Wednesday, October 23, 2019

LABOR SHORTAGE IN AMERICA'S OPEN BORDERS? SUCH CRAP! - "Companies are boosting Americans’ productivity with better software, faster robots, and more machines, according to a Reuters survey of company reports." - IN OTHER WORDS MACHINES ARE DOING THE WORK!

Reuters: Productivity Grows amid Labor Shortage, Rising Wages
Now Hiring Sign in Restaurant
Getty Images
3:20

Companies are boosting Americans’ productivity with better software, faster robots, and more machines, according to a Reuters survey of company reports.

Investment in productivity is being forced by the labor shortage in President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” economy, says the article, which is headlined “U.S. companies facing worker shortage race to automate.”
The companies use the investments to make the employees more efficient, which frees up the savings, which then fund continued wage raises for workers and higher stock-values for investors,  according to the article:
The attempt to save money through technology does not come down to just installing more robots in factories. Instead, companies appear to be confronting the lack of low-cost workers by investing in software and machines that can perform tasks ranging from human resources management to filling prescriptions.
Those investments are helping keep wage growth in line despite historically-low unemployment. Average hourly earnings were unchanged in October despite the unemployment rate falling to 3.5% from 3.7%, while the annual increase in wages fell slightly to 2.9%.
The evidence for the good news comes from the quarterly briefings which executives hold with Wall Street’s investment advisors, says Reuters:
Overall, companies have discussed automation on quarterly earnings calls more than 1,110 times since the beginning of the year, a 15% increase from this time last year and nearly double the mentions by this time in October, 2016, according to Refinitiv data. Corporate orders of robotics alone rose 7.2% over the first half of this year compared with 2018, totaling $869 million in spending, according to the Association for Advancing Automation.
In part, the productivity gains are intended to help employers avoid a bidding war for workers that would drive up salaries and also cut the profits sought by shareholders. But the investment options create wealth for investors and workers, so also expanding the nation’s economic growth.
Advocates for reduced immigration have long predicted this trifecta goal of rising wages, profits, and productivity.
However,  most business groups prefer to maximize wealth for shareholders by simply adding migrant workers so they can cut wages and investment spending.


But a shortage of immigrants is best for the long-term growth of employees’ personal wealth, partly because it forces employers to push for productivity increases.
Trump has ensured a shortage of workers by repeatedly rejecting demands from business groups for more unskilled and more skilled workers. So Trump’s “Hire American” policy is forcing companies to hire Americans — and also to give them better tools in kitchens, warehouses, factories, and office parks.
Economists have worried about the slowing annual growth in productivity since the early 2000s. They are often reluctant to blame the extra labor-supply caused by migration, even as they create new jargon to hide the impact of lower-skilled immigrants. For example, a March 2017 report by McKinsey admitted “a shift in the composition of employment in the economy toward lower-productivity sectors” contributes to the problem, but then quickly changed the subject.
But economists are becoming optimistic recent productivity gains may become a multi-year trend.

Federal economists state the Econ. 101 obvious: Tight labor markets drive up wages, as new study shows younger workers are using Trump's semi-tight labor market to switch jobs to get higher wages. IOW: Of course business groups want more migration. http://bit.ly/2ndyPqH 








EconomyImmigrationPoliticsH-1BImmigrantsmigrationproductivitysalariestight labor marketunemploymentvisa workerswages




Claims of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True

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Posted: Oct 19, 2019 12:01 AM
America's September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969, according to the most recent Department of Labor report.
The tight labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For example, New Seasons Market, a West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom Equipment, a Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.
For the first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of workers enjoyed faster wage growth than their higher-paid peers.
Unfortunately, this positive trend could be short-lived. Corporate special interests are whining about a labor shortage -- and are spending millions to lobby for higher levels of immigration, which would supply companies with cheap, pliable workers.
Hardworking Americans need their leaders in Washington to see through this influence campaign and stand up for their interests. Scaling back immigration would further tighten the labor market, boosting wages and helping the most disadvantaged Americans find jobs.
The U.S. economy is the strongest it has been in years. Employers added 136,000 new jobs in September, marking 108 months of consecutive job growth.
But there's still more progress to be made. Approximately 6 million Americans are currently looking for jobs but remain unemployed. Another 4 million desire full-time positions but are underemployed as part-time workers. Millions more, feeling discouraged about their bleak prospects, have abandoned the job search altogether. Indeed, among 18 through 65-year-olds, 55 million people aren't working.
Many of these folks have limited or outdated skills. Others have criminal records or disabilities. So they might require a bit more training than traditional job applicants.
Rather than put in this extra effort, some big businesses want to eliminate their recruiting challenges by importing cheap foreign workers. These firms have instructed their lobbyists to push for more immigration, which would introduce more slack into the labor market.
The CEO of the Chamber of Commerce recently claimed that America needs a massive increase in immigration because we're "out of people." Chamber officials said their lobbying efforts would center on sizeable increases to rates of legal immigration.
The National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, recently released a proposal which would effectively double the number of H-1B tech worker visas, import more seasonal low-skilled laborers on H-2A and H-2B visas, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And the agriculture industry is lobbying for a path to legalization for illegal laborers and is seeking to expand "temporary" guest-worker programs to include stable, year-round positions on dairy farms and meatpacking plants -- jobs that Americans will happily fill for the right wage. The Association of Builders and Contractors, Koch Industries, and dozens more companies have called for similar measures.
There are already 45 million immigrants in the United States -- 28 million of which are employed -- and counting. More than 650,000 people crossed into the United States illegally in the past eight months alone, already exceeding last fiscal year's totals. And the U.S. government grants an additional 1 million lifetime work permits to immigrants every year.
Those figures will skyrocket even higher if business groups get their way. Such an expansion would hurt hardworking Americans.
The majority of foreigners who cross the border illegally or arrive on guest worker visas lack substantial education. Naturally, they seek out less-skilled jobs in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service -- and directly compete with the most economically vulnerable Americans. The labor surplus created by immigration depresses the wages of native-born high school dropouts up to $1,500 each year.
Several proposals under consideration in Washington could alleviate American workers' woes.
A recent bill from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) would mandate all businesses use a free, online system called E-Verify, which determines an individual's work eligibility in mere seconds.
The system would make it extremely difficult for employers to hire illegal immigrants, roughly 40 percent of whom have been paid subminimum wages at some point. Without a pool of easily abused illegal laborers, businesses would raise pay for Americans.
Several senators also recently introduced the Raise Act, a bill that would reduce future levels of legal immigration.

