Wednesday, February 5, 2020

TRUMPERnomics - Trump did not 'lifte people of welfare'. He singled off the poor and cut them off to offset tax cuts for the rich! “The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.” JOSEPH STIGLITZ

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


Trump Didn’t “Lift People Off Welfare.” He Cut Them Off.

Photo: Leah Millis/Getty Images
Americans are flourishing, Donald Trump insisted during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. Unemployment is down; so is poverty. Everyone is delighted and having a very good time. “Under the last administration, more than 10 million people were added to the food-stamp rolls,” he added. “Under my administration, 7 million Americans have come off of food stamps, and 10 million people have been lifted off of welfare.” Congressional Republicans leapt to their feet and roared approval.
I note, because this is a Trump speech, and certain traditions must be observed: The president is not telling the full truth. The number of Americans on food stamps did increase during the Obama administration. But the increase was linked to the recession, which Obama did not cause. Later, in 2014, Obama signed a version of the annual farm bill that cut the food-stamp budget by $800 million. If Trump’s criticism is that the wastrel Democratic president threw gobs of money away on lazy poor people, it doesn’t quite hold.
Trump’s braggadocio about his own record is similarly undermined by reality. The president spoke tonight of a “blue-collar boom,” an economic golden age instigated by his administration’s deregulatory policies. This is false — unemployment is down, but wages are largely stagnant, and income inequality reached historic heights last year. People didn’t stop using food stamps because their economic circumstances had drastically improved. The percentage of Americans on food stamps shrank because the Trump administration changed eligibility standards. The president took help away from people who needed it. That’s not proof of a blue-collar boom. In fact, the administration has demonstrated no real interest in creating a blue-collar boom at all.
Trump’s economic priorities consist of slashing welfare, deregulating industry, and passing tax cuts that mostly enrich the wealthiest people in America. No standing ovation can obscure the basic fact that the Trump presidency has been disastrous for the poor.

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

 

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.” 
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi


DONALD TRUMP - I am sovereign of America ! The laws and Constitution do not apply to me, my parasite family, Wall Street or the rich!

