Tuesday, June 27, 2017

JOSH HOXIE - RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE MIGHT SAVE AMERICA

THE ENTIRE REASON WE HAVE OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

70% OF ALL ILLEGALS END UP ON WELFARE

The Seattle Minimum Wage Study Is Utter B.S.

http://fortune.com/2017/06/27/seattle-minimum-wage-study-results-impact-15-dollar-uw/

4:45 PM ET


For decades, conservative ideologues have insisted that raising the minimum wage will hurt, not help, low-wage workers. Mandating higher wages will cost jobs, the old canard goes, and the obvious solution is to let the free market function unfettered.
This argument received a significant bump from a recent study by the University of Washington (UW) looking at the impact of the minimum wage increase in Seattle, where in 2014 the city council voted to phase in a $15 wage over the next few years.
The UW study appeared to show that the 2015–2016 wage floor increase from $11 to $13 per hour, one phase on that journey to $15, caused low-wage workers’ annual pay to go down, not up, and overall low-wage jobs to also go down.
Free-market fanatics around the country flung praise at the study, and serious publications like the Washington Post deemed it “very credible.” But fortunately for working people, it turns out the study’s findings are far from that.
The research has significant flaws—most glaringly that its data excludes 40% of the Seattle workforce. It also stands in contrast to a massive trove of actually credible studies showing that raising the minimum wage is a boon for working class families and the communities they live in.
For instance, a team led by Michael Reich, an economics professor at University of California-Berkeley, looked at the impact of the Seattle wage increase on the food industry over the same period and found that wages did in fact go up for restaurant workers, and that employment wasn't affected. These findings were, they claim, “in line with the lion’s share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies.”
Reich and his colleagues have done a significant portion of this research , recently studying cities with the highest minimum wage laws in the country, including Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. They've consistently found that higher wages boost worker pay and haven't led to either job loss or a slowdown in economic growth.
Employers see big benefits, too. Workers stay on the job longer, reducing turnover and training costs. They’re also significantly more productive, according to researchers studying wage increases in the United Kingdom.
There are big benefits for broader society as well. Poverty goes down, as does reliance on public assistance programs—one of the few things both Democrats and Republicans can agree is a net positive. Also improved are infant health and adult mental health outcomes, including a significant reduction in depression. (At a time when one in six Americans pops an anti-depressant every day, this seems particularly important.)
If so much research shows significantly raising the minimum wage has a major net-positive impact, what’s the story with the UW study?
One of the major limitations of the study, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out, is that the data it analyzed excluded business with multiple locations, such as chain restaurants and big box retailers. So the 40% of employees they left out work at places like McDonald'sBest Buy, and other stores that rely heavily on the low-wage workers who got the actual boost. That is a highly significant oversight.
The UW study also draws what the EPI calls "implausible findings." Since high-paying jobs went up during the period that low-paying jobs went down, the study implies that the minimum wage hike created better jobs for the rich at the expense of the poor. But this explanation fails to take into account the overall robustness and gentrification of Seattle's economy—a much more reasonable explanation for the disparity.
Given these flaws, it's no wonder that UW's findings diverge greatly from the broader body of research on this topic, much of which the UW researchers themselves cite.
Raising the minimum wage—at the city, state, or federal level, where it remains an unlivable $7.25 an hour—is still a reliable solution to the scourge of inequality. Research should continue to look critically at its impact, but so far the only credible research gives the policy a big thumps up.
Josh Hoxie is director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org.



CLOSE THE BORDERS, SEND ILLEGALS PACKING, IMPOSE E-VERIFY AND END THE JOBS CRISIS IN AMERICA!

JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL

Here’s how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!
                                            
…. which one has it good under the Dems???


  

