Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Joe
Biden Promises to Let Mayors Import Foreign Workers
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/09/10/joe-biden-promises-to-let-mayors-import-foreign-workers/
If Joe Biden is elected president, mayors and county executives will get a pipeline of foreign workers for local CEOs who say they cannot recruit Americans for the jobs, says Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign platform.
“It is the Democratic version of [President] George W. Bush’s
[2004] ‘Willing worker, willing employer’ proposal,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for
Immigration Studies. The Bush proposal, he said, would have allowed:
Any employer to import any number of workers from anywhere in
the world to do any job at any wage above minimum wage. What Biden wants to do
… is to give city and county governments the ability to import people and then
give them to the employers.
In exchange, Krikorian said, “the [employers] would express
their gratitude with donations and consulting contracts for the [politicians’]
cocaine-addicted sons.”
Biden’s local migration plan is described in his immigration platform titled,
“The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants”:
As president, Biden will support a program to allow any county
or municipal executive of a large or midsize county or city to petition for
additional immigrant visas to support the region’s economic development
strategy, provided employers in those regions certify there are available jobs,
and that there are no workers to fill them. Holders of these visas would be
required to work and reside in the city or county that petitioned for them.
The imported workers would not be legal immigrants, according to
the plan. They would be visa workers who likely could eventually apply for
green cards, presumably if they have earned the approval or CEOs or mayors.
Even without approval from Congress, the plan is doable because
it builds on the existing pipelines of foreign workers.
For example, both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama
cited section 1324a of the 1965
immigration law to create and expand the Practical Training pipeline, which
provided work permits to roughly 500,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges in
2019. In contrast, President Donald Trump has trimmed the program.
Obama used the same 1324a claim to bypass Congress, as he
provided work permits to at least 800,000 younger illegal immigrants under the
so-called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
For more than a decade, lower courts have ping-ponged two
lawsuits by the Immigration Reform Law Institute challenging the 1324a claim.
The Supreme Court declined to address the legality of the 1324a claim when it
rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to cancel the program.
Also, Congress has declined to block the work permit programs,
and in 2019, apparently affirmed a “Parole in Place” presidential authority that could be cited in presidential
amnesties.
Moreover, there is no annual limit on the number of foreign
temporary workers who can be nominated for green cards. This means that Fortune
500 CEOs can import short-term workers and then extend their stay by nominating
them for green cards. Many CEOs prefer indentured workers because they are
unable to leave their employers until they get their green cards, perhaps after
a decade of compliant work.
The Biden program is pitched as a stimulus for interior states
who have been left behind as Congress’s immigration programs deliver millions
of new workers and trillions of dollars in new wealth to coastal investors,
states, regions, and counties.
Biden’s plan says the new pipeline would:
…allow cities and counties to petition for higher levels of
immigrants to support their growth. The disparity in economic growth between
U.S. cities, and between rural communities and urban areas, is one of the great
imbalances of today’s economy. Some cities and many rural communities struggle
with shrinking populations, an erosion of economic opportunity, and local
businesses that face unique challenges. Others simply struggle to attract a
productive workforce and innovative entrepreneurs.
The language in Biden’s plan echoes the pitch by the
investor-created Economic Innovation
Group, which is lobbying legislators to
back a new immigration program dubbed the “Heartland Visa.” The group’s pitch
says that “A place-based visa program would allow mutually-advantageous matches
to be made between skilled immigrants and places wishing to attract more human
capital.”
The group sold its idea to the New York Times, Pete Buttigieg, and others. Buttigieg’s 2020 vision, titled,
“Investing in an American asset: Unleashing the Potential of Rural America,”
said:
Pete will create a new, place-based Community Renewal visa to
provide opportunities for people who want to move to America and help build our
economy where they are needed most and where they will do well. These visas
will be targeted toward counties that have lost prime-working-age population
over the last 10 years, and smaller cities that are struggling to keep pace
economically with larger cities.
The EIG is run by wealthy investors who would gain from any increased inflow of cheap workers,
consumers, renters, and home-buyers — especially if the immigrants needed
federal aid. The group is particularly interested in raising real estate
prices, saying, “The
relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people
means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand.”