Impeachment Exposed Trump’s Authoritarian Ambitions




This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement - but a logic nonetheless. This is the story of how an unparalleled president has scrambled to survive and tested the strength of America’s democracy and its common heart as a nation.
Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
One of the few live debates of the Trump era between intellectuals who remain on speaking terms is whether Donald Trump poses a real danger to the republic. His election spurred a burst of warnings from democracy scholars that Trump fits at least an early pattern of “democratic backsliding,” in which populist authoritarians would lead previously healthy democracies into dictatorship (or something closer to it). This warning — the most influential of which was How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — was met with skepticism from both the far left and the center-right. Even some conservative Trump critics, like Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens, insist the Republic remains safe from Trump’s predations, due to a combination of his own ineptitude or restraints imposed by his fellow partisans.
But his rapid defeat of impeachment charges is a flashing red light. It is not mainly the final verdict, which has seemed inevitable for weeks, that should concern supporters of democracy. It is the entire sham process, which seemed to ratify Trump’s command of his party and encourage his belief in untrammeled power. The Trump who emerges vindicated from his trial is a dangerous man. The behavior of the president and his party should make this more clear to those who have denied it.
When the Ukraine scandal was first exposed in September, it shared some an important traits with presidential scandals that have come before (Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Bill Clinton’s affair): Both parties agreed the alleged conduct was serious and wrong. While many Republicans denied that Trump had withheld aid and a meeting to pressure Ukraine to investigate his opponents, but at first, very few of them defended such behavior. Lindsey Graham said, “If you could show me that Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing”; Steve Doocy — Steve Doocy! — said, “If the president said, ‘I will give you the money, but you have got to investigate Joe Biden,’ that is really off-the-rails wrong.”
Nixon’s misconduct was revealed, and he resigned. Ronald Reagan was never shown to have ordered the covert arms sale and aid to the contras, but apologized for failing to stop his subordinates from doing it, cleaned house, and was not impeached. Clinton apologized, was impeached anyway, but stayed in office.
Trump’s scandal has followed a novel track. The quid pro quo scenario that most Republicans initially said would be totally unacceptable has been borne out. But unlike Clinton and Reagan, Trump offered no apology, and unlike Nixon, his party did not abandon him. Trump managed a feat his predecessors (who were far more popular) could not, and probably would not have dreamed possible: to redefine his misconduct as acceptable, even “perfect.”
A handful of Republican senators did concede Trump’s behavior was less than perfect. But the two decisive votes, Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander, also concluded that since they had decided not to acquit, they would block any further evidence that would discomfit their Republican colleagues who refused to admit Trump had even committed the acts he was accused of. And so Trump can walk away insisting his actions were perfect, and the Senate has vindicated him, while dismissing as irrelevant testimony that proves he is lying. The handful who agree Trump is lying decided to cooperate in a cover-up that will enable him to sustain the lie.
The key development in Trump’s defense turned out to be his legal team’s introduction of the audacious argument that “abuse of power” is not an impeachable offense. The legal reasoning allowed Trump’s softest supporters among the Senate Republican caucus to find their way to the conclusion that more evidence would be unnecessary. After all, since abuse of power is not a crime, it simply doesn’t matter how thoroughly Democrats prove it.
Before the impeachment trial, hardly anybody endorsed this novel constitutional doctrine, which had the idiosyncratic support of Alan Dershowitz. (Dershowitz argued that even if Trump allowed Russia to occupy Alaska, he could not be impeached, an extreme scenario that ought to have illustrated the absurdity of his logic.) But as Republicans embraced it out of sheer necessity, the idea that a president can only be impeached over clear illegality, and not the abuse of legal powers, quickly gained wide acceptance. “It isn’t legitimate to toss a President from office because the House thinks otherwise legal acts were done with ‘corrupt motives,’” editorialized the influential Wall Street Journal. The Journal and Dershowitz did not say a president can commit crimes, but they did say he can use any formal powers afforded the office in any way he sees fit.
This is an argument that would enable almost limitless abuse. Presidents could not only dangle aid to foreign countries in return for investigations of their opponents, they could do the same with domestic aid. (Want that disaster aid, governor? Let’s talk about an endorsement, or maybe an investigation into my opponent’s “corruption.”) They could offer pardons in advance to allies who commit crimes on their behalf — voter fraud, murdering reporters or opposition-party leaders, you name it.
During the impeachment trial, Maine senator Angus King posed a clever thought experiment. What if the president privately warned Israel he would hold up military aid unless its prime minister denounced the president’s rival as an anti-Semite? Under the Republican legal reasoning, wouldn’t such an action be completely legitimate? (The president could simply claim to be concerned about anti-Semitism, just as Trump purports to be concerned about corruption.) Trump’s lawyers dismissed it as a hypothetical case, not even attempting to show how their constitutional principles would exclude it.
How Democracies Die actually devotes significant attention to this very possibility. A — perhaps the — main threat it identifies is that a president will abuse his powers through legal means, not by violating the law. For that very reason, it identifies democratic norms, not laws, as the defensive wall against autocracy. The powers of government simply offer too many possibilities for abuse to foreclose all of them through explicit laws. Norms are necessary to prevent a president from entrenching himself in power, by using it to reward allies or smearing or intimidating critics.
It is therefore especially chilling that Trump’s impeachment not only centers on exactly such an action (Trump using his authority to steer foreign policy to discredit domestic rivals), but that his fellow partisans got around to defending the violation of norms as a general practice. By insisting that only an explicit crime is impeachable, they are defending not only Trump’s actual misconduct but the entire category of norm violation. The Republican impeachment defense is an almost-literal reprise of the arguments in How Democracies Die, but in reverse.
Nearly as discouraging as their license for presidential abuses of power is their unanimous support for Trump’s refusal to acknowledge congressional oversight, the second count of impeachment. Trump’s lawyers have claimed that he is merely defending presidential turf, in the same manner all modern presidents have. “It was not simply absolute defiance and not simply a blanket assertion that we won’t do anything,” protested Pat Philbin during the Senate trial.
Trump himself has not even bothered with this pretense. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” he has boasted. His reasoning for his absolutist position is telling. “These aren’t, like, impartial people,” the president declared of Congress. “The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” The whole structure of the Constitution assumes Congress will maintain political rivalry against the president, so that the ambitions of one branch counteract those of the other. Trump has dismissed the entire logic of the constitutional system. His logic is that of the populist authoritarian. Congress’s political interests make it inherently illegitimate. Through his misleading red maps, constant invocations of his “landslide” victory, reminders of his 63 million votes, Trump is reinforcing his belief that he alone represents the will of the people incarnate.
Yet even the handful of Republicans who expressed a modicum of concern over Trump’s extortion of Ukraine have contemptuously waved away the second article of impeachment, which Lamar Alexander called “frivolous.” Combined with their dismissal of abuse of power, they are arguing not only that the president cannot be impeached over any behavior that isn’t criminal, he can withhold all documents and testimony into any investigation that might establish behavior that is criminal. Between the two, what enforcement mechanism is there against misconduct — other than the president blurting out his crimes in public? (And perhaps, given Trump’s propensity to do exactly that, not even then?)
In the wake of the Mueller investigation, Trump has pushed for, and received, investigations into the investigators. He will almost assuredly do so again. His allies are already working to expose the whistle-blower — a vindictive move that serves the sole objective of intimidating anybody else in government who might report Trump’s wrongdoing. Lindsey Graham is vowing to open the investigation of Joe Biden that Trump tried to get Ukraine to do for him. Trump is trying to block the publication of John Bolton’s book, and Gabriel Sherman reports Trump is trying to gin up a criminal investigation.
Impeaching Trump for his high crimes did not cause or even exacerbate the threat. It exposed a threat that was already there — the president’s authoritarian ambitions, and the complicity of his party. With the honorable exception of Mitt Romney, the Republican Party has engaged in what Levitsky and Ziblatt call “ideological collusion,” the partnering with autocratic politics in order to advance their policy goals, rather than break ranks and join the opposition. Trump has taken note. His next high crime is probably already underway.

A VERY STABLE GENIUS


“This taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date.” - Dwight Garner, The New York Times

THE BOOK

Washington Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and White House bureau chief Philip Rucker, both Pulitzer Prize winners, provide the definitive insider narrative of Donald Trump’s unique presidency with shocking new reporting and insight into its implications.
“I alone can fix it.” So went Donald J. Trump’s march to the presidency on July 21, 2016, when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, promising to restore what he described as a fallen nation. Yet over the subsequent years, as he has undertaken the actual work of the commander in chief, it has been hard to see beyond the daily chaos of scandal, investigation, and constant bluster. It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for one of pure and uninhibited chaos, but there were patterns to his behavior and that of his associates. The universal value of the Trump administration is loyalty - not to the country, but to the president himself - and Trump’s North Star has been the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky and mistrustful democracy.
Leonnig and Rucker, with deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., tell of rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance. Relying on scores of exclusive new interviews with some of the most senior members of the Trump administration and other firsthand witnesses, the authors reveal the forty-fifth president up close, taking readers inside Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as well as the president’s own haphazard but ultimately successful legal defense. Here for the first time certain officials who have felt honor-bound not to publicly criticize a sitting president or to divulge what they witnessed in a position of trust tell the truth for the benefit of history.
This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement - but a logic nonetheless. This is the story of how an unparalleled president has scrambled to survive and tested the strength of America’s democracy and its common heart as a nation.


AMERICA: NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!!!



