Friday, December 6, 2019

WHO SHOULD GET AMERICAN JOBS FIRST? AMERICANS OR INDIANS? - HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRES ONLY WANT THE COUNTRY FLOODED WITH "CHEAP" LABOR FOREIGNERS AND THE TRUE COST PASSED ALONG TO MIDDLE AMERICA

The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.

The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions. JOHN BINDER



Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires

JOHN BINDER

The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder







India’s Ambassador Lobbies Congress to Get Green Cards for U.S.-Based Workers

workers office india migrants
Wonderlane/Unsplash
8:08

India’s ambassador on Wednesday acknowledged a meeting with Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat who is blocking GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 bill that would accelerate the inflow of Indian graduates into the professional jobs sought by American graduates.
“Thank you @SenatorDurbin for an engaging discussion on the value that high-skilled #Indian professionals bring to the #US economy by filling the #STEM shortage,” said a December 4 tweet from Ambassador Harsh Shringla. The roughly 900,000 imported Indian visa-workers are “critical for the competitiveness of #American #tech industry,” Shringla claimed. 
Shringla’s posted a tweet of his meeting with Durbin, which was quickly endorsed by some of India’s H-1B contract-workers in the United States who are lobbying for fast-track green cards, often dubbed “GCs.”


Thank you @SenatorDurbin for an engaging discussion on the value that high-skilled professionals bring to the economy by filling the shortage - so critical for the competitiveness of industry @IndiainChicago





View image on Twitter
Thank you so much Mr. Shringla for taking the lead. We reached out to multiple politicians and diplomats from India to seek support for us and and it feels good to see you take the lead.@realDonaldTrump @sambitswaraj @DrSJaishankar @narendramodi




Jyotsna Sharma describes herself at her Twitter account as “Host-Voice of legal immigrants & It’s My Story at Mana TV & TV5, Pro Clear GC Backlog activist.”
“It’s quite concerning to see the Indian Ambassador to the United States showing up to events where he is pushing for immigration policies that provide preferential treatment to citizens of India,” said Kevin Lynn, the founder of Progressives for Immigration Reform.
Well, the STEM shortage is a myth, and the light is beginning to shine on visa programs like the H-1B & OPT that have been abused to strictly import cheaper labor from India while simultaneously, American workers are being laid off and having to train their foreign replacements on these visas.
Durbin’s office did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
Durbin is opposing Lee’s S.386 bill because it would send nearly all of the 120,000 “Employer-Based” green cards each year to the software industry’s imported Indian workforce. That radical shift would deny green cards to many other immigrants, including foreign scientists at U.S. universities.
Durbin’s rival bill, the RELIEF Act, would provide more green-cards for Indians — and more cards for many other foreign workers who would drive down the salaries of American professionals.  Durbin is a consistent advocate for higher immigration into the United States. “We cannot open our doors to everyone who wants to come through tomorrow. “There has to be an orderly process here — [but] a process that really accommodates the world’s ambition to be part of the future of America,” he said in November.
The award of more green cards to India’s workers would be great for Indian’s economy, partly because the country’s most significant export is the millions of Indians who work abroad in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the United States.
In the United States, there are roughly 900,000 Indian college-graduates in jobs sought by American graduates. They get the jobs via the H-1B, Optional Practical Training, L-1, and J-1 visa-worker programs. In fact, U.S. investor-run technology companies have hired so many Indian visa-workers that Indian managers and recruiters now lead or dominate many U.S-owned companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.
Some of the Indian managers and recruiters at U.S. companies prefer to hire Indians for open jobs, and routinely discriminate against U.S. job seekers, according to Indians and Americans who have witnessed hiring actions.
India’s growing diaspora in the United States is lobbying for more green cards for Indians. For example, Sharma advocates for India’s H-1B outsourcing worker, including roughly 300,000 H-1B workers who complain they cannot get the green-cards that their U.S. employers promised them. India’s U.S. workforce cannot get the cards because the volume of India’s workers in the United States has created a massive backlog for the roughly 20,000 green cards offered to India each year. The roughly 20,000 cards are the Indian allocation under the pro-diversity “country caps” set in the 1965 immigraiton law.
India’s U.S. workforce is providing much of the lobbying power for Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 bill.

Folks stuck in GC backlog, if you haven't participated yet, now is the time @SenatorDurbin heard our compelling stories.We appreciate & respect his time.Thx everyone for enduring the cold to meet Senator. Pls call Senator's office 202 224 2152@immivoice @SIIA_US @GcReforms





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Many of India’s visa-workers in the United States are calling Durbin’s office to get him to agree with Lee’s bill, which is backed by the GOP and its business donors. The calling campaign has been conducted by Indians living far from Durbin’s home state of Illinois:
In July, Shringla touted India’s support of the S.386 bill, which would help India’s economy by steering more income and jobs into the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
“I must compliment the U.S. House of Representatives for adopting the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants bill which removes country caps on the H1B visas,” Indian ambassador Harsh Shringla told a D.C. meeting of lobbyists and advocates on in July. He continued: “I think this is an important initiative. We have worked with congressmen across the board, and we’re happy this is a bipartisan initiative in Congress, and we’re hopeful the Senate would follow course and also adopt the bill.”
India’s lobbying is backed by the U.S. technology industry, which wants to promote the use of India’s workers, partly because India’s government has the power to curb U.S. investors’ access to India’s growing consumer market.
The hiring of India’s workers by U.S. employers has helped stock-market investors in several ways.
It has helped to flood the labor market for American professionals, so pushing down U.S. salaries. It has also shifted many U.S. jobs to low-wage Indian worksites. In general, stocks rise by roughly $10 for every $1 that can be cut from a company’s payroll.
The hiring has also helped major U.S investors get a foot into the Indian consumer marketplace. For example, Walmart and Amazon are pushing the S.386 bill as they try to get India’s permission to expand their retail networks throughout India.
But the wave of Indian outsourcing has slammed the U.S. professional sector and has pushed many Americans professionals out of good jobs. The establishment media largely ignore the huge scale and nationwide impact of the job losses by Americans. But losses have gradually created a series of professionals’ groups who are lobbying against the H-1B program and the S.386 bill.


Lynn praised Durbin for blocking Lee’s bill, saying:
Many immigration pundits have come out against this [Lee] bill because it would redistribute employment based green cards strictly to Indian citizens working in the IT sector, for the next decade. It’s a zero sum bill. Sen. Durbin realized how bad this bill was so he blocked all attempts made at passing this bill through the dubious process of Unanimous Consent voting and has asked for a public hearing. Because Sen. Durbin has become a roadblock for the Indian IT sector, we now see a tweet by Ambassador Shringla meeting directly with Sen. Durbin talking about how there’s a STEM shortage, and why it’s critical for the US economy to rely on the talents of Indian professionals.
Shringla met with Durbin on December 4 but has also met many other U.S. politicians, likely to lobby for greater use of Indians workers instead of U.S. graduates. For example, Shringla met with Gp Sen. Kevin Cramer, who is a leading supporter of the S.386 bill, which would reward more Indian graduates who take jobs in his home state.


Shringla also met Lousiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy:

A great pleasure to meet Senator @SenBillCassidy of at the office to brief him on the - relationship, in general, and our burgeoning energy cooperation, in particular





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He met with Florida GOP Rep. Ted Yoho:

Thank you @RepTedYoho for meeting me in your home sunshine state of - our shared vision of democracy, rule of law and equal opportunities for all citizens is the foundation of the 🇮🇳 🇺🇸 strategic partnership @IndianEmbassyUS





View image on Twitter




He met with Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley:

Great to meet @SenJeffMerkley and talk about our shared objectives of green sustainable development and addressing climate change through innovation; great potential for 🇮🇳 🇺🇸 cooperation @IndianEmbassyUS @CGISFO





View image on Twitter




He also met Alabama Democrat Sen. Doug Jones:


Many U.S. investors hope to expand the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, which allows them to hire Indians in place of Americans, and then use the extra profits to spike their stock-market wealth:


In his travels through the United States, Shringla also meets with the growing Indian diaspora in the United States, many of whom are part of India’s huge visa-workforce in U.S.-based jobs.




