The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce wants Congress to loosen the wages for the migrants who will provide
the nation’s agricultural workforce under the Democrats’ pending farmworker
amnesty bill.
“The proposed prevailing wage levels for temporary agricultural
workers … should be more responsive to market needs,” the business group said in an October 30 letter.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
supports the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would take important steps
to address the growing struggle of agricultural employers to meet their
workforce needs.
We are committed to working
with members of both parties to address these and other issues to improve the
bill as it proceeds through the legislative process.
The pending legislation provides a gradual amnesty for the
resident population of 500,000-plus illegal migrants who accept low-wage jobs
at farms, meat-processing slaughterhouses, and food canneries. Democrats want
the amnesty to spur their political support, but any amnesty would allow the
industry’s labor force to take up their green cards and get jobs in urban
areas.
So the bill creates a replacement workforce
by streamlining the unlimited inflow of H-2A visa workers and by capping the
wages paid to those imported visa workers.
The migrants’ wages are to be
capped at state or federal minimum wages — unless unions can bargain for a
better deal — or by agency officials. This arrangement between Congress and
employers effectively federalizes the future agricultural workforce, and so it
denies American farmworkers — and their children — the chance to win higher
wages amid normal labor shortages.
The resulting flood of low-wage
H-2A
migrants is likely to displace the roughly half-
million American employees
who work in the
agriculture sector, so further shriveling the
economic health
of the nation’s agricultural
districts.
The bill acknowledges the likely damaging
impact of unlimited H-2A visa workers on Americans, saying on page 64 that
government officials should study the economic impact and report back to
Congress:
Beginning in fiscal year 2026,
the Secretary of Agriculture and Secretary of Labor shall jointly conduct a
study that addresses— ‘‘(i) whether the employment of H–2A workers has
depressed the wages of United States farm workers; ‘‘(ii) whether an adverse
effect wage rate is necessary to protect the wages of United States farm
workers in occupations in which H–2A workers are employed; ‘‘(iii) whether
alternative wage standards would be sufficient to prevent wages in occupations
in which H–2A workers are employed from falling below the wage level that would
have prevailed in the absence of H–2A employment;
But the bill does not mandate a
fix for the likely damage to wages and careers of Americans, even though it is
sponsored by 20 GOP legislators and 24 Democrats.
That is bad news for agriculture regions of the United States,
most of which have been falling behind as Democratic-run urban
districts gain in wages and wealth. In
December 2018, Breitbart News reported :
Elite zip codes added more
business establishments during [President Barack] Obama’s economic recovery,
between 2012 and 2016, than the entire bottom 80 percent of zip codes combined.
For instance, while more than 180,000 businesses have been added to rich zip
codes, the country’s bottom tier has lost more than 13,000 businesses even
after the economic recovery.
Advocates for the bill say they
negotiated the text with employers and with a labor union that wants to legalize
roughly 500,000 illegal workers and also to import more migrants. The press
release said:
“When I speak to farmers and
ranchers across the country, labor is often their number one concern. Our
nation’s agriculture industry is diverse and flourishing, but producers are in
desperate need of a legal and reliable workforce,” said [Washington GOP]
Rep. [Dan] Newhouse. “As a third-generation farmer, I understand the
invaluable contributions made by farmworkers to American agriculture, and we
must modernize our guestworker program to work for farmers, ranchers, and
farmworkers in the 21st Century.”
…
“The success of our farmers,
growers, and producers is essential not only for our economy but for our
national security. For far too long, we’ve suffered from a broken H2A
system—making it difficult for farmers to hire the workforce necessary to
provide to the American people,” said [Florida GOP] Rep. Diaz-Balart.
“After months of negotiations,
the UFW and UFW Foundation are enthusiastic about passing legislation that
honors all farm workers who feed America by creating a way for undocumented
workers to apply for legal status and a roadmap to earn citizenship in the
future without compromising farm workers’ existing wages and legal
protections,” said … Arturo S. Rodriguez, President Emeritus of United
Farmworkers & Spokesperson of UFW Foundation.
The 20 GOP sponsors include
several of the most business-friendly GOP leaders and several former GOP
leaders in the House:
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV-02);
Rep. James Baird (R-IN- 04); Rep. Susan W. Brooks (R-IN-05); Rep. Tom Cole
(R-OK-04); Rep. John Curtis (R-UT-03); Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL-13); Rep.
Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL-25); Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-OH-07); Rep. Doug LaMalfa
(R-CA-01); Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA-05); Rep. Paul Mitchell
(R-MI-10); Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA-04); Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA-22); Rep. Tom
Reed (R-NY-23); Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID-02); Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY-21);
Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH-15); Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI-06); Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR-02),
and Rep. Don Young (R-AK- At Large).
