Sunday, October 11, 2020

LOOTING AMERICA - THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AT WORK

Congressmen Call for Investigation into Florida Democratic Party ‘Looting’ PPP

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 20: Newly redesigned $100 notes lay in stacks at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on May 20, 2013 in Washington, DC. The one hundred dollar bills will be released this fall and has new security features, such as a duplicating portrait of Benjamin Franklin and …
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8:30

On Thursday, several congressmen called for a federal investigation into the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) after  revelations that it applied for and accepted a large sum from a federal aid program designed to assist small businesses and workers hammered by the coronavirus pandemic and which explicitly excluded political entities.

In a letter led by U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), members of the Florida congressional delegation called for a federal investigation into the FDP’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) application and for all documents, including the application itself, to be made public.

Implemented by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the PPP offered forgivable low-interest loans to retain workers and cover other existing overhead costs of small businesses facing uncertainty during the current pandemic.

The FDP applied for and received a $780,000 loan in April through a Building Fund – with no employees – and subsequently allegedly funneled the funds to the FDP itself, despite its ineligibility. 

In the letter to Small Business Administration Inspector General Hannibal Ware, the congressmen called attention to the FDP’s whopping $780,000 April loan and claimed that “details of the FDP loan application raise serious questions.” 

Demanding an investigation into “the facts and circumstances of the PPP loan to FDP,” the congressmen are seeking whether any “false or misleading” information appeared on the loan application, and, if appropriate, urge for the filing of “a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution.” 

The congressman also requested a “briefing to detail any findings” from the investigation and that all “documents and communications reviewed during the course of the investigation” be released.

In addition to Waltz, the letter was signed by Florida. Reps. Bill Posey, Neal Dunn, Greg Steube, Ross Spano, and Brian Mast.

Read the full letter:

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was designed to provide a direct incentive for small businesses to keep their workers on the payroll. Congress intended the program to provide relief to America’s small businesses quickly, and demand for the program was extraordinary: PPP lenders approved more than 1.6 million loans totaling more than $342 billion in the program’s first two weeks, according to your office. The Small Business Administration subsequently released data that shows a political organization may have taken advantage of the program’s expedited nature to obtain funds for which they were ineligible.

Specifically, the data show a Democrat-affiliated political organization in Florida applied for and received PPP funds, contrary to the intent of Congress that the program should support small businesses, non-profits, veterans’ organizations, and tribal concerns. The Small Business Administration issued regulations that specifically prohibit “businesses primarily engaged in political or lobbying activities” from receiving PPP loans. Despite this restriction, the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) applied for and received a PPP loan worth $780,000.

The details of the FDP loan application raise serious questions as to whether the applicant intentionally misled the Small Business Administration in order to obtain PPP funds. FDP filed its application under the identity of a non-profit organization called the “Florida Democratic Party Building Fund, Inc.” The Florida Democratic Party Building Fund, Inc. is a separate legal entity from the Florida Democratic Party, but Florida state records show the party formed the not-for-profit corporation in April of 2019 to construct, own or operate “the headquarters of the state executive committee of the Florida Democratic Party and related political organizations.”

Documents show the Florida Democratic Party Building Fund, Inc. has no employees, and that PPP money was subsequently funneled to Florida Democrat Party staff. Indeed, the Florida Democrat Party acknowledged in a public statement that it sought PPP funds because “FDP was concerned about meeting payroll and keeping our staff employed.” The fact that FDP—which was ineligible for PPP funds—applied for the loan via the Florida Democratic Building Fund, Inc. and the money was subsequently transferred back to support FDP’s payroll raises questions as to whether someone at FDP knowingly made a false statement on the PPP application in question.