The EIG group did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.
Immigration shifts wealth from wages to
stocks, from young to old, from central states to the coasts, from the many to
the few.
Yes, migrants get huge relative gains in pay & civic life by moving into
US.
But investors skim the $$ from the diversity#H1Bhttps://t.co/PVA75K3v9T
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 21, 2020
The EIG plan would flood local labor markets and make it
difficult for American workers — especially marginalized workers — to argue for good jobs and decent wages.
Biden’s plan is a “terrible idea for a whole bunch of reasons,”
said Krikorian.
The program would create a local laborforce of indentured
migrant workers, who would be stuck in the district until they eventually get
green cards, said Krikorian. “The indentured side of it is appalling …
Are they going to send ‘immigrant chasers’ after them as they move to the next
town?”
The plan would encourage corrupt deals with employers, he said.
“When politicians have authority over importing visas, businesses have a
real interest in currying favor with those guys — the certainty of
corruption will be the subject of news stories as long as this kind of
thing lasts,” he said.
The plan is bad for local government because the easy
alternative of cheap foreign workers will make it difficult for local
officials, citizens, and executives to make difficult resource decisions about
education and infrastructure spending, said Krikorian:
Businesses and local governments would no longer have an
incentive to make the hard choices about investing in community college,
training programs … they won’t have to. They’ll just call up their Congressman,
and order up a bunch of foreign workers.
EIG’s “place-based visa plan” won’t help the places that hope
for foreign redemption, said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigraiton Reform
Law Institute. “It will never work — people will just move to where they want
to go,” which is usually close to similar people, usually in coastal states, he
said. But that movement would be no problem for the EIG investors who have ties
to many companies around the nation, he said.
By allowing politicians to deliver short-term workers to
cooperative CEOs, the Biden plan would dramatically increase government power
over the CEOs, Krikorian said. But that is not a problem for business advocates
of immigration, he said:
Their goal is maximizing immigration regardless of how it
happens. Yes, they would prefer it happened in a libertarian-ish fashion the
way George W Bush offered, where the government was not involved, but they’ll
settle for Biden’s version. It increases the number of people moving here
because that is the goal.
The better alternative to more visa-worker migration would be to
reduce the distorting impact of the federal government’s cheap-labor
immigration policy, say reformers.
For example, CEOs will move their coastal jobs to cheaper
U.S. locations if they have to pay fair-market pay rates, Miano said. “If you
cut off H-1B visas, there will be a rush of coastal jobs to Kansas, Montana,
and those kinds of places,” he said.
Trump’s 2020 platform promises to end cheap labor replacement of American employees.
“The solution has always been to tighten up the labor
market,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “We’ve seen it in the
[Trump-enforced] exit of J-1s [visa
workers] — when all of a sudden, job opportunities are created for college
students.”
“It is a virtuous circle when you tighten the labor market,” he
said.
The inflow of immigrants and visa workers has changed the
nation’s workplaces, economy, and labor force.
For example, the H-1B visa pipeline delivers roughly 100,000
foreign graduates to CEOs each year. Most of those H-1B workers are hoping to
get green cards from their CEOs, so they are willing to work long hours,
without complaint, for lower salaries, for many years, in the so-called Green
Card Economy.
The H-1B program is just one of several programs that provide
CEOs with a workforce of at least 1 million indentured foreign
graduates who have few legal rights to demand higher wages, to complain to a
federal agency, or to testify in court.
This huge population of foreign graduates reduces nationwide
pressure for pay raises, reduces gateway jobs for young American graduates,
reduce the workplace status of American professionals, reduces turnover and
innovation in the tech sector, and reduces the creation of new companies that
threaten the tech CEOs’ control over their technology.
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other
proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to
dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Donald Trump's labor & immigration
promises for a 2nd term are vague but useful.
They are also better for ordinary Americans than Joe Biden's business-backed,
open-ended inflow of wage-cutting & rent-raising blue-collar workers &
college-graduates. https://t.co/OmE4tRPf4T
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 26, 2020
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Desperation swells among millions of unemployed in the US as layoffs mount and aid dries up
Over six months after pandemic-induced lockdowns went into effect in the US—before being quickly abandoned by Democratic and Republican governors at the insistence of President Donald Trump and the financial oligarchy—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression shows no signs of abating.