In contrast, the population of
roughly 500,000 American agriculture workers — including many ex-immigrants —
are likely to gain if the amnesty bill crashes.
They will gain because agriculture companies will be pressured
to raise their wages and to equip them with expensive, high-productivity,
labor-saving machinery — just as non-farm workers are now gaining from company
investment in technology. This automation trend is now accelerating as farms buy machines and
companies develop new technologies to offset the farmers’ rising payroll costs.
For example, a tweet from the
United Farm Workers union shows farmworkers in New York picking up cabbages and
throwing them into a container at the front of a tractor:
In contrast, Youtube provides
multiple videos of farms using European-developed machines to accomplish the
same task in much less time, For example, a farm in California’s Salinas Valley
is using a Danish-built machine to accelerate the cabbage harvest:
In fact, on October 21, the Chamber touted the value of
American-made, labor-saving machinery for African farmworkers:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
with support from members such as Bayer, John Deere, and IBM, showcased the
impact of technology on agriculture supply chains in Africa. To highlight
developments with precision agriculture technology, representatives from John
Deere discussed how their company is finding innovative ways to help farmers
manage their equipment and crop data to improve profitability.
…
The relevance of emerging
technologies cannot be emphasized enough when it comes to agriculture in 21st
century Africa.
New technologies are changing
the face of Africa’s agriculture value chains. For example, developments in
seed technology, precision agriculture, and mobile financing apps are expanding
opportunities for countless families and farmers across the 54 countries that
make up Africa. Technology such as John Deere’s ExactApply
solutions allows for better weed and pest control, promoting crop growth.
The chamber’s letter also said
it also has concerns about the bill’s requirement that agriculture companies
use the free E-Verify service to ensure the legality of job applicants: “The
transition period for agricultural employers to utilize the E-Verify system
should be extended in order for employers to better adjust to the new compliance
burdens being foisted upon them.”
The E-verify rule was added to
the bill to give a talking point for House legislators who face opposition to
the amnesty.
But the E-verify rule makes
little difference because it only covers hiring in the agriculture sector, not
hiring by the urban restaurants, warehouses, and retail stores that employ most
of the nation’s population of illegal aliens.
Warren
Undercuts Populist Agenda with Donor Class Immigration Plan
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
27 Aug 20196
4:02
While Sen.
Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has vowed an economic nationalist-populist agenda, her
plans to increase foreign competition against American workers match the
solutions routinely offered by the nation’s donor-class and big business lobby.
With a rise in the polls, Warren is doubling down on her
economic agenda, calling out multinational corporations for outsourcing and
offshoring American jobs for decades.
“There are a lot of giant companies who like to call themselves
‘American,'” Warren said in a new video out on Twitter. “But face it, they have
no loyalty or allegiance to America.”
“In a Warren administration, government policy will support
American workers,” Warren said. “I call it economic patriotism … this is not a
question of more government or less government. It’s about who government works
for.”
A lot of giant companies refer to
themselves as “American.” But let’s face it, they only have one real loyalty:
Their shareholders. A Warren administration will halt the hollowing out of
American cities and create good American jobs. Here’s how.
Warren, however, has juxtapositioned her economic patriotist plan to crack down on
outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs by corporations against an agenda
to import additional foreign workers for those corporations.
In her immigration outline released last month, Warren
promised to “expand legal immigration” beyond current historically high legal
immigration levels, at which more than 1.2 million legal immigrants are
admitted to the U.S. every year. Part of this plan includes increasing the
process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens are
allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
America should welcome more legal immigration — done in the
right way and consistent with our principles … We should reflect our values,
which means expanding family reunification and making it easier for relatives
of citizens and green card holders to come to the United States,” Warren
writes.
Warren writes that her expansion of legal immigration will “grow
the economy,” the case often deployed by the donor class and big business lobby
to demand more foreign workers.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce executives, for example, told the Washington Post this year
that the country is “out of people” and thus more legal
immigration is necessary to grow the economy and provide an endless flow of
foreign workers to business.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s organization New American
Economy is wholey dedicated to lobbying for plans like Warren’s to be enacted
in order to grow the U.S. economy and GDP. The organization is headed by
Bloomberg and funded by a long list of billionaire donors,
including the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard, Delta Airlines, Time Warner Inc.,
Goldman Sachs, Quest Diagnostics, and Citigroup.
Warren’s plan is also supported by the editorial board of
billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington
Post , where they argued that the U.S. needs a constant stream of
low-skilled foreign workers to fill American jobs.
Meanwhile, America’s working and middle class have seen their wages crushed for decades just as a stream of illegal
and legal foreign workers have grown their share of various U.S. occupations.
