FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
As these companies continue to make billions, the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has rejected any increase in corporate taxes to fund vital programs to fight the pandemic or provide good jobs for laid off service workers.
Mass layoffs loom for Silicon Valley service workers
A recent report by the trade union-aligned Working Partnerships USA organization highlights the impending threat of mass layoffs among lower-wage service workers at Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many have encouraged or instructed their white-collar software developers, engineers, and managers to work from home to fulfil social distancing guidelines. This has led to a reduction in janitorial and security requirements and a shutdown of cafeteria and shuttle transportation services. Layoffs have already begun and may accelerate.
The Working Partnerships report says tech firms in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties employed roughly 14,000 unionized cafeteria, janitorial and security workers, largely through private contracting agencies, before the pandemic. With skyrocketing rents in the area, these workers—whose median wage is one-sixth the median wages paid to white-collar software developers at the big tech companies—are already teetering on the verge of poverty.
It is unclear how many have already been laid off. Google, Facebook and Twitter have continued to pay the furloughed service workers or reassigned them to other duties such as receptionists at the various buildings on campus. However, many other big tech companies, including Microsoft subsidiary Linkedin, Verizon subsidiary Yahoo! and biotech giant Genentech, have laid off janitors, shuttle drivers, cafeteria workers, receptionists and security guards.
The current unemployment rate in Silicon Valley is 9.3 percent, compared to just 2 percent in a pre-pandemic month. The additional mass layoffs of tech service workers would increase local unemployment by more than 10 percent, the report noted.
The report also found:
- Up to 12,000 service workers could lose health insurance coverage, along with family members who depend on the coverage.
- An estimated 6,500 families with children could be at risk of being unable to pay rent.
- An estimated 8,300 renters could be at risk of being unable to pay rent.
Microsoft, which laid off service workers at its Silicon Valley Linkedin office, made $14 billion in profit in a single quarter. Tesla, led by CEO Elon Musk, who just surpassed Bill Gates to become the second richest man in the world, with $127 billion—was the first to lay off blue collar service workers in April, even though it was also one of the first to restart operations in Silicon Salley in May, in defiance of County regulations.
Verizon, which laid off service workers who had been working at the Yahoo! office for several years, made over $4 billion in profits last quarter. Facebook and Google together have the same number of employees as General Motors. But the market capitalization of Facebook and Google is $1.7 trillion, about 41 times that of GM.
The biggest tech companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google) and Netflix—have raked in it during the pandemic, with stock prices rising over 45 percent year-to-date, hitting historic highs and producing a combined value of over $5.5 trillion. These corporations have also received billions in public subsidies and tax incentives, including at least $654 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds.
The unions that claim to represent these service workers, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), UNITE HERE and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), have sought to channel workers’ anger into fruitless appeals to management and the Democratic Party. UNITE HERE held a protest of laid off workers in early September outside the Yahoo! office after a round of more than 100 layoffs. On November 17, the union held another protest outside the home of Verizon CEO Guru Gowrappan. But the unions have steadfastly opposed any strike action that would quickly pit workers against the Democratic Party, which controls every level of government in California.
Some of those who were laid off as long ago as September have not received unemployment benefits as of mid-November. Erika Sanchez, a Verizon cafeteria worker at the Sunnyvale office interviewed by NBC News, was making $19 an hour or about $38,000 per year. She needs to pay rent and support her son who studies at the University of California, Berkeley. So far, she has not received any unemployment benefits. Like millions across the country, she receives her food through a non-profit and is also trying to make some money selling jewelry and cleaning homes with a friend.
After handing major corporations and Wall Street a multi-trillion-dollar bailout in the bipartisan CARES Act, Congressional Democrats and Republicans have allowed federal aid to expire and refused to enact any measures to prevent laid off workers from falling into destitution. On the contrary, both parties are deliberately delaying any future stimulus funds to force workers back to work under perilous conditions despite the rampant pandemic.
The Democratic Party-run California state government has been no more forthcoming with aid to the unemployed. Silicon Valley companies have long lobbied for tax breaks with claims such as UC Berkeley economics professor Enrico Moretti’s assertion that each tech job creates five service jobs. As these companies continue to make billions, the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has rejected any increase in corporate taxes to fund vital programs to fight the pandemic or provide good jobs for laid off service workers. Nor has the Newsom administration done anything to provide any relief from evictions for laid off workers like Erika Sanchez.
To protect their livelihoods, active and laid off tech service workers must form rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to fight for the rehiring of all laid off workers. These committees must base their demands not on what the employers and the government claim is affordable but on what is socially necessary to safely contain the pandemic and ensure dignified lives for all workers. This is necessarily a political struggle against the Democrats, Republicans and the trade unions.
Tech service workers must form the strongest links possible with white-collar workers at their companies as well as service workers, teachers and all other sections of the working class in the US and internationally to carry out this fight. The vast fortunes of Bezos, Musk and the other billionaires must be expropriated, and the tech and telecommunication giants transformed into public utilities.
Billionaires Back Claim That Only Amnesty and Illegals Can Save America
Getty Images
13 Nov 2020800
5:54
The United States’ complex economy cannot recover from the coronavirus crash without an amnesty for at least 11 million illegals, including the stoop labor in the fields, according to an article that was written, posted, and touted by advocates for billionaires.
The pro-amnesty article said:
Our economic recovery from the pandemic is entirely reliant on providing a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people currently living in the US. There’s no way forward without doing right by the undocumented individuals who are keeping all Americans alive as our country continues to combat the coronavirus crisis.
