3:09
Nearly 12 million Americans remain out of the United States labor force as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approved 30,000 more foreign workers businesses can bring to the country to take blue-collar U.S. jobs.
As Breitbart News reported, Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan said this week that he would approve an additional 30,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to be brought to the U.S. by businesses to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs. This comes as former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen approved an additional 30,000 H-2B foreign workers in March.
Every year, U.S. companies are allowed to import 66,000 low-skilled H-2B foreign workers to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs. For some time, the H-2B visa program has been used by businesses to bring in cheaper foreign workers and has contributed to blue-collar Americans having their wages undercut.
Meanwhile, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data notes that there are nearly 12 million Americans who are either unemployed, underemployed, or out of the workforce but wanting a job.
About 5.8 million Americans remain unemployed. Those most likely to compete against cheaper foreign workers in blue-collar and entry-level industries — U.S. teenagers and black Americans — continue to have significantly higher unemployment rates than other demographic groups.
For example, of the 5.8 million Americans unemployed, about 754,000 are teenagers with an unemployment rate of 13 percent. Likewise, there are 388,600 black Americans who are unemployed, for an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent which is more than double the white American unemployment rate and more than triple the Asian American unemployment rate.
About 2.7 million of the unemployed population either lost their job or completed a temporary job, while 1.2 million, or 21 percent of the total unemployed, said they have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks.
Similarly, 4.7 million Americans are underemployed, that is U.S. part-time workers who want full-time jobs but are unable to find them. Another 1.4 million Americans are marginally attached to the labor force. These are U.S. workers who are ready and willing to work if they could fine a full-time job.
Of those 1.4 million Americans who are marginally attached to the labor force, 454,000 say they are “discouraged” by their job prospects and do not believe there is work for them in the current labor market.
While millions remain on the sidelines of the workforce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has suggested that the U.S. is “out of people” in their efforts to lobby Washington, D.C. lawmakers to support an expansion of the country’s legal immigration system.
For weeks, landscaping companies and lawn care businesses complained to DHS officials that there are not enough workers to fill blue collar and entry-level jobs, Breitbart News has been told. Experts, though, have warned that wage hikes that have benefited blue-collar and working-class Americans will not continue should more foreign workers saturate the labor market, decreasing the price of labor while subjecting Americans to increased competition for jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Report:
White House Plan Drops Reduction of Legal Immigration
JOHN BINDER
7 May 20191,376
5:27
The White House is dropping a longtime initiative of President Trump’s
that reduces overall legal immigration levels to increase U.S. wages, a senior
administration official tells the media.
Throughout 2015, 2016, and 2017, Trump
routinely touted his plans to reduce the number of legal immigrants who arrive
in the U.S. on a myriad of visas. Since the 1990s, when it was expanded by
President George H.W. Bush, legal annual immigration levels have remained at
historic highs with about 1.2 million nationals legally admitted every year.
For
example, since 1980, the number of legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. every
year has not dipped below 525,000 admissions. Since 1999, annual legal
immigration levels have not dropped below 645,000 admissions and since 2004,
the average number of legal immigrants admitted every year has not dipped below
a million admissions.
Trump
often touted the need for reducing legal immigration levels to “reduce poverty,
increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars” in 2017,
arguing that the current importation of more than a million legal immigrants
every year “has placed substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers, and
community resources.”
Trump
said of the current legal immigration system:
Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been
immigrants, and very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against
brand new arrivals. And it has not been fair to our people, to our citizens, to
our workers. [Emphasis added]
An
immigration plan by the White House, with only preliminary details available,
does not seek to reduce any forms of legal immigration to the country, a senior
administration official told the Washington
Post and The Hill.
“A
senior administration official told reporters after the meeting that the
president had approved the effort to overhaul America’s immigration system and
increase border security last week and that it should now be considered ‘the
President Trump plan,'” the Post reported. “…
under the plan, the same number of immigrants would be permitted to enter the
country, but the composition would change.”
Senator
David Perdue (R-GA) — who attended a meeting with Trump on Tuesday — confirmed
to Breitbart News these details of the White House plan.