JOBLESS IN AMERICA




America began as an oasis of plenty in a world of poverty. Farms from New Hampshire to Georgia offered any free man crossing the Atlantic the chance to exchange hard work for a full belly. In 1820, 78 percent of the American labor force farmed. While droughts and pestilence often threatened disaster, joblessness was no part of then-rural America. If you didn’t work, you starved, and there was always another patch of land to hoe and seed.
Unemployment arrived only when workers moved to cities. A vital strength of urban life is that it can connect people who want to work with people who have capital and ideas. But sometimes, those matches aren’t available. Almost half of America’s workers had left their farms by 1870, setting the stage for the recessions of the 1870s and 1890s. University of Florida economist J. R. Vernon estimates that the unemployment rate hit 8 percent in 1878 and may have exceeded 15 percent in the 1890s. In both downturns, financial crises had led to bank failures and massive firm bankruptcies. In 1894, the Pullman Strike disrupted the nation’s transportation network.
Yet as soon as the banking system recovered, American entrepreneurs resumed hiring cheap, usually unskilled, labor. Nominal wages actually fell over both the 1870s and the 1890s because workers had to accept low pay. With no government safety net, long-term unemployment meant deprivation—or even death.
By 1920, the U.S. had become a majority-urban nation. As urban industry replaced agriculture, the country got wealthier but also more vulnerable to economic dislocation. The Great Depression brought it with terrible force: the unemployment rate exceeded 15 percent in 1931, peaked at 24.9 percent in 1933, and remained above 14 percent as late as 1940. (These figures count those working on federal relief programs as unemployed; exclude these individuals, and the unemployment rate was down to 9.5 percent by the end of the decade.) Depression-era Americans endured long-term joblessness, then, but it was fundamentally different from the kind that afflicts us today. The U.S. economy was in disastrous shape throughout the 1930s, with real GDP and industrial output staying below 1929 levels for most of the decade. Whatever the reason—and debates remain lively—American industry recovered from the Depression with painful lethargy. Persistent unemployment mirrored an enduring economic crisis.
The New Deal saw the rise of public programs that worked against employment. Wage controls under the National Recovery Act made it difficult for wages to fall enough to equilibrate the labor market. The Wagner Act strengthened the hand of unions, which kept pay up and employment down. Relief efforts for the unemployed, including federal make-work jobs, eased the pressure on the jobless to find private-sector work.
The carnage of World War II ended both the Nazi regime and the American Depression. The peace augured in 30 years of remarkable growth and prosperity. America enjoyed technological preeminence and an enormous growth in human capital, thanks to policies like the GI Bill. Women surged into the labor force by the millions, yet demand for male work stayed robust. The empowered postwar unions shifted industrial employment to right-to-work states, as the classic work of Thomas Holmes illustrates, but they didn’t compromise the labor market as a whole.
From 1945 to 1968, only 5 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54—prime-age males—were out of work. But during the 1970s, something changed. The mild recession of 1969–70 produced a drop in the employment rate of this group, from 95 percent to 92.5 percent, and there was no rebound. The 1973–74 downturn dragged the employment rate below 90 percent, and after the 1979–82 slump, it would stay there throughout most of the 1980s. The recessions at the beginning and end of the 1990s caused further deterioration in the rate. Economic recovery failed to restore the earlier employment ratio in both instances.
The greatest fall, though, occurred in the Great Recession. In 2011, more than one in five prime-age men were out of work, a figure comparable with the Great Depression. But while employment came back after the Depression, it hasn’t today. The unemployment rate may be low, but many people have quit the labor force entirely and don’t show up in that number. As of December 2016, 15.2 percent of prime-age men were jobless—a figure worse than at any point between World War II and the Great Recession, except during the depths of the early 1980s recession.
The trend in the female employment ratio is more complicated because of the postwar rise in the number of women in the formal labor market. In 1955, 37 percent of prime-age women worked. By 2000, that number had increased to 75 percent—a historical high. Since then, the number has come down: it stood at 71.7 percent at the end of 2016. Interpreting these figures is tricky, since more women than men voluntarily leave the labor force, often finding meaningful work in the home. The American Time Survey found that nonemployed women spend more than six hours a day doing housework and caring for others. Nonemployed men spend less than three hours doing such tasks.
Joblessness is disproportionately a condition of the poorly educated. While 72 percent of college graduates over age 25 have jobs, only 41 percent of high school dropouts are working. The employment-rate gap between the most and least educated groups has widened from about 6 percent in 1977 to almost 15 percent today. The regional variation is also enormous. Kentucky’s 23 percent male jobless rate leads the nation; in Iowa, the rate is under 10 percent.


Graphs by Alberto Mena
Graphs by Alberto Mena

Why, since 1970, has each new downturn added to the ranks of the permanently unemployed? Social science has not fully answered this question, but the best guess involves a combination of a generous social safety net, deindustrialization, and social change.
Both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson aggressively advanced a stronger safety net for American workers, and other administrations largely supported these efforts. The New Deal gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, which were expanded in the 1950s. National disability insurance debuted in 1956 and was made far more accessible to people with hard-to-diagnose conditions, like back pain, in 1984. The War on Poverty delivered Medicaid and food stamps. Richard Nixon gave us housing vouchers. During the Great Recession, the federal government temporarily doubled the maximum eligibility time for receiving unemployment insurance.
These various programs make joblessness more bearable, at least materially; they also reduce the incentives to find work. Consider disability insurance. Industrial work is hard, and plenty of workers experience back pain. Before 1984, however, that pain didn’t mean a disability check for American workers. After 1984, though, millions went on the disability rolls. And since disability payments vanish if the disabled person starts earning more than $1,170 per month, the disabled tend to stay disabled. The economists David Autor and Mark Duggan found that the share of adults aged 25–64 receiving disability insurance increased from 2.2 percent in 1985 to 4.1 percent 20 years later. Disability insurance alone doesn’t entirely explain the rise of long-term joblessness—only one-third or so of jobless males get such benefits. But it has surely played a role.
Other social-welfare programs operate in a similar way. Unemployment insurance stops completely when someone gets a job, which may explain why economist Bruce Meyer found that the unemployed tend to find jobs just as their insurance payments run out. Food-stamp and housing-voucher payments drop 30 percent when a recipient’s income rises past a set threshold by just $1. Elementary economics tells us that paying people to be or stay jobless will increase joblessness.
Scholars Olivier Blanchard and Justin Wolfers have explained Europe’s persistent unemployment, which they called “hysteresis,” by the interaction of adverse economic shocks and extremely generous welfare states. Twenty years ago, the more economically successful European nations, such as Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, reorganized their welfare states to emphasize work and witnessed positive results. Others, including France, Italy, and Spain, did not, and they have struggled. In a sense, the eurozone financial crisis of the past half-decade is the legacy of southern European countries that wouldn’t fix their failing welfare systems. The U.S. needs to decide if it wants to follow the path of Germany or of Spain.
Yet these programs didn’t immediately generate a crisis of joblessness in America. Manufacturing workers weren’t going to leave their well-paying union jobs in 1967 because of the existence of food stamps. But over the next half-century, things changed dramatically. As hundreds of studies have documented, wages for the best-educated and most-successful Americans have risen, while those for the least-educated and least-successful Americans have stagnated.
These developments result from tectonic movements in the economy. Globalization and technological change have steadily eroded—and continue to erode—the demand for American brawn. In 1966, American factories employed millions of industrial workers, making products that were shipped to far poorer places. As technology spread, the world’s lower-wage countries started manufacturing. Asia’s economic tigers initially thrived because of low labor costs, but these increasingly educated countries eventually achieved technological parity with—and sometimes became superior to—many American industries.
Manufacturing’s share of total American output has fallen from 25 percent in 1968 to 12 percent today. The number of manufacturing workers has shrunk from 19.5 million in 1979 to 12.2 million, which represents 8.8 percent of nonfarm employment. The fact that manufacturing today is a larger share of GDP than of employment underscores a shift toward technology-intensive production—another response to high U.S. labor costs. For millennia, men were valued for their muscles. Human strength was crucial to feudal farming and to Henry Ford’s assembly line. We still have some jobs that depend on strong backs, as in the building trades. But they are getting rarer because machines can do the work for us.
We’re not moving toward an entirely mechanized economy. Between 1980 and 2000, U.S. service-sector employment rose by 73 percent—a whopping 37 million new jobs. There remains commercial value in a friendly face and the charm of human interaction. But for millions of men, working in the service sector wasn’t a good option.
American joblessness reflects the social unraveling that Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart. A significant portion of the American heartland has moved from a norm of stable marriage and traditional religion to single-parent families and social dysfunction. A study by Raj Chetty and Nathan Hendren calculated mobility across America using income-tax records. Their data show that the share of single-parent families in an area is a particularly strong predictor of low upward mobility. Any parent knows that raising children is tough, even with two adults involved. When only one parent is around, that task gets even harder. Unsurprisingly, many kids from broken families lack the skills needed to get ahead in today’s competitive economy.
During World War II, the army taught millions of Americans how to behave effectively in a tough organization. Such skills may have helped returning veterans thrive in the industrial America of the 1950s. Yet that very success may also have enabled younger Americans to tolerate joblessness, as they wind up relying for extended periods on their parents’ (or grandparents’) help. Thirty percent of prime-age jobless men currently live with their parents.
The rise of joblessness among the young has been a particularly pernicious effect of the Great Recession. Job loss was extensive among 25–34-year-old men and 35–44-year-old men between 2007 and 2009. The 25–34-year-olds have substantially gone back to work, but the number of employed 35–44-year-olds, which dropped by 2 million at the start of the Great Recession, hasn’t recovered. The dislocated workers in this group seem to have left the labor force permanently.



Unfortunately, policymakers seem intent on making the joblessness crisis worse. The past decade or so has seen a resurgent progressive focus on inequality—and little concern among progressives about the downsides of discouraging work. Advocates of a $15 minimum hourly wage, for example, don’t seem to mind, or believe, that such policies deter firms from hiring less skilled workers. The University of California–San Diego’s Jeffrey Clemens examined states where higher federal minimum wages raised the effective state-level minimum wage during the last decade. He found that the higher minimum “reduced employment among individuals ages 16 to 30 with less than a high school education by 5.6 percentage points,” which accounted for “43 percent of the sustained, 13 percentage point decline in this skill group’s employment rate.”
The decision to prioritize equality over employment is particularly puzzling, given that social scientists have repeatedly found that unemployment is the greater evil. Economists Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald have documented the huge drop in happiness associated with unemployment—about ten times larger than that associated with a reduction in earnings from the $50,000–$75,000 range to the $35,000–$50,000 bracket. One recent study estimated that unemployment leads to 45,000 suicides worldwide annually. Jobless husbands have a 50 percent higher divorce rate than employed husbands. The impact of lower income on suicide and divorce is much smaller. The negative effects of unemployment are magnified because it so often becomes a semipermanent state.
Time-use studies help us understand why the unemployed are so miserable. Jobless men don’t do a lot more socializing; they don’t spend much more time with their kids. They do spend an extra 100 minutes daily watching television, and they sleep more. The jobless also are more likely to use illegal drugs. While fewer than 10 percent of full-time workers have used an illegal substance in any given week, 18 percent of the unemployed have done drugs in the last seven days, according to a 2013 study by Alejandro Badel and Brian Greaney.
Joblessness and disability are also particularly associated with America’s deadly opioid epidemic. David Cutler and I examined the rise in opioid deaths between 1992 and 2012. The strongest correlate of those deaths is the share of the population on disability. That connection suggests a combination of the direct influence of being disabled, which generates a demand for painkillers; the availability of the drugs through the health-care system; and the psychological misery of having no economic future.
Increasing the benefits received by nonemployed persons may make their lives easier in a material sense but won’t help reattach them to the labor force. It won’t give them the sense of pride that comes from economic independence. It won’t give them the reassuring social interactions that come from workplace relationships. When societies sacrifice employment for a notion of income equality, they make the wrong choice.
Politicians, when they do focus on long-term unemployment, too often advance poorly targeted solutions, such as faster growth, more infrastructure investment, and less trade. More robust GDP growth is always a worthy aim, but it seems unlikely to get the chronically jobless back to work. The booms of the 1990s and early 2000s never came close to restoring the high employment rates last seen in the 1970s. Between 1976 and 2015, Nevada’s GDP grew the most and Michigan’s GDP grew the least among American states. Yet the two states had almost identical rises in the share of jobless prime-age men.
Infrastructure spending similarly seems poorly targeted to ease the problem. Contemporary infrastructure projects rely on skilled workers, typically with wages exceeding $25 per hour; most of today’s jobless lack such skills. Further, the current employment in highway, street, and bridge construction in the U.S. is only 316,000. Even if this number rose by 50 percent, it would still mean only a small reduction in the millions of jobless Americans. And the nation needs infrastructure most in areas with the highest population density; joblessness is most common outside metropolitan America. (See “If You Build It . . .,” Summer 2016.)
Finally, while it’s possible that the rise of American joblessness would have been slower if the U.S. had weaker trade ties to lower-wage countries like Mexico and China, American manufacturers have already adapted to a globalized world by mechanizing and outsourcing. We have little reason to be confident that restrictions on trade would bring the old jobs back. Trade wars would have an economic price, too. American exporters would cut back hiring. The cost of imported manufactured goods would rise, and U.S. consumers would pay more, in exchange for—at best—uncertain employment gains.
The techno-futurist narrative holds that machines will displace most workers, eventually. Social peace will be maintained only if the armies of the jobless are kept quiet with generous universal-income payments. This vision recalls John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which predicts a future world of leisure, in which his grandchildren would be able to satisfy their basic needs with a few hours of labor and then spend the rest of their waking hours edifying themselves with culture and fun.
But for many of us, technological progress has led to longer work hours, not playtime. Entrepreneurs conjured more products that generated more earnings. Almost no Americans today would be happy with the lifestyle of their ancestors in 1930. For many, work also became not only more remunerative but more interesting. No Pennsylvania miner was likely to show up for extra hours (without extra pay) voluntarily. Google employees do it all the time.
Joblessness is not foreordained, because entrepreneurs can always dream up new ways of making labor productive. Ten years ago, millions of Americans wanted inexpensive car service. Uber showed how underemployed workers could earn something providing that service. Prosperous, time-short Americans are desperate for a host of other services—they want not only drivers but also cooks for their dinners and nurses for their elderly parents and much more. There is no shortage of demand for the right kinds of labor, and entrepreneurial insight could multiply the number of new tasks that could be performed by the currently out-of-work. Yet over the last 30 years, entrepreneurial talent has focused far more on delivering new tools for the skilled than on employment for the unlucky. Whereas Henry Ford employed hundreds of thousands of Americans without college degrees, Mark Zuckerberg primarily hires highly educated programmers.