The Indian diaspora includes roughly 900,000 workers and at least one million family members, and perhaps 200,000 Indians enrolled in college or universities, many of whom also hold jobs. The population also includes a growing number of unskilled illegals who pay smugglers, dubbed “agents,” to help them migrate to the United States. Many Indians also migrate into the United States to work as independent truckers.
The Indian illegals repay their smuggling debts by getting jobs at the shops, restaurants, and other businesses that serve the growing population of India’s legal visa-workers in California, New Jersey, Texas, Illinois, and Virginia.


Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com



ECONOMY

Despite Job Boom, More Men Are Giving Up On Work

December 5, 2019

The long economic recovery has brought unemployment to historic lows. But the number of men in the labor force during their prime working age has dropped significantly over the past 50 years.
Jetta Productions Inc./Getty Images
David Pierce was never someone who sat around watching life go by. He worked as a chef and had a catering business on the side. He sang in his church choir and did community theater, where he met his wife.
Then, in his mid-50s, doctors removed part of Pierce's foot, a complication of diabetes.
"My health just went, kind of really downhill. It really took a turn for the worse," says Pierce, sitting at his dining room table in his tidy home in Apalachin, N.Y. "I couldn't maintain even a part-time schedule."
A year ago, he went on disability, joining the large army of men who have left the workforce for good.
While the job market has rebounded nicely since the Great Recession, one segment of the population hasn't shared in the recovery. Men between the ages of 25 and 54 are still less likely to be working than they once were, says Melissa Kearney, an economics professor at the University of Maryland.
In 1968, about 95% of men in their prime working years held jobs. The number has fallen to just 86%, even though today's job market is ultra-tight.
David Pierce of Apalachin, N.Y., went on disability a year ago, joining the large army of men who have left the workforce for good.
Jim Zarroli/NPR
Kearney says the recovery and employment growth in the past five years are very encouraging. But, she says, "I still see a lot of data that suggests we have structural challenges, and we need to be doing more to try and draw more prime-age workers back into the workforce."
The decline in male workers is concentrated almost entirely among men with high school diplomas or less, or even a bit of college, she says. At one time, men of all educational levels were equally likely to be working; today, a huge gap has opened up, with many more college graduates holding jobs.
Simply put, there's much less demand for the labor of less-educated men, Kearney says.
"They're competing now with low-wage workers around the globe, and that's depressed domestic demand for their skills in the workforce," she says.
Jonathan DeMarco lost his job at a metal fabricating plant in upstate New York in 2006. He does odd jobs when he finds them, but he hasn't had full-time work ever since.
DeMarco still looks for work, but with his dyslexia, he doesn't read or write well and has trouble persuading employers to hire him, he says.
"It's just hard out there for people like myself to get a job," he says.
He refuses to accept any government assistance, and, like many men in his situation, survives largely because his wife works, at a local factory. But her health isn't good, he says.
"She was out of work ... for four or five months. That put us way behind in the bills," he says.
In rural Schoharie County, where DeMarco lives, the unemployment rate is a very low 3.8%. But a lot of men don't show up in the government's numbers because they aren't looking for work anymore, says Gail Breen, executive director of the local workforce development board.
"There are a lot of hidden people in those numbers that don't have jobs," she says. They are "people who have pretty much just given up."
Some suffer from health problems or drug abuse, or just lack the skills needed for today's workforce, she says.
In rural areas, where public transportation is rare, simply finding a way to get to work can be a challenge.

ECONOMY

An Economic Mystery: Why Are Men Leaving The Workforce?

 

Frank Altieri, who lives in the upstate New York town of Owego, served time in prison on an assault charge and hasn't worked full time since getting out four years ago. At 40, he has come close to finding work sometimes, but without a car his options are limited, he says.
Altieri points out that if he works full time, he and his wife risk losing their disability check and food stamps, so if he takes a job that doesn't pay well, he won't come out ahead.
"I am looking for work, but with my SSI they can actually cut me off, under a certain amount," he says.
At one time, men like Altieri could find work by moving to cities, where they'd make more money. But these days, a high school graduate in New York City or Boston doesn't make much more than someone in a rural area, and costs in the city are a lot higher, says Kearney, the economics professor.
"The wage premium for cities that everyone used to get, even that's disappeared for the non-college-educated," she says.
Since quitting his job, money has been tight for Pierce. His wife, Lonna, a retired school librarian, went back to work temporarily this year.
The Pierces are selling a rental property because they need the money and because Pierce no longer has the energy for upkeep. He and his wife don't travel or go out as much as they once did.
"He's changed a lot," Lonna Pierce says. "We can't do what we did together. That's the thing that makes it harder. And of course it's wearing on a marriage when you're not doing things together. And that's sad. Obviously, that's why you get married. You want to have a partner."
Being without work has taken another toll on Pierce: He has trouble sleeping.
"My career was my identity, who I am," he says. "And to lose that really affected me and created an added layer of depression. I no longer could identify as the guy that was a wonder with food.
"I could whip up all sorts of meals and stuff, and today, if I do one I'm lucky. Just making lunch or breakfast can zap me for the day. That was a real hardship for me."

