When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Thursday, July 12, 2018
THE CLASS WAR OVER PAYING LIVING WAGES TO LEGALS..... Amnesty, non-enforcement and open borders are all about keeping the hordes invading and wages depressed
BUSH HAS ALWAYS BEEN A GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
Bush Center Slams Trump: We Want More Migration AP Photo/Seth Wenig
The economics director at President George W. Bush’s advocacy center slammed President Donald Trump’s popular, pro-American immigration policy.
The May 1 slam came just before Bush posted a May 2 video urging national unity in the coronavirus crash that has pushed more than 25 million Americans out of jobs.
“The most important thing to remember in this is that we don’t want [Trump’s] temporary policy to become permanent immigration policy,” economic director Laura Collins said a video posted on the center’s Twitter account. She continued:
We know immigrants are good for the economy. We know they’re good for our culture. We know they’re in this fight with us together, and we’re going to meet them working with us side by side in any recovery after the pandemic is over.
Trump’s April 22 immigration policy says the economic needs of American employees are more important than the immigration preferences of foreigners. His policy temporarily trims the annual inflow of legal immigrants and directs agencies to review visa worker programs in 30 days.
Polls show the public — including recent immigrants — is overwhelmingly aligned with Trump in prioritizing jobs for Americans over welcomes for legal immigrants.
The visa worker programs targeted by Trump are extremely important to the Fortune 500. In response, the companies’ lobbyists and progressives allies have quickly launched a hard-nosed lobbying campaign and a soft-focus PR campaign to protect the programs and mass migration.
Congress now accepts 1 million legal immigrants per year.
It also allows companies to keep roughly 2 million cheap and complaint foreign visa-workers in U.S. jobs. The 2 million workforce includes roughly 1.5 million foreign white-collar visa workers, plus roughly 400,000 foreign blue-collar guest workers, in professional or seasonal jobs needed by roughly 26 million unemployed Americans.
Collins touted the corporate PR campaign, dubbed #AllofUs, in her video slamming Trump’s pro-employee policy.
.@LVTCollins explains how it will take #AllOfUs, immigrants and native-born Americans, to defeat COVID-19. And once our nation emerges from quarantine, it will take all of us working together to restart our economy.
“The stated objectives of this executive order were to preserve medical supplies in a pandemic for American immigrants already here and to preserve job openings in any recovery for American workers that can be first in line,” Collins said her video posted May 1.
She continued:
Unfortunately, this executive order is not going to accomplish either of those objectives.
First of all, the virus affects all of us equally. It doesn’t care who we are, or where we’re from. Current travel restrictions and quarantine protocols in place, protect us from viral spread regardless of where we’re from. And so there’s not really a need to prevent more people from coming in in terms of slowing down viral spread. We know the virus is here and it’s spreading. And what we’re doing is working.
However, Collins’ main focus is the economic worry that Trump’s reform may permanently reduce the unending inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and renters preferred by CEOs and investors. She said:
We know immigrants are good for the economy. We know immigrants don’t compete with native-born Americans for jobs. And we know that before the pandemic, there were millions of unfilled jobs in the United States.
If we assume that in any recovery, all those jobs come back, every American that wants a job will have the ability to fill the jobs that were there. We’re still going to have shortages and we’re going to need immigrants there to help fill those jobs.
We simply don’t have a labor force at full employment, big enough to fill all the jobs in the economy.
Immigrants — like the birth of Americans’ children — help grow the economy. They expand the labor force, boost retail sales, spike real estate values, fuel the stock market, and expand the number of companies. A growing economy can be good for all — but it is especially good for wealthy people who can invest in company stocks.
Yet every annual wave of immigrants also causes much economic harm to the roughly 220 million Americans (and recent legal immigrants) who work for a living, or who are educating themselves to take jobs in a few years.
Every new wave of legal immigrants and illegal migrants competes for existing jobs and force down Americans’ wages. The arrivals also expand poverty, reduce pressure on investors to buy productivity-boosting machines, drive up the price of good housing, and add congestion to K-12 schools and universities.
Over the last 30 years, since George Bush’s father signed a 1990 bill roughly doubling immigration, the government’s massive inflow of immigrants has kept Americans wages almost flat (until 2018) and so has turbocharged the U.S. stock market.
The establishment’s immigration policy has worked with free trade to shift much wealth from middle-class employees and the heartland states towards the stock market and the major coastal cities.
Trump was elected in 2016 to help reverse the establishment’s economic policy.
Since 2017, he has mostly stopped illegal migration, and he pushed wages up for blue-collars in 2018 and 2019. He has also trimmed legal immigration, and his April 22 policy sets the stage for incremental, significant reductions in the visa worker programs, such as the little-known B-1 and OPT visa programs.
Business lobbies strongly oppose reductions in immigration and visa workers.
Public opinion has shifted strongly against mass migration, so a bipartisan front of #AllofUScare billionaires is using Christian & patriotic themes to help preserve their supply of wage-cutting workers & rent-raising consumers. https://bit.ly/2VUqCXo
Collins’ pro-migration views reflect George W. Bush’s pro-business leaning and his 2001 push to allow U.S. employers to bypass Americans and instead hire any willing workers from anywhere on the globe. The 2001 Twin Towers attack stopped Bush’s “Any Willing Worker” plan.
Collins insisted, “We know immigrants don’t compete with native-born Americans for jobs.”
But the Center for Immigration Studies reported in August 2018:
If immigrants “do jobs that Americans won’t do”, we should be able to identify occupations in which the workers are nearly all foreign-born. However, among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, we find only a handful of majority-immigrant occupations, and none completely dominated by immigrants (legal or illegal). Furthermore, in none of the 474 occupations do illegal immigrants constitute a majority of workers.
For example, companies provide the reward of green cards to roughly 50,000 foreign visa-workers each year after those foreign workers have taken technology jobs from Americans via the H-1B and other visa programs.
Business groups warn the Trump administration: 'Extend work permits for our foreign visa-workers or we'll have "hundreds and thousands" of open jobs for unemployed American voters.'#H1Bhttps://bit.ly/2YlijWd
While businessmen have been complaining loudly about labor shortages for months, data from the government Thursday showed that wage gains trailed consumer prices in June.
The consumer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1 percent in June compared with May. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.2 percent, the Labor Department said Thursday.
Economists had expected both measures to rise by 0.2 percent. The lower-than-expected core inflation reflects the fact that the headline number was driven by higher energy prices, while the core figure was dragged down by price declines in furniture, clothing, and tobacco. Prices of hotel rooms fell 3.7 percent from the previous month. Oil prices have been up sharply.
Compared with a year ago, consumer prices are up 2.9%, the largest gain since February 2012. Core inflation rose a more modest 2.3% in June from a year ago.
Average hourly earnings were up 2.7% in June compared with a year earlier. As a result, average inflation-adjusted wages were about flat for the second month in a row.
Prices are unlikely to keep outpacing wage growth. If wage growth remains low, consumer spending will likely drag, slowing economic growth.
The slow pace of wage growth undermines the case many business leaders have been making for increased immigration to offset the alleged labor shortage. If anything, adding new workers is likely to slow wage growth even more, making a broader economic slowdown more likely.
The lower than expected core-inflation figure also implies that U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum have not driven prices higher, as many critics of the Trump administration’s policies had predicted.
"In other words, the boom in corporate profits has depended on the suppression of wages and the intensified exploitation of the working class." "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."
Washington, D.C. (July 12, 2018) – A new report published by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals an “occupational mismatch” among highly educated immigrants, those who arrive in the United States with a college degree or more. The report calls into question how much paper education credentials should play in a merit-based immigration system.
Highly educated immigrants often hold jobs for which they appear over-qualified on paper; only 22 percent of immigrants with at least a college degree have an elite-skill occupation. These immigrants’ skills often do not fully transfer to the U.S. labor market, and just as importantly, the value of their higher education varies depending on their sending country.
Jason Richwine, an independent public policy analyst and author of the report, cautions lawmakers on their approach to high-skill immigration policy. Richwine points out that “Highly educated immigrants certainly offer more economic benefits than less-educated immigrants, but paper credentials are not necessarily a reliable predictor of employment or income success.”
• Among immigrants with a college degree, 20 percent have a low-skill (bottom third) occupation, compared to 7 percent of natives.
• Nearly 30 percent of Mexican immigrants with a college degree have a low-skill occupation, as do 35 percent of Central American immigrants.