What could change this dynamic? The first step is to improve Americans’ skills. The jobless rate is about 8 percent for prime-age men with a college degree or more but more than 22 percent for men with only a high school diploma or less. We have levers that can improve educational outcomes, like the very best early-childhood programs and charter schools. Such innovations should be expanded and made better through competition and evaluation.
We should also improve the way that we do vocational education. (See “Vocational Ed, Reborn,” page 36.) Many vocational schools, like Boston’s Madison Park High School, have long been troubled. The most ambitious students avoid getting tracked onto a vocational path, and they—and their parents—want schools that focus on college readiness. Consequently, less fortunate or struggling students often get segregated into these vocational centers. The conventional teachers in many vocational programs often lack the know-how for teaching either high-paying blue-collar trades, like plumbing, or cutting-edge fields, like computer programming.
A more effective approach might be to keep students in college-readiness-oriented schools and experiment with out-of-school vocational training. Kids could be taught after school, on weekends, and during the summer by programs specializing in particular occupations. These initiatives can be evaluated swiftly—you can readily determine if a program has produced, say, good carpenters. The superior training programs can then be scaled up and bad ones shut down. Adopting this structure would mean that anyone could potentially compete to run the programs—trade unions, private providers, nonprofits—increasing the chances that some programs will excel. We should also be open to initiatives like Cambridge, Massachusetts’s “The Possible Project,” which has been training youths, many from poorer backgrounds, to launch themselves in the start-up economy. (I am currently working on a randomized control trial for the project.)
Older workers present the toughest training problem. The extensive literature on retraining adults for new jobs has few success stories. We must keep trying; here, too, the more experimentation, the better.
Along with up-skilling workers, we should lower the regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. It’s a sad fact that America tends to regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor much more stringently than it does that of the rich. You can begin an Internet company in Silicon Valley with little regulatory oversight; you need more than ten permits to open a grocery store in the Bronx.
One-stop permitting would be a good step, especially in poorer areas. If new businesses had only a single regulatory office to satisfy, the obstacles to entrepreneurship would be less daunting. One-stop permitting would also make it easier to evaluate the regulator on its speed and the number of permits issued. Permitting shops could specialize in the languages and businesses most common in their areas.
Occupational licensing is another area crying out for reform. The University of Minnesota’s Morris Kleiner has found that the share of American workers who need an occupational license has increased from 5 percent in the 1950s to 29 percent in 2008. States now credential interior designers, tree trimmers, and even florists. In many cases, these requirements are merely means for protecting incumbents from competition. When we license basic service jobs, we make it tougher for the jobless to find something new to do.



