Wednesday, May 8, 2019

MICHELLE MALKIN - THE INVASION OF AMERICA BY INVITATION - KEEPING FAKE ILLEGAL ALIEN FAMILIES TOGETHER

ONLY BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC HOLDER HAVE SABOTAGED THE AMERICAN WORKER MORE THAN SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP!



Right now in L.A., for instance, immigration is now skewed pretty heavily towards less-skilled workers. But the emphasis will shift and there will be a lot more competition for 21-year-old [American] college graduates trying to get a job. The competition also may be greater for [older] mid-career graduates because young Americans are relatively cheap to employers. A middle-aged white-collar American graduate is much more expensive to employers than a desperate young graduate of a college in Bangalore, India.

Keeping Fake Illegal Alien Families Together

https://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2019/05/08/keeping-fake-illegal-alien-families-together-n2546006



Who remembers the hysterical sound and fury of open borders leftists last summer over President Donald Trump's detention and enforcement policies at our besieged southern border?
Remember the #FamiliesBelongTogether, #WhereAreTheChildren, #AbolishICE and #MeltICE hashtags?
Remember the "Trump Child Abuse," "Free the Children," "Save the Children" and "AMERICANS DON'T USE CHILDREN AS PAWNS," posters wielded at protests across the country?
Remember the 24-hour hunger strikes and Instagram-friendly border photo-ops by actresses and supermodels of the anti-Trump resistance who care, care, care, so much more than you about the suffering of migrant children?
Remember Time magazine's fake news "Crying Girl," promoted in June 2018 as a global symbol of Trump's heartless "zero tolerance" stance? Two-year-old Yanela Sanchez was never separated from her mother. In fact, she had been dragged across the border unbeknownst to and against the wishes of her father back in Honduras. He obliterated the "all migrants are simply escaping persecution and violence" narrative by revealing that he had a "good job" and the family's life was "fine." He "never got the chance to say goodbye" to his daughter before his wife paid a coyote $6,000 to bring them to the U.S.
Yanela's mother, who now bides her time awaiting an immigration court hearing in migrant housing in Washington, D.C. (most likely subsidized by you and me), abandoned her husband and three other children for a chance to win in the asylum fraud lottery. She made the decision to tear her own family apart, not Trump.
Here's my question: Where are all the caring resisters and champions of children now that deplorable human renting/recycling scams involving exploited illegal immigrant kids are coming to full light? These horror stories are the unconscionably perverse and utterly predictable consequence of incentivizing families -- real and fake -- to abuse our suicidal generosity.
The Arizona Daily Star reported this week that a Guatemalan man, Maynor Velasquez Molina, allegedly paid a family the equivalent of $130 to 'rent' their 8-year-old son to help him get into the U.S. as a "family." He and the boy were caught in February. Across Central America, the kiddie catch-and-release regime endorsed by open borders ideologues is advertised as the hottest ticket to gain entry. Aliens caught illegally crossing the Rio Grande Valley have told Border Patrol agents they surrendered with children because they expected permisos (free passes) to be granted.
"Borderwide," the Daily Star revealed, "federal officials said they had seen about 3,100 fraudulent family claims since April 2018, alongside about 260,000 migrant family members."
In another outrageous case disclosed this month, Border Patrol agents discovered a "recycled" illegal alien child who had been used by at least three "families" of unrelated adults attempting to get into the U.S. from Mexico. The practice is orchestrated by transnational criminal organizations to increase smuggling profits. One Guatemalan woman in South Carolina recycled children 13 times for payments of $1,500 each.
Border-trespassers and smugglers in turn pay drug cartels a tax -- derecho de piso -- to gain passage through sections of the border controlled by the criminal rackets. The RAND Corporation estimated revenue from derecho de piso at anywhere between $30 million to $180 million in 2017.
Federal Judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas blew the lid off the Obama administration's deplorable role as child smuggling facilitators in a scathing 2013 ruling on the case of U.S. vs. Mirtha Veronica Nava-Martinez. Nava-Martinez, a resident alien, was an admitted human trafficker caught at the border trying to smuggle an El Salvadoran minor into the U.S. using the birth certificate that belonged to one of her daughters. The transaction had been arranged by the minor's illegal immigrant mother living in Virginia. She paid $6,000 up front on an $8,000 fee. After Nava-Martinez and the child were caught, the Department of Homeland Security did not arrest the mother. Instead, DHS "delivered the child to her" in Virginia.
Hanen noted that the Nava-Martinez case was the fourth that had come before his court in which illegal immigrant parents had paid smugglers to bring minor children across the border and the U.S. government had abetted the operations. He called the feds' actions "dangerous" and "unconscionable" for inducing parents to jeopardize their own children's safety by turning the over to strangers engaged in criminal activity with drug cartels and risking their lives in the desert. Indeed, Judge Hanen warned that "the government is not only allowing them to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so."
Trump's efforts to close the myriad loopholes that aid and abet this transnational illegal immigrant kiddie smuggling racket have been condemned as heartless. But what's truly inhumane are the virtue signalers who use and abuse children as pawns in their ruthless, lucrative, sovereignty-sabotaging pursuit of open borders.
Michelle Malkin's email address is writemalkin@gmail.com.



