The Mexican Invasion and Occupation: Mexico &amp; Dems Build the LA RAZA UNIDOus Mex Welfare State

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While Americans have enjoyed significant wage growth in Trump’s economy for blue-collar and working-class Americans, corporate interests have increasingly suggested that the U.S. must continue importing millions of foreign workers every year to fill jobs.

In April 2019, former Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said the U.S. needed more legal immigration because the country is “out of people.”

Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.

Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. 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.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

CBO: Immigration Has ‘Negative Effect on Wages’

PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images

NEIL MUNRO

9 Jan 2020230

7:01

Immigration makes all of America richer, but it can make some Americans poorer, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says in a report issued January 9.

“Immigration, whether legal or illegal, expands the labor force and changes its composition, leading to increases in total economic output,” said the non-partisan report, titled “The Foreign-Born Population and Its Effects on the U.S. Economy and the Federal Budget—An Overview.”

But this national expansion does “not necessarily [deliver] to increases in output per capita,” or income per person, the report said:

For example, business leaders say the nation’s enormous population of immigrants has expanded the nation’s workforce, increased consumption, and driven up housing prices. But that inflow has also shrunk the wages of less-educated Americans, the report said:

Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.

The CBO report contradicts business claims that a bigger economy ensures bigger wages for everyone.

More ominously, the report also suggests that the American middle-class — including millions of young college graduates — may suffer a similar economic disaster if immigration policy is shifted to raise the inflow of foreign college graduates. The report says:

The effects of immigration on wages depend on the characteristics of the immigrants. To the extent that newly arrived workers have abilities similar to those of workers already in the country, immigration would have a negative effect on wages.

Many business advocates in Washington are calling for a dramatic increase in “high-skilled immigration” — meaning foreign college graduates who would compete for the same jobs as American college graduates. For example, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is trying to pass his S.386 bill that offers the prize of renewable work-permits — and eventual citizenship — to an unlimited number of foreign graduates.

Each year, up to 120,000 foreign graduates — and their spouses and children — can get green cards via their employer’s sponsorship, even as perhaps 800,000 Americans graduate from college with skilled degrees.

But Lee’s bill creates a new legal status called “Early Adjustment.” This status would allow an uncapped number of college graduate migrants to apply for renewable work permits long before they can get a green card to become a legal immigrant and citizen.

Existing law allows an uncapped number of foreigners to legally get short-term work permits and jobs after enrolling in U.S. colleges. The migrants can get jobs by first paying tuition to a university, and then getting short-term work permits via the uncapped “Curricular Practical Training” and the “Optional Practical Training” programs. These workers must leave the United States after a few years until they enroll themselves in work permit programs.

But Lee’s bill would remove any caps on this foreign worker population by allowing an unlimited number of foreign workers to get “Early Adjustment” status from their employers.

Neil Munro

The government has released videos of Indian migrants offering to buy and sell fraudulent work permit documents.

DHS posts videos of Indian migrants buying fake documents from ICE's Farmington U. sting operation.
The #OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if #S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh

Watch: ICE Lure and Sting Indian Illegal Labor 'OPT' Traffickers

8:12 AM - Jan 7, 2020

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Many migrants already use the CPT and OPT work permits to get jobs and to also compete for entry into the H-1B visa worker program. Once in the H-1B program — which accepts 85,000 new workers each year — many of the migrants also ask their employers to sponsor them for green cards.

The sponsorship allows them to stay working in the United States until they eventually get their valuable green card, long after their temporary visas have expired. Congress has not set an annual limit on the number of visa workers who can be sponsored for green cards, so the resident population of permanent “temporary workers” is growing fast — and is helping to suppress wages for American graduates.

Roughly 1.5 million foreign visa workers hold white-collar jobs throughout the U.S. economy. This number includes at least 750,000 Indians who are allowed to work via the supposedly temporary CPT, OPT, L-1, and H-1B visa programs. Roughly 300,000 of these Indians — plus 300,000 family members — are being allowed to stay in the United States because they asked their employers to sponsor them for green cards.

The CBO report shows that immigrants comprise roughly 40 percent of the population of people who did not graduate from high school — and that immigrants already comprise roughly 20 percent of all people with a “graduate degree.”

Congressional Budget Office

The 20 percent share likely would quickly rise if the Senate approves Lee’s S.386 plan — and that rise could sharply reduce salaries for American college graduates.

“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent” as the extra workers compete for jobs, says George Borjas, a labor economist at Harvard. That extra labor does expand the economy — but that expansion is dwarfed by the transfer of the wage reductions to investors, he wrote in 2016:

I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about $50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners [mostly employers] is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.

“In low-skilled occupations, a one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an individual’s occupation reduces wages by [0].8 percent,” said a 1998 report by the Center for Immigration Studies.

A 2013 CBO report predicted that the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and immigration bill would reduce the share of income that goes to wage earners and increase the share that goes to investors. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.

But all that cheap labor would boost corporate profits and spike the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”

Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers forces down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs, wages are going to go up.”

Neil Munro

Rising wages are good for politicians, for employees, and for the economy, said Tom Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Are rising wages good for national politics?
“You’re damn right they are,” US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue said, adding: "They are good for national politics if you’re a politician, for sure."http://bit.ly/2FwwCg7

U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Rising Wages Are Good for Politicians

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-class-war-over-paying-living-wages.html

Claims of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True

Bob Harden

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

NEIL MUNRO

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%.

Neil Munro

Americans are getting higher wages and more labor-saving machines because companies cannot get enough immigrants, laments the New York Times.

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

6:40 AM - Aug 26, 2019

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

Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

JOHN BINDER

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.

Americans over 40 are half as likely to get hired — and it’s worse for workers over 50

Published: Jan 7, 2020 10:18 a.m. ET

Federal law makes it illegal to ask someone’s age in a job interview or to discriminate against anyone based on their age

Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

Tom Brady, 42, and the New England Patriots did not reach a deal over his contract. The NFL football player is now a free agent.

BRETTARENDS

Tom Brady is a now free agent, but the NFL player doesn’t have the same worries as millions of Americans over 40.

Workers over 40 are only about half as likely, or less, to get a job offer than younger workers if employers know their age, according to research released this week conducted by economics professor David Neumark at the University of California, Irvine. The data was adjusted for differences in skills, fit and availability.

Key to the study was a major change that the company made to its hiring systems. Previously all applicants had filled out an initial application form in a face-to-face meeting with a restaurant manager. So their age was apparent from the get-go.

Under the new system, applications began first with a standardized, online, electronic screen. This included over 100 questions designed to find out a candidate’s skills, experience, employability and other attributes related to the job. But it contained no age screen.

When managers could determine an applicant’s age group, those over 40 were between 46% and 65% less likely to get a job offer than those under 40.

When managers could determine an applicant’s age group, those over 40 were between 46% and 65% less likely to get a job offer than those under 40.

Under the new system, older workers were actually more likely to pass the initial, age-blind application process than younger ones, typically because they had more experience.

UC’s Professor Neumark crunched the numbers from a proprietary hiring database maintained by an unnamed national restaurant chain. (The database of 1,600 job applications emerged from an age-discrimination lawsuit). The hiring decisions covered jobs from “front of house,” such as servers, to “back of house,” such as chefs.

“This set of results is strongly consistent with age discrimination,” notes professor Neumark, ‘older applicants are more qualified [than younger ones] in terms of applicant characteristics and evaluations used by the company in their online application system,” he says.

He further found that the discrimination was greater for “front of house” jobs than for “back of house,” though it was significant for both. The implication: Managers are more reluctant to employ older servers, because they think the customers won’t like them.

Researchers found that the discrimination was greater for ‘front of house’ jobs than for ‘back of house,’ though it was significant for both.

Older workers and those over 50 are more likely to work as independent contractors, separate research from the progressive Economic Policy Institute, a labor policy think tank, concluded. The share of people working as independent contractors, freelancers and other categories of on-call workers who were ages 55 to 64 increased to 22.9% in 2017 from 18.8% in 2005. For people aged 65 and older, the figure rose to 14.1% from 8.5%.

“For some older people, independent contracting and on-call positions are attractive ways to ease into retirement or earn income after they have left the full-time workforce,” according to the AARP, a public-interest group focused on older workers. “The contracting option can offer an appealing combination of flexibility and extra money, as long as the worker can get health care coverage or save for retirement in other ways. (The AARP receives funding from private health insurers.)

This is by no means the first study to show age discrimination. Previous research has also shown that managers show bias, unconscious or otherwise, against older workers.

Federal law makes it illegal to ask someone’s age in a job interview, or to discriminate against anyone over 40 based on their age. But as the latest study shows, there are many ways round these rules.

Read: Mid-career? Your job is at risk — here’s what to do now

Meanwhile, data from a recent Gallup nationally representative survey program found that formal employment rates plunge once people enter their 50s, but self-employment and, particularly, “independent contractor” rates skyrocket. That’s based on surveys with 61,000 people conducted between May 2018 and March 2019 as part of the Gallup Education Consumer Pulse Survey. About two-thirds of those surveyed were over 50.

About a quarter of those still working age 55 to 59 are self-employed, most of them independent contractors, according to a separate analysis conducted by researchers Katharine Abraham, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, and Brad Hershbein and Susan Houseman at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

“Roughly one-quarter of independent contractors age 50 and older work for a former employer,” they added. This raises the issue that they have been shuffled out of the door as a result of their age — or simply to get them off the company health plan before they start costing too much money. Among those over 50 working as “independent contractors,” most told Gallup they were doing it mainly because they need the money.

Being self-employed can go both ways, experts agree. Most of those who own their own businesses like being their own boss, the researchers said, and many who work as independent contractors prefer it to full-time employment, especially because of the flexibility it may give them.

Now read: You’re likely to be out of a job in your 50s

Mike Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

NEIL MUNRO

7 Jan 20203,560

8:22

Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of Americans.

“This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.:

For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.

The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper than Americans.’

“If business were able to hire without restrictions from anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:

Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings, whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because] Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.

Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’ value,” he said.

“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to immigration,” he added.

President Bush described his “any willing worker” cheap labor plan in 2004, saying:

Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling. (Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane. And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens.

Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First, America must control its borders …

Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.

In December 2018, departing House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Bush’s “any willing worker” goal, saying:

[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.

This “any willing worker” idea encouraged Ryan to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration groups.

Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad, but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people in legally.”

In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans — despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage increases.

Neil Munro

Companies will face greater pressure in 2020 to recruit and train blue-collar Americans and also to pay extra wages, say company officials.

Almost 50% of U.S. employees got higher wages in 2019, up from almost 40% in 2018.
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business. http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7

Pay Raises and Training Expand in Donald Trump's Tight Labor Market

7:20 AM - Dec 24, 2019

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Bloomberg’s “best worker” pitch is not a problem for the Democrats’ 2020 base of “woke” progressives, said Krikorian:

He is running in the Democratic primary and there is an overlap between the plutocrat assault on national borders and the leftist assault on national borders. They come at the issue from the different starting points but they have the same enemy, which is Americans’ sovereignty. It is not obvious that his [pro-employer] immigration stance is going to be a turn-off to Democratic primary votes.. How different are the specifics of his immigration proposal from [Joe] Biden, Sen. [Bernie] Sanders or [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren?

Biden, Sanders, and Warren endorse wide-open borders as a form of charity towards unlucky foreigners fleeing from home country persecution. For example, a January 5 tweet from Biden said:

Our Statue of Liberty invites in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Donald Trump has slammed the door in the face of families fleeing persecution and violence.

Bloomberg’s pro-employer view is coherent and likely sincere, said Krikorian.

Bloomberg aspires to a single global labor market, and everything else follows from that. A concern about improving the lot of less-skilled American workers is by definition contrary to that view because there is no such thing as an American labor market. There is only a global labor market. Domestic employers are not thinking about the consequences for people from Pennsylvania when they hire people from Tennessee, and Bloomberg wants that same approach across the entire world.

There is even an altruistic way of viewing that — which I assume guys like this have — that it improves the lot of Hondurans [and other migrants] who are coming here.

The issue is not that Bloomberg and his guys are factually incorrect. It is that their values are contrary to the values that most Americans hold – which is that we have a greater loyalty and obligation to our fellow countrymen than to foreigners. Guys like Bloomberg reject that [obligation] in principle.

Neil Munro

Voters overwhelmingly want companies to train and hire Americans before importing more legal immigrants or visa workers.

A Rasmussen survey shows likely voters by 2:1 want Congress to make companies hire & train US grads & workers instead of importing more foreign workers.
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants. #S386 http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE

Rasmussen Shows 2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration

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3:15 PM - Dec 30, 2019

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But Bloomberg also wraps his economic demand for more immigrants in a progressive-style cultural message.

Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”

In December, Bloomberg said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues do not meet his standards.

Bloomberg also echoes the Democrats’ claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country built by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.

Bloomberg has long supported greater immigration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians then pushed for passage of the failed Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.

The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans’ wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.

But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”

For Bloomberg, Krikorian said, U.S. “employers have no greater obligation to fellow Americans than to Hondurans [or other foreign workers] … what Bloomberg is saying is that immigration laws should not interfere with the pursuit of shareholder value [because] employers can hire anyone from anywhere at any wage, period.”

Neil Munro

The Washington Post has covered Sen. Mike Lee's S.386 giveaway to Indian visa-workers -- but it excluded the voices of American graduates.

Estb. media and esp. WashPo journos cannot, or dare not, follow the $$$ in immigration politics.
For example, the WashPo article on @SenMikeLee's @S368 bill to expand the outsourcing of U.S. grads' jobs.
Maybe b/c the money ends up in Jeff Bezos' pocket. http://bit.ly/2tChhYt

Munro: WashPost Message to U.S. Graduates -- Drop Dead

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4:37 PM - Dec 21, 2019