THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
TRUMP PARTNERS WITH FEINSTEIN AND PELOSI TO ASSAULT THE AMERICAN WORKER WITH SECRET AMNESTY - MIDDLE AMERICA GETS THE TAX BILLS FOR THE TRUE COST OF ALL THIS "CHEAP" LABOR
The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants.
By Lawrence Harrison
PALO ALTO, CALIF.
President Obama has encouraged Americans to start laying a new foundation for the country – on a number of fronts. He has stressed that we'll need to have the courage to make some hard choices. One of those hard choices is how to handle immigration. The US must get serious about the tide of legal and illegal immigrants, above all from Latin America.
It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.
The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.
Donald Trump Threatens Veto of Cheap Drug Bill — but Not Farmworker Amnesty
SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP/Getty Images
3:48
President Donald Trump’s deputies say he will veto the Democrats’ pending drug bill — but have not threatened to veto a Democrat bill to amnesty at least one million illegals and encourage foreign H-2A visa workers to take agriculture jobs from American agriculture workers.
The amnesty bill has the apparent support of more than 20 GOP farm district legislators and is slated to get a floor debate and House vote on Wednesday.
“It is frankly astounding that the White House did not issue a veto threat on H.R. 5038,” a Capitol Hill source told Breitbart News, adding:
This bill betrays the President’s longstanding desire to encourage American employers – including agriculture – to hire American workers. Worse, this bill amnesties over a million illegal aliens. President Trump won the presidency in no small part because he understands the American people want no part of this. Today the White House cared more about ruffling feathers in the agribusiness community rather than taking a hard line on behalf of the voters he needs for a second term.
One of the bill’s sponsors, GOP Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) claimed in the December 8 Yakima Herald-Republic that Trump supports the amnesty-and-replacement bill:
This is exactly the kind of merit-based immigration reform President Trump has been calling for.
I spoke directly with President Trump about the Farm Workforce Modernization Act and the need for a solution for our farmers. He agreed: We must provide relief now. As the bill moves through the legislative process, I am committed to working with my Senate colleagues in order to send the best possible version of this bill to the president’s desk for signature.
The veto threat was announced Tuesday afternoon for the Democrats’ drug bill, H.R. 3:
…. In its current form, H.R. 3 would likely undermine access to lifesaving medicines. This bill would also compromise the health of Americans by dramatically reducing the incentive to bring innovative therapeutics to market. The preliminary Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis indicates that the bill would reduce the number of new medicines coming to market. The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) finds that H.R. 3’s price controls would affect as much as one third of drugs under development, meaning that out of 300 projected new medicines that would otherwise be approved over 10 years by the Food and Drug Administration, 100 could be severely delayed or never developed. As a result, CEA estimates H.R. 3 would erase a quarter of the expected gains in life expectancy in the United States over the next decade.
…
If H.R. 3 were presented to the President in its current form, he would veto the bill.
The GOP sponsors of the amnesty-and-replacement include several of the most business-friendly GOP leaders and several former GOP leaders in the House: Reps. Mark Amodei (R-NV-02), James Baird (R-IN-04), Susan W. Brooks (R-IN-05), Tom Cole (R-OK-04), John Curtis (R-UT-03), Rodney Davis (R-IL-13), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL-25), Bob Gibbs (R-OH-07), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA-01), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA-05), Paul Mitchell (R-MI-10), Dan Newhouse (R-WA-04), Devin Nunes (R-CA-22), Tom Reed (R-NY-23), Mike Simpson (R-ID-02), Elise Stefanik (R-NY-21), Steve Stivers (R-OH-15), Fred Upton (R-MI-06), Greg Walden (R-OR-02), and Don Young (R-AK-At Large).
Immigration reformers are trying to slow push by Democrats & farm CEOs to amnesty 1M+ illegals & import cheap H-2A visa-workers.
Why would investors hire Americans or buy labor-saving machines if many H-2As will work cheap for the hope of citizenship? http://bit.ly/349L8UE
Reform Groups Rally Opposition to Farmworker Amnesty Vote on Wednesday
Washington, D.C. (December 10, 2019) - The House is expected to vote Wednesday on the hilariously misnamed Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would “modernize” agricultural labor right back to the 17th century.
At the core of the bill are several indentured-labor schemes intended to tie current illegal aliens and future “temporary” workers to farm jobs for four to 10 years, before giving them green cards. The reason for the indenture system is that farmers know from experience that once the illegal aliens or visa workers get green cards, almost all will flee the medieval labor system that prevails in much of fresh fruit and vegetable agriculture.
Fact sheets on the bill are here and here. It provides immediate amnesty to illegal aliens (and their dependents) who have (or claim to have) worked at least part time in agriculture over the past two years. The number of beneficiaries is estimated to be at least 1.5 million.