ANN COULTER: THE WAY WE WERE



coulter-headshot-640x480-640x480
ANN COULTER
 188
4:48

Big news out of the White House this week! After a beehive of activity, Jared Kushner will finally be unveiling his comprehensive immigration plan! 

Reportedly, the proposed bill keeps the number of new immigrants per year at 1 million but stresses merit-based admissions over familial ties. Little else is known about the bill beyond bland generalities — “humanitarian needs,” “border security,” “protecting American wages” and “moving in the right direction.” 
In anticipation of the big reveal, let’s look back at why we voted for Trump in the first place by revisiting his miracle campaign, as described in my book, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!. (Note that NONE of the reasons we voted for him was that we thought he was an amazing businessman, soon to be proved by his tax returns.) 
** ** ** 
The media were dying to call Trump’s immigration policies “racist,” and he tricked them into trying — with the GOP helping. 
Unfortunately for the media and the Republican Brain Trust, Trump’s policies were popular with all kinds of voters. It wasn’t just “angry white men” who were losing jobs to wage-depressing, admittedly hardworking, Mexicans. So were black people. So were Hispanics — at least a third of who oppose amnesty. 
It’s one thing to push an unpopular idea. The GOP does that all the time: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, privatizing Social Security — how about the Iraq War?
Trump’s genius was that he was pushing policies that were popular. The fact that the media said they weren’t just made him look brave. He used the media’s lies against them. 
Political analysts kept droning on and on about Trump’s mysterious appeal, but in all their prolix analyses, I can’t find a single one saying, Boy, were we wrong about immigration! 
Trump proved it’s not a suicidal act to notice that high levels of immigration do not benefit most Americans. Republicans refuse to understand that not all rising tides lift all boats. There are ways the rich can do well while most of the country does worse. … 
Some Republicans surely knew in their hearts that dumping millions of low-wage workers on America was hurting the people who lived here, but they were too scared of not getting the fat checks to say so. 
Trump was in the weird position of not needing big donors. He’s beholden to no one except the millions of ordinary Americans showing up at his speeches, following him on Twitter, and giving him more primary votes than any Republican in history. … 
All of official Washington — the consultants, polling firms, think tanks, political committees — have been acting like they’re the smart half of the team, but Trump has proved they’re a bunch of impotent nose-pickers. He slaughtered his well-funded rivals with no polls, with no consultants, and with more than $75 billion in TV ads being run against him. 
The donor class must have watched in amazement as Trump rose like a rocket by doing everything the political experts said was crazy. 
Donors figured the consultants must know what they’re doing because they’re expensive. Now they’re saying, Holy @#$%! I guess this immigration issue was bigger than we were told by Karl Rove and Mike Murphy! Credulous billionaires are finally realizing they’ve been ripped off by the consultants. At least they won’t have to keep giving millions of dollars to super PACs. 
Maybe there are some geniuses working for the Republican National Committee, but you sure wouldn’t know it from their record. The GOP had been playing a ball-control game. They were able to eke out a few victories, in spite of their Republicanness, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the policies the base supported, they were actually against, and everything the base opposed, they were for. 
While the voters wanted more health care and less invading of other countries, GOP elites were determined to give them less health care coverage and more invading of other countries. 
Elected Republicans run for office on defending the middle class, then get to Washington and concentrate on gifts to big business. They’d say, Of course, we’re with you on immigration, but unless you write us a check there’s nothing we can do. 
Then they get elected and say, Oh yeah … about immigration, we’ll be screwing you over on that — but we are going to pass a job-killing trade deal! And don’t worry — Wall Street will be getting a blank check. I think a little gratitude is in order. 
That’s not what we asked for! 
** ** ** 
We had no choice but to vote for Trump. Hillary was promising to take us straight to hell. I’ve got it all mapped out, the coordinates are in the GPS, I’ll have us in hell within 24 hours! Trump was promising to take us in the exact opposite direction. 
We elected him. But that didn’t happen. It turns out that instead of taking us away from hell, he’s zigzagging all over creation, sometimes getting stuck in a parking lot, sometimes heading straight for hell, then suddenly taking a left at the last minute, so that it’s never clear where we’re headed. 
But on the eve of the big immigration plan unveiling, let’s remind him what we voted for. (By “him,” obviously I mean Jared.)



