THE STAGGERING COST OF THE WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE BUILT BORDER to OPEN BORDER’
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/10/spencer-p-morrison-devastating-cost-of.html
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s
2017 report, illegal immigrants, and their children, cost American
taxpayers a net $116 billion annually -- roughly $7,000 per alien
annually. While high, this number is not an outlier: a recent study by
the Heritage Foundation found that low-skilled immigrants
(including those here illegally) cost Americans trillions over the
course of their lifetimes, and a study from the National Economics
Editorial found that illegal immigration costs America over $140
billion annually. As it stands, illegal immigrants are a massive
burden on American taxpayers.
Poll: Raising Refugee Admissions Is Biden’s Most Unpopular Executive Order So Far
U.S. President Joe Biden’s move to dramatically expand the refugee admissions cap with the stroke of a pen is his most unpopular executive order so far, a new Morning Consult/Politico survey revealed Wednesday.
According to the poll, conducted February 5-7, nearly half (48 percent) of all 1,986 registered voters surveyed strongly or somewhat oppose the president’s refugee plan.
Meanwhile, 39 percent strongly or somewhat support more refugee admissions, and 14 percent had no opinion.
The pollsters declared:
A new Morning Consult/Politico survey shows 48 percent of voters oppose Biden’s plan to allow as many as 125,000 refugees to seek safe haven in the United States during the upcoming fiscal year — a historic high that represents a whiplash change from the historically low 15,000-person limit for the current fiscal year — and fewer than 2 in 5 voters support it.
The change between the refugee admissions limit for FY 2021 set by the Trump administration and the cap proposed by Biden for the upcoming fiscal year marks a more than eight-fold increase.
Of 28 executive actions tracked by the pollsters since Biden’s inauguration on January 20, the February 4 order to increase the refugee admissions cap is the least popular “by a wide margin,” the pollsters found.
“Orders pertaining to immigration and immigrant rights constitute five of [Biden’s] seven least popular actions among voters and are particularly animating for Republicans,” they added.
Opposition to expanding the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. was more pronounced among Republicans (76 percent) and Independents (52 percent).
However, the pollsters proclaimed:
[T]he move to allow more refugees into the country [does not] resonate particularly deeply with the president’s own base. While 61 percent of Democratic voters support the expansion — and 33 percent “strongly support” it — that share places the executive order at the bottom of the list as well.
Nearly three-quarters of GOP voters (76 percent) strongly or somewhat oppose Biden’s refugee plans, while 13 percent strongly or somewhat support it. Eleven percent had no opinion.
The pollsters pointed out:
Three in 5 GOP voters “strongly oppose” raising the refugee cap to 125,000 people, roughly the same share who also strongly opposed Biden’s decision to end taxpayer-funded construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and the Trump administration’s ban on immigration and travel from several predominantly Muslim countries.
Only the administration’s move to include undocumented immigrants residing in the country in the census count drew sharper opposition from Republicans (66 percent).
Among Independent voters, more than half (52 percent) strongly or somewhat oppose admitting more refugees in the U.S., while 33 percent strongly or somewhat support it. Fifteen percent had no opinion.
The pollsters noted:
The 37 percent of independents who strongly oppose raising the refugee cap is also this group’s highest level of dissent against the orders tracked so far, followed by Biden’s move to pause the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers (33 percent).
President Biden has reportedly proposed raising the 15,000-refugee cap for this fiscal year, as the coronavirus pandemic plagues the country, by more than four-fold to 62,500. However, that revelation was not part of the survey.
In setting the FY 2021 limit at 15,000, the Trump Administration noted in a report to Congress:
This proposed refugee admissions ceiling reflects the continuing backlog of over 1.1 million asylum-seekers who are awaiting adjudication of their claims inside the United States, and it accounts for the arrival of refugees whose resettlement in the United States was delayed due to the COVID-19 [coronavirus disease] pandemic.
This week, Biden’s State Department acknowledged that the 125,000-person limit for next year is an “ambitious target,” highlighting the challenges the administration faces in reaching that figure, including the backlog.
“It will take some time for us to get to those targets, precisely because, in this case, the U.S. refugee admissions process had essentially come to a standstill in recent years,” Ned Price, a State spokesman, said Tuesday.
Kroger grocery chain closes Southern California stores due to new “hero pay” laws leading to worker protests
About 20 grocery store workers rallied in Long Beach, California recently to protest the closure of two Kroger supermarkets. Management at the supermarket chain announced that, in response to a $4-an-hour pay raise to all supermarket employees, it would close those two markets in mid-April and lay off and/or transfer the 200 workers employed at both stores.
At the rally, workers carried homemade signs denouncing corporate greed, demanding hazard pay and calling on all workers to speak out.