While the March-April crescendo of job losses of over 11 million has not been repeated, talk of a “V-shaped” recovery in the jobs market has been put to rest as ongoing layoffs in transportation, entertainment and hospitality sectors are adding tens of thousands more to the unemployment rolls every day. The Department of Labor (DOL) reports that 28.4 million workers are currently receiving unemployment benefits or are waiting for approval.
At the same time, small business owners who took advantage of loans offered through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, are teetering on the brink of collapse as Small Business Administration data revealed this week that less than one percent of the over 5.2 million loans granted through the program have been turned into grants. Since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed, with many still on the hook for outstanding PPP loans.
The combined economic squeeze on workers and small businesses has led to growing food insecurity and a rise in evictions. Despite the growing indicators of widespread social displacement, hunger, and mental anguish, including 40 states reporting an increase in opioid-related mortality, the US Congress, overwhelmingly comprised of millionaires, many of whom withheld information on the danger of the pandemic to increase their stock portfolios, continues to feign interest in a fifth coronavirus relief bill while accomplishing nothing.
The latest DOL report states that the US unemployment rate stands at 8.4 percent. However, economists estimate the number to be above 11 percent due to the fact that millions of workers have given up on securing employment as demand for work outstrips available jobs, with 2.5 workers per every one job, according to the DOL, for July, the last month data is available.
Despite the coordinated abandonment of any health and safety guidelines as part of the ruling class’s homicidal “back to school” and “back to work” campaign, which has led to a resurgence of the coronavirus cases across the country, millions of people continue to stay at home and spend what little money they have on essentials.
The reduction of travel, and with it, consumer spending, like all aspects of the pandemic, will be another burden the working class will be forced to shoulder. On Thursday, domestic airline carriers American, United and Delta are set to lay off up to 40,000 workers unless more government bailout funds are secured. As part of the CARES Act, the major airlines received $25 billion in government funding on the condition that they would not lay off workers prior to October 1.
The reduction in travel is hitting entertainment sectors particularly hard. The unemployment rate in central Florida, already 15 percent in Osceola County and nearly 12 percent in Orange County, is expected to balloon once the data is released for the month of September following multiple large-scale layoff announcements from several major resorts.
On Tuesday, Disneyworld and Disneyland resorts announced 28,000 layoffs, affecting workers at the California, Florida, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong locations. Disney Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro said in a statement that the “difficult decision” to eliminate thousands of jobs “will enable us to emerge a more effective and efficient operation when we return to normal.” D’Amaro estimated that “67 percent” of those laid off are part-time, meaning they will not be eligible for full unemployment benefits, which in Florida is capped at an insulting $275 a week for 12 weeks.
The Swan and Dolphin hotels, which are located at Disney World in Orlando, but not owned by the company, also announced 1,100 layoffs at the beginning of September. Shortly thereafter, SeaWorld confirmed that it would be terminating 1,900 workers at its Orlando location, while Universal Orlando Resort also announced in September that it was extending furloughs for nearly 5,400 workers through “at least” the end of the year.
Audits conducted within the last month in California, Wisconsin, Florida and Nevada reveal dysfunctional call centers in which millions of calls from claimants went unanswered, with backlogs growing day after day. Laid-off workers report calling unemployment offices hundreds of times a day for weeks on end, only to be hung up on or, if they do get through, their issue is not resolved.
In Florida, where last month Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump acolyte, admitted that the unemployment system was designed to pay out the “least number of claims ,” claimants still report not receiving funds even after sending in the requisite documentation.
As of September 18, more than 152,000 Floridians were waiting to be paid, according to the state’s own dashboard, while an estimated two thirds of the state’s unemployment funds have already been depleted, leaving many new applicants without access to funds without new legislation or until next year. DOL data for Florida shows that for the month of April only 36.44 percent of approved first unemployment payments were made within 14 to 21 days after the claim was approved. In May this decreased to 31.7 percent.
For those workers who have managed to get through annoying phone trees and have had their claims successfully processed, the expiration of state unemployment benefits, which is capped at 26 weeks a year in many states, combined with the ending of the Lost Wages Assistance Program (LWA), administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, portends more hardship.