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst
Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration
system 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’s research has found that for every one-percent
increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations, their
weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born
American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent.
Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” economic model, on the
other hand, has lifted wages for America’s blue-collar
and working-class by decreasing foreign competition in the labor market through
stricter immigration enforcement. Trump’s agenda has also shifted power from
corporations to U.S. workers where businesses now compete for workers rather
than the decades-long practice of workers competing for jobs at businesses.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
USCIS Chief: Paul Ryan Wanted
Illegal Immigration, Ran a ‘Chamber of Commerce Congress’
22 Aug 201988
5:38
President
Donald Trump’s citizenship director told a Texas business group that House
Speaker Paul Ryan “submarined” the best chance for immigration reform because
he wanted illegal immigration.
“Let’s not forget … when [Rep.] Paul Ryan was the speaker, Paul
Ryan submarined the best opportunity we had legislatively when [judiciary
chairman Rep.] Bob Goodlatte’s bill … came through,” Ken Cuccinelli told
the Texas Public Policy Foundation on August 22.
Cuccinelli, who is the acting director of the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, said, “We had leadership there
that defended the status quo. They were the Chamber of Commerce Congress. They
wanted illegal immigration.”
In contrast, President Trump is following through on his
promises and is giving American voters a clear choice in 2020, he said:
I actually think the 2020 election can help solve that problem.
I believe when you run on things, and people know ‘This is what I get if I vote
for X, if this party becomes the majority, I get this bill’ …. [then you
get] good politics and good policy.
“Not enough people will challenge their own leadership in the
GOP to beat them down when they are wrong,” said Cuccinelli, a populist
conservative from Virginia.
Goodlatte retired from Congress in 2018. In December, he said that Ryan blocked his
bill by dividing the GOP votes between two reform bills: “That is just not a
good strategy and I complained
about it at the time. I said ‘You’ve got to narrow this down to one bill and
then work really hard to get the members to vote for that one bill.’”
Ryan said in November 2018 that he preferred a rival bill,
sponsored by GOP Rep. Chris Curbelo, who was defeated in the November
election.
On immigration, I really
liked—I call it “the Curbelo bill,” it was Goodlatte II — the immigration
compromise bill that I put on the floor in July, which satisfied the
President’s four pillars.” he said.
“Our goal is to not cut legal immigration,” Rep. Carlos Curbelo
told RollCall.com on June 2018. The number of
illegals who get green cards from the amnesty should be “as high a number as
possible,” he said.
Curbelo repeated his demand, telling TheHill.com that “some visas may be
shifted towards employment visas, but our goal is to not cut legal
immigration.”
The Goodlatte bill would have cut legal
immigration by ending the visa lottery, provided a work permit amnesty to just
the 700,000 illegals who are registered in the DACA program, and ensured
immigration cuts, said Rosemary Jenks , policy director of
NumbersUSA.
It also included much careful
language to hinder fraud and to prevent pro-migration judges from hijacking the
bill’s limited amnesty for their own goals, said Jenks, who opposed the bigger
Ryan bill.
Ryan’s support for the Curbelo
bill allowed 41 GOP legislators to vote no on the Goodlatte bill when it came
up for a June vote.
“If it has been the only bill
offered, it might have passed,” Goodlatte said. “We were 20, 21 votes
short,” said Goodlatte. The [bill] would have passed “if we had gotten half of
[the GOP ‘no’ voters] to join with us, we would have gotten there,” he said.
Immigration Numbers
Immigration is a government
economic strategy which seeks to stimulate economic growth and stock prices by
inflating the supply of labor and consumers.
Each year, roughly four million
young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high
school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who
graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or
science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then
imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population
of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately
1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa
workers. The government also prints out more than one million work permits for
foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and rarely punishes
companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak
across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the new labor supply boosts stock values for investors by ensuring that
employers do not have to compete in a free market for American workers with offers
of higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market
with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth
from young employees towards older
investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local tax
burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from
high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many
who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
They want no borders, no allegiance to a nation state, no
citizenship classification connected to a single country. TOM TANCREDO
2020 Census
Citizenship Controversy Exposes True Open Borders Agenda
As usual, the dustup about the census including a question
about citizenship has nothing to do with what the loony left claims as their
motivation to exclude it. They say it’s all about being sensitive to the hurt
feelings and paranoia of people who are illegally present in the U.S. And, by
the way, asking the question it is not a Donald Trump trick to ferret out those
folks who are hiding under their blankets, afraid that the next knock on the
door will be the jackbooted ICE agents, come to drag them from their beds and
put them on boxcars headed for concentration camps.