Long Beach is an industrial port and logistics city in Los Angeles County. As of last weekend, the city had reported 48,824 cases and 698 deaths from the coronavirus. It lies directly southwest of the city of Los Angeles, which for several weeks has been the worldwide epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic with more than 17,000 deaths and more than one million positive cases as of this writing.
The Long Beach City Council mandated the $4-an-hour “hero pay” wage supplement two weeks ago, in response to the pandemic. The order will last 120 days. Similar ordinances are being proposed in other California cities. The LA City Council is discussing a $5-an-hour hazard pay as are other Los Angeles suburbs.
Last week, the board of supervisors in Santa Clara County also voted to draft a $5-per-hour measure. Similar measures are being considered in San José and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Long Beach wage supplement applies to supermarkets and all grocery stores with at least 300 employees nationally or more than 15 employees at each store.
Kroger management denounced the Long Beach rule, charging the city with interfering in the wage-bargaining process, and for treating other large retailers unequally. Long Beach exempted retail giants Target and Walmart from the rule, even though both those chains sell groceries. A company statement declared that both stores had been “long-struggling.” A company spokesperson indicated that underperforming stores in other cities would also close if forced to pay the extra amount.
The Long Beach Press-Telegram quoted an email from John Votava, corporate affairs director for Ralphs supermarkets, who called the new mandates “misguided,” placing “any struggling store in jeopardy of closure.”
The California Grocers Association has filed a lawsuit against the Long Beach measure, claiming that “grocers operate with razor thin margins.”
Not so for Kroger Company—the Brookings Institution reported the firm made $2.6 billion in profits between February 2 and November 7, 2020, out of which it used $989 million for stock buybacks.
Last November, in a study entitled “Windfall for Profits and Deadly Risks,” Brookings examined pandemic hazard pay at Kroger and 12 other companies, ranging from big-box stores and grocery chains to pharmacies and electronic stores. “The numbers are stark,” declared the report. “They paint a picture of most companies prioritizing profits and wealth for shareholders over investment in their employees.” The study found that these companies could have quadrupled hazard pay to their workers and still made a handsome profit during the pandemic.
Nationally, the average Kroger’s cashier makes a poverty wage of $10 an hour. In Long Beach, a city with a high cost of living, the minimum wage for employers with 26 or more workers is almost as exploitative, $14 per hour.
Kroger and the other retailers have counted on the complicity of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). Nearly 17 years ago, a 19-week strike and lockout involving 59,000 Los Angeles area grocery workers resulted in a resounding victory for the employers, including Ralphs and other Kroger markets.
The UFCW accepted drastic reductions in overtime pay, cuts to holiday pay and sick time, increases in health care deductibles and the elimination of defined benefit pension plans. This sellout then served as a model for UFCW contracts across the country.
More recently in 2019, the UFCW settled for contracts in California and Oregon with wages increases of under one percent per year, well below the inflation rate, while banning strike action. In 2020, the UFCW pushed through another sellout agreement in West Virginia. A $4-an-hour increase would barely begin to compensate for those betrayals
Workers should place no confidence in the union to defend their jobs or wages or to protect them from the coronavirus pandemic. That is why grocery workers across California, the US, and internationally must take matters into their own hands, forming rank-and file committees independent of the UFCW and other unions to fight for adequate pay and resources to confront the COVID-19 pandemic and make up for decades of attacks on wages, benefits and working conditions.
January jobs report shows ongoing economic disaster as US Senate strips minimum wage increase from the relief bill
The US Senate voted Friday morning to approve a budget bill, a key step toward enactment of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. In securing passage of the budget bill the Democrats made several key concessions to Republicans, barring a rise in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour during the pandemic, putting a graduated income cap on the $1,400 stimulus payment to individuals and barring payments to undocumented immigrants.
The action on the relief package came as new government economic figures show there was a net increase of just 49,000 jobs in January following a revised figure showing a loss of 227,000 jobs in December. November employment figures were also revised downward. For the week ending January 30 there were 779,000 new claims for unemployment benefits, a decline from the previous week, but still an unprecedented level.
After the Senate vote the Democratic-controlled House passed a key procedural vote clearing the way for the lower chamber in Congress to pass the pandemic relief bill by the end of the month.
The employment figures show the continued heavy economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on workers and their families. With the daily COVID-19 death toll running at over 3,000 and wide areas of the economy nonfunctional, millions are suffering destitution, hunger, the cutoff of medical benefits and the danger of eviction.
The Democrats are using a parliamentary tactic, budget reconciliation, to advance the pandemic relief bill to avoid the threat of a Republican filibuster. However, despite having a working majority in both houses of Congress, the Democrats capitulated on the proposal for a phased-in increase of the minimum wage, set currently at the sub-starvation rate of $7.25 an hour, to $15 by 2025. This after one Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, threatened to vote “no.”