While nearly every single US state and territory was approved for the $300 weekly payment meant to last six weeks, at least 15 states will end the program this week, or have already ended it, including: Arizona, California, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
Conversely, states such as Michigan that were approved weeks ago to begin distributing funds have yet to send funds to most of those who are eligible, while in Nevada, where the unemployment rate in Las Vegas is above 16 percent, Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) Administrator Elisa Cafferata still does not expect LWA payments to begin depositing into workers accounts for at least “another four to five weeks.”
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of increasing income inequality
A new study from the RAND Corporation, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards, provides new documentation of the profound restructuring of class relations in America over the last 40 years.
The study, which looks at changes in pre-tax family income from 1947 to 2018, divided into quintiles of the American population, concludes that the bottom 90 percent of the population would, on average, make 67 percent more in income—every year (!)—had shifts in income inequality not occurred the last four decades.
In other words, any family that made less than $184,292 (the 90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would be, on average, making 67 percent more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5 trillion of collective lost income for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.
Furthermore, the study concludes, that had more equitable growth continued after 1975 (a date they use as a shifting point), the bottom 90 percent of American households would have earned a total of $47 trillion more in income.
Given that there were about 115 million households in the bottom 90 percent of the US in 2018 population (out of a total of 127.59 million in 2018), that would mean that each of these households would, on average, be $408,696 richer today with this lost income.
To reach these conclusions, the authors break down historical real, pre-tax, income into different quintiles of the population (bottom fifth, second fifth, third fifth, fourth fifth, highest fifth). Looking at the period between 1947 and 2018, they divide the years based on business cycles (booms and busts of the economy).
Their data quantitatively expresses the restructuring of class relations that began at the end of the post-WWII boom. Facing intensified economic crisis, automation, and global competition, the US ruling class undertook an aggressive campaign of deindustrialization, slashing wages and clawing back benefits won in the previous period by explosive struggles of the working class, while simultaneously funneling money to financial markets, expanding the wealth and income of both the upper and upper-middle class.
As the data shows, while the bottom 40 percent of American households made significant percentile increases to their income, relative to the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947 and 1968, in the 40 years from 1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In 1980-2000, the bottom 40 percent of the population experienced a net income gain significantly below that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because these are percentile increases, the absolute differences between the gains of the rich versus the poor is far larger.
Furthermore, not included in this data is wealth. In the last 40 years, and especially the last 10 to 20 years, the stock market has become the principal means through which the top 10 percent of the population has piled up historic levels of wealth.
Significantly, the data from 2001 to 2018 shows a sharp slowdown in income gains for all sections of American society as per capita GDP growth slowed and US capitalism experienced a historic decline. However, while the income of the top 5 percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent between 2008 and 2018, the wealth of the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008, just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the beginning of 2018.
By using the data, the authors come up with a set of counterfactual incomes based on what would be the different income brackets in 2018 without a shift in income distribution. The top 1 percent, instead of making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The 25th percentile, instead of making $33,000 would make $61,000.
The authors of the study also make several other important observations by breaking down their data on the basis of location, education, and race.
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Unemployment skyrockets
among youth
More than 7.7 million workers younger than 30 are now unemployed in the US. Over 3 million dropped out of the labor force over the course of a single month, from mid-April to mid-May. The number of young people now unemployed amounts to nearly one in three young workers, the highest rate since the country started tracking unemployment by age in 1948.
These figures are paralleled in countries hit by the coronavirus pandemic all around the world. In Australia, the youth unemployment rate has jumped to 13.8 percent. Youth unemployment rates in Australia were already more than double the overall unemployment rate of the country and were almost three times higher than for those 25 and older.
A report from the Resolution Foundation think tank recently found that youth unemployment in the UK could rise by 640,000 this year, bringing the total above 1 million. In Spain, half of all those who have lost jobs since the start of the outbreak have been adults under the age of 35. In Canada, the youth unemployment rate jumped to 27.2 percent in April, from 16.8 percent in March. Student unemployment was even higher.