“While
this is still in the preliminary stage, the president has proposed maintaining
the 1.1 million legal immigrants we bring in each year but changing the mix to
respond to the needs of our growing economy and workforce,” Perdue told the
media following the meeting.
Instead,
the plan shifts the way in which the U.S. admits the more than 1.2 million
legal immigrants it accepts every year.
During an interview with Time Magazine last month,
senior adviser Jared Kushner said Trump’s focus for reforming the national
immigration system centers on protecting Americans’ wages.
“We
have a lot of objectives … Number one, he wants to protect American wages,”
Kushner said.
High
levels of immigration, illegal and legal, puts downward pressure on U.S. wages
while redistributing about $500 billion
in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards
employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering and Medicine has found.
Economist
George Borjas has detailed how
the country’s working class, those without a high school diploma, have been
primarily hurt by the annual admission of more than a million mostly
low-skilled foreign nationals.
“The
typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually,” Borjas wrote for
Politico in October 2016. “According to census data, immigrants admitted in the
past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the
low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this
particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.”
Center
for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota has discovered similar
wage depression trends.
For
every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’
occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent, Camarota finds.
This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages
reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.
In
a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor
force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by about 12.5 percent.
In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American
workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.
Likewise,
every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of low-skilled U.S.
occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of
low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of
native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.
At
current legal immigration rates, about
one-in-six U.S. residents will have been born outside of the country by
2060, the Census Bureau has found. The foreign-born population in the U.S. is
expected to reach 69 million in the next four decades.
Amid “full
employment,” no recovery in US wages
The US jobs report for November,
released Friday, provides further evidence that the much vaunted economic
“recovery” in the United States has overwhelmingly benefited Wall Street, whose
stock bonanza is based above all on stagnant wages and the destruction of
working-class living standards.
The Labor Department
reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 228,000 and the jobless rate
remained unchanged at 4.1 percent, the lowest level since January 2000 at the
height of the “dot.com” bubble. Manufacturing payrolls rose by 31,000;
construction in the aftermath of the hurricanes in Texas and Florida added
24,000 jobs. There was also a boost in the low-wage retail (18,700) and leisure
and hospitality (14,000) sectors.
Despite what economists,
the media and politicians are calling “full employment,” average hourly
earnings rose only 0.2 percent, or five cents, to $26.55 an hour, from a
downwardly revised 0.1 percent drop in wages in October. Year-to-year wage
increases in November were only 64 cents, or 2.5 percent. If wages rise by another
nickel in December, yearly salaries will be up a mere 2.4 percent in 2017,
barely above the official projected inflation rate of 2.0 percent.
“President Trump’s bold
economic vision continues to pay off,” White House Press Secretary Sarah
Huckabee Sanders boasted on Friday. “The economy’s vital signs are stronger
than they have been in years,” the New York Times declared.
“Companies are posting jobs faster than they can find workers to fill them.
Incomes are rising. The stock market sets records seemingly every month.”
Economic analysts have
pointed to anemic wage growth, euphemistically called weak “inflationary
pressure,” as a major factor in the determination of the Federal Reserve to
continue pumping up the stock market with cheap credit. Although most
economists expect a modest interest rate hike at the Fed’s meeting Wednesday,
Jerome Powell, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Reserve,
made clear last month at his Senate confirmation hearing that he would keep
rates at historically low levels. At the same time, he assured the
senators that there was little danger of a wages push because of continuing
“slackness” in the labor market, i.e., an ample supply of workers desperate for
full-time employment.
Other analysts agree.
“Wage growth has been muted thus far,” especially given the “very healthy pace
of job creation,” said Michelle Meyer, head of US economics at Bank of America.
“It’s been the story throughout the course of this year.”
Describing November’s
wage increase as “tepid,” Carl Riccadonna and Yelena Shulyatyeva of Bloomberg
Economics wrote: “Even though job gains are well in excess of the natural
growth rate for the labor market, labor scarcity is not yet driving wage
pressures higher. The moral of the story from this jobs report is that full
employment is indeed much lower in the current cycle relative to history.”
