Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden
transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan
administration takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an
economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal
agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of
a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall
Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft,
where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams”
named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has
been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising
the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those
teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried
that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many
of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of
center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press
secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who
have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think
tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon,
partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough
experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings
Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about
the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised
the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff,
Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our
eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full
of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the
struggles of the working class,” complains
left-leaning activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in
front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders
hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election,
Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent
contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP)
(Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team
officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the
40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or
recent lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their
cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election,
and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican
operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an
enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition
teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by
making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective
agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden
campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked
with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the
transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary
function.
With a single exception, the agency review team members
mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh
Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before
starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the
transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to
undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee
Louis DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden
transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize
their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get
Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who
worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the
group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner”
to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and
temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all
the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one,
they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white
males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor
who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics
from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes
Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches
entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups
is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In
the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the
American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a
sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the
Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written
on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related
teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not
stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the
lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking
executives to
help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new
president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same
banks.
There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman
Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out.
JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer
of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank
was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an
agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to be surprising to
progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the agency review
teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the summer, the American Prospect
published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative
foray into corporate America. Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official
Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid,
communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax
romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in
experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience
was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for
years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of
Expertise” author
Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently
anti-Trump Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the
government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left
are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not
a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned
against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but
it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie
Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very
much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It
was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist
resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made
that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry,
to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team
officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun
Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense,
in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are
veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice
Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is
troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives”
like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is
both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic
Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the
Treasury transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials
who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become
rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them.
But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham
& Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it
may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks
says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important
institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is
simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic,
social and racial inequalities.
It doesn’t help matters that, today, tech giants are distrusted
by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were run out of Palo Alto
garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad companies of a century
ago.
And like those companies, they know how to use their influence.
In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential technology firms —
Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government affairs,” better known as
lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may have been a subtle warning
to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice President-elect
Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of Justice under
President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber. Jake
Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for
Uber.
The company recently won a major victory in California
with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal
efforts to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not
contractors. That’s exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the
Biden administration must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley in 2017. They
could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free market
capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry
players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that
covers technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser, executive director of
the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has called, without much
affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team for the Office of
Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly from Silicon
Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous amount of power,” says
Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money is doled out
and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role in Trump’s
impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for covert
exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the
Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration
could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the former Sanders adviser,
recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.” The head, in this case,
is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has
long been a skeptic.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,” Gray says. She reasons
that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest movement in American history”
to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted to do much for conservative
causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be made to hear the voices of
progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She points out that there
is widespread support for progressive legislation like the $15 minimum
wage in Florida,
even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small
amounts of drugs, known as Measure
110, was even more
popular than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive ideas are more
popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop screaming that
reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed to keep
fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval Office
once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
DO THE MATH! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE
DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT OPEN BORDERS. ALL DEMOCRATS WANT GLOBALIST TO
KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
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.
While America’s working and middle class have been
subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of
cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million
mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country
annually — the billionaire class has experienced historic
salary gains." Sen. Josh Hawley
"This is how they will destroy America from within. The
leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked
with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the
cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing
but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences
of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug
dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned
an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy
alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the
statesmanship of today.” THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
Biden’s Chief of Staff
Worked on Behalf of Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
13 Nov 2020314
3:13
Democrat Joe Biden has chosen Ronald Klain to be his chief of
staff should he enter the White House in January. Klain worked on behalf of
Silicon Valley executives and their interests, which include providing tech
corporations with an endless supply of H-1B foreign visa workers and more free
trade.
Klain, who was made Biden’s incoming chief of staff this week, served on the
executive council of TechNet — a firm that promotes the interests of Silicon
Valley’s tech corporations in Washington, D.C. Klain served on the
council alongside executives from the Oracle Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise,
Google, Visa, Apple, and Microsoft.
TechNet, most recently, joined a lawsuit against President Trump’s reforms to the H-1B
visa program that sought to prioritize unemployed Americans for jobs rather
than allowing businesses to continue importing foreign workers.
TechNet is one of the groups that has filed
an amicus brief to oppose the new regulations on H-1B visas. https://t.co/ofY4GJ2sVR
— U.S. Tech Workers (@USTechWorkers) November 12, 2020
Trump’s seeking to force businesses to hire Americans over
importing foreign visa workers is an affront to Silicon Valley’s tech
corporations, those represented by TechNet, who advocate for an endless flow of
H-1B foreign visa workers.
There are about 650,000 H-1B
visa workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans
are often laid off and forced to train
their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart
News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to
foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech
workers in Silicon Valley, California, 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. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing
firms are from India.
TechNet’s listed immigration goals include
allowing corporations to dictate the annual level of legal immigration to the
United States and the elimination of per-country caps that would effectively let India and
China monopolize the U.S. green card system.
The group’s goals on trade are in direct opposition to President
Trump’s economic nationalist agenda that has imposed tariffs on foreign imports
from China, Canada, Europe, and other parts of the globe.