A brief history lesson here. The Constitution of the United
States directs the President to conduct a Census every ten years, and that has
been done without controversy since 1790. And with rare exceptions, the
question on citizenship has been part of it from the beginning. Yet, its
inclusion in the 2020 Census has become controversial. The reasons for the
opposition to the citizenship question tell us a lot about the declining health
of our American constitutional republic.
The vehement opposition to the 2020 Census question on
citizenship is a symptom of a deep divide in the body politic, a chasm that
only grows wider and deeper as politicians postpone a decision over the meaning
of the Constitution's opening words, "We the People."
There is a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon separating
individuals who believe that "We the People" means we the citizens of
the United States and those who believe it means, we the global citizens who
temporarily inhabit this territory. To one group having an accurate count of
both citizens and noncitizens resident in each state is vital to the
constitutional purposes of the Census, but to the "global citizen"
contingent that count is not only unnecessary, it is slanderous, racist and,
well -- undemocratic!
It is important to
understand that this debate over the 2020 Census's citizen/noncitizen numbers
is not a debate over counting illegal immigrants residing in the United States.
This controversy goes deeper than the debate over whether the official U.S.
Census estimate of 11.3 million illegal aliens resident in the country is
accurate or woefully inaccurate.
The political resistance to the traditional citizenship
question as part of the decennial Census derives its passion and intensity from
the ideological goal of transforming the nature of political representation in
our republic. In that world, an elected representative in any city council,
school board, county commission, state legislature, Board of Regents, or the U.
.Congress, is duty bound to represent any resident of his or her district with
the same passion and integrity whether that resident be a citizen, a Chinese or
German foreign student at a local university, a legal resident alien born in
Egypt or an illegal alien who swam across the Rio Grande. Should foreign
students at the University of Colorado vote in Boulder city elections? Why not,
if every "person" is entitled to "equal representation"?
The population count produced by the 2020 Census will be the
foundation for Congress' adoption of revised apportionment of the 435 seats in
Congress. Does a new apportionment based on new Census numbers mean a count based
on all persons, all citizens, or something else? Such questions will be debated
in Congress and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court before we know the
answers, but the debate must begin with an accurate count in the Census. Will
we get one?
When the national debate over illegal immigration and border
security was heating up back in 2005 and 2006 in response to amnesty proposals
in Congress, I was roundly criticized for suggesting the opposition to amnesty
was rooted in opposition to secure borders. I was attacked by some prominent leaders of the Republican
Party for saying that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce saw illegal aliens as cheap
labor and the Democrat Party saw them as future Democratic voters. I take no pleasure in observing in 2019 that
Democratic leaders in Congress are aggressively advocating open borders as a
path to a permanent Democratic majority. And there is an even bigger picture
that elitist leftists are trying to paint for us all. They want no
borders, no allegiance to a nation state, no citizenship classification
connected to a single country.
They want a kumbaya world of global citizens that can be
governed by people who “know better.” Think I am wrong? Try to find a recent
college or high school grad who can tell you what it means to be an American
other than by saying it means abiding in a place called America. The members of
what I call the Cult of Multiculturalism infect our schools, our media, and pop
culture. The philosophy permeates the West -- its repercussions and can be seen
playing out all over Europe.
Only a short decade ago, a world-famous Harvard political
scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, wrote a landmark book aptly titled Who Are We? America’s National Identity Crisis . He believed that America's unprecedented achievements and
unparalleled prosperity had their foundation in our nation's European heritage,
a heritage under siege by the formidable forces of multiculturalism. So
eliminating the citizenship question in the Census is a just another step down
the road to the elitist utopia promised by Marx and Engels.
Eventually we will come to the step when jackbooted
government agents really will be pulling people out of their beds and sending
them off to “re-education” camps.” After all, some
people might resist the America that Barack Obama promised to thoroughly
transform.
Former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO),
serves as Advisory Board Member for We Build The Wall. He was author
of the famous Bush Era book called In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America's Border
and Security.
House Democrats, 39
Republicans Pass ‘Temporary’ Amnesty for Venezuelans
25 Jul 20191,586
5:09
House
Democrats and 39 Republicans passed a plan to provide asylum in the United
States to potentially millions of Venezuelans fleeing their socialist dictator.
In a 272 to 158 House vote on Thursday, every Democrat and 39
Republicans voted to create a Temporary Protected
Status (TPS) program for Venezuela’s population — allowing nationals who are
already in the U.S. to remain and incentivizing more to migrate.
Officials with the Trump administration previously voiced their opposition to the
plan in an interview with Breitbart News.
“We would not want to open the
floodgates for them,” an official said in March.
The Republicans who voted with
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and
Rep. Ilhan Omar (R-MN) include:
Rep.
Don Bacon (R-NE)
Rep.