US employers are
exploiting a reserve of unemployed and underemployed workers to keep wages low.
At the same time, corporations are filling positions with young workers who are
paid far lower wages and benefits than the older workers they are replacing.
According to the
government, 6.6 million workers in the US remain unemployed, including 1.6
million, or nearly one out of four jobless people, who have been unemployed for
27 weeks or more. Another 4.8 million were forced to work part-time last month
although they want full-time work, and 1.8 million were “marginally attached”
to the labor force. The latter want to work but did not search for employment
in the four weeks preceding the survey and were therefore not counted as
“unemployed.”
The labor force
participation rate, or share of working-age people in the labor force, remained
at 62.7 percent in November. However, just 79 percent of the prime-age work force,
aged 25 to 54, is actually working—below the rate before the 2008 financial
crash.
The situation facing the
young generation is particularly dire. According to the Class of 2017 report by the
Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for young high school
graduates is 16.9 percent (compared with 15.9 percent in 2007 and 12.1 percent
in 2000). For young college graduates, the unemployment rate is currently 5.6
percent (compared with 5.5 percent in 2007 and 4.3 percent in 2000), and 7.1
percent for young male college graduates.
The figures are even
higher for “underemployment,” which includes young graduates who are
involuntary part-timers or are only marginally attached to the labor force. For
young high school graduates, the underemployment rate is 30.9 percent (compared
with 26.8 percent in 2007 and 20.8 percent in 2000). For young college
graduates, the underemployment rate is 11.9 percent (compared with 9.6 percent
in 2007 and 7.1 percent in 2000).
The share of young
graduates who are “idled” by the economy—neither enrolled in further schooling
nor employed—remains higher in the wake of the Great Recession than in 2007 and
2000, the report noted. This includes 15.1 percent of young high school
graduates and 9.9 percent of young college graduates, many of whom are burdened
with unsustainable debts.
The stagnation of wages
is a long-term tendency. Since the early 1970s, hourly inflation-adjusted wages
have grown by only 0.2 percent annually, and labor’s share of national income
has fallen from nearly 65 percent in the mid-1970s to below 57 percent in 2017.
The deterioration in the
social position of the working class and accompanying explosion of social
inequality are not simply the result of objective economic laws. They are the
intended outcome of the policies of the American ruling class, implemented by
successive Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The transfer of
production to lower-wage countries, deindustrialization and mass layoffs in the
1980s and 1990s were used as a hammer to beat back the resistance of workers to
a historic lowering of their living standards.
This process was aided
and abetted by the trade unions, whose pro-capitalist and nationalist
orientation left workers without any progressive response to globalization. Far
from opposing wage and benefit cuts, the United Auto Workers and other unions
suppressed working-class opposition and collaborated with the corporations to
slash labor costs in the name of boosting competitiveness and “protecting
American jobs.”
This assault was
escalated in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. In the
course of the eight years of the Obama administration, the unions limited
strikes to the lowest levels since the Labor Department began recording work
stoppages in 1947. They collaborated with the Democratic president to crush a
potential wages push in 2015-16 as workers in auto, steel, oil, telecom,
airlines, rail, health care, retail and other industries, as well as teachers
and other public employees, were coming up for new labor agreements.
While workers were
determined to recoup lost income after corporate profits had fully recovered
from the crash, the unions signed deals that limited pay hikes to the rate of
inflation or barely above it while shifting health care and pension costs onto
the backs of workers. This was key to Obama’s “in-sourcing” strategy for
attracting investment on the basis of low wages, as well as his “quantitative
easing” interest rate policy, which fueled the massive rise in the stock market
that continues to this day. Virtually all of the net increase in new jobs
created under Obama’s “gig economy” were part-time, contingent or
temporary OR ILLEGALS!
Trump claims his $1.5
trillion tax cut—including the slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35
percent to 20 percent—will create more jobs and increase wages. As in the Obama
years, however, this massive windfall for big business and the rich will not be
used to expand production, let alone increase the wages and living standards of
workers. It will go for stock buybacks and dividend increases, which benefit
the richest investors.