Lawsuit Alleges Anti-American Bias by Indian Managers in U.S. Workplaces

In this photograph taken on December 13, 2016, an employee of Indian IT security solutions company Innefu Labs works at their offices in New Delhi. In the darkened offices of a tech start-up, a handful of computer engineers sift through a mountain of intelligence data that would normally be the …
SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty
21:47

A legal immigrant is suing an Indian outsourcing firm for allegedly violating U.S. workplace laws and anti-discrimination laws — and is also spotlighting claims the H-1B visa worker program is wrecking U.S. professionals’ workplaces from coast to coast.
Nitin Degaonkar is an Indian business executive who has a green card and is a legal immigrant with full legal rights against age and national discrimination.
He claims in his lawsuit that Infosys “discriminatingly denied me fair, well-deserved, and rightful opportunities of work, positions, commensurate compensations, promotions, salary raise and opportunities of career advancement on the basis of my national origin as a US Worker, a Protected Individual and my Age.”
Infosys Ltd. is one of the earliest and largest Indian outsourcing companies. It makes money for its shareholders by providing cheap Indian visa workers to take college-level jobs in U.S. companies. 
Degaonkar’s lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas alleges he was hired by Infosys in January 2017 but was “benched” while Infosys sent imported Indian H-1B workers to fill jobs at U.S. based companies. 
I was denied my rights of working on the projects for a long period of five months and several Nonimmigrant H1-B Visa employees were deployed by Defendant 1 [Infosys]  … and almost all such vacancies were filled with Nonimmigrant H1-B Visa employees with false LCAs [federal documents] by Infosys. 
Hundreds of Nonimmigrant H1-B workers have been assigned projects in a continued manner for month after month and year after year all along [instead of U.S. workers]
Defendants have discriminatingly and illegally appointed several Nonimmigrant H1-B Visa employees who have less qualifications and less work experience than me at higher job levels and at higher salaries than me.
Upon information and belief, I allege that almost all these vacancies have been filled with the Nonimmigrant employees by Defendant 1 by making false claims in the Labor Condition Applications made to the USCIS, required under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The company also allegedly excluded Americans from a benefit program provided to Indian workers, the lawsuit says:
Infosys has facilities of loans to employees, in particular, the loan scheme for the purchase of vehicle. However, the facility is made exclusive for the NonImmigrant H1-B Visa employees; the US Workers cannot avail this facility.
Infosys repeatedly declined to answer questions from Breitbart News.
Infosys makes most of its U.S. revenue by importing and renting many thousands of Indian H-1B visa-workers to U.S. companies at prices far above the salaries paid to the Indian workers. The company also uses L-1 visa-workers, Indians with STEM-OPT work permits, and it recently paid a fine in California for allegedly using roughly 500 visitors with B-1 visas to perform work. The company has also begun using TN visas to import Indians living in Mexico or Canada.
There are no legal limits on the number of visa workers that can be imported by Infosys and other outsourcing companies nor any rule to ensure the companies hire Americans before importing workers.
Infosys is part of the hidden U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy where U.S. and Indian companies employ roughly 1.5 million legal foreign white collar visa workers, including about 900,000 Indian graduates. This huge visa worker population augments the growing population of college-trained legal immigrants and illegal migrants — and it has pushed huge numbers of American graduates out of jobs and also suppressed their wages.
For example, this outsourcing economy has dramatically shifted the demographics of the U.S. workforce and has even made U.S.-born workers a minority in some areas, such as Silicon Valley.


The outsourcing strategy makes sense for the companies and investors — U.S. companies get relatively cheap Indian workers, and Indian and U.S. shareholders gain U.S. revenue and profits.
This hidden economy also gives U.S.-based Indian managers huge power over their workers. They can offer Indian workers the opportunity of a lifetime — jobs in the United States that offer pay far above Indian wages, and also offer the chance of winning the huge prize of U.S green cards. Those green cards are especially valuable because they provide U.S. citizenship for the Indian workers, plus their spouses, parents, children, and grandchildren.
But that four-cornered deal has been a disaster for millions of American graduates who have been pushed out of jobs and careers, despite their college debts and the cost of raising their families.
Breitbart News has spoken to numerous Indian and U.S. employees who describe India’s workplace culture as exploitative, discriminatory, and illegal under U.S. laws. The Indian and U.S. workers have declined to talk on the record.
These employees have told Breitbart the most-skilled Americans cannot persuade Indian managers to hire them — because even the least-skilled Indian job-seekers will work longer hours for less money, and will travel from one contract job to another without complaint to the media or to senior managers.
U.S. graduates also get sidelined because they cannot be trusted to accept Indian-style office culture, in which employees are often pressured to provide kickbacks to the managers and to minimize criticism of bad decisions, especially if the Indian managers belong to a higher caste. Other barriers to hiring, say Indians and Americans, is that Americans demand English be the normal language for workplace conversations, and may blow the whistle on the Indian managers who are quietly rewarded by their senior managers for importing more Indian workers into each American workplace.
“Indians hire Indians,” U.S. graduates tell Breitbart News.
“I get a phone call from an Indian [hiring manager], and he says, ‘I have this role [temporary job for you] at this bank,” one female American consultant in New York told Breitbart News.
The hiring manager worked for a contract-labor firm that provides regulatory-compliance experts to U.S. banks. “It turned out the [Indian] hiring manager is working with this [Indian bank manager] guy, so I was supposed to be paid a thousand [dollars] and to pay this guy $200 a day,” she said. She was desperate for the job, and so she agreed to pay the kickback, she said. But, she added, “I was pushed out the door — again, another Indian H-1B came on board — and I was let go after three months.”
“I have a lot of Indian friends who are wonderful, hard-working people. But I know a lot of Americans, and we can’t get jobs [because] all the jobs are taken over by Indian [visa workers],” she said, adding, “I’ve had Indians interview me [for a job] and they would not shake my hand.”
Americans’ resumes rarely reach hiring managers in Silicon Valley firms because Indian hiring managers push fellow Indians to the head of the line, said John from Silicon Valley. “If you look around the Valley, everyone in H.R. is Indian … It just amazes me how obvious this is — it is just right out in the open,” he said. “If you say anything about it, they shut you down … so you can’t really talk about it.”
Indian managers are allowed to take over U.S. offices because of “corporate greed — [U.S. executives] do not care about the employees anymore,” said Jim from Texas:
It is all about the bottom line. The vice-president promises his manager; ‘I’m going to reduce costs and employees so that our stockholders can look at how much money they are making’ … It is now flooded so much to a point where it makes it difficult to have a career — I have not had a raise in six years.
Jay Palmer, a U.S. worker whose job as transferred to Indian workers, is helping Degaonkar and other Indian-born workers claim their legal rights in U.S. courts. Palmer declined to comment, but emailed a statement to Breitbart News, “I am very proud of our great President, Ivanka, and Jared Kushner in regards to Friday’s Executive Order On Human Trafficking (TVPA) which will help eradicate “Forced Labor” in our great country.”