12M Americans Out of Workforce as DHS Approves 30K More Foreign Workers



H2-B Visa Landscape Workers
AP/Elise Amendola
JOHN BINDER
  390
3:09


Nearly 12 million Americans remain out of the United States labor force as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approved 30,000 more foreign workers  businesses can bring to the country to take blue-collar U.S. jobs.

As Breitbart News reported, Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan said this week that he would approve an additional 30,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to be brought to the U.S. by businesses to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs. This comes as former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen approved an additional 30,000 H-2B foreign workers in March.
Every year, U.S. companies are allowed to import 66,000 low-skilled H-2B foreign workers to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs. For some time, the H-2B visa program has been used by businesses to bring in cheaper foreign workers and has contributed to blue-collar Americans having their wages undercut.
Meanwhile, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data notes that there are nearly 12 million Americans who are either unemployed, underemployed, or out of the workforce but wanting a job.
About 5.8 million Americans remain unemployed. Those most likely to compete against cheaper foreign workers in blue-collar and entry-level industries — U.S. teenagers and black Americans — continue to have significantly higher unemployment rates than other demographic groups.
For example, of the 5.8 million Americans unemployed, about 754,000 are teenagers with an unemployment rate of 13 percent. Likewise, there are 388,600 black Americans who are unemployed, for an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent which is more than double the white American unemployment rate and more than triple the Asian American unemployment rate.
About 2.7 million of the unemployed population either lost their job or completed a temporary job, while 1.2 million, or 21 percent of the total unemployed, said they have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks.
Similarly, 4.7 million Americans are underemployed, that is U.S. part-time workers who want full-time jobs but are unable to find them. Another 1.4 million Americans are marginally attached to the labor force. These are U.S. workers who are ready and willing to work if they could fine a full-time job.
Of those 1.4 million Americans who are marginally attached to the labor force, 454,000 say they are “discouraged” by their job prospects and do not believe there is work for them in the current labor market.
While millions remain on the sidelines of the workforce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has suggested that the U.S. is “out of people” in their efforts to lobby Washington, D.C. lawmakers to support an expansion of the country’s legal immigration system.
For weeks, landscaping companies and lawn care businesses complained to DHS officials that there are not enough workers to fill blue collar and entry-level jobs, Breitbart News has been told. Experts, though, have warned that wage hikes that have benefited blue-collar and working-class Americans will not continue should more foreign workers saturate the labor market, decreasing the price of labor while subjecting Americans to increased competition for jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.



Report: White House Plan Drops Reduction of Legal Immigration






Chip Somodevilla/Getty
JOHN BINDER
 7 May 20191,376
5:27

The White House is dropping a longtime initiative of President Trump’s that reduces overall legal immigration levels to increase U.S. wages, a senior administration official tells the media.