• About 85 percent of Canadian immigrants with at least a college degree have a high-skill (top third) occupation, compared to 73 percent of natives and 53 percent of Mexican immigrants.
• Among immigrants with an advanced degree, 37 percent have an elite-skill (top tenth) occupation, compared to 50 percent of natives.
• Length of U.S. residency is not strongly correlated with occupational skill level.
College-Grad Salaries Eroded
by Hidden Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers
Every
CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits
by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an
obvious yes.
In an article titled “Workers Welcome Wage Gains, But Companies
Feel Squeeze,” the voice of corporate America, the Wall Street Journal, warns that
workers’ demands for increased wages are threatening to bring the stock market
bonanza to an end.
The article acknowledges that the striving of workers to reverse
years of stagnating and declining wages is in conflict with the profit drive of
corporate America. It thereby implicitly admits that the working class and the
capitalist class are engaged in a zero-sum class war.
“Rising wages are beginning to eat into the profits of some US
companies,” the article begins. “Businesses from dollar stores to hotel
operators to fast food chains have warned in recent months that higher labor
costs have been a drag on their profits—a potential headwind for the nine-year
stock market rally as it struggles for momentum ahead of the second-quarter
earnings season.”
Workers know that the average wage growth of 2.5 percent over the
last 16 months is not enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. But as
far as the Wall Street
Journal is concerned, this slight increase is a “threat.”
The article cites a Goldman Sachs report noting that a one percent
increase in labor costs decreases corporate earnings by 0.8 percent. In other
words, the boom in corporate profits has depended on the suppression of wages
and the intensified exploitation of the working class.
The article follows the release of the minutes from the June
meeting of the US Federal Reserve, showing that the central concern of the
country’s central bankers is the danger of a surge in inflation, by which they
mean, above all, wages. The Journal reported
Wednesday that a majority of the regional Fed bank chiefs are now in favor of
raising interest rates at a faster clip. The purpose of this shift in policy is
to slow down economic growth and the rate of hiring in order to undercut signs
of a wages push by the American working class.
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.
While corporate profits climb to new heights, the reality of life
for tens of millions of workers is defined by increases in the indices of
social misery: growing opioid abuse, increasing maternal death rates,
exhausting and dangerous workplace conditions, declining life expectancy,
crumbling infrastructure and mountains of student loan debt.
This is an international phenomenon. The Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently published its 2018 Global
Employment Outlook Report, which noted: “At the end of 2017, nominal wage growth in the OECD area was only half of what it was just before the Great
Recession for comparable levels of unemployment.” As a result, “poverty has grown
among the working-age population.”
Not only have wages failed to keep up with rising corporate
earnings, they have also fallen behind increases in productivity. The OECD
report notes, “If real median wages had perfectly tracked productivity growth
over 1995-2014, they would have been 13 percent higher at the end of the
period.”
The ruling classes of the US and Europe took advantage of the
financial crisis and resulting mass unemployment to suppress wages, boost
corporate profits and intensify exploitation. This has continued in the most
recent period despite nominally lower unemployment rates.
From 1995 to 2013, aggregate labor’s share of gross domestic
product across the OECD fell 3.5 percentage points—a figure that represents a
wealth transfer equal to roughly $1.89 trillion per year by the end of this
period.
In the United States, the labor share of nonfarm national income
fell from 66.4 percent in 2000 to 58.9 percent in 2018—a transfer of wealth
that will equal $1.4 trillion in 2018 alone.
These massive shifts are not the product of “accidental” economic
processes, but of deliberate policies enacted by the ruling classes of the
major financial powers in the US and Europe. Beginning in 2008, the US Federal
Reserve began pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the vaults of the
banks and corporations, keeping interest rates at or near zero and inflating
the stock market.
The Obama administration, after working with the Bush
administration to oversee the bank bailout, implemented a strategy to slash
workers’ wages and benefits. In the 2009 auto bailout, the Obama White House,
with the full support of the United Auto Workers union, imposed a blanket 50
percent wage cut on all new-hires.
With the passage of Obamacare in 2010, the Democrats provided incentives
for companies to raise workers’ out-of-pocket health care costs and cut
benefits, or eliminate employer-provided health care altogether. The 2013-2014
Detroit bankruptcy was a milestone in the assault on public employee pensions
and health benefits.
The jobs that were added after the market crash were
overwhelmingly part-time and low paying. As the San Francisco Federal Reserve
acknowledged last week, “high rates of involuntary part-time work are here to
stay.” 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.
What made this social counterrevolution possible was the
suppression of the class struggle, in which the trade unions played the decisive
role. The level of US strike activity over the previous decade was the lowest
since the government began keeping records in 1947.
The surge in strike activity this year, led by the teachers’
walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, and above all the fact that
the walkouts were launched on the initiative of rank-and-file teachers, not the
unions, have filled the ruling class with dread, prompting it to take economic
measures to undermine workers’ militancy.
The social counterrevolution is worldwide. Across Europe,
governments are racing to implement policies aimed at eliminating whatever is
left of their social safety nets: the cuts to the National Health Service and
public housing in Great Britain, the passage of punitive labor laws and the
attacks on rail workers in France, new austerity measures in Germany, and the
EU-dictated austerity regimes in Spain, Italy and Greece.
Workers all over the world, increasingly connected by
international communications and supply lines, are advancing demands for substantial
wage increases. In the US, teachers in Arizona asked for $20,000 wage
increases. In Germany, metalworkers demanded a 6 percent wage increase for 3.9
million workers. In France, rail workers remain on strike against attacks on
wages and benefits. Norwegian oil workers went on strike Tuesday demanding an 8
percent wage hike.
In Brazil and China, truck drivers have struck for a large wage
increase, while in Argentina truckers have demanded 30 percent raises. In South
Africa, thousands of public utility workers voted Friday to reject an offer
from their employer, Eskom, of a 7 percent wage increase. Garment workers in
Bangladesh are engaging in protests demanding payment of the minimum wage.
The Wall Street
Journal’s concern is that any wages push will bring down the
stock market like a house of cards. But with each strike and protest, the
fundamental question posed to the working class is: Who controls how the
world’s wealth is allocated?
The immense economic and technological capacities presently used
to exploit workers and increase the wealth of the financial oligarchy must be
transformed into tools for the reorganization of the world economy to meet
human need. The trillions of dollars taken from wages and benefits and funneled
into the stock market must be redirected into public works program to provide
housing, health care, education, proper nutrition, clean water and access to
culture for billions of people worldwide.
Chadwick Moore — Left for Dead in Danville: How Globalism Is Killing Working Class America
The city of Danville, Virginia sits in the bellybutton of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a hat-toss over the North Carolina border and about 85 miles northwest of Raleigh. It’s low hill country and Danville straddles the frothy, chocolate-milk waters of the Dan River. Downtown, once a booming trade district, today is a decomposed industrial husk, a tidy cluster of silent rectangles ensnared by broad, ghostly thoroughfares built for a time in the not-so-distant past when people and goods poured in and out of town.
Those days are gone, perhaps never to return.
The story of Danville is one echoed in countless communities across the country, a gutted middle class left for dead in the wake of sweeping international trade deals in Washington, applauded by liberal economists and a lockstep media portraying such policies as inevitable, ultimately good, and a win for the American consumer–a narrative usually coupled with condescending and disdainful attitudes toward displaced workers for a perceived inability to sprint ahead with the times.
Empty storefronts in the once-bustling downtown Danville, Virginia. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
As recently as the early 2000s, Danville’s top employer, textile manufacturer Dan River Mills, which specialized in bedding, sold 33 percent of production to Wal-Mart stores–the highest number federal law allows a retailer to buy from a single manufacturer–and held other lucrative contracts with K-Mart, producing Martha Stewart’s textile line.
It was an iconic American company. Within 20 years of incorporation, in 1882, Dan River Mills was the largest textile manufacturer in the South, and by 1909 produced annually 78 million yards of cloth.
“My parents raised four children working at the Dan River mill,” says Sonya Lewis, whose grandparents also worked for Dan River, on a recent Saturday evening while attending a memorial service for a friend at a Mexican restaurant in Danville.
“Growing up here, it was booming. It was a great place. I remember that everybody worked, everybody I went to school with, their parents worked,” she says.