It's time for our leaders in Washington to scale back both legal and illegal immigration. By doing so, they can further tighten the labor market and force businesses to bring less-advantaged Americans back into the workforce.


OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."

"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."

 

PELOSI, FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWOMS’S MEXIFORNIA

 

Report: California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24

Middle-class wages in progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.

“Earnings for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
 In just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults are working full-time.
Specifically, inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and housing problems are made worse — especially for families — by the loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting costs. The report says:
Many workers are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.


The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J 

NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines



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Free Trader Paul Krugman Admits Failure of Globalization for American Workers: ‘Major Mistake’

Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
 13 Oct 2019780
3:21

Economist Paul Krugman, the longtime defender of global free trade and a member of the failed “Never Trump” movement, now admits that globalization has failed American workers.

In a column for Bloomberg titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” Krugman admits that the economic consensus for free trade that has prevailed for decades has failed to recognize how globalization has skyrocketed inequality for America’s working and middle class workers.
Krugman writes:
In the past few years, however, worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to ask now what we missed. [Emphasis added]
The pro-globalization consensus of the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little to rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably even correct, to think of these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake — one in which I shared a hand. [Emphasis added]
Krugman, though, writes that he and his fellow free trade economists “had no way to know” that globalization of the American economy or a surge in trade deficits “were going to happen,” though the anti-globalization movement had warned for years of the harmful impact free trade would have on U.S. workers — including Donald Trump.
In an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, economist Alan Tonelson said that Krugman’s acknowledging that he and the free trade economic consensus has been wrong is “better later than never,” but “the damage has already been done.”
LISTEN:
“There’s been an even more startling, in fact jaw-dropping, development on that front. Paul Krugman, the famous Never Trumper, the famous pro-free trade economist, the Nobel Prize winner just published an article … saying that for the past 20 years, he and his other globalist, free trade economist friends have been substantially wrong about the effect of globalization, particularly more trade with low income, low wage countries like China,” Tonelson said.
“They’ve been substantially wrong about its effects on the American economy and American workers in particular,” Tonelson said.
Meanwhile, decades of free trade have spurred mass layoffs, unemployment, and offshoring of high-paying American jobs while surging trade deficits. Since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5 million American jobs from the American economy. Millions of American workers in all 50 states have been displaced from their jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.


Video: Michelle Malkin Speaks at the Freedom Center

Who's really behind America's immigration crisis?
Mon Oct 21, 2019 

Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of Michelle Malkin's talk in Beverly Hills for the David Horowitz Freedom Center on October 15th.  She discusses her latest book: Open Borders Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction. Don't miss it!
Transcript:
Michelle Malkin: As many of you may know, I cut my teeth and started my newspaper journalism career in Southern California, in the Valley.  And I was just joking with a tablemate of mine that I literally lived in a closet in Canoga Park in my early years.  I was an editorial writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News.  And so much of what I observed, reported on, exposed in those early newbie years as a journalist, colored the career that I've laid out for myself over the last 25-plus years.
And as many of you who are longtime Californians, native Californians, know, everything that we're experiencing now with regard to open borders and Open Borders, Inc. started here.  This was ground zero.  And I had my journalistic antennae tuned to grassroots citizens in this state who were the early warning sentinels, who were exposing and decrying the fissures that were beginning to show in our civic culture -- the balkanization of the school system, the impact of the open borders infrastructures Cloward-Piven strategy, which David and the Center have for so long exposed, of completely overwhelming our health, education, welfare, public safety and national security systems.
I was here when Proposition 187 came into existence.  And that too was, I think, a prescient outbreak, revolt, of grassroots citizens against Open Borders, Inc.  And of course, over the last 25-plus years, anytime that citizens have actually had a direct vote and referendum on immigration matters, it is always in favor of sovereignty and against open borders and Open Borders, Inc.
So I've described this latest book, this seventh book of mine, "Open Borders, Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction?" as the third in my Star Wars trilogy of books on immigration.  And I was very humbled to be able to talk about my first book, "Invasion," in 2002 at one of David's early gatherings.  That book was fueled by my outrage in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  And I sought to document how every lapse in immigration enforcement had paved the path for the 19 hijackers who came in through the front door.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, okay?  So I will see a lot of young people purporting to represent the Right and right-thinking people, declaim that they are against illegal immigration and for legal immigration.  Can we graduate beyond this kindergarten level of expressing our views and thoughts and analysis of immigration policy?  All 19 hijackers came through the front door, the vast majority of them through the Bush-created Visa Express program.  That is a legal immigration program.  That is a legal means of getting into the country.  I get it.  You are against people traipsing across the border illegally.  But are you for that?  Are you for the Diversity Visa lottery program, which has been the bane of our immigration system now for 20 years?  We've had Republicans promise over and over again to kill this program, which still is preserved to this day, of randomly giving out the privilege of entering this country.
How many of you are naturalized Americans yourself?  Raise your hands.  Yes.  Anyone come here through the Diversity Visa lottery program?  Handing out the privilege of coming into this country randomly, like the lotto, is probably the most insane thing that I've heard any sovereign country consider doing.
Many of you will remember that there was an attack at the El Al counter at LAX in 2002.  Hesham Hadayet.  How to get into this country randomly through the Diversity Visa lottery program.  There are countless examples of people who were not vetted properly, who did not offer some sort of special skill or special fealty to our Western principles, culture; who didn't have to demonstrate any type of willingness to assimilate to American values, who've come through that legal pipeline into the country.
So "Invasion" connected the dots between our blind tolerance for mass uncontrolled immigration to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  And there's a scene I'll never forget.  And I lived in the Beltway swamp.  This is the kind of refugee that I endorse, refugees from the Beltway swamp.  But when I was there, I would often have to do business and work around the Fairfax County area.  And after 9/11, I visited the same 7-Eleven and DMVs that the 9/11 hijackers did, where they hooked up with illegal alien day laborers who helped provide them with the state IDs that helped them get onto the planes and board the planes that they then drove into the Pentagon, the Twin Towers and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  And you couldn't connect the dots any more clearly or efficiently than that, allowing a swamp of upwards of 30 million illegal aliens in the country, not just border trespassers and deportation evaders, but visa overstayers.  Forty percent of the people who are here illegally are visa overstayers.  And this is a lesson that 3,000 people sacrificed their lives for America to learn.  And we still refuse to learn it to this day.
So flash forward to the launch of "Open Borders, Inc." and my book tour.  I went back to the Beltway swamp, because it is an occasional hazard.  And I helped lead a rally to show support for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.  As part of my book tour, I've become a community organizer for America.  We need more of those.  Right?
(Applause)
And put out a call for patriots and citizens in one of my other former adopted home counties, Montgomery County, Maryland, which is ground zero in the battle against extremist radical sanctuary policies that are endangering America.  And nearly a thousand people came out on our side.  On our side.  This is a county where Soros organizations have held sway over an extremist county council for years now, paving the way for MS-13 to hijack the streets, hijack the schools.
And one of the lead organizations there, which you may be familiar with, is a group called Casa de Maryland, directly subsidized by George Soros -- tax exempt, nonprofit, previously led by the now chief of the Democratic National Committee, Thomas Perez, which was one of the forerunners in the amnesty movement, lobbying successfully for driver's licenses for illegal aliens, in-state tuition discounts for so-called "dreamers," doing everything that they can to obliterate the fundamental difference between legal and illegal aliens.