American entrepreneurs can solve our joblessness crisis only if the U.S. stops incentivizing joblessness. Consolidating social policies would be a crucial step. Struggling families now receive food stamps, housing vouchers, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and other assistance—all of which punish work. If the various programs were combined into a single cash benefit, that benefit could be designed so that the tax on earnings never went above 30 percent. We could follow the lead of Norway on unemployment and disability insurance, allowing the disabled to keep, say, 50 percent of their benefit above the $1,170 threshold, while tightening the requirements for being designated as disabled. Unemployment insurance could be structured so that payments were no longer contingent upon staying completely out of work.
Here, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) offers a design model, by providing funds that initially scale up with earnings, especially for lower-income families with children. Economists Nada Eissa and Jeffrey Liebman found that the credit’s introduction in 1986 increased labor-force participation significantly. The EITC was instituted during one of those rare moments in modern U.S. history when policymakers wanted to avoid rewarding joblessness.
We also need to make hiring workers less costly for employers. Temporarily cutting the payroll tax was one of the most constructive policies adopted during the Great Recession. We could enact a permanent payroll-tax reduction. The tax could be gradually phased in for workers once their hourly earnings went beyond a certain threshold. The payroll tax could be eliminated for workers who had been unemployed, at least for an initial period. The costs of reducing the payroll tax could be offset by raising the minimum retirement age for employees who hadn’t paid these taxes for enough years. Reducing mandated benefits, like health care, that employers must provide lower-income earners would help encourage work, too. Ideally, the reform of our health-care system will ensure that workers have health-care options that don’t unduly burden employers.
Making work pay needs one final, major policy initiative: wage support, which would replace the EITC. The EITC had the right overall idea, but it is cumbersome and indirect. Instead, the federal government could simply provide pay to increase the earnings of minimum-wage workers by a fixed amount—say, $3 per hour. Consequently, a worker paid $7.25 would take home $10.25 hourly, with the difference paid for by taxpayers. The subsidy could fall gradually as wages rise, and it could be targeted for specific groups—larger for returning veterans or the long-run jobless—and rise or fall with the level of aggregate unemployment. The phaseout might slightly slow private-sector wage growth, but the cost would be more than offset by the benefits of such a visible push toward employment. Such a program would be expensive, so it should be matched with spending reductions for other social services.
The rise in joblessness is not inexorable. But to solve this crisis, we must educate, reform social services, empower entrepreneurs, and even subsidize employment. That is an ambitious—but necessary—agenda for ending the war on work before it consumes another generation of Americans.
AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE
                                 
…… ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE… they also get our jobs!




The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.


"Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is 

holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the 

government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era 

surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem 

with MS-13 and other gangs."


AMERICA: WALL STREET, THE DEMOCRAT 

PARTY, THE GOP and LA RAZA SAY NO 

LEGAL NEED APPLY!

“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the 

U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the 

last four decades and while the U.S. represents 

just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 

20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according 

to a new report.”


Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.

Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground. 

Limiting Foreign Student Entries

in Sanctuary Jurisdictions


Potential Federal Government Response to California’s SB 54



WASHINGTON (June 22, 2017) – A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies examines the administration's option of limiting foreign student entries and immigration activities in "sanctuary" jurisdictions as a potential federal response to state and local obstruction of immigration enforcement. This could be especially important if California's SB54 – with its stringent anti-cooperation requirements – is passed and signed into law. SB54 has been approved by the Senate and is currently before the Assembly.

If SB54 blocks the Cal State and California Community College systems' required cooperation with ICE, DHS may be forced to decertify them for purposes of admitting foreign students.

Andrew Arthur, the Center's Resident Fellow in Law and Policy and author of the report, stated, "If the State of California prevents schools from satisfying their obligations under federal immigration law, then DHS needs to consider whether those schools should be allowed to maintain their certifications to accept foreign students."

View the entire report at: http://cis.org/Limiting-Foreign-Student-Visas-in-Sanctuaries

Foreign student visas are available only to people who will be attending schools certified by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), a component of the ICE National Security Investigations Division. By regulation, SEVP-certified schools must designate school officials to regularly provide information to ICE to verify that the foreign students are maintaining their status while in the country, and to notify ICE when those students are not.

This requirement ensures that the government has essential data on those students necessary for national security and immigration-enforcement purposes. This is especially important given the fact that, as DHS recently reported, almost three percent of all foreign students whose authorized status was supposed to end in FY 2016 are suspected of overstaying and illegally remaining in the United States.

Contact: Marguerite Telford
202-466-8185, mrt@cis.org


AMERICA’S BLUDGEONED YOUTH: 

Homeless, Hopeless and Addicted…. 

Will they start the revolution?


"Public education as a whole came under brutal attack as part

of the Obama administration’s effort to shift the burden of 

the financial crisis onto the backs of the working class."

AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE


FOR EIGHT YEARS BARACK OBAMA AND HIS HAREM OF CORRUPT DEM POLS HAVE  SABOTAGED OUR BORDERS TO EASE TENS OF MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS. 


What is left for Legals is only the tax bills for La Raza's looting!


The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and

eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing,

selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.



OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS pounds America’s youth as they build a border to border Mexican welfare state on our backs!

AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE
                                 
…… ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE… they also get our jobs!



The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.


AMERICA STUDENTS STARVE:

Report on the impact of OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS-TRUMPERNOMICS


THE  GIG JOB – In America, No Legal Need Apply

"Possibly most affected by this shift in the economy is the Millennial generation, those  aged 18-30. The report notes that more than half of those under age 25 participate in independent work, not just in the United States but throughout the European Union as well."

June 22, 2017

Government says 30% of children caught at border have ties to violent drug gangs


Government officials revealed during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that 30% of children captured at the border have ties to M-13 and other violent drug gangs.
The Obama administration knew of the problem but claimed by law, they had to admit the refugees regardless of their ties to violent criminal gangs.
Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem with MS-13 and other gangs.

Federal officials refused even to guess at the true scope of the problem, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that they can give only small snapshots of what they see. But they said the devastation on communities across the country is clear: killings and chaos, particularly among other immigrants — both legal and illegal.


The Border Patrol identified 160 teens who were known or suspected gang members when they first showed up at the border, but whom the Obama administration said it had to admit under U.S. law.