To prevent the newly legalized illegals from running off to take construction or service jobs in town, the bill gives them a new “Certified Agricultural Worker” visa, which they need to keep for a period of time before becoming free workers. For those who’d already worked illegally in farming for at least 10 years, the period of indenture would be four years; eight years for those who’d been working in farming for less than 10 years. Only after putting in their time would the amnestied illegals be able to upgrade to get green cards and leave plantation labor behind. A separate 10-year period of indenture for a green card is established for legal workers on the existing (numerically unlimited) H-2A farmworker visa -- that’s where future indentured will come from after today’s illegals all get their green cards and hightail it out of the fields.
The bill also mandates use of E-Verify, but only in agriculture -- where it would no longer be needed, because with this kind of sweet deal, who’d bother to hire new illegals?
The bill, H.R. 5038, is co-sponsored by 28 Democrats and 25 Republicans, and was okayed by the House Judiciary Committee last month, without any hearings.
The problems with this 224-page contrivance are several. First, the amnesty.
Farm animals under a sky darkened by smoke from the Kincade Fire in Windsor, Calif., October 28, 2019. (Stephen Lam/Reuters)It’s cheaper to invest in congressmen than in automation
The House is expected to vote Wednesday on the hilariously misnamed Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would “modernize” agricultural labor right back to the 17th century.
At the core of the bill are several indentured-labor schemes intended to tie current illegal aliens and future “temporary” workers to farm jobs for four to ten years before giving them green cards. The reason for the indenture system is that farmers know from experience that once the illegal aliens or visa workers get green cards, almost all will flee the medieval labor system that prevails in much of fresh fruit and vegetable agriculture.
Fact sheets on the bill are here and here. It provides immediate amnesty to illegal aliens (and their dependents) who have (or claim to have) worked at least part time in agriculture over the past two years. The number of beneficiaries is estimated to be at least 1.5 million.
To prevent the newly legalized illegals from running off to take construction or service jobs in town, the bill gives them a new “Certified Agricultural Worker” visa, which they need to keep for a period of time before becoming free workers. For those who’d already worked illegally in farming for at least ten years, the period of indenture would be four years; eight years for those who’d been working in farming for less than ten years. Only after putting in their time would the amnestied illegals be able to upgrade to get green cards and leave plantation labor behind. A separate ten-year period of indenture for a green card is established for legal workers on the existing (numerically unlimited) H-2A farmworker visa — that’s where future indentured will come from after today’s illegals all get their green cards and hightail it out of the fields.
The bill also mandates use of E-Verify, but only in agriculture — where it would no longer be needed, because with this kind of sweet deal, who’d bother to hire new illegals?
The bill, H.R. 5038, is co-sponsored by 28 Democrats and 25 Republicans, and was okayed by the House Judiciary Committee last month, without any hearings.
The problems with this 224-page contrivance are several. First, the amnesty.
The last time we did a farmworker amnesty, it resulted in “one of the most extensive immigration frauds ever perpetrated against the United States government” — according to the New York Times, no less. This was the “Special Agricultural Worker” portion of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (the smaller of the two main amnesties contained in that law), which legalized 1.1 million people, even though there were only about 400,000 people eligible for it. That represents a fraud rate of 64 percent. People received the “farmworker” amnesty even though they claimed, for instance, to have picked watermelons from trees. One of the beneficiaries was Mahmud “The Red” Abouhalima, an Egyptian illegal alien driving a cab in New York, who used his fraudulently acquired status to travel to Afghanistan for terrorist training, which he used in the first World Trade Center attack.
Does anyone think our government has become more conscientious since then?
Then there’s the indenture. Do we really want an entire segment of our economy to be based on the use of unfree labor? The South tried that a while back, with results not necessarily to its advantage.
But put the Peculiar Institution aside and look at post-Civil War sharecropping and tenant farming. The farm workers — white and black — had few options and were essentially tied to their jobs.
Until they weren’t. Once foreign immigration to northern cities was cut off, sharecroppers and tenant farmers started heading north, leaving farm owners at a loss. Who would pick the cotton? Rotting In The Fields, and all that.
This is where the third problem with the Farm Workforce Modernization Act comes in. It actually slows the modernization of farming. When the cotton farmers started seeing their once-captive workforce flee, and didn’t have any established way of importing new serfs, they invested in research and development to automate the harvest. Now no human hand touches a boll of cotton as it is harvested and processed.
So long as American agri-business can rely on a continually replenished supply for foreign labor, it has little incentive to invest in automation. Neil Munro over at Breitbart juxtaposed of a series of tweets by the United Farmworkers, showing hard-working farm laborers, with machines (mostly developed abroad) that doing the same jobs immeasurably faster. Perhaps most striking was a UFW tweet showing a woman, literally kneeling in the dirt, picking radishes with remarkable speed and dexterity, contrasted with a Japanese radish-harvesting machine that was orders of magnitude more productive.
House members will decide this week which of these approaches will they incentivize — high-productivity, modern mechanized agriculture, or the continuation of a system to, as Munro writes, “harvest the crops with methods that have changed little in 10,000 years.”
So long as it’s cheaper to invest in congressmen than in automation, the use of stoop labor will persist.
November US jobs report in perspective: Most jobs “added” to US economy are low wage
The November US jobs report released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that official unemployment in the US is at a 50-year low of 3.5 percent. The government reported that 266,000 jobs were added by employers in the month of November, which is about 86,000 more than predicted by economists.