False statements in connection with a PPP loan application may be a felony. Applicants must certify the application, and the application itself advises that applicants may be penalized for “knowingly making a false statement to obtain a guaranteed loan from SBA” or for knowingly using the funds for unauthorized purposes.6 The application states that knowingly making a false statement is punishable by a maximum of five years’ imprisonment and/or a $250,000 fine under 18 U.S.C. §1001 (making false statements) and 18 U.S.C. §3571 (sentence of fine); (2) two years’ imprisonment and/or a $5,000 fine under 15 U.S.C. §645 (false statements to SBA); and (3) 30 years’ imprisonment and/or a $1,000,000 fine, if submitted to a federally insured institution, i.e., virtually any bank, under 18 U.S.C. §1014 (false statements to banks with respect to loans). False statements in a PPP application may also subject violators to up to 20 years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine for wire fraud (18 U.S.C. §1343) and mail fraud (18 U.S.C. §1341), and up to 30 years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine for bank fraud (18 U.S.C. §1344), among other things.

In light of the possibility of criminal misconduct in this case, we request that your office takes the following actions:

1. Investigate the facts and circumstances of the PPP loan to FDP, to include whether the information on FDP’s loan application was false or misleading.

2. File a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution if appropriate.

3. Provide a briefing to detail any findings from your investigation, and provide all documents and communications reviewed during the course of the investigation, including but not limited to FDP’s loan application.

Last month, Breitbart News published an in-depth report on the story — detailing numerous alleged fraudulent activities on the part of the FDP — with several congressmen providing exclusive statements. 

In his statement to Breitbart News, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), noting that Congress had explicitly excluded political parties, said “The Florida Democrat Party should disclose their PPP Loan application. Floridians deserve to know who is responsible for swindling a program meant to keep workers employed,” he said.

Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) told Breitbart News, “I am having a hard time explaining to my constituents how money I voted for to help workers seems to have ended up in the hands of political party operatives who were specifically excluded from eligibility.” 

Congressman Neil Dunn (R-FL) told Breitbart News, “I voted for a program to help struggling businesses, not a bunch of politicians looking to fatten their war chest in an election year,” 

One top GOP consultant told Breitbart News, “Florida Democrats looted a program intended to protect jobs for hardworking Americans and the mainstream media is doing nothing short of participating in the cover-up. The two pillars of media bias are their refusal to face the truth and their cult of willful ignorance. Meanwhile, a major political party is getting away with an $800,000 heist in broad daylight.”

With FDP members involved in the Biden campaign, and Florida being a critical swing state, the scandal can have far-reaching implications for the upcoming elections.

Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.

SHOULD JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS FIRST?

THAT IS THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY’S DOCTRINE!

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.

HOW MANY MORE ILLEGALS BEFORE THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS DESTROYED MIDDLE AMERICA ALL TOGETHER???

Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of increasing income inequality

HAVE YOU EVER WITNESSED A BANKSTER-OWNED DEMOCRAT POL DOING SOMETHING FOR MIDDLE AMERICA???

Joe Biden Promises Welcome for Venezuelan, Cuban Migrants

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images

Democratic candidate Joe Biden is offering a green light to migrants who want to flee from Cuba and Venezuela.

“The Venezuelan people need our support to recover their democracy and rebuild their country,” Biden told a political event in Florida on October 7.  “That’s why I would immediately grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans” in the United States, he said.

The TPS status allows foreigners to live and work in the United States, and to get welfare and access to K-12 schools. Since 2017, President Donald Trump has blocked TPS for Venezuelans, amid campaigns by Florida business groups and D.C.-based progressives. Trump has also worked to shrink TPS populations created by prior presidents.

Biden continued:

There are almost 10,000 Cubans languishing in tent camps along the Mexican border because of the administration’s anti-immigration agenda. That’s the administration actively separating Cuban families by not processing visas [and] through restrictions on family visits and remittances. I think we have to reverse that.

If implemented, Biden’s welcome policy “will set off a new exodus from those countries as people try to take advantage of the opportunity to stay in the United States,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Biden’s plan would hurt Americans, she said. “What scholars found specifically when they looked at the [1980] impact of Cubans in South Florida is that the wages of American workers who were competing for unskilled or less skilled jobs went down significantly … The usual suspects will benefit — the employers who will have a labor surplus and will get away with paying low wages, [and] the slumlords who can fill up their substandard affordable housing.”