Empty streets in downtown Danville on a Saturday afternoon. Before textile manufacturing defined the city’s economy, it was a hub of the tobacco trade. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
When Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993, business was so good that, even with technological innovations in manufacturing, Dan River Mills still had a labor shortage. The company acquired seven other manufacturing facilities in the area, employing 6,500 workers, according to Owen Voss, a former employee in Dan River’s corporate offices.
But Voss saw the writing on the wall when Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, a deal drafted by his predecessor, President George H.W. Bush. The following year the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a 50-year-old trade agreement aimed at reducing tariffs, was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO), which then included 125 nations and governed 90 percent of global trade.
“Bill Clinton killed manufacturing in the United States,” Voss, a gentle, soft-spoken middle-aged man and motorcycle enthusiast, says.“Dan River is a perfect example. It built this town, and NAFTA killed it.”
President Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at the White House on September 14, 1993. Behind him (left to right) is President Gerald Ford, House Speaker Thomas Foley of Washington, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, former President Jimmy Carter, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, former President George Bush, House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois, and Vice President Al Gore. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)
Since 2000, the year that China joined the WTO and six years after the NAFTA agreement was signed, the U.S. has lost an estimated 5 million manufacturing sector jobs, with 900,000 of those from the textile industry. Only one in five job losses in domestic textiles has been attributed to technological advancements in automation. Between 1997 and 2009, 650 textile plants, mostly in the South, have closed in the U.S.
Voss recalls the then-CEO of Dan River, Joseph Lanier Jr., passed around a petition to block NAFTA that was later sent to Clinton’s White House.
“My life, like everyone else’s, took a big dip,” says Voss. “The murder rate has tripled, gang activity is everywhere, suicides are up. My cousin committed suicide in 2010. He was laid off from Dan River and unable to find work and got into drugs. My nephew was murdered that same year, it had to do with drugs. He was 28. You couldn’t imagine any of this happening in the 90s. The middle class has moved to the lower class. What used to be a middle class neighborhood is now ‘the hood,’” he says.
A home on Danville’s north side, once a thriving suburban community where mill workers lived. Now, there are entire blocks of abandoned or unsound structures. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
In 2015, Danville’s median household income stood at $32,935, well below Virginia’s statewide average of $66,262. In 1990, the average income of Danville was $44,357 per household, when adjusted for inflation.
According to statistics from the Federal Reserve, as the population decreased by almost 20 percent between 1990 and 2014, the number of food stamp recipients in Danville nearly tripled from less than 5,000 in 1989 to nearly 13,000 today. That is more than a quarter of the population.
With the economic collapse, racial tensions are on the rise, an ugly development in a town that is 47 percent white and 48 percent black, where many recall the prosperous years of a harmonious, multi-racial middle class entwined in the same industry. Last year, the Ku Klux Klan announced a rally in Danville. It never materialized save for counter-protesters who showed up in response. This year, flyers for the KKK were seen circulating around town.
Danville sits in Virginia’s 5th Congressional district, a chunk of the state larger in area than New Jersey. Future president James Madison was the district’s first representative in Congress. The city, which by the 1800s was a prosperous tobacco trading center, would go down in history as the last capital of the Confederacy when Jefferson Davis fled here after the fall of Richmond and set up a temporary White House where, soon after, he surrendered to the Union.
A strip of boarded-up industrial spaces in downtown Danville, Virginia. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
In 1994, NAFTA passed with overwhelming support in Congress (mostly from Republicans) with both Virginia Senators and the 5th district’s Democratic Congressman, Lewis Payne, voting for the trade agreement. (Payne was re-elected the following year, but died in 1997). Virginia’s 5th has sent a Democrat representative to Congress each year since the 1880s, but flipped Republican in 2012, where it has remained since.
In 2006, after hemorrhaging jobs for years under the pressure from retailers to compete with cheap foreign products, the White Mill–Dan River’s main production facility–closed its doors for good. The company was acquired by Gujarat Heavy Chemicals, of India, and the remaining 500 workers were terminated. The 650,000 square foot gothic-revival structure had been in continual operation since opening in 1921, towering for generations over the landscape like a citadel.
The White Mill facility, the base of Dan River Mills’ operations, closed its doors in 2006 after hemorrhaging jobs for decades. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
Michael Stumo, the CEO of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nonprofit trade policy think tank, describes the myth that so-called free trade agreements are universally beneficial as having completely fallen apart in recent years.
“There’s a lot more losers than we thought. It’s starting to look like it might be a majority of losers if you’re not in New York City, San Francisco, and the like,” Stumo says. “Everything in between is being economically carpet-bombed.”
He calls NAFTA the model for several free trade agreements that have followed, particularly with China, which, despite the Washington and New York narrative of such deals being a sublime realization of true free market capitalism, are in reality anything but.
“When you have China, for example, subsidizing energy, free land, subsidized employment, low cost or free credit loans that become grants and can undercut you by half, that’s really big. It’s an unearned advantage because of subsidies.”
Sumo cites the formation of the WTO in 1995, which formalized previous trade parameters and deepened the globalist model of dissolving borders and displacing national sovereignty, as a follow-up to NAFTA.
“When China joined the WTO in 2000 with 1.3 billion people underemployed, it began pulling them out of the rice paddies, the farms, and rural areas, and putting them to work. The Chinese under-consume. They produce more than they consume, [in] a country that’s four and a half times as big as ours and relying on the American consumer to fund their path to wealth and doing so with a state-directed economy, which is different than communist, it’s a strategic mix of state capitalism with a little bit of private sector in it. We always thought communism would fail, but China found central planning 2.0 and is pretty good at it,” he says.
Today, somewhere between 70 percent and 80 percent of all products sold in U.S. Wal-Mart stores are from China. Following such deals to their eventual end reveals an even more grim future for the American middle class if trade borders continue to dissolve.
If the U.S. and China, for example, were to enter into a single labor and goods market, wages would then converge. Whereas a factory worker in China was making, say, $3 an hour and a comparable worker in the U.S. made $30 an hour; the Chinese worker shoots up to about $15 an hour, and the American worker’s wages collapse to the same. In China, everyone is happy and rich. In the U.S., the government would be overthrown.
“We have free trade within the 50 states,” Stumo says. “By impoverishing our middle class with this offshoring driven by free trade policy, you’re killing the U.S. consumer market, which drives growth, because they have no money. Five or ten percent cheaper prices is overwhelmed in this stage by lack of production and stagnant wages,” he says. “The U.S. middle class cannot afford to fund the rise of other countries anymore.
“Industry doesn’t stand still; industry is always incubating–you give up the jobs, the wealth creation, the supply chain clusters in communities, and that affects the service sector around them,” Stumo says. “You pull those plants out, and a lot of people are out of work, and then the whole general wage level drops because burger-flipping isn’t an upward pressure on wages, but production is.”
Alexander Hamilton composed the first report on manufacturing in the U.S. in 1789. “Hamilton knew we had to produce in order to become wealthy,” Stumo says. “We certainly over-consume and under-produce. Germany, China, Japan, and South Korea have a strategy of overproducing and under-consuming. They basically export their unemployment to us. And that’s not how free markets are supposed to work. They’re supposed to be balanced. It’s a balance versus imbalance issue in production versus consumption.”
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump kept to a campaign promise and withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was at the heart of Obama’s Asia policy. And following blustery language on the campaign trail regarding the U.S.’s trade deficit with China–which reached $309.6 billion in 2016–President Trump received an unprecedented welcome there on his recent Asia trip. Throngs of cheering fans were photographed welcoming the president, who is the first foreign leader to ever be invited to dine in China’s Forbidden City.
Speaking at a summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, President Trump remarked, “I will make bilateral trade agreements with any Indo-Pacific nation that wants to be our partner and that will abide by the principles of fair and reciprocal trade. What we will no longer do is enter into large agreements that tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty, and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible.”
When the jobs left, Danville’s crime rate skyrocketed. And even after a slow decline over the ensuing years, in 2015, Danville still ranked as the second most crime-riddled municipality in the state of Virginia, with violent crimes 211 percent higher than the state average and all crimes 66 percent higher than the national average. In recent years, drug addiction, particularly opioids, have plagued the community, and youth suicide rates have spiked nearly 50 percent above the state average.
An “Open” sign hangs on the door of a long abandoned storefront just north of the Dan River. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
These days, nearly everyone in town has a story to tell about the untimely death of a loved one. Two years ago, Dwayne Martin’s best friend committed suicide. At an early age, Martin, a 32-year-old Danville native and restaurant cook, saw himself getting into trouble. There were drugs around, and his classmates were committing robberies around town. There were no jobs, and Martin left town to attend culinary school.
“Dan River Mills used to sponsor a lot of stuff for the youth to do,” Martin recalls over beers at a local restaurant. The youngest of 11, he says he returned to Danville realizing his nieces and nephews might fall into the same traps he nearly did, and wanted to be a strong role model for them. It was just before coming back he learned of his friend’s suicide.
“He was big into a lot of different activities that got cut out because of funding. He was stressed out about having nothing to do, there’s no jobs around, and he was depressed,” Martin says.
A row of empty storefronts on Danville’s north side, across the river from the White Mill. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
Danvillians are also dying faster in other ways. A report this year from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found Danville ranked 127 out of 133 localities in the state for the overall health of its citizens. The report identified unemployment and childhood poverty as the cause of higher than average rates of adult smoking, obesity, infant mortality, physical inactivity, teenage pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases.
“That’s the story of wage stagnation and off-shoring and this gradual dissolution of the borders,” Stumo told me. “That’s causing this drug addiction, this breakdown of the family, and the like. You have to have rational nationalism. You have to take care of the people in your own border.”
Cautious optimism spread through town a couple years ago. Rumor had it a national security contractor was moving into the White Mill facility, bringing hundreds of jobs with it. That never happened. The city then toyed with turning it into a shopping mall. That also failed. Last year, the city of Danville bought the property for $1.5 million, with no plans for what to do with the space.
The city of Danville recently paid millions to purchase the empty White Mill facility. But plans to turn it into a shopping mall were abandoned. Hope floated as a national security firm considered moving into the space, before also pulling out. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
The city also committed $14.5 million to revitalizing downtown, which as recently as five years ago was a blighted ghost town. Today, downtown has been significantly cleaned up, even if a fresh coat of paint and repaired broken windows only accentuate the fact that, like a Hollywood soundstage, many of the structures are empty props.
On a rainy April late afternoon, I left my budget hotel on Riverside Drive to get something to eat. There is a group of men in dusty workwear who sit outside the entrance each day drinking beer from a cooler and amassing a small pyramid of cigarette butts in the ashtray near the door. At night, women wander the halls. Coquettish shrieks reverberate from the rooms at all hours.
I stopped by Hamm’s, a popular restaurant and bar. The sky had been pregnant and moody all afternoon, the occasional god-light bursting through clouds of rolling blue-grey. From the highway, long dead smokestacks perch ominously on the horizon like the once revered stone deities of a bygone civilization. In the foreground, along Riverside Drive, steam trails from the tops of lesser buildings, fast food restaurants, lined up like minutemen, where the only semblance of an assembly line left in Danville seemed to be the procession of cars inching along the drive-thrus.
In the car over, National Public Radio is running a segment on Janesville, Wisconsin, House Speak Paul Ryan’s hometown. His family has been there for five generations.
Janesville had been making Chevrolets for 85 years. In 2008, Ryan, then a congressman, received a phone call from the chairman and CEO of General Motors informing him that the company would cease all production of Chevrolets at its 4.8 million square foot facility.
What followed there was the same collapse seen in Danville; when GM left, the economy in this Wisconsin community of 60,000 toppled like dominos. Nearby suppliers shut down. Wages collapsed. Marriage rates fell, drug addiction increased, and political partisanship exploded in a once concordant Midwestern, Democrat-leaning town. Wisconsin went for Trump in the 2016 election, the first time the state voted for a Republican in 30 years.
A fence surrounds the shuttered GM assembly plant on May 4, 2009, in Janesville, Wisconsin. Production of GM products at the plant ended in December 2008, eliminating all but a few of the 1,200 remaining jobs which once numbered over 5,000. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
On the NPR show, a caller rings in from Portsmouth, Ohio, to recount a similar story from her community. Heroin is everywhere now, she says.
Curiously absent from the NPR segment and from a book about Janesville released last year, is any mention of globalization, NAFTA, and outsourced jobs overseas. The show’s host and journalists hold the hand of suffering working class Midwesterners, exploiting the fallout with no reference to the cause.
I am from a GM town–Columbia, Tennessee, a small, hilly, lush city about 45-minutes south of Nashville in the heart of Jack Daniels country. It’s known as Muletown, U.S.A. for the annual Mule Day celebration in April. A sign at the entrance to town proclaims Columbia is “Where the Old South Meets the New South.” Grand plantations sweep the landscape amid trailer parks and derelict little homesteads. GM keeps the middle class just above water here, even as the wealthy suburbs of Nashville encroach and bring with them generic strip malls and a more cosmopolitan set of people. Celebrities, including musician Sheryl Crow, have begun buying land in the area.
In September 2017, GM announced it would be cutting 680 jobs at the Spring Hill facility next to Columbia. Built in the 1980s to manufacture GM’s now-discontinued Saturn line, the plant has been plagued by incremental layoffs for years, coinciding with soaring crime rates and drug addiction.
Days after GM’s announcement, subcontractor Ryder Supply Chain Solutions announced it will cut an additional 361 jobs at the Spring Hill facility, a stark reversal from two years ago when the company said it planned to create 600 new jobs in the area.
It is karaoke night at Hamm’s in Danville and the crowd is in good spirits. I sparked conversation with David Thaxton, a high school math teacher.
“I have students who can’t learn because they haven’t had a meal in 24 hours, so I bring food to school to feed my kids so they can learn,” Thaxton, a tall, lanky man in his 30s, tells me.
“Many people in this town are now unemployable,” he says. “There are a lot of people who can’t pass a drug test. That has to do with ten years of economic depression.”
The next morning at House of Hope, a homeless shelter in downtown Danville, a 56-year-old father of five named James tells me he has occupied a bed here for two weeks. He is a former Dan River employee unable to find steady employment in the last few years.
“There was a lot of jobs back then,” he says, sitting in a sunny window of the 16 bed facility that opened in 2008. In the next room, a handful of men are sunk into the sofas in a common area watching television. “There were a lot of factories that were open. I can’t even name half of them.You had so many factories that were open and people mostly had jobs.”
James recently kicked cocaine and alcohol addiction and paid off hefty fines to reinstate his driver’s license.
“Danville always to me been somewhere that was laid back, if you wanted to retire it was good for that. It had a good atmosphere and not too much crime going on. Now the majority of the people I know have left to seek employment. Now it seems the city can only employ about a third of the people who are here. Most the people here are senior citizens, on disability, and not working,” he says.
This year, citing demand, the city of Danville announced plans to open a second homeless shelter. The city’s population, at 41,000, has been in freefall since NAFTA, with 10,000 fewer residents today than in the mid-90s, and many of those who’ve remained were only able to do so because of retirement packages from Dan River Mills.
A row of dilapidated homes in downtown Danville, Virginia. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
Tim Kaine, current Virginia senator, former governor, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, is a staunch proponent of free trade agreements and was an early fan of NAFTA and later President Obama’s 2015 renewal of the Trade Promotion Authority (or “fast track”), expanding executive power over trade negotiations.
As recently as July 2016, the month of the Democratic Convention, Kaine called the Trans Pacific Partnership, an Obama free trade proposal with Asia reviled by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump supporters, “an improvement of the status quo.” Only after Sanders’s supporters pressured the party to alter its platform later that month to go against TPP, Kaine said he no longer supported the policy in its current form.
As a state elected official, Kaine has made multiple face-saving trips to Danville, most recently last April. In 2014, Kaine began his keynote address to the Danville Economic Development Summit by telling attendees, “When you talk about issues of globalism and global trade, it’s natural in Danville to think about what we lose in globalism, what jobs might have gone, what manufacturing opportunities might have left. And there is a reality to that that we have to grapple with. And we’re talking about new free trade agreements right now, and we have to talk about what happened when NAFTA was passed since, and analyze what was good and what was bad.”
“This is an area that’s had economic challenges due to the transition from one industry to another industry,” Kaine, who is up for reelection to the senate this year, said, perhaps suggesting that Danville’s welfare system is a type of “industry” on par with manufacturing.
“The global economy, like it or not, that’s where we are. And you’re going to be more likely to succeed if you’re out there aggressively battling,” he said to a chilly audience through his folksy, Joker-grin.