Report: Immigration Encourages Job Discrimination Against Americans

Dave Einsel/Getty
29 Oct 2019118
9:50

Mass migration encourages mass discrimination against Americans, especially black employees, according to federal data unearthed by the Center for Immigration Studies.

“You really have to be out of touch with reality to argue that there are no negative effects of immigration on native workers,” said Jason Richwine, a statistician who studied the issue for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Forty percent of the decline in labor participation rates among black workers over three decades was attributable to competition from illegal immigration,” labor lawyer Peter Kirsanow said at a CIS press event at the press club. That “comes to nearly 1 million fewer jobs for black Americans as a result of the competition from illegal immigrants … and it is the wage levels also,” Kirsanow told the audience on October 25.
The huge impact of this discrimination is mostly ignored by wealthy “woke” professionals, who prefer to use discrimination claims as a political club against conservatives. The documented discrimination is just “the tip of the iceberg,” but left-wing critics have gone silent since Donald Trump was elected, said CIS director Mark Krikorian,
Yet white-collar workers are also losing salaries and jobs because of discrimination, said Kevin Lynn, founder of Progressives for Immigration Reform:
The gains made by women and minorities in STEM fields over the past three decades have really been reversed. For example, today on average 12 percent of women earn degrees in computer science. In 1984 it was 37 percent. So you have to ask yourself what’s going on. Well, when the opportunities become scant and the workplaces become hostile to women, they typically choose other career alternatives.
….
There is a preference for hiring Indians over Americans in these [Indian-run] consulting firms because, one, they will work longer hours. It’s a quiescent workforce, largely because they’re here on H-1B visas. And a lot of what goes into this is they are given the hope that their company will sponsor them for an – a green card, and then they’ll eventually get citizenship here in the U.S. Unfortunately for the American worker, that means that they’re competing with someone who is willing to work for less, work for increasingly lower benefits and other benefits that go along with their salaries, and it just ultimately makes things a lot more difficult.
The press club event was scheduled to spotlight Richwine’s study of discrimination lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He summarized several of the EEOC cases, often quoting directly from the commission’s reports:
When a warehouse in Memphis began using a new employment agency to fill its daily work crew, the agency, quote from EEOC, “essentially replaced the African Americans with Hispanics.” End quote. Potential workers would line up outside the warehouse each day, but the agency would select Hispanics over blacks even when black workers were farther ahead in line. Sometimes managers would send potential black workers home by announcing in English that there were no more positions. After the African Americans left, the Hispanics were allowed to come into the warehouse and work. Again, systematic – neither subconscious nor subtle.
Richwine described cases where Hispanic managers discriminated against American blacks:
Perhaps the most egregious example of this comes from Prestige Transportation Services. It would discard or refuse to accept employment applications from non-Hispanic blacks. Quote from EEOC: “On multiple occasions when a black person applied for employment, Prestige managers Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Rodriguez would stand behind the applicant and rub their hand on their skin to display their disdain for black people.” End quote. Staff meetings were conducted in Spanish only.
The record shows that some Indian immigrants also discriminates against blacks, he said.
At a Hampton Inn in Colorado, three non-Hispanic white housekeepers were fired by the new general manager and replaced by Hispanics. The owners, Falgun Patel and Mukund Patel, told the general manager that they prefer that maids be Hispanic because in their opinion Hispanics worked harder while American employees are lazy. The general manager allegedly told a Hispanic employee to recruit friends for the incoming vacancies because the owner preferred a Hispanic workforce. After three months, all of the Hampton Inn’s non-Hispanic housekeepers were gone.
The pattern of lawsuits by Hispanics is very different, said Richwine. Instead of losing job opportunities because of discrimination, Latinos lose workplace protections that were once normal for Americans, he said:
When Hispanics file suits, they are not complaining that they are being replaced by some other group in the workforce; instead, they’re complaining about working conditions, they complain about low pay, they complain about dangerous situations on the job site, and they complain about harassment. Harassment oftentimes is ethnically based, ethnic slurs and so on directed at them. The saddest part is that when we’re talking about Hispanic women, sexual harassment is a very pervasive problem if you believe these EEOC lawsuits,
The examples are merely the most egregious ad straightforward cases, he said, ensuring that they are likely many other cases of discrimination that do not end up in court.
Deputies for President Donald Trump have partly reversed some discrimination against blacks, for forcing wages up to record levels.
But his deputies done little to curb the white-collar discrimination, partly because there is so much more money at stake for high-tech firms, hospitals, and investors.