The impact of low wages and surplus labor on Floridians was sketched in a June 2020 article in the Washington Post:

KISSIMMEE, FLA. — The pandemic had forced them from their home. Then they had run out of money for a motel. That left the car, which is where Sergine Lucien, Dave Marecheau and their two children were one recent night, parked in a lot that was tucked behind a row of empty storefronts.

Even when the economy was booming, Dave and Sergine had lived in a state of near homelessness, shuttling between seedy motels that had become a shelter of last resort for thousands in the Orlando area. Last year, after six years of the motel life, they had saved enough to finally make it out. They bought an RV and rented a spot in a quiet and clean mobile home community. Sergine promised the kids they would never go back.

Now all that was gone. In theory, they qualified for a $3,400 federal stimulus check, but they had no bank account or address to collect it. In theory, Dave was entitled to unemployment, but as of May only about 43 percent of the state’s 1.1 million claims had been paid.

“I would immediately grant temporary protected status to Venezuelans as President." 🇻

— @JoeBiden🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/4vGTctYTLX

— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) October 7, 2020

“We have to be extremely prudent in offering any kind of temporary humanitarian protection,” Vaughan told Breitbart News.

Politicians ignore the emotional incentive for migrants to get into the United States, Vaughan said. “For the privileged, it might be a dollars-and-cents calculation. But for others, it’s more than that — it’s an opportunity to live freely with the opportunity to have a decent quality of life [and] to put their children on a trajectory towards prosperity.”

TPS migrants are rewarded for being in the United States, she said. “They are allowed to immediately access welfare programs, as happened with the Cubans [in 1980 and 1994] and Haitians [in 2010] — unlike other asylum seekers or green card admission –  at an enormous cost.”

Even apparently small changes in border rules can precipitate floods of migrants, she said. The Central American migration began as “a trickle at first [in 2010], and quickly turned into a flood because the smuggler started to take advantage and fed this idea of coming here with kids, or sending your kids.”

The Central American migration was largely stopped in 2020 — but only because President Donald Trump and his deputies fought numerous high-profile battles with the agencies, various pro-migration groups, the establishment media, and many judges to impose a set of migration curbs.

Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular restrictions on immigration and visa workers.

But Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegal aliens, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.

“The number of [foreign] people who could potentially benefit [from Biden’s welcome] is limited only by the tolerance of our government,” Vaughan said. But Biden had his progressive supporters “live insulated from the effects of it, whether it is their schools, their job markets, or their neighborhoods … they live in a bubble.”

Biden’s allies “disregard the effects of their actions on regular Americans, which means it’s selfish elitism.” Like the characters in the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, she said, “they use working people for their own sexual and emotional gratification and cast them aside, caring nothing for the effects on people’s lives.”

Opposition to refugees is bigotry, sneers WashPo columnist.
If 
@crampell stepped outside the country club, she'd see cheap labor hurts Americans' income, society, productivity & competitiveness.
But snobs praise diversity to reject solidarity w/ citizens.
https://t.co/WdcYgwNU0R

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) October 7, 2

Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of increasing income inequality

25 September 2020

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).

Growth in Annualized Real Family Pre-tax, Pre-Transfer Income by Quantile from RAND, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” by C. Price and K. Edwards.

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.

Data source: RAND; Graphics by Marry Traverse for Civic Ventures; as published in TIME Magazine

The authors of the study also make several other important observations by breaking down their data on the basis of location, education, and race.

 Kamala Paints Picture of a ‘Harris Administration … with Joe Biden’ for Latino Voters

Joe Biden/Instagram

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) may only be the vice presidential nominee on the Democrat ticket, but she is already promising that a “Harris administration with Joe Biden” will be a boon to voters.

The California lawmaker, whom the former vice president said he chose as his running mate last month because of her readiness “to lead on day one,” told a group of Latino small business owners from Arizona on Saturday that it was vital they made the right choice this November.

“As part of our Build Back Better agenda, we will need to make sure you have a president in the White House who actually sees you, who understands your needs, who understands the dignity of your work, and who has your back,” Harris said in a five-minute virtual address to the group, according to the Arizona Republic.