Justice Dept. arrests Indian CEO for college-grad labor-trafficking in Seattle, via the H-1B visa-worker system. Tip of the iceberg, say H-1B critics. Let's have unlimited white-collar inflow, say business groups. http://bit.ly/2C2T5SS 


But Indians are also frozen out of U.S. jobs by Indian managers once they get green cards. They get excluded because legal immigrants can denounce abusive managers, and can sue managers who demand who violated U.S. laws. “Once they are Ameican, they’re toast,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of Progressives for Immigration reform. Indian managers “can’t exploit them,” he said, except by using them to help flood the labor market and so depress graduates’ salaries.
Degaonkar is a legal American immigrant because he has a green card. In his lawsuit, he said his forced unemployment was accompanied by discriminatory insults from an Infosys manager working at another U.S. company:
From August 2018 till now, on at least six occasions … the manager in charge of Infosys staff at [at the U.S. company](who himself is a Nonimmigrant employee), has mocked me with sarcastic and insulting comments about my age.
The last incident … took place on September 25, 2019 at about 4:30 PM. The Infosys employees present at the display stall of Infosys were going to take a group picture but Hanuman Gadepalli (Industry Principal of Infosys [working at the U.S> company]) told me not to be in the picture and he told me that he is asking me to move away because of my age. As Hanuman has repeatedly mocked and insulted me with this type of comments about my age, and the incident …  was even more humiliating, I requested Hanuman to be aside and asked him – why he is making such comments on my age again and again and expressed my displeasure. He responded with a retort-like question to me as whether I was looking for trouble.
On Sunday, November 10, 2019 at around 9:00 PM, I received a phone call from Mr. Dhiraj Tarimela of Infosys, the project manager for the project I was working on … who informed me that [the U.S. company] has instructed to remove me from the project assignment with immediate effect.
This hostile work environment is becoming commonplace in the United States because many U.S. investors have hired Infosys and other outsourcing companies to replace more than 1 million American managers and graduates with imported Indian contract-workers, said Lynn.
Americans’ professional culture “has been replaced by an Indian caste system,” where Americans are the discriminated outsiders, he said. “They’re the outsiders; they don’t know the social cues, the pecking order … our meritocracy has been replaced by a caste system,” he said.
“Workplace rights have been pushed back 100 years with regard to job security, wage growth, benefits, and access to the employment laws,” he said, adding that many Americans have also been pushed out of jobs by Chinese visa workers.

US graduates organize rally against H-1B visa-worker outsourcing of middle-class jobs. Many US coys spike stock values by employing roughly 1.5M cheap, foreign, college-grad temps. Left-wing reporters say little about $ transfer b/c 'nation of immigrants' http://bit.ly/2T0ws5J 


This workplace transformation is happening because Congress allows U.S. managers and shareholders to use the H-1B program and OPT program to hire Indian managers and workers for a growing share of their companies’ critical functions. Those tasks include software design, accounting, finance, and operations centers, Lynn said. U.S. executives “are the ones driving it,”
But the Indian managers abuse their helpless H-1B workers partly because they are also under constant pressure from their managers, directors, and shareholders, said an Indian professional who has worked for an outsourcing company.
The Indian managers “find it is very soft [easy] to deal with the people who are H-1B  dependent employees,” he said. Those Indian workers accept the abuse, he said, because they “are also very much willing to do everything that they can in terms of getting a far larger kind of earning, as compared to what they get in India.”
“They’re young, they’re more interested in saving as much money as they can in whatever time they’re able to spend here, so they will go through it,” he said.
This inequality of power means that U.S.-style professionalism — where people are rated for their work contributions — is rare in H-1B workplaces, the Indian professional said. “Some of these [H-1B] employees, in order to keep going with the job and prospects in the U.S., or get good performance ratings, will even present costly gifts to the managers during Diwali [an annual Hindu festival] or anytime, with something like iPads, or an Apple watch.”
The critical factor is the huge premium that Indian workers earn by taking Americans’ jobs in the United States, he said. 
U.S. wages are far higher than Indian wages so that H-1B workers can be set for life after just a few years in the United States, he said. “So, it’s just to give you an example, when we spend $20 for one haircut here, you can have haircuts — with a tip to the barbershop — for the entire year in India,” he said. 
“If you are a bachelor, everyone is interested in you,” when the H-1B workers return to India, he said. “You will have a car, you can have your own apartment … You can not only get a good wife, you can win … a great dowry also [from the wife’s family,” he said, adding, “You are actually like a Maharajah.”
But the abuse also occurs between Indian subgroups that Americans cannot even recognize, he said. Indian-run workplaces in the United States are often fractured along the lines of India’s regional and caste splits, he said. For example, Infosys used many managers from the Telegu and Tamil regions of Indian, he said, “and they speak their own unique [regional] languages which you and I cannot make head or tail of.”
The Telegu and Tamil managers favor people from their own regions, he said, and so “they will always have a tendency to have their own boss or their own team members.” These regional groups favor their members regardless of professional expertise, he said. “Obviously — It goes without saying.”
For example, this regional nepotism often decides which H-1B workers get sponsored for a green card via the EB, or ‘Employer-Based’ green card process, he said:
Everyone will try to get [a] green card …  but 90 percent cannot get green cards. Only 10 or 20 percent can get green cards. Because, you know, again, there is a bias [about who is sponsored] … There was someone telling me that ‘You know this Telegu guy, he came here one year back, and he’s already filed his I-140,’ which means [the company] has already recommended him for the green card. Because Telegu.
So I must say [from a manager’s perspective] those who are nice with you, or maybe are your cousin or distant cousin, or are married to your cousin, they will get a green card, or [someone who] is willing to marry your cousin [so she can get a green card], will get it. There are so many equations in these and it all is so ugly at times, it’s better not to know about it. Ignorance is bliss. 
This Indian workplace culture may hit 5 million American graduates because many American companies are hiring Indian managers to import H-1Bs, he said.
Many of the H-1Bs are used to export white-collar jobs back to India. For example, the New York Times reported how Toys “R” Us company used just eight Indian visa workers to outsource much of its 67-person computer department to India:
By late June, eight workers from the outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS, had produced intricate manuals for the jobs of 67 people, mainly in accounting. They then returned to India to train TCS workers to take over and perform those jobs there. The Toys “R” Us employees in New Jersey, many of whom had been at the company more than a decade, were laid off.
Managers ignore American workplace laws with “brazenness and indifference to the things that they can get away with because nobody’s going to talk about it,” he said.
The managers would stop if the law were enforced, he said, but the U.S. government “is not serious about it.”
Indians’ office culture has been described in lawsuitsU.S. government documents, and embassy reports, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The topic is described and debated by academicsplaintiffsIndiansReddit chatrooms, article commenters, and Public Radio International.
The anti-American hiring behavior is alleged in numerous lawsuits. A ComputerWorld report about a 2016 lawsuit by four American plaintiffs reported:
David Neumark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, analyzed Infosys’ U.S. workforce for the plaintiffs and wrote a 76-page report filed this week in federal court in Wisconsin, where the case is being heard …
One plaintiff was hired by Infosys to work on a $49.5 million Affordable Care Act, government-funded development project for the District of Columbia. There were about 100 Infosys employees working on the healthcare project, but only three were American, the lawsuit claimed. The plaintiff alleged harassment, and was denied promotion, the complaint said.
Neumark brought a statistical analysis to the discrimination claim. Specifically, the economist wrote, “from 2009 through 2015, 89.39% of Infosys’ United States workforce was South Asian while only 11.45% of the United States’ Computer Systems Design and Related Services industry was South Asian.”
Lynn’s point about routine EEOC violation is illustrated by another lawsuit filed against Infosys in 2018 by Subash Thayyullthil. That lawsuit claimed that Infosys violated workplace rules against retaliation and visa rules, and it was settled out of court, one source told Breitbart News.
Thayyulthil was hired in 2000, and he was working in the United States with an L-1 work-visa when the alleged violations occurred. The lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas said, “Plaintiff returned from FMLA leave on or about August 2017 and then filed a written complaint detailing the visa fraud/misuse. On or about August 31, 2017 Defendant Infosys terminated Plaintiffs employment.”
American opposition to H-1B outsourcing has been galvanized by Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 bill. The Utah GOP Senator’s bill would supercharge the abuse by Indian managers at U.S. companies to deliver green cards and citizenship to roughly 60,000 Indian graduates each year if they take jobs from Americans at low wages. Under current rules, the Indian managers can only provide green cards to about 10,000 Indian workers and roughly 10,000 wives or children.
Lee’s bill is strongly backed by Utah politicians, investors, and universities. — and also by Mike Bloomberg, one of the Democrats competing for the 2020 primary.