And this group had a political arm, Casa in Action, that had supported and given campaign donations to the Montgomery County Executive, Marc Elrich.  He showed up at the Stand With ICE rally on the other side, with the amnesty mob, with people who were wearing Antifa T-shirts.  And the people on the other side, who I call sanctuary anarchists, outlaws, tried to drown out an Angel Mom and an Angel Wife who talked about the bloody consequences of open borders and how they had been permanently separated from their family members because of this revolving door that benefits criminal aliens.
Well, that night, I debated one of the leaders of Casa de Maryland.  And I started out by talking about how I had bought my first house in Montgomery County, how my two children were raised in Montgomery County, and how we used to be able to go to a local mall and play land and local parks with our then baby and toddler and feel safe.
But in Germantown, where I had bought my house, multiple criminal aliens had preyed upon young girls and teenagers, one an 11-year-old who was gang raped by two criminals who had already been issued final orders of deportation, after multiple encounters with the law.  Another 16-year-old girl was the victim of a home invasion robbery in Germantown, not far from where I had raised my kids.  Her suspected rapist had also been apprehended multiple times at the border, issued an NTA, a notice to appear; which really should be called an NTD, a notice to disappear.  And the only reason why these incidents became news and then national news, because I'm sure -- raise your hand if you heard about this over the summer -- in the course of one month, 10 of these suspects had finally been caught after going through the revolving door.
Why do we know about them?  Not because of the county.  The county doesn't keep statistics like that.  They don't want to know.  No papers, no problems.  The only reason we know about it is because brave local police officers were so disgusted with sanctuary policies that tied their hands behind their backs and gagged their mouths, and prevented them from communicating and cooperating with federal immigration agents.
And so I laid this all out in this local debate on a DC TV station with this smirking Soros minion sitting next to me.  This was the week of the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that we were debating.  And so I started talking about the nexus between mass uncontrolled immigration and national security.  And her response was to laugh.  To laugh out loud.  And then, the so-called moderator -- moderator -- immoderator -- said, "That's a different topic," and interrupted me, and prevented me from finishing the thought.  We just keep hitting the snooze button and indulging in this collective amnesia about what the fundamental lessons should've been, that we should've learned and acted upon.  Every September 11th, there are platitudes: never again, never forget.  And then amnesia sets in all over again.
The second in my Star Wars trilogy of immigration books shifted focus to the economic impact on American workers.  That book was called "Sold Out," and it was coauthored with an incredible patriot, a former American computer software programmer, who is now a lawyer who represents the best and brightest American IT workers who've been negatively affected by the H-1B visa program and other  pipelines that have been abused by big business, with its insatiable thirst for cheap foreign labor.
This book was initially prompted by my exasperation, on both sides of the camera, of watching TV news segments try to explain the phenomenon of these illegal alien caravans that have escalated under the Trump Administration.  So watching them, but also being on the other side of the camera, and being asked a question and only having two minutes to answer, who's funding this, who's behind it?  And by the time I start my answer, the segment is over.
So I sought to cram as much information in the middle of two covers to answer that question, and to provide people with intellectual ammunition -- uh-oh, I said ammunition, that's a trigger word.  I said trigger, that's a trigger word, too -- so that they have as much knowledge and data and facts to counter the daily onslaught of Open Borders, Inc. propaganda.
I have sought over the course of my career to highlight the work of so many independent investigators, think tanks, organizations like David's, that have done the yeoman's work in this regard.  A lot of the information will not be necessarily new to you all.  But I think what I did was take all of the puzzle pieces and piece them together to paint, I think, as vivid a picture as possible of how these hundreds of organizations and dozens of very powerful CEOs and open borders philanthropists work in concert to sabotage our borders and undermine our sovereignty.
People have asked me, "What was the most surprising thing that you learned in the course of writing the book?"  And I would have to say that, looking from 14,000 feet -- and that is almost literal, because I'm on my mountaintop in Colorado Springs -- what was most daunting was documenting the billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies that are underwriting our own destruction and, along with that, the billions of dollars that people may unwittingly and unknowingly be donating to charities and organizations that they think are doing good for those communities.
And I'll start with the Catholic Church.  I am a Catholic.  And I have long known about -- and I'm sure -- how many Catholics in the room here, yes -- we all know about the social justice hijacked wing of the Church.  We've got this nightmare of a Pope who has designated himself the global leader of the anti-Trump Resistance every single day.  We know about the radical ties between the bishops in Chicago and Saul Alinsky himself.  Much of the work that David's researchers have done has illuminated this, the funding mechanism created by Saul Alinsky and Bernard Sheil, the Chicago bishop, in the late '60s.  That was the permanent legacy of the community organizing wing of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Industrial Areas Foundation.
And these groups have persisted decade after decade.  During the Bush years, they were at the forefront of organizing the illegal alien marches that we saw, where the American flag was flown upside-down and replaced with the Mexican flag.  And the sort of militant and most grievance mongering of the open borders protestors showed their faces before there was a PR makeover.  Right?  Because, remember that, after the defeat, they realized they needed to clean up, give everybody a little American flag and stop talking about La Raza, and the borders crossed us, we didn't cross the borders.  Right?  No more Reconquista talk for a little while.  But they can only hold it in for so long.  Right?