Michael Bost (R-IL)
Rep.
Tom Cole (R-OK)
Rep.
Dan Crenshaw (R-TX)
Rep.
John Curtis (R-UT)
Rep.
Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
Rep.
Sean Duffy (R-WI)
Rep.
Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Rep.
Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
Rep.
Mike Gallagher (R-WI)
Rep.
Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH)
Rep.
Tom Graves (R-GA)
Rep.
Vicky Hartzler (R-MO)
Rep. Jaime
Herrera Beutler (R-WA)
Rep.
Clay Higgins (R-LA)
Rep.
French Hill (R-AR)
Rep.
Will Hurd (R-TX)
Rep.
David Joyce (R-OH)
Rep.
John Katko (R-NY)
Rep.
Peter King (R-NY)
Rep. Adam
Kinzinger (R-IL)
Rep.
Brian Mast (R-FL)
Rep.
Michael McCaul (R-TX)
Rep.
Tom Reed (R-NY)
Rep.
Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA)
Rep.
Francis Rooney (R-FL)
Rep.
Austin Scott (R-GA)
Rep.
John Shimkus (R-IL)
Rep.
Chris Smith (R-NJ)
Rep.
Ross Spano (R-FL)
Rep.
Elise Stefancik (R-NY)
Rep.
Bryan Steil (R-WI)
Rep.
Steve Stivers (R-OH)
Rep.
Glenn Thompson (R-PA)
Rep.
Michael Waltz (R-FL)
Rep.
Steve Womack (R-AR)
Rep.
Rod Woodall (R-GA)
Rep.
Ted Yoho (R-FL)
Rep.
Don Young (R-AK)
Leading the opposition against
giving TPS to Venezuela’s population, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) called the plan an
effort to continue current U.S. national immigration policy that acts as “the world’s
orphanage for children and adults alike.”
Brooks said:
This bill proposes a tsunami of people coming to our country who
are ill-equipped to support themselves . And, let’s put that into the perspective of where we are a
nation. We just blew through the $22 trillion debt mark earlier this
year. This year, we are looking at a roughly $900 billion deficit .
A deal that has been reached that will only increase our deficit by $2 trillion
over the next two years pushing our debt up to $22 trillion. This is money
we do not have, have to borrow to get, and cannot afford to pay back .
[Emphasis added]
How does that relate to H.R. 549? Well, let me share some
numbers with you. Sixty percent of households with a lawful immigrant
in them are on welfare, living off the hard work of others. Seventy percent of
illegal alien households are on welfare, living off the hard work of others here
in the United States of America. [Emphasis added]
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a
major donor the to the GOP establishment, urged Republicans to join Democrats
in helping to pass TPS for Venezuelans.
“The Chamber applauds
Representatives Soto and Diaz-Balart for leading the House effort to pass H.R.
549, which would allow many Venezuelans currently in the U.S. the opportunity
to legally remain and work in the U.S. while Venezuela is in a state of
crisis,” the Chamber’s Neil Bradley said in a statement. “The U.S. government
should make it clear that Venezuelan nationals who pose no risk to the safety
or security of the U.S. will not be sent back into harm’s way.”
TPS has become a quasi-amnesty
for otherwise illegal aliens created under the Immigration and Nationality Act
of 1990 (INA) that prevents the deportation of foreign nationals from countries
that have suffered through famine, war, or natural disasters. Since the Clinton
administration, TPS has been transformed into a de facto amnesty program as the
Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have continuously renewed the program
for a variety of countries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
TRUMP’S CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND
WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
*
Only a complete fool would believe that
Trump is any more for American Legal workers than the Democrat Party for
Billionaires and Banksters!
*
“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled
American Workers.”
*
The latest ad from the Federation for
American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump to reject the mass illegal and
legal immigration policies supported by Wall Street, corporate executives, and
most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch brothers.
*
Efforts
by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W.
Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would
likely crush the historic
wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
*
Mark Zuckerberg’s
Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and
industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful
of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
MAGA vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
The general public typically equates
the Chamber of Commerce with local Mom and Pop businesses in their area
which meet for networking and mutual support in local chapters across the
country. This is erroneous. According to theHill :
While
local chambers cater to the needs of car dealers and restaurant owners, the
national Chamber operates as the lobbying arm of large corporations that have
never met a big government program they did not like.
They
are weapons dealers pushing billion-dollar battleships and telecommunication
lobbyists protecting slow Internet at the world's highest prices. They are
lobbyists for pharmaceutical companies, big banks, and Wall street traders who
treat the American people as gullibles to be fleeced without mercy.