Meanwhile, a spot check this month of 138 teens being held by the federal Health and Human Services Department identified 39 with gang ties. Four of them were forced into cooperating with the gangs and 35 joined voluntarily, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“It is well-known that MS-13 actively targets and recruits children as young as 8 years old,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee who called Wednesday’s hearing.
“While their illegal status and Central American heritage are a key factor in MS-13’s targeting, without a doubt the failures of the current system for handling these children is also to blame,” he said. “The current system is fraught with abuse, systematic errors and a lack of effective cooperation.”
He was stunned that no agency could say how many “UAC,” as the government dubs unaccompanied alien children, have been recruited.
The agencies point to one another and to federal laws, saying their hands are tied.
Agencies are reviewing Obama-era interpretations of the law, but it seems incomprehensible that this loophole can exist. It seems clear that M-13 and other gangs are using the children and US policy on dealing with unaccompanied minors at the border to engage in gang activity on American soil.
Officials said MS-13 is involved in some drug dealing and does engage in human trafficking, but its real money-making operation is extortion. The gang threatens families — including American citizens — with violence against relatives back in Central America unless those in the U.S. pay them off.
Gang members in the U.S. take directions directly from gang commanders in El Salvador, authorities say.
Kenneth A. Blanco, acting assistant attorney general in the criminal division at the Justice Department, also said immigrants who fail to report crimes to local police are often not afraid of being deported by federal authorities, but rather fear retaliation from the gang members and other criminals who live in their neighborhoods.
He said witnesses’ names become public, making them targets for retribution.
“That really, in my 28 years, has been the fear they have of calling the police. Not so much the other way around,” he said. “They’re really scared of these people.”
That runs counter to the argument made by Democrats and some local police chiefs that illegal immigrants refuse to report crimes because they fear entanglement with federal deportation agents.
These kinds of "below the radar" policies cost lives. That should be the bottom line in creating and implementing any immigration and refugee policy regardless whether it affects adults or children. That 30% of children who we've been told only want to come to America to get away from gang violence, are themselves, engaged in gang activity is a clear and present danger to Americans and illegal immigrants alike. 
That the government has known of this problem for years and allowed it to continue is the height of stupidity and bureaucratic incompetence.





Federal ‘OPT’ Program Rewards Companies For Hiring 330,000 Foreign College Grads in 2016




The federal government quietly helped and rewarded companies and universities which hired roughly 330,000 cheap foreign graduates in 2016 instead of hiring American graduates, many of whom are deep in debt.

The little-known “Optional Practical Training” program has grown from 91,140 new foreign job-seekers in 2009 to 329,158 new job-seekers in 2016, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. That is almost a four-fold increase in seven years — and the program is growing even larger in 2017.
There is no cap on the OPT program, which quietly and semi-automatically gives work permits lasting up to three years when requested by foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities and colleges. Companies are not required to even interview Americans before hiring OPT graduates — and they get tax breaks for hiring foreigners over Americans.
“The government is enticing employers to hire foreigners instead of Americans … it is ridiculous,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies. Even the middle-class Americans who have downplayed the impact of cheap-labor immigration on blue-collar Americans should be alarmed by the government’s discrimination against their own college-graduate children, he added.
In 2014, the OPT program provided work permits to 249,998 foreign graduates, according to the data provided to Breitbart News by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the program. Two years later, the number of new foreign graduates entering the program had risen by 32 percent up to 329,158.
The program provides a one-year work permit to all graduates. It also provides an extra one-year permit to graduates who work in a so-called high-tech “STEM” job. In 2016, officials working for former President Barack Obama extended the STEM permits from one year to two years. If only 20,000 of the 51,672 STEM workers from 2015 used Obama’s one-year extension, they would have increased the 2016 total from 329,158 up to 350,000.
That 350,000 estimate for 2016 means that the government is offering work permits to one foreign graduate for almost every two of the 800,000 young Americans who graduate from college each year with high-skilled degrees in business or medicine, science or software, math or physics.
The OPT program will likely grow to 500,000 foreign workers in 2020 unless it is killed by a pending lawsuit.
Under the new transparency rules established by DHS secretary John Kelly, DHS officials also provided Breitbart with the initial OPT numbers for 2017. That data showed the OPT program in the first half of 2017 by giving work permits to 255,412 foreign students, including 57,315 high-skill technology graduates. That half-year number for 2017 is larger than the 2014 total.
These high numbers likely understate the scale of the OPT outsourcing program, because the federal government also allows foreign students to get a one-year work permit via the “Curriculum Practical Training” program before they graduate into the OPT program. If 100,000 students used that CPT program in 2016, then the combined CPT and OPT programs delivered almost 450,000 white-collar American jobs to foreign students and graduates in 2016.
The annual inflow of new foreign OPT workers is now roughly three times larger than the annual inflow of 110,000 H-1B white-collar contract workers. However, the H-1B program offers longer visas to foreign workers, so it keeps a larger population of roughly 650,000 foreign white-collar workers in the United States, compared to roughly 35o,000 OPT workers.
The H-1B visas help companies hire foreign white-collar workers to take the place of the experienced American professionals who need decent salaries to help support and educate their children.
Who is impacted?
Many American college graduates are threatened by OPT, partly because the program allows foreign students to take any job, but also because the government grants three-year work permits to students who take “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math” jobs — but those STEM jobs are very expansively described. They include:
dairy science… horticultural science…  environmental studies … natural resources conservation … urban forestry … artificial intelligence … computer graphics … solar energy … naval science … cyber/electronic operations and warfare … nutrition sciences … sustainability studies … child psychology … archaeology … medical science … veterinary physiology … business statistics … management science.
The OPT program is also a threat to upward mobility because it is increasingly being used to outsource community college technician jobs — such as nursing — which are the primary upward path for Americans born into lower-income families. The DHS list of STEM jobs also includes more than 50 types of technical jobs, including:
Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering Technology/Technician … solar energy … welding … industrial production … quality control … automotive engineering … [and] biology.
College grads have done better than American blue-collar workers since the 2009 crash, but recruiters say graduates overestimate their market value, and researchers say salaries remain low in 2017:
Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an unpublished analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers … “It has been like this for the past five, six years now,” said Ban Cheah, a research professor at Georgetown who compiled the data. “It’s a little depressing.”