And there was an outbreak of that as I was finishing up the manuscript this summer for "Open Borders, Inc." in my adopted home state of Colorado.  At an ICE facility right outside of Denver, in Aurora, Colorado, these Antifa and Abolish ICE forces laid siege to the grounds of the facility.  The police had been ordered to stand down.  And the American flag at the facility was torn down and replaced with a Mexican flag and a defaced "Blue Lives Matter" flag.
Again, sort of looking at this from 14,000 feet, you can see the natural progression of the cop bashing that David and so many of his compatriots first exposed in the '60s and '70s.  The Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army.  They morphed into the MoveOn mob and the Answer Coalition, the Soros funded organizations; whether it was ACORN morphing into the Code Pink people.  Then it became the Occupy movement.  And these were the people that were defecating on police cars in New York City.  And now, under Trump, it's the same people.  You know, they even have some of the same signs, targeting immigration enforcement now, and physically intimidating and harassing 20,000-plus ICE agents across the country.
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times earlier this year championing the doxing -- in other words, the revealing of the private information -- of ICE agents and their families.  And these are the people who call us inciters to violence and hatred.  In the book, I have a screenshot of a tweet that was allowed to stand on Twitter for many days, that was posted by Occupy Wall Street New York's chapter, graphically showing the murder of an ICE agent and what illegal aliens should do if they encounter them, basically garroting them.
This week, we had this hoo-hah about some meme video that was shown at a conference at the Trump Doral Hotel.  And yet, the same people who are decrying that as some incitement to violence have had nothing to say about the shots that have been fired at ICE facilities in San Antonio.  There was a protest at the house of the warden of the Aurora, Colorado facility, where the Antifa mobsters threatened not only the warden and his family but shouted at the "pigs" of the Aurora Police Department who were there to protect the house and the neighborhood and told them to "go home and swallow bullets."
Hardly a peep about what happened in Tacoma, Washington, at the ICE facility there, where the paid Soros-Lite minions included an Antifa thug who attempted to firebomb the building.  Did you hear about that?  Not a peep.
There's one other huge factor in perpetuating these gross caricatures of our ICE agents as somehow KKK or Nazis or SS guards; the most noxious rhetoric aimed at them.  And that is Hollywood itself.  Right?  And here we are, in the land of high walls and bulletproof windows and armed 24/7 guards.  Many of the social justice groups have infiltrated the Screenwriters' Guild.  And they're weaving their open borders ICE-bashing narratives into sitcoms and movies.  And they are allowed to advocate physical violence against ICE agents and then put a laugh track underneath.
Some of you may remember, before it died a necessary death, the revival of Murphy Brown in the past year.  And for Thanksgiving, they had an episode where there was an ICE raid that was going to target a family friend who had a food truck.  And Murphy Brown threatened to spatchcock the ICE agents if they did their job.  Any culinary folks here know what spatchcocking is?  Do you want to say what it means?
Unidentified Audience Member: [Inaudible]
Michelle Malkin: And crack it open.
Unidentified Audience Member: [Inaudible]
Michelle Malkin: Yes.  For roasting.  This is what they wanted to do to ICE agents.  And yet, this week, we've got this hue and cry, and there's going to be op-eds out the wazoo about a meme of Trump.  But that's allowed.
The underwriting of that agenda in Hollywood, unfortunately, doesn't just come from the Left.  And I document in the book about the Chrissy Teigens and John Legends of the world directing millions of dollars to illegal alien propaganda groups.  These are the same groups that are taking cases on behalf of illegal aliens all the way up to the Supreme Court.  So, you know, I've told people outside of the Hollywood zone that they should think twice about downloading another John Legend song.  Because you can defund Open Borders, Inc. in small ways in your own home.  It's easy not to give him money when you know where it's going.
And when people open up the newspapers every day and see that our President's plenary powers are once again being stymied by these rogue judicial sanctuary anarchists -- I mean, at least Antifa, they wear their black masks; we know that they're the enemy.  But it's the anarchists in black robes who are doing so much more damage and causing so much more peril to our country.
But it's not just the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  All across this country, we have these judges who are issuing nationwide injunctions from their lower court benches affecting the entire country and throwing monkey wrenches into every aspect of immigration enforcement, whether it's slamming shut the revolving door of the deportation abyss, trying to get a handle on the asylum racket, stopping the "dreamer" scheme that issued 800,000 work permits.  That's what it's really about.  It's not about hopes and dreams; it's about work permits.
And the entire illegal alien lawyers lobby, of course, is subsidized by both Soros and Hollywood and, again, our own tax dollars.  Pretty much every law school, public and private, in this country runs clinics where they take their law school students down to the border to conduct Know Your Rights seminars, where they're -- I mean, you wonder where they're cooking up all of the fraudulent claims?  It's at the Know Your Rights seminars.
So the Catholic Church, the Hollywood elite, the legal infrastructure, and the deliberate overwhelming of every aspect of our system -- if that wasn't enough -- and this is something that so many patriots have faced over the years, but it's escalating now -- is that there's an intersection between the war on our borders, the war on our sovereignty and the war on free speech.