Even seasoned politicians are
susceptible to having misconceptions about the Chamber. Former U.S. senator Jim
Demint admits he naively thought it was lobbying for free enterprise and
creating a better business environment for everybody. Now he says, "I
pronounce them part of the swamp." Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich), a
conservative, adds, "I believe in free markets and am against cronyism and
corporate welfare, and they [the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] support those
things."
So what is the
USCC? It is a business lobbying group that represents 80% of the Fortune 100
companies and is by far the largest interest group in Washington. According the Wall
Street Journal , the Chamber spent $125 million in lobbying in 2014 and $95
million last year. This dwarfs the spending of any other interest group. One
tactic the Chamber uses to swell its revenue is to solicit money from big
international companies to promote specific goals. Since donor names are not
public, the Chamber can pursue controversial fights without identifying the
firms behind the effort.
The Chamber of Commerce and its president
Thomas Donohue came into conflict with Donald Trump and his America First
platform very early on. For 18 months during the runup to the 2016 election,
the Chamber spared no effort to demonize Trump. In doing so, the
Chamber was carrying water for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Donohue and
company figured they could better deal with Hillary than Trump in the Oval
Office. In this, the Chamber was exactly right.
The big hangups the Chamber and its
client base had against Donald Trump involved immigration, trade, and
tariffs. Adhering to its corporate masters’ call for a continuous supply
of cheap labor, the Chamber lobbies for more immigration and resists tight
border controls. Trade is much the same. Past trade pacts have allowed Wall
Street to grow obscenely rich in the outsourcing of American jobs to
third-world countries for sake of the bottom line of the multinationals. In the
process, over a million ordinary Americans were left holding the bag.
All this is still playing out today.
The president is striving to adjust the unfair trading arrangements that the
political class, in cahoots with the big money interests on Wall Street, have
saddled the U.S. with. But Trump and his trade team of Robert Lighthizer,
Wilbur Ross, Steven Mnuchin, and Larry Kudlow are fighting not just China, but
what is effectively a Fifth Column here at home. It's composed of the likes of
the Chamber of Commerce and a sizable portion of the political establishment,
which is used to dipping its beak in special-interest money.
As to this latter point, just look at
the breaking news of the dealings of Joe Biden's son, Hunter, with the Chinese
government. Writing in the New YorkPost , Peter Schweizer outlines in detail
the $1.5 private equity deal the younger Biden made with the Chinese while
Biden was vice-president. And now, Joe Biden is out on the stump soft-peddling
the damage China has done to the U.S. economy and downplaying its threat to us
and pretending to be for the working man. You can't make this up.
It's important not to conflate Big
Business (Wall Street) with small business (Main Street). Wall Street is the
financial economy. It pushes paper around. For example, they write derivatives
on real assets, say stocks, to the point where the value of derivatives traded
is far greater than the assets they are based on. Investopedia says this : "The derivatives market is, in
a word, gigantic -- often estimated at more than $1.2 quadrillion on the high
end."
A quadrillion is 1,000 trillion. In
dollar terms, a quadrillion is 15-times the GDP of the entire world.
Main Street actually makes and sells
things. For over a generation or more, Big Biz has dominated Main Street. This
is why the Midwest and other places across the U.S. are littered with closed
factories and why middle-class wages stagnated. In many ways, the financial
economy is parasitic on the real economy. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump
represented Main Street while Clinton was in the pocket of the big money
interests on Wall Street.
What this means is that what is good
for Main Street will not be good for Wall Street and Big Biz, at least not in
the short run. What benefits the American worker -- fair trade policy and tight
immigration control -- will initially hurt Big Biz and Wall Street. And the hurt will continue
until the financial economy is scaled back to its proper size and is no longer
allowed to the tail that wags the American economic dog. Until then, MAGA is at
war with Big Biz and the bought-and-paid-for political establishment. And this
explains much of the resistance to Trump's tariffs and trade position.
A closing observation
says a lot. Thomas Donohue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, is 80
years old. His board is pushing him to retire. The replacement they are
looking at is former Congressman Paul Ryan. A perfect fit given the Chamber's
agenda.
Chamber
of Commerce Demands More Immigration: ‘U.S. Is Out of People’
26 Apr 20194,424
4:12
The United States Chamber of Commerce is
vowing to continue fighting President Trump’s shaping of the Republican Party
into a pro-U.S. worker party of blue collar working and middle class Americans.
In an interview with the Washington Post , numerous
Chamber of Commerce officials said the organization’s corporate lobbying
efforts would soon attempt to court more elected Democrats to support their
economic libertarian agenda of more free trade and increased legal immigration.
“The GOP’s drift toward
protectionism, nativism, and isolationism since Donald Trump took over the
party in 2016 is also at odds with the Chamber’s longtime support for expanding
free trade, growing legal immigration and investing in infrastructure,” the Post story details.