Throughout 20152016, and 2017, Trump routinely touted his plans to reduce the number of legal immigrants who arrive in the U.S. on a myriad of visas. Since the 1990s, when it was expanded by President George H.W. Bush, legal annual immigration levels have remained at historic highs with about 1.2 million nationals legally admitted every year.
For example, since 1980, the number of legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. every year has not dipped below 525,000 admissions. Since 1999, annual legal immigration levels have not dropped below 645,000 admissions and since 2004, the average number of legal immigrants admitted every year has not dipped below a million admissions.
Trump often touted the need for reducing legal immigration levels to “reduce poverty, increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars” in 2017, arguing that the current importation of more than a million legal immigrants every year “has placed substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers, and community resources.”
Trump said of the current legal immigration system:
Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been immigrants, and very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against brand new arrivals. And it has not been fair to our people, to our citizens, to our workers. [Emphasis added]
An immigration plan by the White House, with only preliminary details available, does not seek to reduce any forms of legal immigration to the country, a senior administration official told the Washington Post and The Hill.
“A senior administration official told reporters after the meeting that the president had approved the effort to overhaul America’s immigration system and increase border security last week and that it should now be considered ‘the President Trump plan,'” the Post reported. “… under the plan, the same number of immigrants would be permitted to enter the country, but the composition would change.”
Senator David Perdue (R-GA) — who attended a meeting with Trump on Tuesday — confirmed to Breitbart News these details of the White House plan.
“While this is still in the preliminary stage, the president has proposed maintaining the 1.1 million legal immigrants we bring in each year but changing the mix to respond to the needs of our growing economy and workforce,” Perdue told the media following the meeting.
Instead, the plan shifts the way in which the U.S. admits the more than 1.2 million legal immigrants it accepts every year.
During an interview with Time Magazine last month, senior adviser Jared Kushner said Trump’s focus for reforming the national immigration system centers on protecting Americans’ wages.
“We have a lot of objectives … Number one, he wants to protect American wages,” Kushner said.
High levels of immigration, illegal and legal, puts downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
Economist George Borjas has detailed how the country’s working class, those without a high school diploma, have been primarily hurt by the annual admission of more than a million mostly low-skilled foreign nationals.
“The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually,” Borjas wrote for Politico in October 2016. “According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.”
Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota has discovered similar wage depression trends.
For every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent, Camarota finds. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.
In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by about 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.
Likewise, every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.
At current legal immigration rates, about one-in-six U.S. residents will have been born outside of the country by 2060, the Census Bureau has found. The foreign-born population in the U.S. is expected to reach 69 million in the next four decades.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.



Amid “full employment,” no recovery in US wages

The US jobs report for November, released Friday, provides further evidence that the much vaunted economic “recovery” in the United States has overwhelmingly benefited Wall Street, whose stock bonanza is based above all on stagnant wages and the destruction of working-class living standards.
The Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 228,000 and the jobless rate remained unchanged at 4.1 percent, the lowest level since January 2000 at the height of the “dot.com” bubble. Manufacturing payrolls rose by 31,000; construction in the aftermath of the hurricanes in Texas and Florida added 24,000 jobs. There was also a boost in the low-wage retail (18,700) and leisure and hospitality (14,000) sectors.
Despite what economists, the media and politicians are calling “full employment,” average hourly earnings rose only 0.2 percent, or five cents, to $26.55 an hour, from a downwardly revised 0.1 percent drop in wages in October. Year-to-year wage increases in November were only 64 cents, or 2.5 percent. If wages rise by another nickel in December, yearly salaries will be up a mere 2.4 percent in 2017, barely above the official projected inflation rate of 2.0 percent.
“President Trump’s bold economic vision continues to pay off,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders boasted on Friday. “The economy’s vital signs are stronger than they have been in years,” the New York Times declared. “Companies are posting jobs faster than they can find workers to fill them. Incomes are rising. The stock market sets records seemingly every month.”
Economic analysts have pointed to anemic wage growth, euphemistically called weak “inflationary pressure,” as a major factor in the determination of the Federal Reserve to continue pumping up the stock market with cheap credit. Although most economists expect a modest interest rate hike at the Fed’s meeting Wednesday, Jerome Powell, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Reserve, made clear last month at his Senate confirmation hearing that he would keep rates at historically low levels. At the same time, he assured the senators that there was little danger of a wages push because of continuing “slackness” in the labor market, i.e., an ample supply of workers desperate for full-time employment.
Other analysts agree. “Wage growth has been muted thus far,” especially given the “very healthy pace of job creation,” said Michelle Meyer, head of US economics at Bank of America. “It’s been the story throughout the course of this year.”
Describing November’s wage increase as “tepid,” Carl Riccadonna and Yelena Shulyatyeva of Bloomberg Economics wrote: “Even though job gains are well in excess of the natural growth rate for the labor market, labor scarcity is not yet driving wage pressures higher. The moral of the story from this jobs report is that full employment is indeed much lower in the current cycle relative to history.”
US employers are exploiting a reserve of unemployed and underemployed workers to keep wages low. At the same time, corporations are filling positions with young workers who are paid far lower wages and benefits than the older workers they are replacing.
According to the government, 6.6 million workers in the US remain unemployed, including 1.6 million, or nearly one out of four jobless people, who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. Another 4.8 million were forced to work part-time last month although they want full-time work, and 1.8 million were “marginally attached” to the labor force. The latter want to work but did not search for employment in the four weeks preceding the survey and were therefore not counted as “unemployed.”
The labor force participation rate, or share of working-age people in the labor force, remained at 62.7 percent in November. However, just 79 percent of the prime-age work force, aged 25 to 54, is actually working—below the rate before the 2008 financial crash.
The situation facing the young generation is particularly dire. According to the Class of 2017 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for young high school graduates is 16.9 percent (compared with 15.9 percent in 2007 and 12.1 percent in 2000). For young college graduates, the unemployment rate is currently 5.6 percent (compared with 5.5 percent in 2007 and 4.3 percent in 2000), and 7.1 percent for young male college graduates.
The figures are even higher for “underemployment,” which includes young graduates who are involuntary part-timers or are only marginally attached to the labor force. For young high school graduates, the underemployment rate is 30.9 percent (compared with 26.8 percent in 2007 and 20.8 percent in 2000). For young college graduates, the underemployment rate is 11.9 percent (compared with 9.6 percent in 2007 and 7.1 percent in 2000).
The share of young graduates who are “idled” by the economy—neither enrolled in further schooling nor employed—remains higher in the wake of the Great Recession than in 2007 and 2000, the report noted. This includes 15.1 percent of young high school graduates and 9.9 percent of young college graduates, many of whom are burdened with unsustainable debts.
The stagnation of wages is a long-term tendency. Since the early 1970s, hourly inflation-adjusted wages have grown by only 0.2 percent annually, and labor’s share of national income has fallen from nearly 65 percent in the mid-1970s to below 57 percent in 2017.
The deterioration in the social position of the working class and accompanying explosion of social inequality are not simply the result of objective economic laws. They are the intended outcome of the policies of the American ruling class, implemented by successive Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The transfer of production to lower-wage countries, deindustrialization and mass layoffs in the 1980s and 1990s were used as a hammer to beat back the resistance of workers to a historic lowering of their living standards.
This process was aided and abetted by the trade unions, whose pro-capitalist and nationalist orientation left workers without any progressive response to globalization. Far from opposing wage and benefit cuts, the United Auto Workers and other unions suppressed working-class opposition and collaborated with the corporations to slash labor costs in the name of boosting competitiveness and “protecting American jobs.”
This assault was escalated in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. In the course of the eight years of the Obama administration, the unions limited strikes to the lowest levels since the Labor Department began recording work stoppages in 1947. They collaborated with the Democratic president to crush a potential wages push in 2015-16 as workers in auto, steel, oil, telecom, airlines, rail, health care, retail and other industries, as well as teachers and other public employees, were coming up for new labor agreements.
While workers were determined to recoup lost income after corporate profits had fully recovered from the crash, the unions signed deals that limited pay hikes to the rate of inflation or barely above it while shifting health care and pension costs onto the backs of workers. This was key to Obama’s “in-sourcing” strategy for attracting investment on the basis of low wages, as well as his “quantitative easing” interest rate policy, which fueled the massive rise in the stock market that continues to this day. Virtually all of the net increase in new jobs created under Obama’s “gig economy” were part-time, contingent or temporary OR ILLEGALS!
Trump claims his $1.5 trillion tax cut—including the slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent—will create more jobs and increase wages. As in the Obama years, however, this massive windfall for big business and the rich will not be used to expand production, let alone increase the wages and living standards of workers. It will go for stock buybacks and dividend increases, which benefit the richest investors.
Wages are so low now that 7.6 million Americans are forced to work multiple jobs, a number not seen in 20 years. In a recent article titled “China-Like Wages Now Part of US Employment Boom,” Forbes noted that a forklift operator hired at $12.75 an hour at Amazon’s Fall River, Massachusetts fulfillment center makes $382 for a 30-hour week, “not much more than the average guy in Beijing,” where the median weekly wage is $329.53. At 40 hours a week, a higher paid, full-time Amazon worker in Fall River earns $28,800 a year before taxes, roughly what Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos pockets every minute.

 

Fixing America’s Unemployment Crisis

Trump was elected in part on the promise of creating jobs, but how about those who stopped looking for work?
What has been called a “quiet catastrophe” has been unfolding in America: the collapse of work for millions of America’s men, and, more recently, for America’s women as well.
Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates there are 10 million men who are jobless and no longer looking for work. According to calculations using 2014 data, an estimated 3.6 million women are in the same situation.
President-elect Donald Trump has announced a raft of policies meant to spur economic growth and create jobs, but thought needs to be given to what specific measures might help this urgent situation.
How to address this crisis depends on what one understands the problem to be. A graph showing the prime-age employment rate for men provides a kind of Rorschach test for possible responses.
Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, and author of, most recently, “The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity,” focuses on the cyclical upturns in the jagged line, on those periods of prosperity when workers regain jobs that had been lost.
Eberstadt focuses on the straight trend line, which has been going inexorably and disastrously downward for decades.
Bernstein and Eberstadt represent two typical and contrasting approaches to the unemployment problem.
*
If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the great recession.
— JARED BERNSTEIN
Bernstein published the graph in a chapter he contributed to Eberstadt’s book “Men Without Work,” in which he critiques Eberstadt’s diagnosis of the employment crisis.
For Bernstein, the key is a missing demand for labor.
“If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the Great Recession,” Bernstein said in an interview. “That doesn’t sound to me like a group that has given up. It sounds to me like a group that is not facing ample opportunity.”
For Eberstadt, the problem is a detachment from work.
Using various government databases, Eberstadt gives a composite portrait of those men who are out of the workforce and not looking for work.
They don’t read newspapers, seem to have few familial responsibilities, and tend not to be involved in a church or their communities. They spend most of their time entertaining themselves with TV or hand-held devices; 31 percent admitted to survey takers that they used illegal drugs.
Bernstein counters this portrait by noting that the causal connection may go from a lack of employment opportunities to suffering from depression, which then leads to these men planting themselves on the couch.
As to the individual motives of the non-working, Bernstein said, “We just don’t know.” His advice to Trump is to aggressively pursue full employment, which involves the federal government using a number of different tools.
An officer waits to escort Harvey Lesser, an unemployed software developer, from his apartment after serving him with a court order for eviction in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 11, 2009.

Stimulus and Subsidies

Bernstein believes the key to the downward trend his graph shows is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. He favors trade policies that will reduce America’s chronic trade imbalances, which will create more demand for domestic manufacturing.
Bernstein also favors an infrastructure program, with the caveat that “you have to do it right,” he said.
He would like to see the federal government get involved in communities that “don’t have enough businesses, child care slots, supermarkets, and stores—these are a classic market failure.”
The federal government could subsidize private employers in these neighborhoods, giving them an incentive to move their businesses there.
Bernstein also favors special efforts to help those with a criminal record, and Eberstadt agrees finding ways to help this population is key to addressing the problem of non-working adults. He estimates that, by the end of 2016, there will be 20 million with a felony conviction in their past.

If illegals can afford cartels, they can afford asylum fees


Wednesday, May 8, 2019
 | 
Chad Groening (OneNewsNow.com)

Border Patrol stationA border enforcement advocacy organization says it's "not unreasonable" for the Trump administration to charge asylum seekers a fee to process their applications.

In a recent presidential memorandum addressing border security and immigration, Trump directedhis attorney general and acting homeland security secretary to take additional measures to overhaul the asylum system, which he insists "is in crisis" and plagued by "rampant abuse."
In the memorandum, Trump directs officials to begin charging a fee to process asylum and employment authorization applications, which do not currently require payment.
OneNewsNow spoke with Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, about the processing fee.
Mehlman
"It's not clear if it's going to curb the abuse of the political asylum system," he begins. "But you do have to remember that these are people who have given the criminal cartels who smuggle them to the United States border quite a bit of money to get to this point."
That said, Mehlman argues it's "not unreasonable" to ask those applying for political asylum to cover some of the "enormous" costs of processing the applications for political asylum – "most of which are completely bogus," he adds.
"So [a fee] may have some deterrent effect, but it is not obviously a substitute for congressional action to fix the problems down there."
But Mehlman concedes that Congress likely won't change its ways – at least not between now and the next election.