Mike Bloomberg says employers & investors should be allowed to hire "the best" employees from around the world.
Usually, the best = cheapest.
After all, who believes immig laws should inconvenience investors?
PS. How many Bloomberg journos pass the test?http://bit.ly/2T1suws 


The Infosys lawsuit comes as President Donald Trump’s deputies deal with a growing variety of immigration-related white-collar crime, such as the creation of fake resumes by H-1B workers, fake claims of labor shortages, and even fake job offers for the foreign students of U.S. colleges.
Trump is also dealing with anger and disappointment among many Americans graduates who backed him in 2016 because of his promise to curb the very unpopular H-1B program. For example, a Trump statement in March 2016 said:
The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements.
In 2017, the DoJ warned employers, including Indian employers, that:
The Justice Department cautioned employers petitioning for H-1B visas not to discriminate against U.S. workers. The warning came as the federal government began accepting employers’ H-1B visa petitions for the next fiscal year.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate employers misusing the H-1B visa process to discriminate against U.S. workers,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler of the Civil Rights Division. “U.S. workers should not be placed in a disfavored status, and the department is wholeheartedly committed to investigating and vigorously prosecuting these claims.”
White collar immigration crime “is something that it’s something that we certainly take seriously.” the acting head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told Breitbart News January 23. But, he added, “Congress also has the ability to prioritize what gets done by providing us resources to do address certain criminal activity. They’ve done it in the drug space, they’ve got it in other realms. That can be done here.”

Goldman Sachs says blue-collars are getting a 4.3% raise or 2.7% after inflation.
That growth is beating white-collar salary growth since 2016, partly b/c of higher min-wage laws, but also b/c the gov't imports many foreign grads to lower salaries. http://bit.ly/2slediI 


Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, create an alert for “Neil Munro, immigration,” and email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com




Key findings in the report:
  • Shortages should not occur in a free market
  • Tight labor markets benefit marginalized groups
  • Wages have been stagnant over the long term
  • Labor force participation is down over the long term
  • Domestic industries should hire Americans
  • Natives participate in all major occupations
  • Plenty of STEM workers are available
  • Gains to the economy are not the same as gains to natives
  • Immigration is not an efficient solution to population aging

BLOG: IS THIS FOR REAL?!?!?

·         But Bloomberg also wraps his economic demand for more immigrants in a progressive-style cultural message.
·         Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”
·         In December, Bloomberg said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues do not meet his standards.


Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
 10 Mar 2019122
3:19

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.

In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least amounts, would be better to take care of their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare … plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific). 
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

 

Mike Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans


Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says
he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best”
workers from around the world instead of Americans.
BLOG: ‘THE BEST’ ARE NOT HIS ILLITERATE MEXICANS HE IS HISPANDERING TO!
“This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper than Americans.’
“If business were able to hire without restrictions from anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings, whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because] Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.
Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’ value,” he said.
“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to immigration,” he added.
President Bush described his “any willing worker” cheap labor plan in 2004, saying:
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling. (Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane. And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First, America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.
In December 2018, departing House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Bush’s “any willing worker” goal, saying:
[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.
This “any willing worker” idea encouraged Ryan to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration groups.
Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad, but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people in legally.”
In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans — despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage increases.