Specifically, Chamber of Commerce
President and CEO Tom Donahue said the U.S. needed more legal immigration so
that corporations and business secure a never-ending flow of cheaper labor,
claiming the country is “out of people.”
And they’re still looking to work
with Trump even on areas where they’re not really in agreement, such as
immigration. The Chamber advocates for protecting the “dreamers” from
deportation and expanding rates of legal immigration . “The
fundamental issue is that the United States of America is out of people,” said
Donohue . “We have the lowest unemployment we’ve had in 65 years. We have
brought more people back into the workforce and still have the lowest
unemployment.” [Emphasis added]
Despite Donahue’s claims, at
least 12 million Americans who want
full-time jobs remain on the sidelines of the workforce. This includes 6.2
million Americans who are unemployed that want a job, 4.5 million Americans who
are underemployed working part-time jobs, and 1.4 million Americans who
continue to be entirely out of the workforce though they want full-time
employment.
While millions remain on the
sidelines of the workforce, the Chamber of Commerce has routinely advocated for
increasing legal immigration levels as a boon to corporations while depressing
job prospects and wages for America’s working and middle class. Already, about
1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants are admitted to the country every
year, to the detriment of U.S. wages.
The Chamber of Commerce’s push to
increase legal immigration levels is vastly out of step with Republican voters
and American voters as a whole. Last year, nearly two-out-three U.S. voters
said they supported reducing legal immigration, while most recently about 43 percent of Republican
voters said immigration hurts the country.
Extensive research by economists
like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s
current mass 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.
Borjas has previously called the country’s
legal immigration system the “largest anti-poverty program” in the world at the
expense of blue-collar Americans and middle-class taxpayers.
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.
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 composition 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.
Though corporate interests and the
open borders lobby have sought to sway Trump from
his “America First” illegal and legal immigration agenda, senior advisor
Jared Kushner recently said the
president’s top priority in terms of the White House’s reform efforts is protecting
Americans’ wages.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
///
Chamber of Commerce
Considering Legal Action to Block Mexico Tariffs
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
31 May 2019 634
1:44
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other
business groups are considering ways to challenge the new tariffs on goods
imported from Mexico.
The powerful U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, which advocates for cheap labor policies and opposes American First
trade initiatives, told reporters
Friday that it is considering all options, including legal challenges, to
thwart the Trump administration’s policy.
“We have no choice but to pursue every option available to push
back,” Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer at the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Friday.
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will impose a 5
percent tariff on goods imported from Mexico if the Mexican government does not
stem the flow of illegal immigrants from Central America.
Chamber of Commerce President and chief
executive Tom Donahue told the Washington Post in April
that the U.S. needed more legal immigration because the country is “out of
people.” The chamber has pushed for legal protection for so-called “Dreamers”
and led political resistance to efforts to deport more illegal border crossers.
The chamber began 2019 by opposing legislation
that would have allowed President Donald Trump to impose reciprocal tariffs on
specific foreign imports.
“The bill would effectively give the President unilateral
authority to increase U.S. tariffs on imports from any foreign country,”
Bradley wrote in a letter sent to many lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “The harm to
Americans would be immediate: Tariffs are taxes, and they are paid by American
families and American businesses.”
Business Cheers as Cory Booker Urges More
Low-Skilled Immigration
Scott Olson/Getty Images
1 Aug 2019152
6:55
Sen. Cory Booker called for more low-skilled immigration
Wednesday night as he tried to cut down Joe Biden in the Democrats’ 2020 race.
“I heard the vice president say that
if you got a PhD., you can come right into this country,” Booker said, adding:
Well that’s playing into what the Republicans
want, to pit some immigrants against other immigrants. We need to reform this
whole immigration system and begin to be the country that says everyone has
worth and dignity and this should be a country that honors everyone.
If implemented, Booker’s call for
more low-skilled immigration would increase competition for blue-collar jobs
and cheap apartments in New Jersey, so imposing additional economic pain on
lower-skilled Americans in Booker’s home state. More migration would also add
to the divide-and-rule diversity which hinders Americans from periodically
uniting to curb the elites’ self-serving policies.
Republicans
want to pit some immigrants against others. But we need to reform this whole
immigration system and begin to be the country that says, “Everyone has worth
and dignity, and this should be a country that honors everyone.” #DemDebate
Booker’s call for un-skilled
immigration got plaudits from advocates for “diverse” immigration into the
United States.
“That was solid immigration talk
from Booker,” said Alex Merced, the “Latinx Vice Chair” of the Libertarian
Party. “Merit based immigration is condescending and presumes government can
determine our individual potential, I sure as hell don’t trust government to do
that.”