The long-term unemployed (those without a job for 27 weeks or more) account for 20.8 percent of the unemployed, unchanged from October.
The manufacturing sector added the highest number of jobs, with 54,000 jobs in November, but the vast majority of these came from the return to work of about 48,000 autoworkers at General Motors who were on strike across the country in September and October. The United Auto Workers ended the strike after imposing a concessions contract.
The contracts imposed at GM and Ford, along with a contract currently being voted on by Fiat Chrysler workers, allow the corporations to permanently hire workers as temporary and part-time, with few to no benefits and low wages.
In this Oct. 1, 2019, file photo people wait in line to inquire about job openings with Marshalls during a job fair at Dolphin Mall in Miami. On Friday, Dec. 6, the U.S. government issues the November jobs report. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File)
After manufacturing, the health care sector added the second highest number of jobs, with 45,000. Most jobs added were related to ambulatory health care services (34,000) and hospitals (10,000), areas of low-paid and generally unstable work.
Despite record low unemployment numbers, wages have begun to backslide throughout 2019, a trend which continued in November.
On a longer-term scale, the rising costs of living have gradually outpaced what little income growth existed for workers in the US. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that between 1995 and 2019, education costs in the US have increased nearly 180 percent, housing costs by nearly 150 percent, health care costs by nearly 135 percent, and median income by less than 120 percent.
These figures illustrate the reality that, for all the claims of an economic “recovery,” workers have been forced into low-wage work with little to no opportunity for financial growth. A recent Brookings Institution study reported that an astounding 44 percent of US workers are earning low wages.
Last month, researchers at Cornell University Law School, the Coalition for a Prosperous America, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity released the new US Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI).
The authors note, “The reporting of employment data by the U.S. government, the media, business economists, as well as by other entities providing analytics, has lacked insight to the quality of America’s employment as most workers interpret it—the basic metric of weekly dollar income that a job generates for a worker.”
The JQI provides a measure of the quality of jobs in the US as opposed to the mere quantity and sector of industry. The JQI is a measure of the ratio of what the report deems “high quality” jobs, those which offer more hours and pay than the national average weekly wage of $755.38, to “low quality” jobs, which offer fewer hours and pay below the national average weekly wage.
The report compares the JQI from 1990 to 2019. It reveals a significant decline in the overall quality of jobs in the US over the past three decades. In 2019, the JQI is 81 according to the report, meaning that for every 100 low-quality jobs, just 81 high-quality jobs exist.
The JQI was at its lowest in 2012, coming out of the last US recession. However, the 2019 numbers are still far below the JQI in 2006, before the 2008 stock market crash, when it calculates 90 high-quality jobs for every 100 of low quality.
An important finding of the report is that the decline in job quality for workers in the US stems from the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs from the US economy after the post-WWII manufacturing expansion, with a rapid loss in the 1970s and 1980s. These jobs by and large have been replaced by low-paying service jobs in four main private sector industries: retail, administration and waste services, health care, and leisure and hospitality.
The report notes that the European job market is following a similar path, pointing to a global phenomenon of the depression of wages and quality of work in order to serve the international banks and financial markets.
Also significant is the report’s acknowledgment of the low participation rate of the US labor force. The BLS report notes that the labor force participation rate hovered at only 63.2 percent in November. The JQI explains that many would-be jobseekers, especially male workers in their prime working years, are giving up looking for work when faced with a job market saturated with low-wage, low-quality jobs.
The cruel reality of low-paid, temporary work is an indictment of the nationally based trade unions, which responded to the globalization of production and the decline of American capitalism by integrating themselves into corporate management and imposing layoffs, wage cuts and other concessions.
A whole series of strikes were betrayed by the United Steelworkers, Teamsters, United Auto Workers and other unions in the period of the 1980s when the report marks a significant decline in the quality of US jobs—including the strikes by Hormel meat packers, Phelps Dodge copper miners, Greyhound bus drivers, and at International Paper and US Steel.
The solutions offered by the authors of the report include a ramping up of nationalism, in particular advocating for more punitive trade actions against China, and an appeal to Democratic and Republican lawmakers to institute these measures as a way of returning heavier manufacturing of goods such as automobiles and metals to the United States.
In fact, such measures, which began to be implemented under the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama and intensified under the Trump administration, have been based on the lowering of wages and benefits in the US to be “competitive.”
In response to the growth of social unrest and opposition, the ruling class has promoted figures like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to stem the tide of working-class anger and channel it behind a political program that offers empty phrases and poses no threat to the private profit system of rule. Both Sanders and Warren have offered their own varieties of economic nationalism.
Workers in the US and around the world seeking a way forward against the downward spiral of low-wage jobs with no benefits and no guarantee of stability must look to an alternative to the capitalist system of private profit.
The way forward is not through the trade unions and pro-capitalist political parties, but through a rejection of nationalist politics and the organization of a global movement based in the working class to fight for socialist revolution, the reorganization of the productive forces of society to meet social need, not private profit.
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