Almost 50% of U.S. employees got higher wages in 2019, up from almost 40% in 2018.
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business.
http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7 

Pay Raises and Training Expand in Donald Trump's Tight Labor Market



Bloomberg’s “best worker” pitch is not a problem for the Democrats’ 2020 base of “woke” progressives, said Krikorian:
He is running in the Democratic primary and there is an overlap between the plutocrat assault on national borders and the leftist assault on national borders. They come at the issue from the different starting points but they have the same enemy, which is Americans’ sovereignty. It is not obvious that his [pro-employer] immigration stance is going to be a turn-off to Democratic primary votes.. How different are the specifics of his immigration proposal from [Joe] Biden, Sen. [Bernie] Sanders or [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren?
Biden, Sanders, and Warren endorse wide-open borders as a form of charity towards unlucky foreigners fleeing from home country persecution. For example, a January 5 tweet from Biden said:
Our Statue of Liberty invites in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Donald Trump has slammed the door in the face of families fleeing persecution and violence.
Bloomberg’s pro-employer view is coherent and likely sincere, said Krikorian.
Bloomberg aspires to a single global labor market, and everything else follows from that. A concern about improving the lot of less-skilled American workers is by definition contrary to that view because there is no such thing as an American labor market. There is only a global labor market. Domestic employers are not thinking about the consequences for people from Pennsylvania when they hire people from Tennessee, and Bloomberg wants that same approach across the entire world.
There is even an altruistic way of viewing that — which I assume guys like this have — that it improves the lot of Hondurans [and other migrants] who are coming here.
The issue is not that Bloomberg and his guys are factually incorrect. It is that their values are contrary to the values that most Americans hold – which is that we have a greater loyalty and obligation to our fellow countrymen than to foreigners. Guys like Bloomberg reject that [obligation] in principle.


A Rasmussen survey shows likely voters by 2:1 want Congress to make companies hire & train US grads & workers instead of importing more foreign workers.
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants.
#S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE 

Rasmussen Shows 2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration



But Bloomberg also wraps his economic demand for more immigrants in a progressive-style cultural message.
Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”
In December, Bloomberg said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues do not meet his standards.
Bloomberg also echoes the Democrats’ claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country built by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg has long supported greater immigration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians then pushed for passage of the failed Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans’ wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
For Bloomberg, Krikorian said, U.S. “employers have no greater obligation to fellow Americans than to Hondurans [or other foreign workers] … what Bloomberg is saying is that immigration laws should not interfere with the pursuit of shareholder value [because] employers can hire anyone from anywhere at any wage, period.”


Estb. media and esp. WashPo journos cannot, or dare not, follow the $$$ in immigration politics.
For example, the WashPo article on
@SenMikeLee's @S368 bill to expand the outsourcing of U.S. grads' jobs.
Maybe b/c the money ends up in Jeff Bezos' pocket.
http://bit.ly/2tChhYt 

Munro: WashPost Message to U.S. Graduates -- Drop Dead






WEST HOLLYWOOD WELCOME MAT FOR ILLEGALS...
Not a single employer of illegals ever prosecuted in this LA RAZA SANCTUARY CITY where they print voting ballots in Spanish so illegals can vote for more!

Foreign Workers See Nearly 5X Job Growth of Americans

Foreign workers saw nearly five times as much job growth as native-born American workers did last month, Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals.

In November 2018, foreign-born worker employment increased 5.1 percent compared to the same time last year. Meanwhile, native-born Americans saw an employment increase of only about 1.2 percent year-to-year, almost five times less job growth as their foreign worker competitors.
The foreign-born workforce — those who are employed and looking for work — also had significantly higher gains than native-born Americans. Last month, the number of foreign-born workers in the labor force increased almost five percent. At the same time, native-born Americans in the labor force increased only 0.66 percent.
The labor force participation rate among foreign-born workers increased 1.2 percent, while the labor force participation rate for native-born Americans increased only 0.2 percent from year-to-year.
Though foreign-born workers have had significant gains in the last three months of President Trump’s economy, native-born Americans’ unemployment dropped by an impressive 12.5 percent while their foreign competitors’ unemployment decreased by 5.9 percent.
The fast-growing employment of foreign-born workers over American citizens is exacerbated by the country’s wage-crushing national immigration policy whereby about 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants are added to the U.S. population every year.
While legal immigrants continued being admitted to the U.S. to take blue-collar working-class jobs and many white-collar, high-paying jobs, there remain about six million Americans who are unemployed, 12 percent of whom are teenagers and nearly six percent of whom are black Americans.
There remain about 1.3 million workers who have been jobless for more than two years, 4.8 million workers who are working part time but who want full time jobs, and 1.7 million workers who want a job, including more than 450,000 workers who are discouraged by their job prospects.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.


Mike Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
7 Jan 20203,560
8:22
Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of Americans.
“This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper than Americans.’
“If business were able to hire without restrictions from anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings, whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because] Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.
Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’ value,” he said.
“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to immigration,” he added.
President Bush described his “any willing worker” cheap labor plan in 2004, saying:
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling. (Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane. And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First, America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.
In December 2018, departing House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Bush’s “any willing worker” goal, saying:
[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.
This “any willing worker” idea encouraged Ryan to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration groups.
Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad, but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people in legally.”
In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans — despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage increases.