“Booker speaking truth again
on immigration,” tweeted Jonathan
Capeheart, a member of the Washington
Post ‘s editorial board.
But Booker’s call for more unskilled
immigration also got him a shout-out from Todd Schulte, who runs FWD.us, a
cheap labor lobby shop for Mark Zuckerberg and other West Coast investors .
“Appreciate @CoryBooker,” said
a tweet from Schulte. “Pointing
out that this [immigration] section of the debate is being dominated by poor
assumptions, bad framing and a lack of focus on many of the most critical
aspects of immigration — not cutesy gotcha stuff that misses huge aspects of
the debate.”
Schulte’s donors employ many foreign
graduates, including both visa workers and immigrants. But his donors also have
coherent economic reasons to oppose any cutbacks to the immigration of
unskilled workers and family chain migrants, as urged by President Donald
Trump’s 2018 “Four Pillars” plan.
Unskilled migrants serve as both
cheap workers, extra consumers, and predictable renters. Their multi-sided
value for investors is spotlighted by FWD.us’ support for DoorDash, which hires
people to deliver food by auto, scooters, and bikes. In a September 2018
statement, the FWD.us investors denounced Trump’s plan to cut unskilled
immigration into the United States, saying it would reduce immigrant-driven
economic growth:
Immigration powers the American
economy, and ensuring that immigrant families living here today can thrive
means greater benefits for all U.S. residents and our children in the future.
The earning potential of immigrants
and their contributions to the labor-force and economy grows over time and over
generations …
Tony Xu, the founder of DoorDash,
embodies this story … in 2013 Tony founded DoorDash, an incredibly successful
meal delivery service. Today, DoorDash is valued at $4 billion , using
recent investment to expand into 1,200 new cities and to hire 250 new employees , in
addition to over 100,000 part-time gigs already
created for delivery drivers across the country.
DoorDash’s investors in FWD.us funders include Sequoia Capital, KPCB, SV
Angel, CRV, and Y Combinator. In June 2019, Schulte’s group also
helped persuade New York’s legislature to grant drivers’ licenses to illegals —
so freeing many to join the labor force of delivery drivers.
The
demand by investors for endless migrant labor has created a new thing: The
US-India Outsourcing Economy. This no-regulation zone redirects new wealth into
a few cities & a small elite. Elites want to expand it, so US college-grads
get #HR1044 . http:// bit.ly/2LpqAmx
Booker’s televised support for
low-skilled immigration also sought to paint an elitist gloss on Biden’s call
for higher-skilled migration.
But there is little or no evidence
that a President Biden would want to reduce lower-skilled immigration. During
the TV debate, for example, Biden described Americans’ homeland as “a country
of immigrants.” He continued by crediting immigrants — not skilled immigrants —
with creating America, not Americans:
We should … [and] I proposed,
significantly increasing the number of legal immigrants who are able to come.
This country can tolerate a heck of a lot more people. And the reason we’re the
country we are is we’ve been able to cherry-pick from the best of every
culture. Immigrants built this country.
…
Some here came against their will;
others came because they in fact thought they could fundamentally change their
lives … That’s what made us great.
Also, Biden strongly supported the
2013 “Gang of Eight” bill, which would have amnestied all illegals. It would
also have doubled legal immigration to two million a year — or one migrant for
every two American births. That resulting flood of labor would have
shifted more of the nation’s new wealth from employees over to investors,
according to a 2013 study of the bill by the Congressional Budget
Office. “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.”
Genial
Joe Biden hides his elitist cheap-labor agenda with the usual
illegal-migration-bad/legal-migration-good schtick. Econ 101 = inc. labor
supply pushes down wages (usually, esp. in short term, etc.). That's been the
US economy since the 1990s. http:// bit.ly/2yt4yqa
Immigration Numbers
Each year, roughly four million
young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high
school or university. This total includes roughly 800,000 Americans who
graduate with skilled degrees in business or healthcare, engineering or
science, software or statistics.
But the federal government then
imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population
of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately
1 million H-1B workers and spouses —plus roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa
workers.
The government also prints out more
than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million
illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of
thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their
legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor
supply boosts economic
growth for investors because it
transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete
for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market
with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and
blue-collar labor also shifts enormous
wealth from young employees towards older
investors, even as it also widens wealth
gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and
local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy
also pushes Americans
away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans,
including many who are now struggling with fentanyl
addictions.
“If there is a growing flood of
foreign labor, the American middle class is no longer going to exist, and
Republicans will not have a constituency,” said Hilarie Gamm, a co-cofounder of
the American Workers Coalition.
Wages
are climbing again. For unclear reasons, blue-collars are gaining faster than
college graduates. http:// bit.ly/2Kew28v
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