There is a chapter, that I think is especially important and especially relevant to David's group and all of you who support him, on the Southern Poverty Law Center.  And of course, the SPLC has now infiltrated the inner sanctums of Silicon Valley.  And that is what's most daunting.
And I'll tell you, just from a personal perspective as somebody who was an early adopter in the social media space, it seems so quaint now, this idea, when I first started out on the internet in 1999.  I mean, I started a blog before "blog" was even a word.  I used this clunky program called Microsoft FrontPage to construct a website that took all day to update, for just like a single paragraph.  And when I talk to young people, I say, "You don't understand what 2400 baud sounded like."  Remember that?  And then, when it would finally finish, "Yes! One new paragraph on the internet!"  But the idea that you could just plant your flag and never have to be concerned that the political or ideological nature of your content would get your website pulled, those days are over.
And as I was putting this manuscript to bed, one of the researchers that I most admire, a solo practitioner named Ann Corcoran -- and I'm saying it in the past tense -- had an incredible website called Refugee Resettlement Watch.  And this is an aspect of our failure to have a rational immigration system that is very discriminating -- and yes, we can say that word, discriminating -- this is one aspect that has been neglected until recently.  And she highlighted cases of fraud, cases of lack of community input, subversion of local control.
You wonder how the Twin Cities became the Twin Cities?  It was because of the United Nations, Soros NGOs, and religious contractors.  U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is a biggie.  But in Minnesota, it was the Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services.  And when I've talked about this, there are lot of conservative Lutherans who protest, they don't want to hear it.  Well, that's not our Senate; that's someone else's.  Both Senates, whether it's the conservative one or the more liberal ELCA, have supported the work of the Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services, which is one of the biggest profiteers in the refugee resettlement space.
And Ann Corcoran had been reporting on this for upwards of 10 years and woke up one morning earlier this summer to find that WordPress, which is the blogging software that she uses -- and that I use, by the way -- had determined that her work had violated some community guidelines or standards.  There's no appellate process, and she has spent the last several months trying to rebuild 10 years' worth of reporting on this racket.
So I finished this book with a special sense of urgency.  Because the tactics of the SPLC, which named Ann Corcoran one of its agents of hate, along with me and David, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ben Carson -- these are the groups that have labeled me a white supremacist.
(Laughter)
I'm not doing a very good job of it, am I?  They're the same groups that have attacked me since the launch of the book as -- yes, and I know many of you have also borne these slings and arrows and chuckled about it -- an anti-Semite.  I am married to the grandson of Ukrainian Jews.  Doesn't matter.  They have gotten away with slapping these defamatory labels on peaceful patriotic citizens for decades.  You would've thought, after the internal crumbling of the SPLC in the past year, whistleblowers coming out of the woodworks to talk about sexual harassment, racial harassment, Morris Dees finally slinking away -- even many left-wing publications and reporters talking about the fraud of the poverty palace.  And within weeks of that scandal finally blowing up, there was the New York Times and the Washington Post reverting back to form, quoting the SPLC as the absolute moral authority on who's a hater, who's a xenophobe, who's a racist.
When is this going to stop?  After the House Republicans, when they were in power, defunded ACORN, didn't you have a sense of hope?  All right! We're just getting started! What happened?  ACORN reconstituted itself into five different other community organizations that still do their work.  Many of these groups are going to be getting money to conduct the census.  We continue to subsidize our own destruction.  And these establishment Republicans in the swamp have allowed it to happen.  They've enabled it either by default, by neglect or, unfortunately -- and this has been a theme of so much of my work over the last 25-plus years, and it's a note I'll end on now -- too many of these Republicans themselves are charter members of Open Borders, Inc. who are lining their own pockets.
Some of you might've seen a speech that I did at CPAC earlier this year.  Anybody?  Thank you.  You can watch it on YouTube if you haven't seen it yet.  But I was disgusted by the fact that after two days into the conference, only 13 minutes total had been spent on the most important existential issue of our time.  And that is, it's not just immigration.  It is the right of self-determination of any country to decide who gets in, how many; and what we do when we detect people who don't belong here in the first place.
And the numbers are everything.  The numbers are everything.  It's not just the 30 million who may be here illegally, and that's probably a lowball figure.  It's the one million new green cards that we issue every year.  It's the overwhelming that I've talked about, the 700,000 visa overstayers, the half million deportation evaders; and then all of these legal pipelines which are being exploited to the detriment of American citizens, American families and American workers.
And I gave the speech.  And I pointed out that the organizers of CPAC itself had allowed people to come inside their tent who have targeted many of the patriots who've warned about our problems.  Van Jones got to cuddle up to Matt Schlapp onstage at CPAC.  Van Jones, who has been one of the most active hit men of the Soros-funded Left.  And yet, many nationalist patriots were banned from even entering the ballroom to listen to my speech.  There's something wrong with that kind of enterprise which has been converted into a pay-for-play system for Open Borders, Inc.
I tell a story in the preface of the book about how after I finished my speech, I had to go backstage to get out of the venue.  And I was stopped by a couple of people who thanked me for my speech.  Then there were people who sort of avoided me.  And then there were the clueless, three-piece-suited lobbyists who came up to me.  And remember what I said at the beginning about this platitude of "I'm against illegal, I'm for legal."  So a lobbyist comes up to me.  Says, "Oh, I really appreciated what you had to say."  Hadn't listened to me.  "I'm against illegal immigration, too.  But here's my business card.  We really ought to talk about how you can support expansion of the H-2 program for seasonal workers."  Low-wage foreign workers.  Did you not hear anything I just said?