“It’s not just economic gibberish — it is demeaning to Americans,” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
He added, “I don’t even know if that’s the way they mean it because they’re just lobbyists saying whatever they think is going to promote their issue. But it really does come across that way and, to use the cliche: This is why you got Trump.”
In reality, prosperity for ordinary Americans rose rapidly in Trump’s lower-migration economy, without any amnesty. Bloomberg reported October 30:
In 2016, real median household income was $62,898, just $257 above its level in 1999. Over the next three years it grew almost $6,000, to $68,703. That’s perhaps why, despite the pandemic, 56% of U.S. voters polled last month said their families were better off today than they were four years ago.
The pro-amnesty article’s author is Alida Garcia. She works for Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group as a director of coalitions and policy. Zuckerberg’s group was created to pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty that would have transferred even more wealth from wage earners to investors. The founding members and donors include many wealthy investors, such as Eric Schmidt, the former chief of Google, and Greg Penner, the chairman of Walmart.
FWD.us is now chaired by David Plouffe, a Zuckerberg advisor who also seems to have played a critical role in spiking urban turnout for Biden in several states.
FWD.us director Todd Schulte touted Garcia’s claim as a “really important OpEd.”
FWD.us supports multiple campaigns to get cheap labor for investors. For example, the group funded the p.r. campaign that got the Supreme Court to block Trump’s cancellation of President Barack Obama’s award of work permits to roughly 800,000 illegal migrants under the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” amnesty.
The Garcia article was posted by the Milken Institute, run by Michael Milkin. He earned a fortune — plus a 10-year jail sentence and a $600 million fine — while working on Wall Street.
The Milken Institute also touts cheap-labor migration into the United States and Europe. For example, Garcia’s article calls for an economy powered by immigrant workers and consumers, not by Americans, their children, and their work:
We should transform our immigration system fundamentally … Immigration can power the next century of American moral leadership, not just economic leadership.
…
We need individuals to be able to come to the US to contribute across a wide array of industries and skill levels, helping to infuse our country with talent, creativity, and innovative energy from all over the world.
The article comes as the billionaire groups prepare a 2020 blitz to shove a cheap labor bill through the House and Senate.
The push will likely showcase attractive young illegals while hiding the economic transfer in complexity and push polls. The lobbyists will also try to get their wealth-shifting measure through the legislative via a series of complex and obscure bills that will likely be ignored by the legacy media.
Garcia’s billionaire-boosted article is “opportunism secure in the knowledge that they won’t be mocked by legacy media figures … [so] they don’t realize when they verge into the preposterous,” Krikorian said. He added, “The legacy elite shares their perspective so that they’re not going to mock them the way they deserve to be mocked …. There’s nobody at their shop or even anyone that they talk to or interact with that would tell them, ‘This is comical; why don’t you dial it back just a little bit?'”
But the article is also “a continuation of the idea that Americans are inadequate … that without immigration, we can’t function,” said Krikorian. It is “insulting to everybody who’s not an illegal alien [to claim] that a vast continental nation with a third of a billion people can’t function without a few million illegal immigrants.”
The idea is also embedded in the establishment’s post-1950s insistence that the United States is only a “nation of immigrants,” instead of a nation of and for Americans.
Overall, open-ended migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants help transfer massive wealth from American wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.
Progressives romanticize stoop labor as vibrantly diverse agriculture.
That condescension is great for companies b/c it perfumes their $$-decision to not buy labor-saving & clean machines.
Gov't should incentivize US mechanization over #H2a migration.https://t.co/tPbAhMaSKS
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) April 6, 2020
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEGALS). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
…or will it be continued non-enforcement? No matter, Wall Street will write it!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/bidens-plan-to-fix-americas-jobless.html
THE BIDEN AMNESTY - Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine labor rights, and even redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities. NEIL MUNRO
Facebook Suppressed
Breitbart, Promoted CNN,
Following Election
Immediately following the November 2020 Election, Facebook suppressed what it considers “hyperpartisan” news pages, including Breitbart News, while promoting what it considers “authoritative” news pages such as CNN, according to the New York Times.
As reported by the Times, Facebook did this buy adjusting its secret “quality score” for publishers to promote certain publishers and to downrank others on the Facebook news feed, the mix of news items and posts from friends and other accounts that greets users when they log on to the platform.
Facebook employees reportedly:
…proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls “news ecosystem quality” scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.
Typically, N.E.Q. scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users’ feeds. But several days after the election, Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to N.E.Q. scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
The pretext, according to the Times, was the spread of “election-related misinformation” in the days after the election. However, incredibly, the suppression was not apparently based on post-election content published. The move was tantamount to what in a legal First Amendment context would be considered an illegal prior restraint of speech.
On a call with reporters, a Facebook executive said the change was temporary, although they did not indicate for how long.
According to the Times’ report, some Facebook employees want the suppression of Breitbart News to become permanent. The employees reportedly asked for the “nicer news feed,” one suppressing Breitbart News and boosting CNN, to be the new normal — regardless of how the site’s users react.
Guy Rosen, a Facebook executive who oversees the integrity division that is in charge of cleaning up the platform, said on a call with reporters last week that the changes were always meant to be temporary. “There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” he said. John Hegeman, who oversees the news feed, said in an interview that while Facebook might roll back these experiments, it would study and learn from them.
Breitbart News has reached out to Facebook for comment.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
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