Young workers are vastly over-represented in the sectors hardest hit by the lockdown and social distancing measures. These sectors include hospitality, food services, retail, arts and recreation. Nearly 40 percent of the young workers who are unemployed in the US worked in the devastated retail and food service sectors alone. The Millennial generation, those aged between 26 and 40, make up a majority of bartenders and half of restaurant workers.
According to a new report by Data for Progress, over half of people under the age of 45 say that the $1,200 cash payment from the US federal government covered just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults.
The US Labor Department continues to report that the majority of laid-off workers expect their joblessness to be temporary. However, there is growing concern among economists that many jobs will never come back.
Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, recently told the New York Times that the path to recovery “is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought.” Bloom is the co-author of an analysis of the pandemic’s effects on the labor market titled “COVID-19 Is Also a Reallocation Shock.” In it, he and his co-thinkers estimate that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.
A large body of research, along with the fresh experience of the 2008 recession, shows that young people, especially those without a college degree, are particularly vulnerable during economic downturns and recessions.
An analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that up to 57 million US jobs are now vulnerable, including a growing number of white-collar positions. Furthermore, the report finds that 86 percent of jobs made vulnerable by the pandemic pay less than $40,000 a year. In other words, those workers who were already in precarious situations are not only getting hit the hardest, many will be forced out of their industry altogether.
For those workers in the Millennial generation (now aged 26 to 40) and older, this is the second major economic catastrophe in barely a decade. The researchers note in their report that “the generation that first entered the job market in the aftermath of the Great Recession is now going through its second ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ downturn.”
If the 2008 financial crash is any indication, we can expect that the current economic downturn will exact a devastating toll on all workers, the youth in particular.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, youth unemployment soared to more than 60 percent in some European regions. In many countries, the youth unemployment rate never fully recovered to pre-recession levels. In the US, half of recent graduates were unable to find work during the recession years. Millennials’ official unemployment rate ranged as high as 20 or 30 percent.
The recession was used as an opportunity to make more fundamental changes to the economy that would leave young workers hounded by high rates of underemployment, low wages and stagnant earnings trajectories for the following decade.
Full-time salaried positions were slashed with the introduction of “gig” economy work. Nearly 95 percent of the jobs created during the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2017, were part-time, contract, on-call or temporary. This piecemeal work, cynically sold to the younger generation as “flexible” work, often excludes health care, retirement benefits, sick days and other benefits, and is highly unreliable.
It has already become commonplace for workers to hold down two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet and provide for their families.
To get a sense of the scale of the economic crisis pre-pandemic, one should consider that in 2019 some 61 percent of US workers were reporting that they did not have enough savings to cover a $1,000 emergency room visit or car repair. One in five Millennials reported not being able to afford routine health care expenses, and nearly half had nothing saved. This situation is being dramatically worsened by the impact of the pandemic.
In 2018, taking note of the devastating toll the recession had taken on a whole generation of young workers, the Wall Street Journal noted that Millennials were at risk of becoming “America’s Lost Generation.” Similar warnings have already begun to circulate in regard to the emerging generation, known as Gen Z.
However, as the Journal itself nervously pointed out at the time, the Millennial generation in the US was also the first generation to favor socialism over capitalism. The dire conditions facing young people, which are more and more understood to be the consequence of decaying social order, have created the objective basis for a vast radicalization of young people and workers across the globe. The two years prior to the onset of the pandemic were marked by the reemergence of the class struggle internationally, in which young workers played leading roles.
Generation Z is now coming of age under conditions that far outstrip those which the Millennials confronted in the aftermath of 2008. The events of the day will not pass by this new generation, or the older generations, for that matter, without leaving a profound and revolutionary political impact.
The younger generation is coming of age in a world of immense contradictions, with enormous developments in technology and science occurring simultaneously with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of workers internationally as a result of the criminal response of the ruling class to the pandemic. Trillions of dollars are being poured into the coffers of the global corporate elites while young people’s schools are defunded and their jobs destroyed.
Instability and uncertainty are among the defining features of everyday life. Under such conditions, there is no doubt that the popularity of socialism among young people will continue to grow at a rapid pace. Far from becoming the “Lost Generation” as predicted by the Wall Street Journal, the emerging generation of young workers carries within it an enormous revolutionary force.
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