The 2016 election ignited the long-simmering discontent of Americans on the received-end of lectures from politicians like Kaine. As they saw it, the last twenty years was a cycle of betrayal, abandonment, and deceit. First, America’s governing and financial elites stole their livelihoods with destructive trade deals, then lectured them about how great free trade has really been for them, then they ignored communities like Danville as they sunk deeper into decline. Finally—when these “deplorable” Americans chose candidate Donald Trump over the advice of their betters on the political right and the left—they were told, in the words of National Review’s Kevin Williamson, that their broken communities “deserve to die.”
Six months after assuming office, President Trump, speaking from the Rose Garden on his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, told reporters, “I was elected to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Seven months after that, Trump turned his attention sharply to the steel industry. While speaking to members of Congress in February, he calling out Chinese steel dumping into the U.S. market, saying “You see what’s happened with our steel and aluminum industries. They are being decimated by dumping from many countries—in particular one, but many countries.”
Cheap Chinese steel is produced below cost by state-owned entities propped up with heavy government subsidies. China’s economic industrialization began with reforms by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. By 1999, China produced around 123 million metric tons of steel a year. By 2011, just ten years after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, China produced 45 percent of the world’s steel, at 683 million metric tons a year.
In the U.S., steel production peaked in the 1970s at roughly 140 million metric tons, but by 2014 domestic steel production had plummeted by nearly 40 percent, to 88 million metric tons. Behind China and Japan, the U.S. is now the third largest producer of raw steel in the world.
Twenty days after his meeting with congressmen, President Trump signed increased tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum into law.
The move was met with mostly derision from the media. “Trump Misleads The Public On Steel Tariffs,” read the headline at Forbes. “Trump steel tariffs may leave these U.S. steelworkers jobless,” wrote Reuters. “The Real Danger of Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs,” blasted the New Yorker. “U.S. allies see Trump’s steel tariffs as an insult,” wrote the Washington Post.
At the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump was surrounded by steel and aluminum workers who then asked the president to autograph their hardhats. Almost immediately after news spread, citing the tariffs, Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel announced it would re-open an idle plant in Granite City, Illinois, and hire 500 new workers.
Surrounded by applauding steel and aluminum workers, President Trump holds up the “Section 232 Proclamations” on steel imports that he signed in Roosevelt Room of the White House on March 8, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Chadwick Moore is a journalist and conservative political commentator who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow him on Twitter @Chadwick_Moore.
Who ultimately really pays for all the true cost of all that "cheap" labor?
THE DEVASTATING COST OF MEXICO’S WELFARE STATE IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS
“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE
This is the land of opportunity, and anyone who wants the come here can…legally. That’s not the issue. For the Trump White House, it’s been their stated position to shift our immigration policy toward allowing more high-skilled workers into this country.
As for the families of the low-skilled working immigration population in the country, 51 percent (76 percent counting immigrant-led households with children) are collecting some sort of check from our welfare services. Is that good? No. Does that mean we shut it all down? No. That figure comes from the Center for Immigration Studies, who noted the need for the immigration process to be more “selective.” At the same time, there are a lot of American households with children that are also getting some form of government assistance (via USA Today):
About 51% of immigrant-led households receive at least one kind of welfare benefit, including Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and housing assistance, compared to 30% for native-led households, according to the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration.
Those numbers increase for households with children, with 76% of immigrant-led households receiving welfare, compared to 52% for the native-born.
The findings are sure to fuel debate on the presidential campaign trail as Republican candidates focus on changing the nation's immigration laws, from calls for mass deportations to ending birthright citizenship.
Steven Camarota, director of research at the center and author of the report, said that's a much-needed conversation to make the country's immigration system more "selective."
[…]
Linda Chavez agrees with Camarota that the country's welfare system is too large and too costly. But Chavez, a self-professed conservative who worked in President Reagan's administration, said it's irresponsible to say immigrants are taking advantage of the country's welfare system any more than native-born Americans.
[…]
Chavez, president of the Becoming American Institute, a conservative group that advocates for higher levels of legal immigration to reduce illegal immigration, said politicians should be careful about using the data.
[…]
"These kids who get subsidized school lunches today will go on to graduate high school ... will go on to college and move up to the middle class of America," Chavez said. "Every time we have a nativist backlash in our history, we forget that we see immigrants change very rapidly in the second generation."
Yet, as the publication noted, with most immigration waves, first generations are usually less-educated, poorer, and work low-skill jobs. It’s their children that break into the middle class. Both sides will use this to their respective talking points, though I think it’ll be best for the GOP to stay on message by promoting strong borders, enforcing our immigration laws, and making this about security. You have to secure the border first before any talk about reforming our welfare state can begin. And for the most part, this study doesn’t really deviate from past studies about immigrant households. Can there be room for reform? Yes. And in general, our welfare state should be reformed to not engulf people in a pool of dependency, but rather a nice cushion that prevents them from crashing into the floor, but one that also catapults them back into the job market and back on track economically. In other words, it’s a temporary measure. Democrats have removed work requirements and asset tests, which has not fared well concerning accountability of these programs. Yet, that’s for another time.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
America builds the La Raza “The Race” Mexican welfare state
MEXIFORNIA under LA RAZA SUPREMACY RULE: CA has the largest and most expensive prison system in the nation. Half the inmates are Mexicans. Half the murders in CA are by Mexican gangs.
In Mexico’s second largest city of Los Angeles, 93% of the murders are by Mexicans.
"The state of California and the sanctuary city laws that make it a safe-haven for criminal illegal aliens is likely responsible for at least 5,000 crimes that were committed by criminal illegal aliens released by local authorities rather than being handed over to federal immigration officials."
HERITAGE FOUNDATION:
AMNESTY WOULD DOUBLE U.S. POPULATION, POVERTY, HOUSING AND HOMELESS CRISIS
"Critics argue that giving amnesty to 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. would have an immediate negative impact on America’s working and middle class — specifically black Americans and the white working class — who would be in direct competition for blue-collar jobs with the largely low-skilled illegal alien population." JOHN BINDER
TRUMP’S SECRET AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
A dashcam video of downtown Los Angeles on Christmas day reveals a stunning sight: hundreds of tents and lean-tos on the sidewalks that serve as shelter for the homeless. The scene is reminiscent of a third-world country. RICK MORAN / AMERICANTHINKER com
HOMELESS CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES, MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST
CITY, WORSENS BY THE DAY…. Approximates the great depression
"Fox’s Tucker Carlson noted Thursday that Obrador has previously proposed granting AMNESTY TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class,” Carlson added."
Borders are in the news as never before. After millions of young, Muslim, and mostly male refugees flooded into the European Union last year from the war-torn Middle East, a popular revolt arose against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within Europe. The concurrent suspension of most E.U. external controls on immigration and asylum rendered the open-borders pact suddenly unworkable. The European masses are not racists, but they now apparently wish to accept Middle Eastern immigrants only to the degree that these newcomers arrive legally and promise to become European in values and outlook—protocols that the E.U. essentially discarded decades ago as intolerant. Europeans are relearning that the continent’s external borders mark off very different approaches to culture and society from what prevails in North Africa or the Middle East.
A similar crisis plays out in the United States, where President Barack Obama has renounced his former opposition to open borders and executive-order amnesties. Since 2012, the U.S. has basically ceased policing its southern border. The populist pushback against the opening of the border with Mexico gave rise to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump—predicated on the candidate’s promise to build an impenetrable border wall—much as the flood of migrants into Germany fueled opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Driving the growing populist outrage in Europe and North America is the ongoing elite push for a borderless world. Among elites, borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of our age—and, as with other such ideas, it has shaped the language we use. The descriptive term “illegal alien” has given way to the nebulous “unlawful immigrant.” This, in turn, has given way to “undocumented immigrant,” “immigrant,” or the entirely neutral “migrant”—a noun that obscures whether the individual in question is entering or leaving. Such linguistic gymnastics are unfortunately necessary. Since an enforceable southern border no longer exists, there can be no immigration law to break in the first place.
Today’s open-borders agenda has its roots not only in economic factors—the need for low-wage workers who will do the work that native-born Americans or Europeans supposedly will not—but also in several decades of intellectual ferment, in which Western academics have created a trendy field of “borders discourse.” What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs, methods of marginalization designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatize and oppress the “other”—usually the poorer and less Western—who arbitrarily ended up on the wrong side of the divide. “Where borders are drawn, power is exercised,” as one European scholar put it. This view assumes that where borders are notdrawn, power is not exercised—as if a million Middle Eastern immigrants pouring into Germany do not wield considerable power by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western notions of victimization and grievance politics. Indeed, Western leftists seek political empowerment by encouraging the arrival of millions of impoverished migrants.