The miserable $7.25 rate was set in the first year of the Obama administration and has not budged since then despite periodic cynical posturing by Democrats.
Following the Senate vote Biden said it is likely the minimum wage increase would be dropped from the final relief bill after it emerges from the House-Senate reconciliation process. He claimed it would be put forward later as a separate measure, but passage even in a scaled-back form is extremely unlikely given the ability of Senate Republicans to block legislation using the filibuster.
The refusal of the Democrats—in full control of Congress and the White House—to draw a line in the sand over the minimum wage increase, a measure that would potentially benefit 32 million workers, shows the insincere character of Biden’s claims, reiterated at a news briefing on the pandemic relief measure Friday, that he was prioritizing the needs of workers over the wealthy.
A full time worker earning the current minimum wage takes home about $15,080 annually. That is well below the absurdly low official poverty level of $17,240 annually for a family of two and $21,720 for a family of three.
Significantly, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, now chairman of the Senate budget committee, supported the amendment by Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa saying that no minimum wage increase should take place during the pandemic. The callousness of this move is hard to overstate. Many of those workers who would be immediately benefited by a minimum wage increase are in food distribution and logistics and other essential, frontline services, where workers risk their lives daily for starvation rates of pay.
In addition, eight Democrats also joined the entire Republican Senate delegation to impose a ban on the distribution of pandemic relief checks to undocumented workers.
Democrats have indicated they are open to capping the proposed $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals based on household income, scaling them back starting at $50,000 annual income for an individual or $100,000 for a household, a move that would impact millions of working class families. In a further slap at workers, income in 2019, prior to the economic impact of the pandemic, will be used as the basis for calculation of the reduction.
Meanwhile, no relief from the pandemic is yet in sight. The disastrously slow and inept rollout of vaccines is being undermined by the emergence of new, more infectious and deadly variants of the virus. Further, evidence is mounting that these variants may also be at least partly vaccine resistant.
The numbers released Friday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economic disaster triggered by the pandemic is far from over. Nearly 18 million workers are receiving unemployment assistance of some kind and another 6 million counted as employed are working part-time jobs because they cannot find full-time employment.
The net job loss in December was increased from 140,000 to 227,000 while the gain for November was revised downward from 336,000 to 264,000.
There are 4 million long-term unemployed, those who have been unemployed 27 weeks or longer. The number applying for extended benefits rose by 197,000 to 1.7 million in the week ended January 16, the most recent week whose figures are available, an indication the number of long-term unemployed is increasing.
While the official unemployment rate in January fell 0.4 percent to 6.3 percent, other measures show that the number of jobless is holding steady. The labor force participation rate, the percentage of the working-age population who are employed, is still 1.9 percent lower than the January 2020 level.
Only a net of 49,000 new jobs were created in January, the bulk in government. Private employment increased by just 6,000. Employment in leisure and hospitality, including eating and accommodation, continued to be hard hit, declining by 61,000 jobs last month after falling by 536,000 in December.
In addition, employment in temporary help services rose 80,900 in January, more than the overall employment gain, an indication that employers are reluctant to create permanent, well-paid jobs.
Even the small job gains in government may be illusory. The Labor Department previously warned that the layoffs of education workers last year due to the pandemic had distorted normal seasonal buildup and layoff patterns, possibly making the hiring numbers for January appear better than they were in actuality.
Further illustrating the irrationality and socially regressive nature of the capitalist response to the pandemic, employment in health care declined by 30,000 jobs in January. This despite the initiation of supposedly robust vaccination programs and tragic scenes of overcrowded hospitals and intensive care units amid a post-holiday surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths.
The endless concessions and retreats by the Democrats demonstrate that even with control of both houses of Congress and the presidency they are incapable of, and in fact are opposed to, advancing any serious economic measures to address the social catastrophe confronting the working class in the United States. The alternative that is posed is for workers to take up the fight for socialism to take control of society and end the subordination of economic and social life to the profit requirements of the rich.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell Calls for ‘Society-Wide’ Push to Restore Labor Market
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank will keep monetary policy “patiently accommodative” even if prices jump later this year and urged lawmakers not to worry about budget deficits until the economy fully recovers.
“Despite the surprising speed of recovery early on, we are still very far from a strong labor market whose benefits are broadly shared,” Powell said Wednesday in a speech to the Economic Club of New York.
Powell said an expansive fiscal policy is an “essential tool” for restoring the labor market.
“Given the number of people who have lost their jobs and the likelihood that some will struggle to find work in the post-pandemic economy, achieving and sustaining maximum employment will require more than supportive monetary policy. It will require a society-wide commitment, with contributions from across government and the private sector,” Powell said. “The potential benefits of investing in our nation’s workforce are immense.”
Powell’s remarks came as lawmakers consider the Biden administration’s proposal for a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief spending bill. Critics of the proposal—including leading liberal economists Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard—have said the proposed spending is too high and risks triggering inflation.