“A Harris administration together with Joe Biden as the president of the United States, the Biden-Haris administration will provide access to 100 billion dollars in low-interest loans and investments for minority-business owners,” she added:

Harris’ remarks come as some Democrat strategists continue to express concerns over Biden’s fitness and stamina for the presidency. Since jumping into the 2020 race, the former vice president has flummoxed many with his frequent gaffes and misstatements on the campaign trail.

The issue came to a head last week when a one-time White House stenographer, who worked exclusively with Biden during the Obama administration, told the Washington Free Beacon that the former vice president had deteriorated since leaving office.

“It is a complete difference from what he was in 2017,” the stenographer said. “He’s lost a step and he doesn’t seem to have the same mental acuity as he did four years ago.”

“He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the pace of his speaking,” they added. “He’s a different guy.

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/

 

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

NEIL MUNRO

10 Sep 2020280

10:20

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

Joe Biden’s Immigration Plan to Accelerate Chain Migration Inflow

NEIL MUNRO

Democrat Joe Biden’s immigration plan contains hard-to-see policy changes that would dramatically accelerate the inflow of roughly four million chain migrants.

Biden’s promise is included in his 6,600 immigration platform, titled, “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants.” The document says:

As president, Biden will support family-based immigration by preserving family unification as a foundation of our immigration system; by allowing any approved applicant to receive a temporary non-immigrant visa until the permanent visa is processed;

“This is the equivalent to issuing temporary driver’s licenses to anyone who sends in an application,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director for the Center for Immigration Studies. “They can have the temporary license until they come back for the road test,’ she said.

If Biden’ plan is adopted, “the sky would be the limit … and besides blowing up the numerical limits on annual immigration [it] would be an enormous boost to the fake-document and fake-marriage industry,” she said, adding:

We don’t (or at least we try not to) let people come live here before they have completed the entire [immigration] application and vetting process … Under the Biden-Harris system, people would simply create fake relationships to get the [initial immigration] petition approved, and then get their temporary visa to come here and just [quit] the application, knowing there is very little interior enforcement to make them go home later, when or if the fraud is discovered.

Each year, roughly four million Americans turn 18 and begin using their skills and diligence to earn wages and salaries.

But the federal government slashes their ability to earn wages and buy homes by delivering roughly one million legal immigrants — including about 600,000 workers — to employers around the United States.

The federal government also allows companies to import and keep roughly 1.3 million foreign contract workers in myriad white collar jobs. Those jobs, including many well paying Silicon Valley jobs, are needed by U.S. graduates to advance in their careers.

Congress and the White House also allows companies to keep roughly 600,000 foreign workers in blue collar seasonal jobs. This inflow allows companies to avoid building a recruitment business to help young people find a variety of decent jobs around the United States.

Congress also does little to deport illegals — or even to deter companies from employing roughly eight million illegal migrant workers.

These federal economic policies help companies and investors by inflating the labor supply, so raising the price of housing, and spiking government spending.

Yet at least 150 million more foreigners want to migrate into the United States.

The federal government does not set any limits on the annual inflow of legal immigrants’ minor children and elderly parents.

But there are limits — and so, waiting lines — for other categories of immigrants, such as adult children, married children, and siblings.

Overall, roughly 3.6 million would-be migrants are waiting in multiple lines, according to a November 2019 report by the Department of State.

For example, more than two million additional people are waiting in the “Fourth Preference” — or F4 line — for the adult siblings of U.S. citizens, but only 65,000 are given green cards each year.

Similarly, the federal government awards 23,400 green cars for the married sons and daughters of green card and citizen immigrants. This “Third Preference,” or “F3,” waiting list includes 647,236 foreign sons and daughters — many of whom will also try to bring in their children and relatives once they are admitted into the United States.

Also, the government provides green cards to 23,400 adult children of new legal green card immigrants, who are not yet citizens. But federal data in November 2019 showed that this F2B  waiting list of 282,551 adult sons and daughters of green-card holders.

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

 

 

 


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