Dreams of a borderless world are not new, however. The biographer and moralist Plutarch claimed in his essay “On Exile” that Socrates had once asserted that he was not just an Athenian but instead “a citizen of the cosmos.” In later European thought, Communist ideas of universal labor solidarity drew heavily on the idea of a world without borders. “Workers of the world, unite!” exhorted Marx and Engels. Wars broke out, in this thinking, only because of needless quarreling over obsolete state boundaries. The solution to this state of endless war, some argued, was to eliminate borders in favor of transnational governance. H. G. Wells’s prewar science-fiction novel The Shape of Things to Come envisioned borders eventually disappearing as elite transnational polymaths enforced enlightened world governance. Such fictions prompt fads in the contemporary real world, though attempts to render borders unimportant—as, in Wells’s time, the League of Nations sought to do—have always failed. Undaunted, the Left continues to cherish the vision of a borderless world as morally superior, a triumph over artificially imposed difference.
Yet the truth is that borders do not create difference—they reflect it. Elites’ continued attempts to erase borders are both futile and destructive.
H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel "The Shape of Things to Come" envisioned a borderless world run by transnational superelites. (KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES)
Borders—and the fights to keep or change them—are as old as agricultural civilization. In ancient Greece, most wars broke out over border scrubland. The contested upland eschatia offered little profit for farming but possessed enormous symbolic value for a city-state to define where its own culture began and ended. The self-acclaimed “citizen of the cosmos” Socrates nonetheless fought his greatest battle as a parochial Athenian hoplite in the ranks of the phalanx at the Battle of Delium—waged over the contested borderlands between Athens and Thebes. Fifth-century Athenians such as Socrates envisioned Attica as a distinct cultural, political, and linguistic entity, within which its tenets of radical democracy and maritime-based imperialism could function quite differently from the neighboring oligarchical agrarianism at Thebes. Attica in the fourth century BC built a system of border forts to protect its northern boundary.
Throughout history, the trigger points of war have traditionally been such borderlands—the methoria between Argos and Sparta, the Rhine and Danube as the frontiers of Rome, or the Alsace-Lorraine powder keg between France and Germany. These disputes did not always arise, at least at first, as efforts to invade and conquer a neighbor. They were instead mutual expressions of distinct societies that valued clear-cut borders—not just as matters of economic necessity or military security but also as a means of ensuring that one society could go about its unique business without the interference and hectoring of its neighbors.
Advocates for open borders often question the historical legitimacy of such territorial boundaries. For instance, some say that when “Alta” California declared its autonomy from Mexico in 1846, the new border stranded an indigenous Latino population in what would shortly become the 31st of the United States. “We didn’t cross the border,” these revisionists say. “The border crossed us.” In fact, there were probably fewer than 10,000 Spanish-speakers residing in California at the time. Thus, almost no contemporary Californians of Latino descent can trace their state residency back to the mid-nineteenth century. They were not “crossed” by borders. And north–south demarcation, for good or evil, didn’t arbitrarily separate people.
What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs.
The history of borders has been one of constant recalibration, whether dividing up land or unifying it. The Versailles Treaty of 1919 was idealistic not for eliminating borders but for drawing new ones. The old borders, established by imperial powers, supposedly caused World War I; the new ones would better reflect, it was hoped, ethnic and linguistic realities, and thus bring perpetual peace. But the world created at Versailles was blown apart by the Third Reich. German chancellor Adolf Hitler didn’t object to the idea of borders per se; rather, he sought to remake them to encompass all German-speakers—and later so-called Aryans—within one political entity, under his absolute control. Many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German intellectuals and artists—among them the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, historian Oswald Spengler, and composer Richard Wagner—agreed that the Roman Empire’s borders marked the boundaries of civilization. Perversely, however, they celebrated their status as the unique “other” that had been kept out of a multiracial Western civilization. Instead, Germany mythologized itself as racially exceptional, precisely because, unlike other Western European nations, it was definable not only by geography or language but also by its supposed racial purity. The fairy-tale origins of the German Volk were traced back before the fifth century AD and predicated on the idea that Germanic tribes for centuries were kept on the northern and eastern sides of the Danube and Rhine Rivers. Thus, in National Socialist ideology, early German, white-skinned, Aryan noble savages paradoxically avoided a mongrelizing and enervating assimilation into the civilized Roman Empire—an outcome dear to the heart of Nazi crackpot racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg (The Myth of the Twentieth Century) and the autodidact Adolf Hitler. World War II was fought to restore the old Eastern European borders that Hitler and Mussolini had erased—but it ended with the creation of entirely new ones, reflecting the power and presence of Soviet continental Communism, enforced by the huge Russian Red Army.
Few escape petty hypocrisy when preaching the universal gospel of borderlessness. Barack Obama has caricatured the building of a wall on the U.S. southern border as nonsensical, as if borders are discriminatory and walls never work. Obama, remember, declared in his 2008 speech in Berlin that he wasn’t just an American but also a “citizen of the world.” Yet the Secret Service is currently adding five feet to the White House fence—presumably on the retrograde logic that what is inside the White House grounds is different from what is outside and that the higher the fence goes (“higher and stronger,” the Secret Service promises), the more of a deterrent it will be to would-be trespassers. If Obama’s previous wall was six feet high, the proposed 11 feet should be even better.
In 2011, open-borders advocate Antonio Villaraigosa became the first mayor in Los Angeles history to build a wall around the official mayoral residence. His un-walled neighbors objected, first, that there was no need for such a barricade and, second, that it violated a city ordinance prohibiting residential walls higher than four feet. But Villaraigosa apparently wished to emphasize the difference between his home and others (or between his home and the street itself), or was worried about security, or saw a new wall as iconic of his exalted office.
“You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world,” Secretary of State John Kerry recently enthused to the graduating class at Northeastern University. He didn’t sound envious, though, perhaps because Kerry himself doesn’t live in such a world. If he did, he never would have moved his 76-foot luxury yacht from Boston Harbor across the state border to Rhode Island in order to avoid $500,000 in sales taxes and assorted state and local taxes.
While elites can build walls or switch zip codes to insulate themselves, the consequences of their policies fall heavily on the nonelites who lack the money and influence to navigate around them. The contrast between the two groups—Peggy Noonan described them as the “protected” and the “unprotected”—was dramatized in the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush. When the former Florida governor called illegal immigration from Mexico “an act of love,” his candidacy was doomed. It seemed that Bush had the capital and influence to pick and choose how the consequences of his ideas fell upon himself and his family—in a way impossible for most of those living in the southwestern United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offers another case study. The multibillionaire advocates for a fluid southern border and lax immigration enforcement, but he has also stealthily spent $30 million to buy up four homes surrounding his Palo Alto estate. They form a sort of no-man’s-land defense outside his own Maginot Line fence, presumably designed against hoi polloi who might not share Zuckerberg’s taste or sense of privacy. Zuckerberg’s other estate in San Francisco is prompting neighbors’ complaints because his security team takes up all the best parking spaces. Walls and border security seem dear to the heart of the open-borders multibillionaire—when it’s his wall, his border security.
This self-serving dynamic operates beyond the individual level as well. “Sanctuary cities,” for instance, proclaim amnesty for illegal aliens within their municipal boundaries. But proud as they are of their cities’ disdain for federal immigration law, residents of these liberal jurisdictions wouldn’t approve of other cities nullifying other federal laws. What would San Franciscans say if Salt Lake City declared the Endangered Species Act null and void within its city limits, or if Carson City unilaterally suspended federal background checks and waiting periods for handgun purchases? Moreover, San Francisco and Los Angeles do believe in clearly delineated borders when it comes to their right to maintain a distinct culture, with distinct rules and customs. Their self-righteousness aside, sanctuary cities neither object to the idea of borders nor to their enforcement—only to the notion that protecting the southern U.S. border is predicated on the very same principles.