Almost 50% of U.S. employees got higher wages in 2019, up from almost 40% in 2018.
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business.
http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7 

Pay Raises and Training Expand in Donald Trump's Tight Labor Market



Bloomberg’s “best worker” pitch is not a problem for the Democrats’ 2020 base of “woke” progressives, said Krikorian:
He is running in the Democratic primary and there is an overlap between the plutocrat assault on national borders and the leftist assault on national borders. They come at the issue from the different starting points but they have the same enemy, which is Americans’ sovereignty. It is not obvious that his [pro-employer] immigration stance is going to be a turn-off to Democratic primary votes.. How different are the specifics of his immigration proposal from [Joe] Biden, Sen. [Bernie] Sanders or [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren?
Biden, Sanders, and Warren endorse wide-open borders as a form of charity towards unlucky foreigners fleeing from home country persecution. For example, a January 5 tweet from Biden said:
Our Statue of Liberty invites in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Donald Trump has slammed the door in the face of families fleeing persecution and violence.
Bloomberg’s pro-employer view is coherent and likely sincere, said Krikorian.
Bloomberg aspires to a single global labor market, and everything else follows from that. A concern about improving the lot of less-skilled American workers is by definition contrary to that view because there is no such thing as an American labor market. There is only a global labor market. Domestic employers are not thinking about the consequences for people from Pennsylvania when they hire people from Tennessee, and Bloomberg wants that same approach across the entire world.
There is even an altruistic way of viewing that — which I assume guys like this have — that it improves the lot of Hondurans [and other migrants] who are coming here.
The issue is not that Bloomberg and his guys are factually incorrect. It is that their values are contrary to the values that most Americans hold – which is that we have a greater loyalty and obligation to our fellow countrymen than to foreigners. Guys like Bloomberg reject that [obligation] in principle.


A Rasmussen survey shows likely voters by 2:1 want Congress to make companies hire & train US grads & workers instead of importing more foreign workers.
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants.
#S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE 

Rasmussen Shows 2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration



But Bloomberg also wraps his economic demand for more immigrants in a progressive-style cultural message.
Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”
In December, Bloomberg said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues do not meet his standards.
Bloomberg also echoes the Democrats’ claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country built by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg has long supported greater immigration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians then pushed for passage of the failed Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans’ wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
For Bloomberg, Krikorian said, U.S. “employers have no greater obligation to fellow Americans than to Hondurans [or other foreign workers] … what Bloomberg is saying is that immigration laws should not interfere with the pursuit of shareholder value [because] employers can hire anyone from anywhere at any wage, period.”


Estb. media and esp. WashPo journos cannot, or dare not, follow the $$$ in immigration politics.
For example, the WashPo article on
@SenMikeLee's @S368 bill to expand the outsourcing of U.S. grads' jobs.
Maybe b/c the money ends up in Jeff Bezos' pocket.
http://bit.ly/2tChhYt 

Munro: WashPost Message to U.S. Graduates -- Drop Dead







No Labor Shortage: 11M Americans Out of Work, but All Want Full-Time Jobs

Scott Olson/Getty Images
 10 Jan 20201,070
2:53
There remain more than 11 million Americans who are out of work but want full-time jobs, despite claims by corporate interests and the big business lobby of a so-called “labor shortage.”
The latest unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals there is still slack in the labor market for disenfranchised Americans to enter the workforce rather than business bringing foreign workers to the U.S. to take jobs.
Overall, about 5.8 million Americans are unemployed — 12.6 percent of whom are teenagers who generally seek entry-level jobs and 5.9 percent of whom are black Americans. These nearly six million unemployed also include about 1.2 million Americans who are considered “long-term unemployed” because they have been out of work for more than six months.
Another 4.1 million Americans are working part-time jobs but want full-time employment. Additionally, 1.2 million Americans are out of the labor force entirely after looking for a job sometime within the last year. These marginally attached Americans are available for work and want full-time jobs.
Roughly 277,000 of the 1.2 million Americans out of the labor force completely are considered “discouraged workers” because they do not believe there are jobs in the labor market for them.
In total, about 11.1 million Americans are either unemployed, out of the labor force, or underemployed; however, all have said they want good-paying, full-time jobs.


The constant cry from corporate lobbyist @USChamber and "newsplainer" @voxdotcom is that America is "running out of workers." If that were true there wouldn't be people to come off the sidelines and take jobs.





While Americans have enjoyed significant wage growth in Trump’s economy for blue-collar and working-class Americans, corporate interests have increasingly suggested that the U.S. must continue importing millions of foreign workers every year to fill jobs.
In April 2019, former Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said the U.S. needed more legal immigration because the country is “out of people.”
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.
Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

CBO: Immigration Has ‘Negative Effect on Wages’

NEIL MUNRO
9 Jan 2020230
7:01
Immigration makes all of America richer, but it can make some Americans poorer, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says in a report issued January 9.
“Immigration, whether legal or illegal, expands the labor force and changes its composition, leading to increases in total economic output,” said the non-partisan report, titled “The Foreign-Born Population and Its Effects on the U.S. Economy and the Federal Budget—An Overview.”
But this national expansion does “not necessarily [deliver] to increases in output per capita,” or income per person, the report said:
For example, business leaders say the nation’s enormous population of immigrants has expanded the nation’s workforce, increased consumption, and driven up housing prices. But that inflow has also shrunk the wages of less-educated Americans, the report said:
Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.
The CBO report contradicts business claims that a bigger economy ensures bigger wages for everyone.
More ominously, the report also suggests that the American middle-class — including millions of young college graduates — may suffer a similar economic disaster if immigration policy is shifted to raise the inflow of foreign college graduates. The report says:
The effects of immigration on wages depend on the characteristics of the immigrants. To the extent that newly arrived workers have abilities similar to those of workers already in the country, immigration would have a negative effect on wages.
Many business advocates in Washington are calling for a dramatic increase in “high-skilled immigration” — meaning foreign college graduates who would compete for the same jobs as American college graduates. For example, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is trying to pass his S.386 bill that offers the prize of renewable work-permits — and eventual citizenship — to an unlimited number of foreign graduates.
Each year, up to 120,000 foreign graduates — and their spouses and children — can get green cards via their employer’s sponsorship, even as perhaps 800,000 Americans graduate from college with skilled degrees.
But Lee’s bill creates a new legal status called “Early Adjustment.” This status would allow an uncapped number of college graduate migrants to apply for renewable work permits long before they can get a green card to become a legal immigrant and citizen.
Existing law allows an uncapped number of foreigners to legally get short-term work permits and jobs after enrolling in U.S. colleges. The migrants can get jobs by first paying tuition to a university, and then getting short-term work permits via the uncapped “Curricular Practical Training” and the “Optional Practical Training” programs. These workers must leave the United States after a few years until they enroll themselves in work permit programs.
But Lee’s bill would remove any caps on this foreign worker population by allowing an unlimited number of foreign workers to get “Early Adjustment” status from their employers.