Liberty University, graduation 2017.
Many recent graduates were hurt long-term by the slump, according to a 2014 Pew rstudy:
In a recent report, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York went deeper and looked at underemployment among recent grads (defined as people aged 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree). The Fed researchers used data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine whether employed grads were in jobs that typically required a college degree, what those jobs paid, and whether they were working full- or part-time. They found that in 2012, about 44% of grads were working in jobs that didn’t require a college degree — a rate that, while about what it was in early 1990s, increased after the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions. Only 36% of that group were in what the researchers called “good non-college jobs” — those paying around $45,000 a year — down from around half in the 1990s. The share of underemployed recent grads in low-wage (below $25,000) jobs rose from about 15% in 1990 to more than 20%. About one-in-five (23%) underemployed recent grads were working part-time in 2011, up from 15% in 2000.
Other reports emphasize negative and positive prospects for recent college grads as the nation emerges from a decade-long slump.
Critically, the OPTs compete with new American graduates and nudge down the Americans’ starting salaries — which can have a huge impact on their lifetime earnings, say salary experts:
“Maximizing your first salary is really important because it determines your salary for the rest of your life,” says Matt Wallaert, chief scientist at GetRaised.com … “Your final salary is heavily dependent on your starting salary,” agrees Glenn Hiemstra, the founder of Futurist.com,
Moreover, many U.S. graduates are defaulting on college loan debts owed to the U.S. government because they cannot find well-paying jobs.
Joseph Palos, a high-tech graduate from Cornell University, formally objected to the OPT program in 2015. ”Companies don’t want to hire Americans and they abuse… OPT to hire cheap immobile labor instead of hiring anyone over the age of 35, especially in software or tech areas,” he wrote to a federal agency, according to a report in ComputerWorld.
Which companies hire OPTs?
Most universities and colleges hide useful data about their OPT programs from their American students, the tuition-paying parents and the voting public.
But a Breitbart search of the data revealed that Penn State posted a list of companies which hire OPT and other foreign graduates. The companies include accounting firms Deloitte & Touché LLP plus Ernst & Young, LLP, as well as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the GE Global Research Center in New York. Other OPT employers included Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, Calif., Intel in Arizona, Motorola in Florida, Nokia in Texas,  and Microsoft in Washington State, plus Cadbury Schweppes in New Jersey, Glaxo Smith Kline in Philadelphia, Hyatt Hotels in Washington D.C., Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Penske Logistics in Ohio, and the Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands, Ca.
The Penn State list also includes many universities, many of which can keep cheap OPTs on the payroll for several years by converting them into H-1B employees. There are no limits on universities’ hiring of H-1Bs.
There’s not much reason to blame the companies for hiring OPTs, said Krikorian. By reducing employers’ taxes and subsidizing OPT employees’ pay with a chance to win green cards, “the government is encouraging these employers to hire foreign workers,” he said.
Who supports the OPT program?
Unsurprisingly, the semi-secret OPT program has intense behind-the-scenes support in Washington.
First, the OPT program — like the similar H-1B and H-2B programs — are strongly supported by business groups because they provide very cheap, compliant and disposable workers:
When a job is given to an OPT worker, neither the worker nor the employers have to pay Social Security or Medicare taxes. That tax break cuts the company’s salary costs for that foreign worker by roughly 23 percent.
When a foreign students seeks a job, Americans lose bargaining power to get decent wages for that jobs. Nationalwide, the extra inflow of immigrant labor annually transfers roughy $500 billion from employees to employers, accordin to data in the 2016 report on immigration by the National Acadeimes of Sciences.
The OPT jobs put the foreign graduates on the first step towards citizenship, which is a hugely valuable deferred bonus student studemt her overseas fmaily and their descedents in perpetuity. In effect, the federal government provides OPT workers a free lottery ticket for the prize of citizenship if they work for the pay and conditions set by the employer. But this is also a huge hidden subsidy for employers who hire foreigners instead of Americans because it allows employers to pay foreigners with hope of citizenship, while Americans must be paid in dollars.
Also, the OPT employers is heavily dependent on the employer to put him or her the next step on the path to citizenship, ensuring a compliant attitude despute low-pay and long hours. The next step is usually a H-1B visa, which requires the employer to ask the govrenment for the visa.
The OPT program adds a small but useful addition to the number of native-born and immigrant consumers who buy products in hte U.S. economy.
Universities strongly favor the OPT program because it allows them to effectively sell government-supplied, no-cost work permits to the foreign students who pay higher than normal tuition fees — providing there is no political pushback from their own indebted graduates and their worried parents.
The annual inflow of foreign students adds $2.8 billion in economic activity, and 400,000 jobs to the economy, says the NAFSA advocacy group, wich is led by university officials. Few politicians are willing to openly disagree with the universities in their district.
Universities market themselves to foreign customers as way-stations to citizenship. For example, Dartmouth University highlighted employment statistics for foreign graduates, saying 71 of 79 foreign graduates got work permits and jobs in 2015, and 79 of 86 got work permits and jobs in 2014.
A growing percentage of foreign students are using the OPT work permits. The percentage rose from 21.5 percent in 2014 up to 24.5 percent in 2016, according to DHS data.
The OPT and CPT programs allow a growing number low-grade “diploma mill” universities to provide work permits to foreign workers in exchange for tuition. The scale of the new industry was described by Buzzfeed in 2016: “With little fanfare and virtually overnight, Nothwestern Polytechnic has become one of the country’s largest importers of international students — 95% of whom are Indian. Last year, 9,026 foreign students had active visas to attend NPU, according to federal immigration data — that’s more students than the entire undergraduate population of Harvard, and an increase of 350% from two years earlier, when Northwestern had just 1,200 … Northwestern Polytechnic’s 9,026 foreign students would make up the ninth-largest body of international students in the country, according to IIE numbers — above Michigan State University and just below UCLA.”
Education-industry officials have downplayed the number of OPT approvals for several years. For example, the New York-based Institute of International Education estimated  67,804 OPT job-seekers in 2009, and 147,498 OPT seekers in 2016. In contrast, DHS estimated the numbers at 91,140 in 2009 and 329,158 in 2016.
Progressives strongly favor the OPT program, partly because it is backed by their prestigious allies in the Internet industry and by university groups, but also because it levels the status of foreigners and Americans.
In June 2017, a pro-immigration columnist for the New York Times, who formerly worked at the Wall Street Journal, argued that Americans rightly belongs to foreigners, not Americans, saying:
I’m the child of immigrants and grew up abroad, I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers — the people who strain hardest to become a part of it because they realize that it’s precious; and who do the most to remake it so that our ideas, and our appeal, may stay fresh.
That used to be a cliché, but in the Age of [President Donald] Trump it needs to be explained all over again. We’re a country of immigrants — by and for them, too. Americans who don’t get it should get out.
GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan backs programs that allow low-tech business to import cheap foreign workers instead of hiring U.S. workers. “We need to have an immigration system that is wired for what our economy needs … so let’s find out where those gaps in our labor markets are and have our immigration system wired for that,” Ryan said in 2016.
President Barack Obama declared in 2014 that Americans do not have the right to favor their fellow citizens over foreigners, saying:
Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently. And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration.  If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks’ — even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.
Under Obama’s lax border policies, roughly 550,000 additional illegal aliens flew or walked into the United States in 2016, while only a tiny percentage of the 11 million resident illegals were sent home.
This bipartisan open-border viewpoint is part of the law and played a large role in Obama’s policies. For example, from 2011 to 2016, Obama used a loophole in federal law to allow more than 300,000 unskilled migrants from Central American to live and work in the United States, despite the harmful impact on the kids’ schools and local crime rates.
Economic and Political Impact
These pro-immigration views held by progressives and business-minded Republicans means that the federal government now imports one million legal immigrants each year to compete for jobs against the 4 million Americans who graduate from schools or colleges each year.
The federal government also imports more than 1 million temporary contract workers, including roughly 110,000 H-1B workers per year. That rapid rise of the secret OPT program — plus likely rises in other semi-secret L and B-1 visas — suggest that the government allows companies and universities to keep an army of more than 1.6 million foreign contract-workers in the United States.
Most of those foreign contract workers are white-collar professionals, while fewer than 100,000 are legal temporary agricultural workers, according to the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute.
This flood of foreign labor spikes profits and stock values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees, drives up real estate prices, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and sidelines marginalized Americans and their families. The flood also fragments Americans’ civic society into competing identity groups, sometimes dubbed social “diversity.”
OPT
2017 graduation ceremonies at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia.
This social conflict also distorts Americans’ politics, allowing the inauguration of New York real-estate magnate Donald Trump on January 20, 2017.
Since then, despite massive bipartisan pressure from politicians and industry groups eager for cheap labor, Trump has declared his policy to be “Buy American, Hire American.” He has scuttled the cheap-labor Trans-Pacific Partnership program, sharply reduced illegal immigration, slowed the growth of contract workers programs, started reforming the H-1B white-collar outsourcing program, and eliminated the ‘DAPA’ amnesty for four million illegals.
Because of pressure from progressives in the media and the Democratic Party, Trump has also preserved some of Obama’s open-borders rules, such as the 2012 ‘DACA’ policy which delivers work permits to roughly 765,000 younger illegals.
So far, Trump and his deputies have done little publicly to curb the fast-growing OPT program — even though it discriminates against the children of politically influential college-graduates. “You would think that when their own college-educated kids are being discriminated against, it would get attention,” said Krikorian.
However, in December 2016,  the Department of Education disbarred the accreditation organization which validated the NPU’s educational claims. In March 2017, Trump’s DHS stopping issuing OPT or H-1B approvals to foreign students from the diploma-mill colleges which rely on that accrediting organization.
However, Trump’s officials will soon need to deal with the legality of the “crony capitalist” OPT program, said lawyer John Miano, who is suing the federal government on behalf of the Washington Alliance of Tech Workers. His lawsuit shows how OPT was created by regulators in 1992 and then expanded in 2002 without any action by Congress or an agency regulatory process. The legal claim is strong, he said, because “we have the government making law via regulation… [what is] the largest guest worker program” in the nation.
But without strong public pressure on legislators, the corporate and university pressure for the OPT program will likely deter the Trump administration from accepting a courtroom defeat over OTP, Miano said. “I don’t expect the Trump administration to say ‘We can’t defend it’ … [but] we don’t know what they are planning to do.”

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com
Below are four images of the Penn State list of companies that hired OPT or “Academic Training” foreign graduatesMany of the companies and universities also hire H-1B workers. 
OPT
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New education regulations will make colleges much more vulnerable financially and legally. Some colleges could be forced to shut down.