and fought against that selfsame army...and won! Embracing a threat, even a supposed controlled embrace, leads to an undesirable endgame. Rome was sacked and destroyed in the 5th century.
We are facing a threat of this magnitude, whether Bill "The Genius" Gates realizes it or not. His genius in business may not translate into wisdom or a grasp of historical realities.
BORDER AGENT RESCUES DROWNING MIGRANT INVADERS…. Mexico ships them back over the border to register Democrat and collect their anchor baby welfare!
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"The newly elected president, Andrés López-Obrador, was gleeful during the election when he told his compadres they should all move to America, illegally. His encouragement along with his pro-poverty policies will set the stage for another tsunami of illegal immigration." COLIN FLAHERTY
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"They will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion. They have nothing but contempt for us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gangs, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
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The immigration debate has been raging for years.
Advocates for open borders can be found on both sides of the political aisle and in a wide variety of special interest groups who have come to see the immigration system that delivers an unlimited supply of cheap and exploitable labor, an unlimited supply of foreign tourists, and unlimited supply of foreign students and, for the lawyers, an unlimited supply of clients. MICHAEL CUTLER
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