More broadly, ironies and contradictions abound in the arguments and practices of open-borders advocates. In academia, even modern historians of the ancient world, sensing the mood and direction of larger elite culture, increasingly rewrite the fall of fifth-century AD Rome, not as a disaster of barbarians pouring across the traditional fortified northern borders of the Rhine and Danube—the final limites that for centuries kept out perceived barbarism from classical civilization—but rather as “late antiquity,” an intriguing osmosis of melting borders and cross-fertilization, leading to a more diverse and dynamic intersection of cultures and ideas. Why, then, don’t they cite Vandal treatises on medicine, Visigothic aqueducts, or Hunnish advances in dome construction that contributed to this rich new culture of the sixth or seventh century AD? Because these things never existed.
Academics may now caricature borders, but key to their posturing is either an ignorance of, or an unwillingness to address, why tens of millions of people choose to cross borders in the first place, leaving their homelands, language fluency, or capital—and at great personal risk. The answer is obvious, and it has little to do with natural resources or climate: migration, as it was in Rome during the fifth century AD, or as it was in the 1960s between mainland China and Hong Kong—and is now in the case of North and South Korea—has usually been a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or its Westernized manifestations. People walk, climb, swim, and fly across borders, secure in the knowledge that boundaries mark different approaches to human experience, with one side usually perceived as more successful or inviting than the other.
Western rules that promote a greater likelihood of consensual government, personal freedom, religious tolerance, transparency, rationalism, an independent judiciary, free-market capitalism, and the protection of private property combine to offer the individual a level of prosperity, freedom, and personal security rarely enjoyed at home. As a result, most migrants make the necessary travel adjustments to go westward—especially given that Western civilization, uniquely so, has usually defined itself by culture, not race, and thus alone is willing to accept and integrate those of different races who wish to share its protocols.
Many unassimilated Muslims in the West often are confused about borders and assume that they can ignore Western jurisprudence and yet rely on it in extremis. Today’s migrant from Morocco might resent the bare arms of women in France, or the Pakistani new arrival in London might wish to follow sharia law as he knew it in Punjab. But implicit are two unmentionable constants: the migrant most certainly does not wish to return to face sharia law in Morocco or Pakistan. Second, if he had his way, institutionalizing his native culture into that of his newly adopted land, he would eventually flee the results—and once again likely go somewhere else, for the same reasons that he left home in the first place. London Muslims may say that they demand sharia law on matters of religion and sex, but such a posture assumes the unspoken condition that the English legal system remains supreme, and thus, as Muslim minorities, they will not be thrown out of Britain as religious infidels—as Christians are now expelled from the Middle East.
Even the most adamant ethnic chauvinists who want to erase the southern border assume that some sort of border is central to their own racial essence. The National Council of La Raza (“the race”; Latin, radix) is the largest lobbying body for open borders with Mexico. Yet Mexico itself supports the idea of boundaries. Mexico City may harp about alleged racism in the United States directed at its immigrants, but nothing in U.S. immigration law compares with Mexico’s 1974 revision of its “General Law of Population” and its emphasis on migrants not upsetting the racial makeup of Mexico—euphemistically expressed as preserving “the equilibrium of the national demographics.” In sum, Mexican nationals implicitly argue that borders, which unfairly keep them out of the United States, are nonetheless essential to maintaining their own pure raza.
Migration has usually been a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or its Westernized manifestations.
Mexico, in general, furiously opposes enforcing the U.S.–Mexican border and, in particular, the proposed Trump wall that would bar unauthorized entry into the U.S.—not on any theory of borders discourse but rather because Mexico enjoys fiscal advantages in exporting its citizens northward, whether in ensuring nearly $30 billion in remittances, creating a powerful lobby of expatriates in the U.S., or finding a safety valve for internal dissent. Note that this view does not hold when it comes to accepting northward migrations of poorer Central Americans. In early 2016, Mexico ramped up its border enforcement with Guatemala, adding more security forces, and rumors even circulated of a plan to erect occasional fences to augment the natural barriers of jungle and rivers. Apparently, Mexican officials view poorer Central Americans as quite distinct from Mexicans—and thus want to ensure that Mexico remains separate from a poorer Guatemala.
When I wrote an article titled “Do We Want Mexifornia?” for City Journal ’s Spring 2002 issue, I neither invented the word “Mexifornia” nor intended it as a pejorative. Instead, I expropriated the celebratory term from Latino activists, both in the academy and in ethnic gangs in California prisons. In Chicano studies departments, the fusion of Mexico and California was envisioned as a desirable and exciting third-way culture. Mexifornia was said to be arising within 200 to 300 miles on either side of an ossified Rio Grande border. Less clearly articulated were Mexifornia’s premises: millions of Latinos and mestizos would create a new ethnic zone, which, for some mysterious reason, would also enjoy universities, sophisticated medical services, nondiscrimination laws, equality between the sexes, modern housing, policing, jobs, commerce, and a judiciary—all of which would make Mexifornia strikingly different from what is currently found in Mexico and Central America.
When Latino youths disrupt a Donald Trump rally, they often wave Mexican flags or flash placards bearing slogans such as “Make America Mexico Again.” But note the emotional paradox: in anger at possible deportation, undocumented aliens nonsensically wave the flag of the country that they most certainly do not wish to return to, while ignoring the flag of the nation in which they adamantly wish to remain. Apparently, demonstrators wish to brand themselves with an ethnic cachet but without sacrificing the advantages that being an American resident has over being a Mexican citizen inside Mexico. If no borders existed between California and Mexico, then migrants in a few decades might head to Oregon, even as they demonstrated in Portland to “Make Oregon into California.”
Removing borders in theory, then, never seems to match expectations in fact, except in those rare occasions when nearly like societies exist side by side. No one objects to a generally open Canadian border because passage across it, numbers-wise, is roughly identical in either direction—and Canadians and Americans share a language and similar traditions and standard of living, along with a roughly identical approach to democracy, jurisprudence, law enforcement, popular culture, and economic practice. By contrast, weakening demarcated borders between diverse peoples has never appealed to the citizens of distinct nations. Take even the most vociferous opponents of a distinguishable and enforceable border, and one will observe a disconnect between what they say and do—given the universal human need to circumscribe, demarcate, and protect one’s perceived private space.
Again, the dissipation of national borders is possible only between quite similar countries, such as Canada and the U.S. or France and Belgium, or on those few occasions when a supranational state or empire can incorporate different peoples by integrating, assimilating, and intermarrying tribes of diverse religions, languages, and ethnicities into a common culture—and then, of course, protect them with distinct and defensible external borders. But aside from Rome before the fourth century AD and America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, few societies have been able to achieve E pluribus unum. Napoleon’s transnational empire didn’t last 20 years. Britain never tried to create a holistic overseas body politic in the way that, after centuries of strife, it had forged the English-speaking United Kingdom. The Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires all fell apart after World War I, in a manner mimicked by the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s. Rwanda and Iraq don’t reflect the meaninglessness of borders but the desire of distinct peoples to redraw colonial lines to create more logical borders to reflect current religious, ethnic, and linguistic realities. When Ronald Reagan thundered at the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” he assumed that by 1987, German-speakers on both sides of the Berlin Wall were more alike than not and in no need of a Soviet-imposed boundary inside Germany. Both sides preferred shared consensual government to Communist authoritarianism. Note that Reagan did not demand that Western nations dismantle their own borders with the Communist bloc.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost famously wrote, “That wants it down.” True, but the poet concedes in his “Mending Wall” that in the end, he accepts the logic of his crustier neighbor: “He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ” From my own experience in farming, two issues—water and boundaries—cause almost all feuds with neighbors. As I write, I’m involved in a border dispute with a new neighbor. He insists that the last row of his almond orchard should be nearer to the property line than is mine. That way, he can use more of my land as common space to turn his equipment than I will use of his land. I wish that I could afford to erect a wall between us.
The end of borders, and the accompanying uncontrolled immigration, will never become a natural condition—any more than sanctuary cities, unless forced by the federal government, will voluntarily allow out-of-state agencies to enter their city limits to deport illegal aliens, or Mexico will institutionalize free entry into its country from similarly Spanish-speaking Central American countries.
Borders are to distinct countries what fences are to neighbors: means of demarcating that something on one side is different from what lies on the other side, a reflection of the singularity of one entity in comparison with another. Borders amplify the innate human desire to own and protect property and physical space, which is impossible to do unless it is seen—and can be so understood—as distinct and separate. Clearly delineated borders and their enforcement, either by walls and fences or by security patrols, won’t go away because they go to the heart of the human condition—what jurists from Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment called meum et tuum, mine and yours. Between friends, unfenced borders enhance friendship; among the unfriendly, when fortified, they help keep the peace.
Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Top Photo: The ruins of a boundary fortress designed to separate Athens from Thebes; in ancient Greece, most wars broke out over territorial disputes. (HERVÉ CHAMPOLLION/AKG-IMAGES /THE IMAGE WORKS)
Billionaire Mexicans tell their poor to JUMP U.S. OPEN BORDERS and LOOT THE STUPID GRINGO… and loot they do!
Billions of dollars are sucked out of America from Mexico’s looting!
1) Mexico ended legal immigration 100 years ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation but pays the 220th lowest minimum wage to force their subjects to invade the USA. The expands territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish language, and culture and genotypes, while earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as Foreign Remittance Income.
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MICHELE MALKIN
Understanding LA RAZA / UNIDOSus: The U.S. tax dollar funded Mexican fascist party which is the fastest growing political party in America
Only in America could critics of a group called "The Race" be labeled racists. Such is the triumph of left-wing identity chauvinists, whose aggressive activists and supine abettors have succeeded in redefining all opposition as "hate."
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Previous generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica, by Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards, blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.” LLOYD BILLINGSLEY/ FRONTPAGE mag
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PAUL KRUGMAN
The disintegration of California, a Mexican satellite welfare state of poverty, crime and high taxes
"Chairman of the DNC Keith Ellison was even spotted wearing a shirt stating, "I don't believe in borders" written in Spanish.
According to a new CBS news poll, 63 percent of Americans in competitive congressional districts think those crossing illegally should be immediately deported or arrested. This is undoubtedly contrary to the views expressed by the Democratic Party.
Their endgame is open borders, which has become evident over the last eight years. Don't for one second let them convince you otherwise."Evan Berryhill Twitter @EvBerryhill.
AMERICA: 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.
“Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and
illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country
through the process known as “chain migration” whereby newly naturalized
citizens can bring an unlimited number of relatives to the U.S. In the next 20
years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import 15
million new foreign-born voters. Between 7 and 8 million of those foreign-born
voters will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.” JOHN BINDER
THE SECRET REPORT ON ILLEGALS TAKING
MIDDLE AND HIGH END JOBS…. What? You thought they only took the shit
jobs?
The US Labor Department released its consumer price index (CPI) report for June on Thursday, showing that accelerated inflation has cut the real wages of most American workers over the past year.
This is despite a significant increase in strike activity in the US—and internationally—since the beginning of 2018, including the state-wide teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, and growing signs that workers are eager to carry out a militant struggle to recoup wages and benefits lost through union-imposed contract concessions over the past 40 years.
The inflation report revealed that consumer prices were 2.9 percent higher than in June of 2017, wiping out the tepid 2.9 percent average increase in workers’ wages over that period. The large majority of workers who fall into the category of production and non-supervisory employees suffered an actual cut in real wages. They lost 0.2 percent in June, following a similar decline in May.
The year-over year 2.9 percent rise in the CPI in June was the fastest pace in more than six years. The price surge was led by energy commodities. Gasoline prices rose a seasonally adjusted 0.5 percent in June from the previous month, bringing the 12-month rise to 24 percent. The average price for a gallon of gasoline rose to $2.89 last month, the highest price since June of 2014.
Shelter and rent costs were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, and medical services were up 2.5 percent. Food prices rose 1.4 percent. Meals at restaurants and cafeterias rose 2.8 percent over the past year.
There is little or no precedent for workers’ wages stagnating or declining under conditions of low official unemployment and an acceleration of economic growth. Unemployment, now officially at 4 percent and expected to drop further in the coming months, is at its lowest levels since the 1960s.
Corporate profits are setting new records. JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both reported record quarterly profits on Tuesday. JPMorgan, the biggest Wall Street bank, posted a second quarter profit of $8.32 billion, an increase of 18 percent over the same period last year. Citigroup, the fourth largest US bank by assets, reported a second quarter net income increase of 16 percent, to $4.49 billion.
Both banks profited massively from the Trump tax cut for corporations and the rich enacted in December, as have corporations more generally. Citigroup said its effective tax rate in the second quarter was 24 percent, down from 32 percent a year ago. The Treasury Department reported Thursday that government tax receipts fell 7 percent in June, mainly due to a 33 percent drop in gross corporate taxes.
The tax cut is fueling a rapid growth of the federal budget deficit, which will be used to justify an intensified assault on what remains of social programs, including basic entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
The decades-long suppression of wages, which accelerated after the 2008 financial crash and continues today, has provided the economic basis for the historic rise in corporate profits and stock prices, and the accompanying record growth of social inequality.
The Wall Street Journal on Friday quoted David Kelly, chief global strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management, who wrote in a note to clients this week: “Wage growth remains surprisingly weak. The remarkable ability of firms to lure more workers back into the labor force and get stronger productivity gains from them without raising wages is a clear positive for profits.”
The attack on workers’ real wages via inflation will only accelerate under the impact of Trump’s trade war tariffs. Trump’s first tariff this year targeted imported washing machines, and the CPI report revealed that the cost of laundry equipment has jumped 13 percent over last year.
The Journal cited Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, as noting that Chinese products subject to the $200 billion in newly proposed tariffs account for almost 6 percent of the core CPI, meaning the proposed 10 percent levy will lift the index by up to 0.6 percentage points.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is citing the low official jobless rate and the rise in inflation to justify a more rapid increase in interest rates, in the name of preventing the economy from “overheating.” This is above all aimed at preventing the development of a wages movement of the working class by slowing economic growth and hiring.
How is the anomaly of wage stagnation amidst relatively low unemployment and accelerating economic growth to be explained? It is the outcome of a decades-long social counterrevolution, carried out by both parties of American big business. This ruling class war on workers entered a new stage following the financial crash of 2008. That breakdown of world capitalism, centered in the United States, was used by the ruling elite to carry out a radical restructuring of social and economic relations, to the detriment of the working class.
The Obama administration oversaw an expansion of the bank bailout and the pumping of trillions of dollars into the financial markets to enable the financial oligarchy to recoup its losses and increase its plundering of the social wealth. This included the slashing of wages, beginning with the across-the-board 50 percent wage cut for new-hires in Obama’s auto bailout of 2009, along with massive cuts in health care, education and pensions. Virtually all of the decent-paying jobs that were destroyed in the Great Recession were replaced by part-time, temporary and low-paying jobs.
The key factor in this process has been the suppression of the class struggle, and the chief instruments for strangling the resistance of workers are the trade unions. They have held strike activity over the past decade to the lowest level since the government began compiling statistics in 1947.
But there are increasing signs that the working class is seeking to break the grip of these corporatist syndicates in order to wage a serious struggle to recoup its losses. All of this year’s statewide teachers’ strikes were organized by rank-and-file educators who used social media to overcome the opposition of the teachers’ unions. However, the unions were able to gain control of the struggles in order to isolate them and shut them down without meeting any of the teachers’ demands.
The hostility of the unions to a struggle for wages, benefits and decent working conditions has been demonstrated once again with the announcement Tuesday by the Teamsters union that it has agreed to indefinitely extend the July 31 strike deadline at United Parcel Service. Last month, more than 93 percent of the 230,000 UPS workers voted to authorize a strike at the end of this month.
The best efforts of the unions and their allies in the Democratic Party will not in the end succeed in blocking the emergence of mass working class struggles. Workers are being radicalized and impelled into struggle not only by the attacks on their living standards, but also by the naked criminality of the Trump administration, its assault on immigrants and democratic rights, and the war-mongering of both Trump and his Democratic Party rivals.
The militant mood is indicated by the fact that workers are increasingly unwilling to settle for token sops and are instead calling for substantial wage increases. The Arizona teachers included in their strike demands a $20,000 wage increase.
Both past and current experience has demonstrated that workers cannot recoup their losses, let alone make new gains, without rebelling against the trade union apparatuses. They need to establish their own, independent and democratic organizations of struggle. The Socialist Equality Party urges workers across the economy to form rank-and-file committees independent of the trade unions and the big business parties to coordinate and link struggles over wages, social services and democratic rights both nationally and internationally.
At the same time, the working class requires a new political strategy to prevent any gains in wages and benefits given by the corporations and the government with one hand, under mass pressure from below, from being taken back with the other in the form of inflation and cuts in social programs. The struggle against social inequality, poverty, authoritarianism and war requires the fight for a workers’ government to expropriate the corporate-financial oligarchy and replace the capitalist profit system with socialism.
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