This is the Beltway mentality.  This is what we face.  Because these people are inside the tent.  And I will say it again -- fragging from inside the tent is so much more dangerous than the bombs and grenades that are lobbied from outside.  And that is not a comfortable message.  It's definitely not one that I'm going on Fox News to talk about a lot, although I'm happy to, if anyone wants me to.
But going forward, I think, especially as we head into this deep plunge of an election cycle, it's easy to make fun of the clown car of the Democratic presidential candidates.  That's easy.  What's harder is to combat the people from inside the tent that are sabotaging the best opportunities we have to seize back control of our country.  We've got good people in the West Wing.  They're the ones who are revamping the Refugee Resettlement program who are doing everything they can do in their power to fight back against judicial anarchy and reclaim the powers of the President over immigration policy.
The last platitude that just gets on my nerves is that our laws are broken.  Our laws are not broken.  Our will to enforce them is.
(Applause)
I will stop here, because I think I am going to answer questions?
Unidentified Participant: Yes.
Michelle Malkin: And I appreciate your time.  Thank you.
(Applause)
Yes?
Unidentified Audience Member: [Inaudible]
Unidentified Participant: Wait.  We've got the mic.  I'll come to you next.  But we'll start here, and then I'll come over.
Michelle Malkin: Yes, ma'am?
Unidentified Audience Member: I'm going to assume that Trump takes back the House and the Senate.  What can we expect on immigration, assuming that?
Michelle Malkin: It depends on who we're sending to the House and the Senate.  And what I have seen over the last couple of years, unfortunately, are groups funded, for example, by the open borders Libertarians -- the Koch Foundation, for example -- to combat patriots that would be sent to Washington to help provide ground troops and support for President Trump.  There was a race up in Northern California where a longtime grassroots immigration enforcement hawk, Tim Donnelly, was going up against a Never Trumper moderate.  And for some reason, forces in the White House convinced Trump to endorse the guy who hated him instead of the guy who supported him.
And so when you have this open borders, Never Trump faction that does things like what 11 Republican senators did in the last couple of weeks -- two weeks ago, you might've seen the headlines -- 11 GOP senators voted against the emergency declaration at the border that was supported by President Trump.  If we keep sending people like that back to the House and Senate, what's the point?
Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah.  I know you didn't quite -- there's kind of an elephant in the living room that I don't know if you really talk about in your book or not, but it's human trafficking, like the sex trafficking.  I mean, that's what's really kind of behind this is the mass enslavement of these people that is even -- you know, because, like I said, they're being brought as a permanent basically slave class to vote in and destroy this country, like is being done throughout Europe.  I don't know how much you discuss that.  But that seems kind of the elephant in the living room I wanted to say.
Michelle Malkin: Yeah.  Chapter one, which is called, "Sin Fronteras: All Aboard The Caravan Cartel," talks about the misery that is enabled and induced by people who hide behind the compassion curtain.  And that includes many of the Catholic organizations that stand up all of these illegal alien shelters, from Central America all the way up through Mexico and into the interior of our country.  I mean, the inducements that they are creating, the pull factors, the magnets, of illegal alien family, parents, who are paying coyotes to drag their underage girls, who are then subjected to the worst kind of abuse.  And then, the coyotes, who pay the drug cartels derecho de piso to get across the finish line into the country.  And at some point, there needs to be some sort of journalistic and political and ideological jujitsu to turn the table of that narrative that we're the ones that don't care, that we don't care about human rights, that we don't care about women.
And I think the Montgomery County, Maryland example was a perfect opportunity to do that, to put that laser focus on the fact that most of the victims of these criminal aliens going through the revolving door are themselves members of these illegal alien communities.
Unidentified Participant: We'll go here.  And then, Carl, you're next.
Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah.  You're one of the good naturalized citizens in this country.  So the country needs people like you and other naturalized citizens that are contributing greatly to our economy and to our country.  How would you design an immigration policy that attracts those people that are going to benefit the country in a manner that gets our economy going forward, as opposed to just getting people who are here to undermine our country?
Michelle Malkin: So just to refresh a little bit about my own personal background -- my parents came here legally from the Philippines in 1970.  They had to know English fluently before they even stepped foot on American soil.  They had to pay all of their medical fees and undergo medical screening.  I was born here.  And my father was a neonatologist at a time when that specialty was really just coming into the fore.  And so he had to demonstrate an extreme benefit to the country, because there weren't many people who were involved in his specialty.  And he was at the Johns Hopkins University with one of the godfathers of neonatology and then ran the NICU unit at the Atlantic City Medical Center for almost 30 years.
My mom was a public schoolteacher and taught everything from so-called bilingual education -- and of course, those of you in California know why I say "so-called" bilingual education, right?  Because it's really native language maintenance that helps school districts collect a $2,000 per pupil fee.  That was a shock to my mom, a revelation.  She was outraged to learn that she was participating in that and stopped doing it.  Because she knew, even in her own life, of course, that English is the language of success.  Of course, that's a trigger, you're not allowed to say that, either.