TechNet’s trade goals include reducing “tariff
and non-tariff barriers to information, communications, and advanced energy
technology products, services, and investments” as well as “protections for the
free flow of data across borders…”
While Biden has vowed to flood the U.S.
labor market with more foreign workers to compete against Americans for jobs,
he has shied away from questions on whether he will eliminate tariffs on
foreign imports that were imposed by Trump. Such elimination of tariffs would
be a boon to multinational corporations that offshore their production and jobs
overseas only to import their products back into the U.S. market, often with no
penalties for doing so.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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
THE BIDEN AMNESTY
…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
|
|
Michelle Malkin: There
Is NO American Worker Shortage
Earlier, by Michelle
Malkin: A Day Without American
Tech Workers
"We're full, our system's full, our country's full!" That was President Donald Trump last year at our southern
border.
"Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on
foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American
families." That was Trump in January 2017 at his inaugural address.
"The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps
unemployment high, and makes it difficult... to earn a middle class wage."
That was presidential candidate Trump in 2016.
Contrast those clarion "America First" statements with
the apparent hysteria of Trump's current acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who was
caught on tape telling a private audience of elites in
England last week: "We are desperate—desperate—for more people. We are
running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we've had in our nation
over the last four years. We need more immigrants."
Mulvaney reportedly went on to push for "expanding"
merit- and employment-based immigration to fill all the high-skilled jobs that
Americans purportedly aren't capable of filling. By how much, for how long, in
which visa categories and under what conditions this "expansion"
should happen, Mulvaney is not reported to have detailed. (He will be featured
at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning. It would be nice if someone asked him
to elaborate, wouldn't it?)
"Running out of people" is typical Beltway swamp talk
from a big business lobbyist trafficking in open borders "Chicken
Little" alarmism. Has Mulvaney opened a newspaper or browsed the internet
in the last 10 years? How about the last week? Over a 48-hour period, I compiled a Twitter thread of more than 50 stories of tens of thousands of recent
U.S. worker layoffs in tech and other high-skilled industries. Among the U.S.
corporations and institutions responsible for laying off, replacing, offshoring, and outsourcing tens of thousands of
American jobs:
Wayfair, TripAdvisor, LogMeIn,
Inc., Zume Pizza, VMWare, Shutterfly, Intel, Comcast, Xilinx, 23andMe,
NortonLifeLock, AT&T, Macy's, Walgreens, Uber, Lyft, UCSF Medical Center, Baptist
Health, Sysco, WeWork, American Family Insurance, Tennessee Valley Authority, Amway,
UPS subsidiary Coyote Logistics, Comcast, Lime, Bird, Unicorn, Getaround,
Cerner, Oracle, Samsung US, Edmunds.com, Textron Aviation, Morgan Stanley,
Spirit AeroSystems, Mozilla, UiPath, Plexus, Cisco, Ancestry.com, Clover
Health, State Street Corporation, Anthem, Transamerica, Verizon, MassMutual, Disney, Carnival, Abbott Labs,
EmblemHealth, Harley Davidson, Cargill, Eversource Energy, Best Buy, Southern California Edison and Qualcomm.
The most recent entry in my U.S. worker layoffs thread came in
Monday from Expedia, which announced it is laying off 12% of its information
technology workforce (roughly 3,000), including 500 employees at its Seattle
headquarters. Tip of the iceberg. As leading American workers' employment attorney and Protect US Workers advocate Sara Blackwell (right)
points out, "so many companies are able to conduct this awful business
model under the radar." And they
get away with it because it's legal, workers are silenced, and most Americans
"just do not care because it does not yet touch them personally."
Do we "need more immigrants," as
Mulvaney claims? Marie Larson, an American mom who founded the American Workers Coalition with Barbara Birch and Hilarie Gamm, told me: "I talk
to Americans almost daily who are being discriminated against, who keep getting
laid off by Indian managers, who have
to train their foreign replacements to get the much-needed severance packages,
who have to pull kids out of college because they can't afford it, even having
to sell their houses. These are STEM workers, who got
the 'right' degrees and did everything they were supposed to do, only to have
our government turn their back and sell out to big businesses push for even
more H-1Bs." Tech firms cut 64,166 American jobs in 2019, up
351% from 14,230 in 2018.
Are we so "desperate" for more bodies to "fuel
economic growth?" Let's recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of
330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million
immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally.
One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An
estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including
the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That
doesn't include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign
"students" now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as
the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work
with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor
market shortages.
"We" ordinary Americans don't need more immigrants.
Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines
of cheap foreign labor. They've
been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s,
when the National Science Foundation's Erich Bloch hyped a STEM
shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
Remember: The only persistent tech worker shortage in America is
a shortage of workers at the wage employers want to pay. Beltway swampers
gnashing their teeth over barren American worker recruitment pools are full of
it.
Michelle Malkin [Email her] is the
author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and
Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s
review. Click here for Michelle
Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin is also the author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks
& Cronies, ,Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American
Tinkerpreneurs, and Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway
Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers.
Malkin is author of the book, "Open Borders, Inc.: Who's Funding America's
Destruction," available directly from
VDARE.com in hardcover. To find out
more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate
writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. HOME TO
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment