About 40% of H-1B Jobs Give Employers a Tidy $40,000/Year Discount
By David North on
January 18, 2019
A
recently released report on the H-1B program (for skilled nonimmigrant workers)
indicates that in at least 40 percent of the jobs the employer gets a full-time
(alien) worker for a $40,000 a year discount from actual prevailing wages.
No
wonder many employers use this program and shoulder aside citizen and
green-card workers! My sense is that between half a million and a full million
resident college grads have lost decent jobs to alien workers as a result of
H-1B.
The
comprehensive and damning report, "Reforming US' High-Skilled Guestworker
Program", is by one of America's leading experts
on the H-1B program, Professor Ron Hira of Howard University, and Bharath
Gopalaswamy, director of the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center. It was
published by the Atlantic Council, a distinguished Washington think tank whose
chairman is Jon Huntsman Jr., the former GOP governor of Utah, and currently
our ambassador to Russia.
The
14-page document carefully describes the complex inner workings of the H-1B
program and its impact on U.S. workers. The best of many such articles I have
read on the subject over the years, it highlights these points:
·
Most H-1B employers do
not have to make any effort to recruit U.S. workers before they are
eligible to use the program;
·
Most of the H-1 B
workers have, at best, average credentials and most are doing run-of-the mill
work;
·
The program
design itself is deeply flawed, and it is important to address that issue
rather than overemphasizing the behavior of certain "bad actors"
within the program; and
·
The program needs
an assertive, well-designed enforcement program rather than just responding to
individual complaints.
Perhaps
the strongest part of the article is its analysis of the weak, complex, and (to
many) the easy-to-misunderstand wage regulations set by the U.S. Department of
Labor. In a context of actual wages paid in the industry in question, the
Department sets four wage levels for H-1B hiring purposes:
|
Wage
Level
|
Wage
Percentile
|
|
1
|
17th
|
|
2
|
33rd
|
|
3
|
Median
(i.e., 50th)
|
|
4
|
66th
|
The
employer then chooses which level to pay the specific alien worker. Level One
is for entry workers, while Level Four is for supervisors, with gradations in
between.
Were
the system to be fair to both aliens and competing U.S. workers, the pay
choices of the employers would be about 25 percent in each of the levels. This
does not happen.
Instead,
in 2017 employers used wage Level One for 41 percent of the jobs, and Level Two
for 37 percent, leaving only 12 percent of the jobs at the average wage or
above. It is in wage Level One that employers are getting the $40,000 a year
discount mentioned earlier. The discount for wage Level Two is about $20,000 a
year.
Hira
comes to these comparisons (on page 10 of his article) by quoting the Labor
Department’s own statistics (from the Office of Foreign Labor Certification)
which show, for 2017, that the Level One wage for computer systems analysts in
the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara MSA was $76,918, while the mean wage in the
same occupation was $116,522 per year, a difference of $39,604 per year.
Employers
and their lobbyists talk about the program as being designed to bring America
the "best and the brightest" of the foreign workers, and then pay 88
percent of these workers at substandard wages.
This
article is a must-read for anyone worried about the fact that our immigration
system is tilted so heavily in favor of employers.
Topics: H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Progam
Grassroots Immigration Group: Amnesty Is Worse than No Wall
5:54
President Donald Trump should not offer a combined “DACA-Dreamer” amnesty to win “one-tenth of a border fence,” says William Gheen, founder of the grassroots Americans for Legal Immigration PAC group.
“Every single amnesty bill we’ve seen for 15 years has been filled with all sorts of restrictions and enforcement promises designed to garner votes in Congress and give lawmakers things to cover their asses with angry constituents,” Gheen told Breitbart News. He continued:
Each time we have found language in the bill that
allows all enforcement to be skipped or ignored
or they will just pass it and ignore the
enforcement restrictions like the ’86 Amnesty. It
is completely offensive and wrong that the U.S.
Senate is even considering anything like Dreamer
or DACA Amnesty considering the way the nation
voted in 2016 to try to go in a different direction.
Breitbart TV
The statement was made after Trump announced his support for a deal in which he would get $5.7 billion for border wall funding in exchange for endorsing three-year work permit amnesties for one million people in the DACA and Temporary Protected Status programs. The exchange is supported by business groups who are clamoring for more imported workers to help suppress wage raises before the 2020 election.
Gheen said Trump’s deputies are planning to offer more giveaways to Democrats and business-first Republicans in exchange for a “DACA-Dreamer amnesty.”
Trump “is only hearing from CEOs,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Numbers USA group, which favors reduced migration. Trump should not give up on his wage-raising “Hire American” policy, especially for white-collar professionals threated by the H-1B program, she said, adding:
The people he campaigned with, the [H-1B-] displaced workers, are just distraught. If he helps wages and job opportunities grow for Americans, he will turn out voters in 2020. If he helps put in place more policies that harm American workers and wages, he will not turn out voters.
In a press statement, ALIPAC said:
ALIPAC calls on Amnesty Trump to end his “Trump Wall Pretense” now that it is clear he’s using the issue to promote border destroying Amnesty for illegal immigrants.…While originally supportive of a massive new wall on the southern border, ALIPAC is dropping support for Trump’s wall efforts because he is only building fencing and he is only seeking a small fraction of funding needed for border structures in exchange for Amnesty for illegal immigrants which will render any borders and defenses moot.From this point forward, ALIPAC will refer to the President as Amnesty Trump and to his deceptive bait and switch promises of a border wall as “Trump’s Wall Pretense” now that President Trump is using the wall issue to advance DACA and Immigration Reform Amnesty for illegals.…ALIPAC also feels that Trump’s chances of reelection in 2020 are now very low because Trump will never be able to rally and mobilize millions of American voters, like those at ALIPAC, who responded to his campaign promises about border security and illegal immigration.
Gheen’s ALIPAC does not have an office in Washington D.C., but it played major roles in defeating the 2006 and 2007 would-be amnesties, and the 2010 push to amnesty the large population of “Dreamer” young illegals. In 2014, the group also helped to kill off the 2013 “Gang of Eight” cheap labor amnesty by helping ensure the primary defeat of GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
ALIPAC drops support for @realDonaldTrump Trump's Wall Pretense as an Amnesty Vehicle #StopDACA
alipac.us/f8/alipac-drop…
Other pro-American advocates are growing concerned about the pro-amnesty push among officials in Trump’s White House. Breitbart News reported:
Co-host of the “Red Pilled America” podcast Patrick Courrielche told Breitbart News that while amnesty would be a boon to DACA illegal aliens, it would hurt the very Americans who supported Trump.“Trump promised us no amnesty,” Courrielche said. “Passing DACA amnesty knowing the devastating results of Reagan’s amnesty on American workers and families would be an unforgivable betrayal. I’d prefer no wall deal if it includes legalizing DACA.”A DACA amnesty would put more U.S.-born children of illegal aliens — commonly known as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported, while American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill.
Mickey Kaus is also urging Trump to preserve his wage-raising “Hire American” policy by trading non-immigration policies to win the wall:
Ann Coulter is the strongest advocate for a wall, and she argues that Trump should anti – offer to swap support some Democratic priorities, such as “a higher federal minimum wage, an infrastructure bill, a solar panel bill.”
Gheen’s opposition to the pending amnesty-for-wall trade was ridiculed by Todd Schulte, the D.C. director of a pro-migration advocacy group funded by Silicon Valley investors:
Ooohhhh—super nutso @ALIPAC ditching the wall as a priority because deporting Dreamers is more important to them.
Schulte’s investors want more H-1B visa workers to cut their payroll costs, and they want more immigrant customers for their new companies. The group’s investors include Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-billionaire founder of Facebook.
The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.
GOP/Dems Consider DACA Amnesty-for-Wall Deal Backed by
Billionaire Donors
Getty Images
3 Jan 2019832
4:10
A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a
plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some
amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the
U.S.-Mexico border.
Rep. Mark
Meadows (R-NC), as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Democrats such
as Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Debbie Dingell (D-MI) have signaled that
they are at least open to granting amnesty to at least 800,000 illegal aliens
who are enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program
if it meant receiving a fifth of wall funding.
In an
interview with Yahoo News, Meadows said he has had multiple conversations
with Graham about a DACA amnesty-for-wall funding deal:
“Compromise and finding common ground are not void from the
conversations that he and I have had, as well as some of the
conversations I’ve had with some of my Democratic colleagues,” Meadows said.
[Emphasis added]
Though the
Freedom Caucus has previously opposed extending protections from deportation
for the children of undocumented immigrants, Meadows suggested he would be
open to a deal to preserve such concessions in exchange for wall funding.
[Emphasis added]
Graham has
touted an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens for months as part of a deal on
funding at least a portion of Trump’s proposed wall.
Coincidentally,
the DACA amnesty deal is supported by the billionaire donor class that delivers
campaign funds every election cycle to Republicans and Democrats who support
the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy of importing about 1.5
million mostly low-skilled foreign workers every year to compete against
America’s working and middle class.
As Breitbart
News most recently reported, the billionaire Koch
brothers and their network of organizations have made passing an amnesty for
DACA illegal aliens their goal for the new year.
Similarly,
billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s cheap labor lobbying group FWD.us is
asking Republicans, Democrats, and the Trump administration to reach a deal
whereby DACA illegal aliens are allowed to permanently remain in the U.S.
The
organization, founded and funded by Silicon Valley’s tech plutocrats, has
been demanding an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens since
at least 2017.
So here is what @FWDus would like to see happen with the incoming Congress, this harmful shutdown
and urgently needed immigration policy changes...
Billionaires Demand Fast-Track Green Cards for 400,000 Visa
Workers
7 Dec 2018384
6:49
Internet
billionaire Marc Benioff is urging the GOP Congress and President Donald
Trump to fast-track 400,000 foreign visa-workers — plus 400,000 family
members — to green cards, the U.S. job market, and the
ballot box.
“This
is good for our economy,” Benioff said in a Tuesday tweet that was
applauded by Silicon Valley lobbyists. “We need to grow our workers to grow our
economy.”
Benioff’s
comment is a tautology: Expanding the population by importing more than 800,000
people would obviously grow the nation’s economy, retail sales, government
taxes, company profits, and Wall Street stock options.
But
Benioff’s cheap-labor importation plan would also shrink the income and careers
sought by millions of American college graduates, many of whom will vote in
2020 for or against Trump.
I strongly support HR392 eliminating the per country visa
cap. This bill must happen. The high skill visa provision has overwhelming
bi-partisan support because this is good for our economy. We need to grow our
workers to grow our economy. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392 …
The planned giveaway is in a
pending House bill, dubbed H.R. 392. It is also hidden in the House version of
the 2019 funding package for the Department of Homeland Security. If Trump
accepts that funding package, he will help companies import more cheap
visa-workers from India and China an inflict more economic and career
damage to the nation’s professional-status workforce of at least 55
million American college-graduates.
The nation’s workforce now
includes roughly 1.5 million foreign college-graduate contract-workers who are
imported via the H-1B, L-1, OPT, O-1, J-1, and other visa programs. These
outsourcing workers are not immigrants, but instead, they are contract workers
hired for one to six years, at lower wages, to take jobs that would otherwise
go to American graduates.
GOP Reps. are still pushing Rep. Yoder's middle-class
outsourcing bill to put 600K Indian visa-workers & families on fast-track
to US jobs/voting. It would help CEOs import more Indians for US college-grad
jobs - w/o any benefit for US workers or even GOP. http://bit.ly/2QzuoDJ
DHS Opposes GOP's Stealth Bill to Outsource College Graduate Jobs
This
massive level of middle-class outsourcing has suppressed the wage growth needed
by many American graduates to repay their college debts, get married, buy
homes, and raise children. For example, the salaries for 21 million
“professional and business services” employees rose by just roughly one
percent after inflation from the second quarter of 2017 to the second quarter
of 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their
after-inflation pay was flat from 2o15 to 2016.
The
Americans’ salary loss, however, would be a gain for the CEOs who see
their profits rise and their stock options spike as middle-class salaries
decline.
The
MyVisaJobs.com site shows that Benioff’s company
asked for 1,063 H-1B visa workers in 2018, up from 880 in 2017. The site also
shows job titles and work locations.
The
company’s stock price has doubled since Trump’s election,
but Benioff and most of his employees have strongly supported Democrats,
including Hillary Clinton in the
2016 election. For example, only 5.2 percent of employee donations to
candidates went to GOP candidates in 2018.
Now Benioff
and his fellow executives as asking Trump to raise their stock portfolios by
fast-tracking green cards to roughly 400,000 foreign contract-workers — plus
400,000 family members — who sidelined hundreds of thousands of American
college graduates.
Benioff’s
support for the visa workers was echoed by Todd Schulte, who is the
director of a pro-migration lobbying group. The Democratic-aligned group, FWD.us,
was formed and funded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and numerous other CEOs and investors who prefer to import visa-workers instead of hiring Americans.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and numerous other CEOs and investors who prefer to import visa-workers instead of hiring Americans.
This from @Benioff is really important. A really important fix to our immigration system that
would help so many people stuck in the green card backlog because of
discriminatory country caps.
Without
irony, Schulte’s website declares that “We believe that when every
person has the opportunity to achieve their full potential, our families,
communities, and economy thrive.”
Amazon
is also urging Trump to approve the green-card giveaway. Amazon’s founder, Jeff
Bezos, also runs the Washington Post and
supported Clinton.
Amazon applauds @KevinYoder on the passage of his amendment to the @DHSgov appropriations bill, H.R. 392, that would remove the per-country limit on
green cards. This is an important step towards green card reform, and
Amazonians thank you for your leadership on this issue.
In
2018, Amazon asked the government for almost
6,000 H-1B visa workers and almost 5,000 green cards. Facebook
asked for almost 2,400 H-1B workers and 1,400 green cards. Those outsourcing
requests add up to 15,000 white-collar jobs sought by U.S. graduates.
Business
lobbyists are trying to minimize publicity about their demand for a green-card
giveaway and they are pressing GOP leaders behind closed doors to keep the
giveaway in the 2019 DHS budget.
But
opposition is rising as Americans graduates have begun organizing to block the
giveaway. For example, Protect
US Workers helped defeat Rep. Kevin Yoder who used his authority as an
appropriations chairman to insert the giveaway into the DHS budget.
Yep, I helped fund these billboards and voted straight
RED in FL. Yoder's love for foreign guestworker/Replacemnts sent him packing.
No American should ever have to train their Foreign Replacements@NeilMunroDC @bseeker @Dawnnewyorker pic.twitter.com/WOnwxr3seY
The American graduates are also
using federal data to show U.S. legislators how many Americans’ middle-class
jobs are being outsourced in their districts to the
foreign workers.
I clean homes for a living. These kind of
policies undercuts my job because of cheap labor. The dems try to make excuses
for their policies against American workers. They don’t care about Americans,
they just care about non citizens. They need to be voted out on 2020.
Yep, been there, trained my foreign Replacements in '02.
Awful experience. Went public with it, told Congress. The worst part was the
disregard we got from our 2 Dem senators
My house testimony:http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa91679.000/hfa91679_0.HTM#104 …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJlesZ9popA …
The managing director of Thiel
Capital, Eric Weinstein, tweeted to Benioff to highlight his report which shows
that the federal officials created the H-1B visa program to lower salaries paid
to American technology experts:
You know why we developed the H-1B visa Marc? It was to
weaken American workers’ bargaining positions so much that they would be
*forced* to mitigate their wage demands at your bargaining table. It’s a wage
tampering program.
You might find this helpful: https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_NSF_SG_Complete_INET.pdf …
The
mass outsourcing also adding pressure to the lives of many American
technology workers, many of whom have already lost jobs to cheaper
contract-workers. An informal survey of tech workers shows that almost four-in-ten
say they are depressed.
One
of the leading advocates for the green-card giveaway is Leon Fresco, an
immigration lawyer who helped Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer pass the
disastrous 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty through the Senate. The bill was so
unpopular that the GOP gained nine Senate seats in 2014, preventing Schumer
from becoming Senate Majority Leader.
On
December 6, Fresco suggested there is only a small chance that the giveaway
will get into the final DHS bill:
Many Indian
contract workers are lobbying to help pass the green-card bill:
Thank you @Benioff for your leadership on ensuring fairness by the removal of national origin
discrimination on Employment Based Green Cards #HR392 #S281
In
the United States, the establishment’s economic policy of using migration to
boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people
by flooding the market
with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside
labor spikes profits and Wall Street
values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees offer.
The
policy also drives up real estate
prices, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local tax
burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from
high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans
and their families, including many who are now struggling with
fentanyl addictions.
Immigration
also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland
states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the
large immigrant populations who prefer to live in the coastal states.
The stakes are high. Once the
treaty is ratified, it will be exponentially harder to roll back internet
censorship. Unless you want the tech giants’ right to censor to persist for
another 20 years (that’s how long NAFTA lasted), now is the time to make your
voice heard.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via
mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it
floods the market with foreign
labor, spikes
profits and Wall Street values by cutting
salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and
white-collar employees. It also drives up real
estate prices, widens
wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state
and local tax burdens, hurts kids’
schools and college
education, pushes Americans away
from high-tech careers, and sidelines at
least 5 million marginalized Americans and
their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid
addictions.
But not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart
News reporting that Silicon Valley has the highest income inequality in the nation and the U.S. News & World Report naming California as the worst state for “quality of
life,” due to the high cost of living.
“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their
media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled
in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would
legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
In the July/August version of the Atlantic,
columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their
Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and
again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or
her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York
Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and
former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for
deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed
“costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals
want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom
immigrants compete.”
llustration by Lincoln Agnew*
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that
only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode
down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of
conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the
right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago,
liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many
progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for
your iPhone to listen to more titles.
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The
first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed,
particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008,
the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population.
Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of
undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after
all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised
a decade ago remain relevant today.
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration.
Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the
family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these
moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because
immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age,
they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like
Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost
productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes
rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent
of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete.
And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a
high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the
least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the
most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups
liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against
each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting
immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the
barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating
America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review,
Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis,
examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants.
Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often
assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal
immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the
U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for
undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from
receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant
to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting
people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding
difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate
those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of
their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors.
Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of
difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words
to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative
America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and
Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous
lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that
liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter
probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding
name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary
Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as
a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled
to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite
universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but
Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of
English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if
she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then
insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what
makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Europe
Must Resist Third-World Migration
Bill Gates has recently
commended Germany for
allocating 0.7% of GDP for payments to fight poverty in less developed
developing countries (LDDCs). With his infinite browser wisdom, he
asserts that the developed world, especially Europe, must increase these
contributions or face a flood of migration from the LDDCs that will overwhelm
the continent. We all understand that by "overwhelm," he is
referring to crime, housing, health care, education, and cultural viability of
European identities. In short, the Europe we know will be crushed.
Gates's vocabulary includes terms like "unfolding tragedy,"
"migratory pressure," and "development aid payments."
He is fixated on drama ("tragedy"), demography, and the tired
category of development that has become a cliché in use for the last 72 years
since the end of WWII. These terms out of the business and administrative
glossary fail to capture the depth and danger of the situation Gates is
referring to.
Gates thinks the migration can be stopped by an even greater
effort to rehab (read: buy off) the LDDCs under the decades-old rubric of
development. Again, according to the guilt-ridden, weakened leftist
mindset, it's so sad to see those sub-Saharans and Arabs living in great
poverty and under-development that we need to throw more money at the problem, and
thereby save ourselves. So Gates is not really changing his tune.
He's not worried about obliterating European identities or economies.
Rather, he is still singing the old liberal-left song. Throw money
at vast social problems, and your peace and stability will be
assured.
Building up the LDDC economies is not a new idea. This has
been the clichéd response since the end of WWII when the U.N., the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank were founded. Going
back to the 1960s, Walter Rostow, one of Harvard's eminent economists,
projected his theory of the "take-off stage." With economic
development support through the three above-named institutions, the poorest
countries would be subsidized and finally move to the take-off stage, where
they could generate sufficient surplus capital to manage and grow their own
assets and begin to develop viable economic projects and infrastructure without
"development funds" and without the currency undergirding of the IMF.
These take-off stages never materialized.
Nevertheless, the United Nations has intensified its commitment to
saving the LDDCs from self-destruction. The latest round of this utopian
vision is the formulation by the United Nations of 17
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the developing world. For the purposes of
this article, it is worth noting that their goal of the elimination or radical
reduction of poverty acknowledges that despite the efforts of the United
Nations for 72 years, there are 867 million people in the world living in
poverty defined as income of less than $1.25 a day.
The implementation of programs in support
of the U.N.'s SDGs involves providing the people in the least developed countries
with welfare in every area of their lives. It is projected as a global
welfare system that will make the welfare systems of the U.S. or even Europe
look like child's play. Housing, food, health, employment, childbearing,
childrearing, education, gender equality, etc. are areas for dedicated U.N.
action. Multiple sectors of third-world economies will be upheld by a
vast global welfare bureaucracy. Do you think we as taxpaying Americans
(45% do not pay any tax) are burdened now? Wait and see what is moving to
the front burner! Obviously, Bill Gates, former boy wonder, and now the
richest man in the world, sees a speedup of the SDG implementation as essential
for stemming the tide of migration. But instead of talking about an
explosion of economic support and world governance beyond anything ever dreamed
of on planet Earth, he hides the horrific reality behind abstractions like
"increasing the percentage contributions of national GDP by developed
countries."
He says nothing about confronting the "small matters" of
governmental corruption, governmental waste, and tribal conflict in the LDDCs.
Inter-tribal warfare is a norm in sub-Saharan Africa. We give money
despite the fact that genocide and civil wars in many countries is the norm.
Likewise in the Middle East. We see Muslim against Muslim as well
as Muslim against infidels for 1,400 years. All they know is the fight
for power.
Instead of increasing the amounts of "developmental
assistance," there should be increased resistance to terrible third-world
governance and to migration. This resistance must be multi-pronged.
There must be pushback against the U.N.'s SDG Programs, there must be pushback
against the corrupt World Bank and IMF, and there must be pushback against
migration from Africa and the Middle East.
Europe is experiencing an invasion. Powerful segments of
political leadership in North America are attempting to open the doors to
invasion. What should be done? There should be a lessening of
welfare payments to refugees and migrants to Europe, Canada, and the USA as a
disincentive to leave the home countries, and as an incentive for refugees and
migrants to leave these wealthy areas and go back to their native lands.
Additionally, some boats will have to be turned away since the occupants
do not have papers. Extreme vetting of refugees from war-torn sub-Saharan
and Middle Eastern countries must be instituted.
A massive campaign of literature should be dropped on those
countries with high migration telling them that there are no facilities for
them in their goal countries, and they will be turned back. Matchbooks
should be dropped by the millions (this matchbook technique has been used on
other occasions, notably when they were searching worldwide for Ramzi Yousef,
the bomber of the World Trade Center in the early 1990s) announcing that the
immigration venues have been closed. Get this message to the people.
The matchbooks could be in French, English, Arabic, and Swahili.
Let us learn from history. Migration of Germanic tribes was
the undoing of the Roman Empire. The Romans could not stem the tide.
Various strategies were undertaken, but they failed in the end. The
Vandals, Franks, Saxons, Angles, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths just kept
coming. Eventually, the migrants, called "barbarians" by the
Romans, were brought into the military to help support the Roman defense
against border crossing, but the Germanics who were in the Roman army coalesced
and fought against that selfsame army...and won! Embracing a threat, even
a supposed controlled embrace, leads to an undesirable endgame. Rome was
sacked and destroyed in the 5th century.
We are facing a threat of this magnitude, whether Bill "The
Genius" Gates realizes it or not. His genius in business may not
translate into wisdom or a grasp of historical realities.
Tech Billionaires urge fast-track green cards for 400,000 contract visa-workers - and many more later. Just guessing here, but maybe most Americans prefer fewer visa workers for biz & higher salaries for their families? bit.ly/2UpS5NT
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