Wages are so low now that
7.6 million Americans are forced to work multiple jobs, a number not seen in 20
years. In a recent article titled “China-Like Wages Now Part of US Employment
Boom,” Forbes noted that a forklift operator hired at $12.75
an hour at Amazon’s Fall River, Massachusetts fulfillment center makes $382 for
a 30-hour week, “not much more than the average guy in Beijing,” where the
median weekly wage is $329.53. At 40 hours a week, a higher paid, full-time
Amazon worker in Fall River earns $28,800 a year before taxes, roughly what
Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos pockets every minute.
Fixing America’s
Unemployment Crisis
Trump was elected in part on the promise of creating jobs, but
how about those who stopped looking for work?
What has been called a
“quiet catastrophe” has been unfolding in America: the collapse of work for millions of America’s men, and, more recently, for America’s women as well.
Nicholas Eberstadt, the
Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute,
estimates there are 10 million men who are jobless and no longer looking for
work. According to calculations using 2014 data, an estimated 3.6 million women
are in the same situation.
President-elect Donald Trump
has announced a raft of policies meant to spur economic growth and create jobs,
but thought needs to be given to what specific measures might help this urgent
situation.
How to address this crisis
depends on what one understands the problem to be. A graph showing the
prime-age employment rate for men provides a kind of Rorschach test for
possible responses.
Jared Bernstein, senior
fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, former economic adviser
to Vice President Joe Biden, and author of, most recently, “The Reconnection
Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity,” focuses on the cyclical upturns in
the jagged line, on those periods of prosperity when workers regain jobs that
had been lost.
Eberstadt focuses on the
straight trend line, which has been going inexorably and disastrously downward
for decades.
Bernstein and Eberstadt
represent two typical and contrasting approaches to the unemployment
problem.
If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers,
they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the great
recession.
— JARED BERNSTEIN
Bernstein published the
graph in a chapter he contributed to Eberstadt’s book “Men Without Work,” in
which he critiques Eberstadt’s diagnosis of the employment crisis.
For Bernstein, the key is a
missing demand for labor.
“If you look at the
employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back
two-thirds of their losses since the Great Recession,” Bernstein said in an
interview. “That doesn’t sound to me like a group that has given up. It sounds
to me like a group that is not facing ample opportunity.”
For Eberstadt, the problem
is a detachment from work.
Using various government databases,
Eberstadt gives a composite portrait of those men who are out of the workforce
and not looking for work.
They don’t read newspapers,
seem to have few familial responsibilities, and tend not to be involved in a
church or their communities. They spend most of their time entertaining
themselves with TV or hand-held devices; 31 percent admitted to survey takers
that they used illegal drugs.
Bernstein counters this
portrait by noting that the causal connection may go from a lack of employment
opportunities to suffering from depression, which then leads to these men
planting themselves on the couch.
As to the individual motives
of the non-working, Bernstein said, “We just don’t know.” His advice to Trump
is to aggressively pursue full employment, which involves the federal
government using a number of different tools.
An officer waits to escort Harvey Lesser, an unemployed
software developer, from his apartment after serving him with a court order for
eviction in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 11, 2009.
Stimulus and Subsidies
Bernstein believes the key
to the downward trend his graph shows is the disappearance of manufacturing
jobs. He favors trade policies that will reduce America’s chronic trade
imbalances, which will create more demand for domestic manufacturing.
Bernstein also favors an
infrastructure program, with the caveat that “you have to do it right,” he
said.
He would like to see the
federal government get involved in communities that “don’t have enough
businesses, child care slots, supermarkets, and stores—these are a classic
market failure.”
The federal government could
subsidize private employers in these neighborhoods, giving them an incentive to
move their businesses there.
Bernstein also favors
special efforts to help those with a criminal record, and Eberstadt agrees
finding ways to help this population is key to addressing the problem of
non-working adults. He estimates that, by the end of 2016, there will be 20
million with a felony conviction in their past.
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