And so both of my parents, by virtue of their own educational background and work skills, demonstrated that they were not going to be public charges in America.  And of course, we've got all of these left-wing groups suing over that reform by President Trump.
What does an ideal immigration system look like?  Well, we can't know until we have what I have advocated since I came out with "Invasion" in 2002, a complete immigration moratorium.  We need to take a breather.
(Applause)
Then we can systematically go through every single aspect, both physical control of our land, sea and air ports of entry.  We have to look at the consular offices overseas and what they're doing to vet people who are applying for short-term visas and green cards.  Every single program -- and I've documented this in my entire trilogy -- has been overwhelmed.  There is no control.  We have to reassert control.
And then, that of course includes thinking about the magnets that are drawing people here to break our laws.  That includes rethinking birthright citizenship.  And it means ditching chain migration.  And then, when it comes to elevating special skills, we have to be very vigilant and make sure that we are not shortchanging American workers.  Because the H-1B program is proof of concept that, even if you have special skills as your criteria, it is being abused and sabotaged by big business forces.
Unidentified Participant: We're going to do two more questions.  Carl, and then we'll see about the last one.
Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah.  Ms. Malkin, in your discussion, you mentioned the New York Times twice.  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times came out with a publication that said the United States as a nation didn't start with the pilgrims in 1620 or with the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but in 1619, when 20 or 40 black slaves were imported into Jamestown.  Which means that the United States is fundamentally a racist, white supremacist nation that has no right to any sovereignty, has no right to make any borders.  Could you comment on that?
Michelle Malkin: Yes.
So that curriculum now will be spread in thousands of government-run school districts across the country.  And it is merely a supplement to all of the sovereignty undermining propaganda that has metastasized in the school system for the last 30 years.  Think about that.  And couple it with the fact -- and I report on this in the book -- that the SPLC has a curriculum called -- and they always have the most brilliant and anodyne sounding names -- Teaching Tolerance.  Teaching Tolerance.  This is in 10,000 school districts.  And what they're doing with that curriculum is obliterating the difference, again, between legal and illegal immigration.  They teach the children how to be junior lobbyist for the illegal alien dreamer agenda.  And they teach the kindergarteners how to draw signs that say, "migration is beautiful" and "no human being is illegal."  Everything starts in K through 12.
And that is my warning to -- I understand that we absolutely have to focus on all of the craziness and the orthodoxies that have infested higher education.  But I think the mistake is that we haven't paid nearly enough attention to what's going on in K through 12.
My friend, Brigitte Gabriel, who has an organization, Act for America, did an analysis of middle school textbooks and how they are whitewashing violent jihad in their propagandizing about radical Islam.  When you've got the teachers' unions, who put "Rules for Radicals" as the number-one book on their teachers' reaching list, we've ceded the game right there.
And again, I practice what I preach.  I homeschooled, with my husband, my youngest child for five years.  And I think that's probably the best immunization.  That's the one kind of vaccine I support these days is the vaccine against liberal virus, right?  But it goes to show you that we have to pay attention down-ballot as well.  And that's something that's not going to get on the Drudge Report or Fox News.  But I absolutely support more people, like the people in this room, running for school boards across the country.
Unidentified Participant: Okay.  Brent's going to get the last question.  But before that, Michelle is going to sign books at the table in the back of the room here.  And we still have books for sale out by the registration.
Unidentified Audience Member: Hello.  God bless you, Michelle.
(Applause)
Michelle Malkin: Thank you, appreciate that.
Unidentified Audience Member: You are what I call one of the modern American matriarchs and the authentic feminists.  With the situation with the viciousness of the Cloward-Piven invasion, euphemistically called immigration, what is it that women don't realize?  And how can they be spoken to to recognize they are the direct victims of this fraud?
Michelle Malkin: I need to think about how to answer that.  Because, you know, I've done this for a long time.  And I had the passion to expose radical open borders ideology early on in my career because I understood what a privilege it was for my parents to come here.  And they always inculcated that in me.  And, you know, you hear this word "privilege" bandied about now as if it's some sort of expletive.  And the problem isn't that we should apologize for privilege; it's that we should be grateful for it.
And then, when I had my own kids, the nature of my passion changed.  Because I thought about what my parents were able to bestow on my brother and me.  And the urgency of writing "Invasion," and the thousands of columns and blog posts that I've done over the years, was fueled by my desire to leave a better place for my own children.  And that's obviously what binds us all together as fellow American citizens is that we want to preserve and protect the American dream for ourselves and our posterity.
And for so many addled left-wing women not to see that they are cheating themselves and their futures, it alarms me to no end.  And again, I just want to come back to the fact that it's women who are paying the most attention to what goes on in the classroom.  And it's women who need to take more responsibility for inculcating in their children this sense of gratitude that I'm talking about.
When I look at the faces of the congressional brat pack, and Alexandria Open Borders --
(Laughter)
-- and how vile and ugly that hatred they have for the blessings that we enjoy every day, I know that I'm going to be in this fight for a long time.  And I know you will be, too.
Thank you.
(Applause)


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