DHS posts videos of Indian migrants buying fake documents from ICE's Farmington U. sting operation.
The 
#OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if 
#S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh 

Watch: ICE Lure and Sting Indian Illegal Labor 'OPT' Traffickers



Many migrants already use the CPT and OPT work permits to get jobs and to also compete for entry into the H-1B visa worker program. Once in the H-1B program — which accepts 85,000 new workers each year — many of the migrants also ask their employers to sponsor them for green cards.
The sponsorship allows them to stay working in the United States until they eventually get their valuable green card, long after their temporary visas have expired. Congress has not set an annual limit on the number of visa workers who can be sponsored for green cards, so the resident population of permanent “temporary workers” is growing fast — and is helping to suppress wages for American graduates.
Roughly 1.5 million foreign visa workers hold white-collar jobs throughout the U.S. economy. This number includes at least 750,000 Indians who are allowed to work via the supposedly temporary CPT, OPT, L-1, and H-1B visa programs. Roughly 300,000 of these Indians — plus 300,000 family members — are being allowed to stay in the United States because they asked their employers to sponsor them for green cards.
The CBO report shows that immigrants comprise roughly 40 percent of the population of people who did not graduate from high school  — and that immigrants already comprise roughly 20 percent of all people with a “graduate degree.”
Congressional Budget Office
The 20 percent share likely would quickly rise if the Senate approves Lee’s S.386 plan — and that rise could sharply reduce salaries for American college graduates.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent” as the extra workers compete for jobs, says George Borjas, a labor economist at Harvard. That extra labor does expand the economy — but that expansion is dwarfed by the transfer of the wage reductions to investors, he wrote in 2016:
I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about $50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners [mostly employers] is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.
“In low-skilled occupations, a one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an individual’s occupation reduces wages by [0].8 percent,” said a 1998 report by the Center for Immigration Studies.
A 2013 CBO report predicted that the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and immigration bill would reduce the share of income that goes to wage earners and increase the share that goes to investors. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost corporate profits and spike the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers forces down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs, wages are going to go up.”


Are rising wages good for national politics?
“You’re damn right they are,” US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue said, adding: "They are good for national politics if you’re a politician, for sure."
http://bit.ly/2FwwCg7 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Rising Wages Are Good for Politicians

 

 

Claims of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True


America's September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969, according to the most recent Department of Labor report.
The tight labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For example, New Seasons Market, a West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom Equipment, a Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.
For the first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of workers enjoyed faster wage growth than their higher-paid peers.
Unfortunately, this positive trend could be short-lived. Corporate special interests are whining about a labor shortage -- and are spending millions to lobby for higher levels of immigration, which would supply companies with cheap, pliable workers.
Hardworking Americans need their leaders in Washington to see through this influence campaign and stand up for their interests. Scaling back immigration would further tighten the labor market, boosting wages and helping the most disadvantaged Americans find jobs.
The U.S. economy is the strongest it has been in years. Employers added 136,000 new jobs in September, marking 108 months of consecutive job growth.
But there's still more progress to be made. Approximately 6 million Americans are currently looking for jobs but remain unemployed. Another 4 million desire full-time positions but are underemployed as part-time workers. Millions more, feeling discouraged about their bleak prospects, have abandoned the job search altogether. Indeed, among 18 through 65-year-olds, 55 million people aren't working.
Many of these folks have limited or outdated skills. Others have criminal records or disabilities. So they might require a bit more training than traditional job applicants.
Rather than put in this extra effort, some big businesses want to eliminate their recruiting challenges by importing cheap foreign workers. These firms have instructed their lobbyists to push for more immigration, which would introduce more slack into the labor market.
The CEO of the Chamber of Commerce recently claimed that America needs a massive increase in immigration because we're "out of people." Chamber officials said their lobbying efforts would center on sizeable increases to rates of legal immigration.
The National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, recently released a proposal which would effectively double the number of H-1B tech worker visas, import more seasonal low-skilled laborers on H-2A and H-2B visas, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And the agriculture industry is lobbying for a path to legalization for illegal laborers and is seeking to expand "temporary" guest-worker programs to include stable, year-round positions on dairy farms and meatpacking plants -- jobs that Americans will happily fill for the right wage. The Association of Builders and Contractors, Koch Industries, and dozens more companies have called for similar measures.
There are already 45 million immigrants in the United States -- 28 million of which are employed -- and counting. More than 650,000 people crossed into the United States illegally in the past eight months alone, already exceeding last fiscal year's totals. And the U.S. government grants an additional 1 million lifetime work permits to immigrants every year.
Those figures will skyrocket even higher if business groups get their way. Such an expansion would hurt hardworking Americans.
The majority of foreigners who cross the border illegally or arrive on guest worker visas lack substantial education. Naturally, they seek out less-skilled jobs in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service -- and directly compete with the most economically vulnerable Americans. The labor surplus created by immigration depresses the wages of native-born high school dropouts up to $1,500 each year.
Several proposals under consideration in Washington could alleviate American workers' woes.
A recent bill from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) would mandate all businesses use a free, online system called E-Verify, which determines an individual's work eligibility in mere seconds.
The system would make it extremely difficult for employers to hire illegal immigrants, roughly 40 percent of whom have been paid subminimum wages at some point. Without a pool of easily abused illegal laborers, businesses would raise pay for Americans.
Several senators also recently introduced the Raise Act, a bill that would reduce future levels of legal immigration.
It's time for our leaders in Washington to scale back both legal and illegal immigration. By doing so, they can further tighten the labor market and force businesses to bring less-advantaged Americans back into the workforce.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."

"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."

 

PELOSI, FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWOMS’S MEXIFORNIA

 

Report: California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24

Middle-class wages in progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.

“Earnings for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
 In just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults are working full-time.
Specifically, inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and housing problems are made worse — especially for families — by the loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting costs. The report says:
Many workers are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.


The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J 

NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines