Mike
Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
7 Jan 20203,576
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.
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.
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.”
BLOOMBERG’S
ECONOMY POLICY IS TO HAND 40 MILLION ILLEGALS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE
REST OF THEIR FAMILY AND THEN CUT TAXES FOR THE RICH.
Mike
Bloomberg: Don’t Believe Trump – Our Economy Is Broken
By
Michael R. Bloomberg
Democratic Presidential
candidate Michael Bloomberg addresses a crowd in North Carolina. Photograph by Melissa Sue
Gerrits/Getty Images
This
article originally appeared on MarketWatch,
a sister publication of Barron’s.
President Donald Trump says our economy is “the
best it has ever been,” and he is planning to ride that false claim to a second
term.
I won’t let him get away with it. I have the
track record—in business and government—to show America what real economic
leadership looks like.
Sure, the stock market is at an all-time high.
But almost half the country doesn’t own any stocks. And yes, the unemployment
rate is low. But nearly half of all workers are in jobs that earn $18,000 at
the median. In fact, the share of national income going to workers—rather than
investors—is near an all-time low.
Too much wealth is in too few hands. And while
a handful of big cities are doing well, a lot of the country is struggling; our
middle class is being hollowed out; and working Americans are being squeezed by
higher prices on everything from health care to housing.
As a candidate, Trump promised to take on these
issues. As president, he has been in the pockets of the special interests that
dominate Washington.
Remember when candidate Trump promised to
deliver for regular people—the forgotten Americans?
Well, President Trump pushed through the
biggest tax cut for the wealthy in history, and nearly all the money goes to
people like me, who don’t need it.
Remember when candidate Trump stood in front of
the GM factory in Lordstown, Ohio and promised to keep it open?
In 2018, that plant closed down.
Remember when candidate Trump promised to
“protect the farmers”?
Last year, farmers lost billions of dollars,
and many lost their farms, as a direct result of his tariffs and trade wars.
Again and again, candidate Trump made economic
promises to working people that he had no intention of keeping. And sure
enough, he has broken all of them.
In fairness, we faced serious economic problems
before President Trump took office. That’s one of the reasons he won. He
promised to fix them.
Instead, he has made them worse.
We need to elect a leader who can actually
deliver real change—not just talk about it—and create more good jobs, with good
salaries, all across America.
And I know I can do that, because I’ve done it.
Coming from a middle-class home, where my
father never made more than $6,000 in a year, I was lucky to get a good
education and work my way up from an entry-level job. When I got laid off, I
started a company from scratch that now employs 20,000 people. We pay good
salaries and provide the best health benefits money can buy, including six
months of parental leave—at full pay.
As mayor of New York, I helped create nearly
500,000 new jobs, most of them outside of Manhattan.
When I was first elected shortly after the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, the question everyone asked us was: Can you rebuild
Lower Manhattan?
Our answer was: Yes, but that’s not enough.
We set out to rebuild every area of the city,
starting with those outside Manhattan that had faced decades of industrial
abandonment and decay. We spread good jobs with good salaries to those
communities. I know we can bring about that kind of progress all across
America.
This week on the South Side of Chicago, I
announced some of the core elements of the strategy I’ll take to create
millions of good jobs where they are needed most, by investing in areas of the
country that have been hurt by globalization and automation, and have been ignored
by the federal government for too long.
To start, I will dramatically increase spending
on research and development, by over $100 billion. Rather than sending that
money to only a few places that already have massive research budgets, like
Harvard and Stanford, we’ll spread it to places like Akron, Ohio, where I was
today.
The way we’ll do it is by funding new “job
factories” in Akron and around the country, with the goal of bringing
opportunity to places that don’t have enough of it. We call them job factories
because that’s what they’ll produce: jobs. They’ll do it by generating
scientific breakthroughs in a wide variety of areas, which will generate
millions of good jobs in everything from green energy and sustainable
agriculture to advanced manufacturing and public health.
We’ll also make sure Americans have the skills
they need to do the work—supporting community colleges, apprenticeships, and
job-training programs all across our country.
In addition to preparing people for good jobs,
we will modernize the social contract between employee and employer—so laborers
are protected, no matter where they work.
We will do that by working to guarantee paid
sick leave and paid family leave for all workers—just as we do at my company.
We will support the right of all workers to organize and bargain
collectively—including gig, contract, and franchise employees, many of whom
have to work two or three jobs to put food on the table.
I know a lot of candidates say they’re going to
create good jobs. But for me, creating good jobs is not something I just talk
about. It’s what I’ve spent my whole career doing.
That’s a key part of the message we need to
beat Trump. I’m ready to take it directly to him.
Michael
R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is the founder of Bloomberg
LP.
Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more
in taxes
Many
of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied
behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential
run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bloomberg,
the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is
himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of
wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the
race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March
that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a
lock on the nomination.
The
immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the
polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by
the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of
candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and
New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and
Sanders.
The second event was Warren’s
announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1
billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a
previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.
Neither of these taxes would be passed
by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is
true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in
part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in
populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and
anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated
and suppressed.
But the modern-day lords and ladies who
inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of
having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health
care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at
the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social
inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.
They do not fear Warren, a
self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic
Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging
social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the
issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.
The levels of wealth wasted on this
parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko
Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:
It is very difficult to comprehend what
a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside
the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity
it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount
indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and
that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run
through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is,
the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the
second case.
And yet, there are 607 people in the United
States with a net worth of over a billion
dollars.
Bloomberg, a liberal on
so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a
vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he
attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and
presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall
Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy
that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.
Last January he
denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably
unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist propaganda, he warned that
seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed
to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
Over the past several
months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a
wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s
Medicare plan.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie
Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,”
complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft founder Bill
Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US
behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of
editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed
reforms), said last week, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the
capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative
companies.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban
tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from
reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.
Hedge fund owner Leon
Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t
need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and
Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and
socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s
potential candidacy.
The New York
Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number
of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall
Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and
Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption
charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel,
he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and
Chrysler workers.
But for fawning toward
the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an
authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column
by the Times ’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”
Calling for
“celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I
want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one
who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs…
Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of
job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a
candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened,
they want a strong leader.”
This is under
conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of
social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the
richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million
adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’
share has tripled since the 1980s.
In their new
book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in
2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower
tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since
1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half,
dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.
The United States is
not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically
and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.
The ferocious response
of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut
into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting
serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the
pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and
Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders
bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the
nomination.
There is no way to
address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment
and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by
the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put
toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast
majority of the population.
The corporations and
banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned
utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the
production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized
to meet human needs, not private profit.
This is a revolutionary
task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle
in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a
conscious political leadership.
Trump: Open Borders Threatens the
Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers
Getty Images
President Donald
Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding
that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those
gains.
“Since
the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American
worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But
for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never
happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage
gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been
particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings
rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier,
according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor
Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages
grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may
mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you
know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk
about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The
so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks
and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record
last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit
record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in
November.
Trump
gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and
employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would
threaten those gains, he added.
“Our
tight labor market is helping them the
most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in
Washington want to erase these gains
through an extreme policy of open borders,
flooding the labor market and driving down
incomes for the poorest Americans.
And
driving crime through the roof.”
Economic
studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that
companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“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,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate
percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers,
including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage
dip.”
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