Another lawsuit alleging discrimination by Indian managers in the US, this time at Intel Corp. One Indian manager rejects a US graduate, says "It would be easier to hire a younger, unmarried Indian man."
Many US grads have similar stories, so share yours.
http://bit.ly/2ocutR4 

Lawsuit: Intel's Indian Managers Discriminated Against American | Breitbart



For example, the federal government rewards companies that discriminate in favor of Indian “OPT” work-permit workers by rejecting American graduates, Lynn said.
American companies which hire Indian graduates are not required to pay Social Security taxes, he said, adding:
That’s about a 15 percent premium that is added to hiring someone on the OPT program and, again, these people compete directly with our new [American] graduates in the workplace … [where] a [U.S.] student today might exit university with anywhere from $35 [thousand] to $85,000 in debt. That’s a lot of money, and … they’re having their legs broken as they leave the gate into the workplace.
Instead, American victims of Indians’ discrimination are suing the Indians firms in court. For example, in a 2016 lawsuit against a giant Indian software firm, Infosys, American witnesses alleged:
Hiring Manager Instructions: an Infosys hiring manager admitted “There does exist an element of discrimination. We are advised to hire Indians … because they will work off the clock without murmur and they can always be transferred across the nation without hesitation unlike [a] local workforce.”
Talent Acquisition Unit Observations: Recruiters in Talent Acquisition observed that Indians were highly favored, and it was extremely difficult to move non-South Asians ahead in the hiring process. Non-Indians were regularly rejected as being “not a good fit,” – an Infosys euphemism for “non-Indian.” This discrimination is on-going. In 2016 for example, an Infosys manager in their Talent Acquisition Unit observed that of Infosys’ 2,900 hires in the United States, 2,200 (76%) were Indian. She observed a similar hiring disparity in prior years.
Applicant Data Manipulation: Infosys manipulates applicant tracking data in such a way that consideration of non-South Asians and non-Indians is minimized, and the hiring of South Asians is maximized. For example, recruiters have observed that non-South Asian applicants were repeatedly deleted from Infosys’ applicant tracking system, forcing one recruiter to keep a separate spreadsheet of applicants on his computer. Recruiters have also observed South Asian applicants, located by Infosys’ “sourcers” in India, manually entered into the applicant tracking system despite those individuals not having formally applied, thus streamlining the hiring process. Individuals sourced in this way were moved “to the front of the line” ahead of applicants in the U.S. A recruiter also observed that applications for United States positions were regularly not reviewed, and in 2016, approximately 11,000 to 12,000 were rejected en masse.


Census data shows how huge numbers of American software graduates have been replaced by Indian & Chinese visa-workers in N.J., California, N.C., Georgia, N.Y., Texas, Virginia, Florida, and other states. Next: Healthcare professionals. @S386 http://bit.ly/2o0X4cp 

Census: Indian Visa Workers Drive Americans Out of Middle-Class Jobs




Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants. It also adds replacement workers to a resident population of more than 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and about 500,000 blue-collar H-2B, H-2A, and J-1 visa workers. The government also prints more than one million work permits for new foreigners, and it rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for investors. The stimulus happens because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a growing economy.
The Census Bureau said September 10 that men who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, bringing their median salaries to $45,097 for full-time, year-round work.


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.



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