In stark contrast, Powell downplayed the risk of inflation from too much deficit spending. He said that prices could rise if demand surged as the economy reopened but this would be a temporary event that would not cause the Fed to raise rates or result in sustained inflation.
Powell praised the progress made during the pre-pandemic Trump era, although he did not credit the Trump administration for the labor market’s strength.
Fortunately, the participation rate after 2015 consistently outperformed expectations, and by the beginning of 2020, the prime-age participation rate had fully reversed its decline from the 2008-to-2015 period. Moreover, gains in participation were concentrated among people without a college degree. Given that U.S. labor force participation has lagged relative to other advanced economy nations, this progress was especially welcome.
As I mentioned, we also saw faster wage growth for low earners once the labor market had strengthened sufficiently. Nearly six years into the recovery, wage growth for the lowest earning quartile had been persistently modest and well below the pace enjoyed by other workers. At the tipping point of 2015, however, as the labor market continued to strengthen, the trend reversed, with wage growth for the lowest quartile consistently and significantly exceeding that of other workers.
At the end of 2015, the Black unemployment rate was still quite elevated, at 9 percent, despite the relatively low overall unemployment rate. But that disparity too began to shrink; as the expansion continued beyond 2015, Black unemployment reached a historic low of 5.2 percent, and the gap between Black and white unemployment rates was the narrowest since 1972, when data on unemployment by race started to be collected. Black unemployment has tended to rise more than overall unemployment in recessions but also to fall more quickly in expansions.4 Over the course of a long expansion, these persistent disparities can decline significantly, but, without policies to address their underlying causes, they may increase again when the economy ultimately turns down.
These late-breaking improvements in the labor market did not result in unwanted upward pressures on inflation, as might have been expected; in fact, inflation did not even rise to 2 percent on a sustained basis. There was every reason to expect that the labor market could have strengthened even further without causing a worrisome increase in inflation were it not for the onset of the pandemic.
The Fed chief painted a dour picture of the current labor market, saying that the unemployment rate is probably closer to 10 percent than the 6.4 percent in official figures. He said misclassification of some workers as employed and people dropping out of the labor force has led headline unemployment figures that “dramatically understated” the economic damage of the pandemic.
GOP Senators Reintroduce Mandatory E-Verify to Protect U.S. Workforce
A group of Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), have reintroduced legislation that would mandate E-Verify, the program designed to protect the United States workforce by banning employers from illegal hiring.
Grassley’s Accountability Through Electronic Verification Act would make permanent and mandatory the E-Verify program to prevent employers from hiring illegal aliens over Americans and legal immigrants.
The legislation is co-sponsored by senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), John Boozman (R-AR), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MO), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Mike Lee (R-UT), John Thune (R-SD), and Roger Wicker (R-MS).
“Expanding the system to every workplace will improve accountability for all businesses and take an important step toward putting American workers first,” Grassley said in a statement.
A party that wants to be pro-American worker must oppose mass amnesty, prevent abuse of guest worker programs, support #MandatoryEVerify & work to reduce overall immigration numbers. @GOPLeader https://t.co/lP1XFbLM9v
— NumbersUSA (@NumbersUSA) February 10, 2021
The legislation would require all U.S. employers to use E-Verify within one year of its enactment into law while mandating that federal contractors and agencies use the program immediately. Most significantly, the legislation increases penalties for employers that hire illegal aliens over American citizens and requires them to check their current employees’ legal status within three years.
To tackle identity theft in illegal employment, the legislation would have the Social Security Administration track multiple uses of the same Social Security numbers and clarifies that those stealing Americans’ identities can be prosecuted for aggravated identity fraud.
Cotton said it is often the case that “crooked employers have a strong incentive” to hire illegal aliens as they are “willing to work under the table for little pay and few benefits.”
“Permanent, nationwide E-Verify will help us build an economy that works for American citizens while eliminating a serious incentive for illegal aliens to come here in violation of our laws,” Cotton said.
Why isn’t every senator co-sponsoring [Sen. Grassley’s] E-Verify bill?” Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies wrote in a post.
Mandatory E-Verify and more protections of the U.S. workforce remain some of the most popular policy proposals despite overwhelming opposition from the big business lobby, corporate special interests, and the donor class.
A weekly survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports shows that more than 7-in-10 likely voters agree that mandatory E-Verify should become law to protect the U.S. workforce. This includes 74 percent of Hispanic likely voters. Less than 20 percent of likely voters oppose mandatory E-Verify.
Additionally, 65 percent of likely voters say it is better for employers to raise wages and try harder to recruit the 17.1 million Americans who are out of work rather than importing cheaper foreign workers. Another 61 percent of likely voters say the U.S. already has enough skilled talent in the domestic labor pool for employers to recruit from.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment