Thursday, October 31, 2019

IMMIGRATION ENCOURAGES JOB DISCRIMINATION AGAINST LEGALS - BUT WALL STREET WANTS AMERICAN FLOODED WITH "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS - PASS ALONG THEIR WELFARE COST TO MIDDLE AMERICA


Report: Immigration Encourages Job Discrimination Against Americans

HOUSTON - FEBRUARY 1: U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer Thomas Wuenschel (L) monitors his screen as an arriving passenger uses a new biometric scanner at George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport February 1, 2008 in Houston, Texas. The new system is set up to scan all ten fingers instead …
Dave Einsel/Getty
9:50

Mass migration encourages mass discrimination against Americans, especially black employees, according to federal data unearthed by the Center for Immigration Studies.

“You really have to be out of touch with reality to argue that there are no negative effects of immigration on native workers,” said Jason Richwine, a statistician who studied the issue for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Forty percent of the decline in labor participation rates among black workers over three decades was attributable to competition from illegal immigration,” labor lawyer Peter Kirsanow said at a CIS press event at the press club. That “comes to nearly 1 million fewer jobs for black Americans as a result of the competition from illegal immigrants … and it is the wage levels also,” Kirsanow told the audience on October 25.
The huge impact of this discrimination is mostly ignored by wealthy “woke” professionals, who prefer to use discrimination claims as a political club against conservatives. The documented discrimination is just “the tip of the iceberg,” but left-wing critics have gone silent since Donald Trump was elected, said CIS director Mark Krikorian,
Yet white-collar workers are also losing salaries and jobs because of discrimination, said Kevin Lynn, founder of Progressives for Immigration Reform:
The gains made by women and minorities in STEM fields over the past three decades have really been reversed. For example, today on average 12 percent of women earn degrees in computer science. In 1984 it was 37 percent. So you have to ask yourself what’s going on. Well, when the opportunities become scant and the workplaces become hostile to women, they typically choose other career alternatives.
….
There is a preference for hiring Indians over Americans in these [Indian-run] consulting firms because, one, they will work longer hours. It’s a quiescent workforce, largely because they’re here on H-1B visas. And a lot of what goes into this is they are given the hope that their company will sponsor them for an – a green card, and then they’ll eventually get citizenship here in the U.S. Unfortunately for the American worker, that means that they’re competing with someone who is willing to work for less, work for increasingly lower benefits and other benefits that go along with their salaries, and it just ultimately makes things a lot more difficult.
The press club event was scheduled to spotlight Richwine’s study of discrimination lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He summarized several of the EEOC cases, often quoting directly from the commission’s reports:
When a warehouse in Memphis began using a new employment agency to fill its daily work crew, the agency, quote from EEOC, “essentially replaced the African Americans with Hispanics.” End quote. Potential workers would line up outside the warehouse each day, but the agency would select Hispanics over blacks even when black workers were farther ahead in line. Sometimes managers would send potential black workers home by announcing in English that there were no more positions. After the African Americans left, the Hispanics were allowed to come into the warehouse and work. Again, systematic – neither subconscious nor subtle.
Richwine described cases where Hispanic managers discriminated against American blacks:
Perhaps the most egregious example of this comes from Prestige Transportation Services. It would discard or refuse to accept employment applications from non-Hispanic blacks. Quote from EEOC: “On multiple occasions when a black person applied for employment, Prestige managers Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Rodriguez would stand behind the applicant and rub their hand on their skin to display their disdain for black people.” End quote. Staff meetings were conducted in Spanish only.
The record shows that some Indian immigrants also discriminates against blacks, he said.
At a Hampton Inn in Colorado, three non-Hispanic white housekeepers were fired by the new general manager and replaced by Hispanics. The owners, Falgun Patel and Mukund Patel, told the general manager that they prefer that maids be Hispanic because in their opinion Hispanics worked harder while American employees are lazy. The general manager allegedly told a Hispanic employee to recruit friends for the incoming vacancies because the owner preferred a Hispanic workforce. After three months, all of the Hampton Inn’s non-Hispanic housekeepers were gone.
The pattern of lawsuits by Hispanics is very different, said Richwine. Instead of losing job opportunities because of discrimination, Latinos lose workplace protections that were once normal for Americans, he said:
When Hispanics file suits, they are not complaining that they are being replaced by some other group in the workforce; instead, they’re complaining about working conditions, they complain about low pay, they complain about dangerous situations on the job site, and they complain about harassment. Harassment oftentimes is ethnically based, ethnic slurs and so on directed at them. The saddest part is that when we’re talking about Hispanic women, sexual harassment is a very pervasive problem if you believe these EEOC lawsuits,
The examples are merely the most egregious ad straightforward cases, he said, ensuring that they are likely many other cases of discrimination that do not end up in court.
Deputies for President Donald Trump have partly reversed some discrimination against blacks, for forcing wages up to record levels.
But his deputies done little to curb the white-collar discrimination, partly because there is so much more money at stake for high-tech firms, hospitals, and investors.

Another lawsuit alleging discrimination by Indian managers in the US, this time at Intel Corp. One Indian manager rejects a US graduate, says "It would be easier to hire a younger, unmarried Indian man."
Many US grads have similar stories, so share yours. http://bit.ly/2ocutR4 

224 people are talking about this

For example, the federal government rewards companies that discriminate in favor of Indian “OPT” work-permit workers by rejecting American graduates, Lynn said.
American companies which hire Indian graduates are not required to pay Social Security taxes, he said, adding:
That’s about a 15 percent premium that is added to hiring someone on the OPT program and, again, these people compete directly with our new [American] graduates in the workplace … [where] a [U.S.] student today might exit university with anywhere from $35 [thousand] to $85,000 in debt. That’s a lot of money, and … they’re having their legs broken as they leave the gate into the workplace.
Instead, American victims of Indians’ discrimination are suing the Indians firms in court. For example, in a 2016 lawsuit against a giant Indian software firm, Infosys, American witnesses alleged:
Hiring Manager Instructions: an Infosys hiring manager admitted “There does exist an element of discrimination. We are advised to hire Indians … because they will work off the clock without murmur and they can always be transferred across the nation without hesitation unlike [a] local workforce.”
Talent Acquisition Unit Observations: Recruiters in Talent Acquisition observed that Indians were highly favored, and it was extremely difficult to move non-South Asians ahead in the hiring process. Non-Indians were regularly rejected as being “not a good fit,” – an Infosys euphemism for “non-Indian.” This discrimination is on-going. In 2016 for example, an Infosys manager in their Talent Acquisition Unit observed that of Infosys’ 2,900 hires in the United States, 2,200 (76%) were Indian. She observed a similar hiring disparity in prior years.
Applicant Data Manipulation: Infosys manipulates applicant tracking data in such a way that consideration of non-South Asians and non-Indians is minimized, and the hiring of South Asians is maximized. For example, recruiters have observed that non-South Asian applicants were repeatedly deleted from Infosys’ applicant tracking system, forcing one recruiter to keep a separate spreadsheet of applicants on his computer. Recruiters have also observed South Asian applicants, located by Infosys’ “sourcers” in India, manually entered into the applicant tracking system despite those individuals not having formally applied, thus streamlining the hiring process. Individuals sourced in this way were moved “to the front of the line” ahead of applicants in the U.S. A recruiter also observed that applications for United States positions were regularly not reviewed, and in 2016, approximately 11,000 to 12,000 were rejected en masse.



Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants. It also adds replacement workers to a resident population of more than 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and about 500,000 blue-collar H-2B, H-2A, and J-1 visa workers. The government also prints more than one million work permits for new foreigners, and it rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for investors. The stimulus happens because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a growing economy.
The Census Bureau said September 10 that men who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, bringing their median salaries to $45,097 for full-time, year-round work.

Dems, NYT & CNN don't want to talk about wage raises - but Trump is touting wage raises he's getting for blue-collars in his lower-migration economy. So maybe DC opposes salary raises for the Democrats' core of post-grad progressives? See the debate. http://bit.ly/2pohGfe 

See Neil Munro's other Tweets




Again?: GOP Sen. Mike Lee Keeps Pushing College Job Giveaway to Indians

In this photograph taken on December 13, 2016, an employee of Indian IT security solutions company Innefu Labs works at their offices in New Delhi. In the darkened offices of a tech start-up, a handful of computer engineers sift through a mountain of intelligence data that would normally be the …
SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty
7:12

Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee is expected to try again on Thursday to pass his S.386 bill, which helps India’s graduates grab hundreds of thousands of college level jobs from American graduates.

All GOP Senators are expected to stay silent while Lee pushes his bill that rewards roughly 300,000 of India’s contract workers in the United States with a fast track to citizenship. Silicon Valley investors back his bill, which also allows companies to annually pay 60,000 of India’s contract workers — plus 60,000 family members — with government-provided green cards after they take jobs from American graduates.
Existing “country caps” set an annual limit of 20,000 on the number of cards that can be provided by employers to Indian visa workers.
Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin is expected to save American graduates from Lee’s bill by denying Lee’s request for a “Unanimous Consent” approval. This is Lee’s fifth attempt to pass his jobs giveaway bill.
But Durbin is blocking Lee’s bill because he wants to pass an even bigger giveaway that would reward roughly 240,000 Indian workers and family members each year with green cards, providing they take jobs from American graduates.
Durbin’s giveaway bill, dubbed the RELIEF Act, is based on the 1960s claim that America is a “nation of immigrants,” not a normal nation of citizens and their children.
On Wednesday, Durbin tried to pass his RELIEF Act by the Unanimous Consent process. But his request was blocked by GOP Sen. John Thune, South Dakota. “The legislation to which the Senator from Illinois has referred, Senator Lee’s bill, he’s not able to be here to object and so on his behalf, I object,” said Thune, who did not criticize the Lee or Durbin bills.
The GOP may rely on Democrats to block Lee’s bill. But some immigration lawyers say Democrats should let Lee’s bill pass because it is so unfair that legislators would unite to fix the damage by passing a bill offering a bigger inflow of company workers.
Durbin touted his bill Wednesday afternoon:
Immigration Voice is the lobby group for India’s contract workers in the United States. The members are not Americans and so cannot vote. But they have organized to push Lee’s bill:

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨

Tomorrow, @SenMikeLee will once again bring up for unanimous consent.

We are incredibly grateful for the Senators’ heroic leadership & tenacity in ridding our country of the stain of National Origin Discrimination.

More -> https://www.facebook.com/243363639063201/posts/2716863975046476 


View image on Twitter



Backed by the Indian government, roughly 800,000 of India’s contract workers hold a wide variety of healthcare, management, technology, and accounting jobs, which are needed by U.S. graduates. Many of the Indians occupy well paid Silicon Valey jobs, but many work in software sweatshops in the hope of getting into the H-1B program and winning a green card.
This army of migrants was created to staff the “U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy,” which spikes the stock values of American companies moving jobs to cheaper Indians, who were located both in the United States and in India.
The scale of this U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy is huge.
But it is difficult to track because India’s workforce in the United States also moves many jobs back into India. For example, the New York Times reported how Toys “R” Us company used just eight Indian visa workers to outsource much of its 67-person computer department to India:
For four weeks this spring, a young woman from India on a temporary visa sat elbow to elbow with an American accountant in a snug cubicle at the headquarters of Toys “R” Us here. The woman, an employee of a giant outsourcing company in India hired by Toys “R” Us, studied and recorded the accountant’s every keystroke, taking screen shots of her computer and detailed notes on how she issued payments for toys sold in the company’s megastores.
“She just pulled up a chair in front of my computer,” said the accountant, 49, who had worked for the company for more than 15 years. “She shadowed me everywhere, even to the ladies’ room.”
By late June, eight workers from the outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS, had produced intricate manuals for the jobs of 67 people, mainly in accounting. They then returned to India to train TCS workers to take over and perform those jobs there. The Toys “R” Us employees in New Jersey, many of whom had been at the company more than a decade, were laid off.
U.S. graduates face structural disadvantages when competing against this bloc of contract workers.
They have difficulty winning jobs in sectors overseen by Indian managers because of anti-American discrimination by Indians who favor Indians.
Also, many Indians will accept far lower wages in the hope of being given the hugely valuable prize of citizenship after they get into the H-1B program.
So far, neither Congress nor the administration has made a significant effort to level the playing field for American graduates, for example, by demanding the enforcement of routine workplace laws, such as laws against national discrimination.


The playing field will be further tilted towards the Indians by Lee’s bill.
But his bill is opposed by would-be immigrants from China, Europe, South America, and many other countries because they would be blocked once the employers are allowed to reward their Indian workforce with green cards.


Americans who oppose the bill have rallied behind several grassroots groups, including U.S. Tech Workers:


Looks like @SenMikeLee will once again bring S.386 up for another UC vote tomorrow. At this point, he’s just embarrassing himself & Senate @GOP. 4 failed attempts, & now he’s just making a mockery. Call your Senator & tell them to OBJECT to S.386!
This bill will remove country cap quotas for employment based green cards so only Indian nationals who displaced American workers from their jobs coming via the H-1B visa program will take ALL green cards for the next decade!


View image on Twitter



Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants. It also adds replacement workers to a resident population of more than 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and about 500,000 blue-collar H-2B, H-2A, and J-1 visa workers. The government also prints more than one million work permits for new foreigners, and it rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for investors. The stimulus happens because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a growing economy.
The Census Bureau said September 10 that men who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, bringing their median salaries to $45,097 for full-time, year-round work.

Census data shows how huge numbers of American software graduates have been replaced by Indian & Chinese visa-workers in N.J., California, N.C., Georgia, N.Y., Texas, Virginia, Florida, and other states. Next: Healthcare professionals. @S386 http://bit.ly/2o0X4cp 






EconomyImmigrationPoliticscontract workerDick DurbinH01BL-1Mike LeeNation of Immigrantsvisa worker



Jobless Claims Creep Up to 218,000

Little kids at a Halloween party
Getty Images
0:45

The number of Americans filing for state unemployment benefits increased by 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 218,000 last week.

Labor Department data released Thursday also revised up the previous week by 1,000 to 213,000.
Economists had forecast a rise to 215,000.
Jobless claims can be volatile. To get a better gauge of the health of the labor market, economists look to the four-week moving average of claims, which smooths out the lumpiness of weekly claims. This fell by 500 last week to 214,750.





Report: Immigration Encourages Job Discrimination Against Americans


Dave Einsel/Getty

Mass migration encourages mass discrimination against Americans, especially black employees, according to federal data unearthed by the Center for Immigration Studies.

“You really have to be out of touch with reality to argue that there are no negative effects of immigration on native workers,” said Jason Richwine, a statistician who studied the issue for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Forty percent of the decline in labor participation rates among black workers over three decades was attributable to competition from illegal immigration,” labor lawyer Peter Kirsanow said at a CIS press event at the press club. That “comes to nearly 1 million fewer jobs for black Americans as a result of the competition from illegal immigrants … and it is the wage levels also,” Kirsanow told the audience on October 25.
The huge impact of this discrimination is mostly ignored by wealthy “woke” professionals, who prefer to use discrimination claims as a political club against conservatives. The documented discrimination is just “the tip of the iceberg,” but left-wing critics have gone silent since Donald Trump was elected, said CIS director Mark Krikorian,
Yet white-collar workers are also losing salaries and jobs because of discrimination, said Kevin Lynn, founder of Progressives for Immigration Reform:
The gains made by women and minorities in STEM fields over the past three decades have really been reversed. For example, today on average 12 percent of women earn degrees in computer science. In 1984 it was 37 percent. So you have to ask yourself what’s going on. Well, when the opportunities become scant and the workplaces become hostile to women, they typically choose other career alternatives.
….
There is a preference for hiring Indians over Americans in these [Indian-run] consulting firms because, one, they will work longer hours. It’s a quiescent workforce, largely because they’re here on H-1B visas. And a lot of what goes into this is they are given the hope that their company will sponsor them for an – a green card, and then they’ll eventually get citizenship here in the U.S. Unfortunately for the American worker, that means that they’re competing with someone who is willing to work for less, work for increasingly lower benefits and other benefits that go along with their salaries, and it just ultimately makes things a lot more difficult.
The press club event was scheduled to spotlight Richwine’s study of discrimination lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He summarized several of the EEOC cases, often quoting directly from the commission’s reports:
When a warehouse in Memphis began using a new employment agency to fill its daily work crew, the agency, quote from EEOC, “essentially replaced the African Americans with Hispanics.” End quote. Potential workers would line up outside the warehouse each day, but the agency would select Hispanics over blacks even when black workers were farther ahead in line. Sometimes managers would send potential black workers home by announcing in English that there were no more positions. After the African Americans left, the Hispanics were allowed to come into the warehouse and work. Again, systematic – neither subconscious nor subtle.
Richwine described cases where Hispanic managers discriminated against American blacks:
Perhaps the most egregious example of this comes from Prestige Transportation Services. It would discard or refuse to accept employment applications from non-Hispanic blacks. Quote from EEOC: “On multiple occasions when a black person applied for employment, Prestige managers Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Rodriguez would stand behind the applicant and rub their hand on their skin to display their disdain for black people.” End quote. Staff meetings were conducted in Spanish only.
The record shows that some Indian immigrants also discriminates against blacks, he said.
At a Hampton Inn in Colorado, three non-Hispanic white housekeepers were fired by the new general manager and replaced by Hispanics. The owners, Falgun Patel and Mukund Patel, told the general manager that they prefer that maids be Hispanic because in their opinion Hispanics worked harder while American employees are lazy. The general manager allegedly told a Hispanic employee to recruit friends for the incoming vacancies because the owner preferred a Hispanic workforce. After three months, all of the Hampton Inn’s non-Hispanic housekeepers were gone.
The pattern of lawsuits by Hispanics is very different, said Richwine. Instead of losing job opportunities because of discrimination, Latinos lose workplace protections that were once normal for Americans, he said:
When Hispanics file suits, they are not complaining that they are being replaced by some other group in the workforce; instead, they’re complaining about working conditions, they complain about low pay, they complain about dangerous situations on the job site, and they complain about harassment. Harassment oftentimes is ethnically based, ethnic slurs and so on directed at them. The saddest part is that when we’re talking about Hispanic women, sexual harassment is a very pervasive problem if you believe these EEOC lawsuits,
The examples are merely the most egregious ad straightforward cases, he said, ensuring that they are likely many other cases of discrimination that do not end up in court.
Deputies for President Donald Trump have partly reversed some discrimination against blacks, for forcing wages up to record levels.
But his deputies done little to curb the white-collar discrimination, partly because there is so much more money at stake for high-tech firms, hospitals, and investors.



Claims of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True

|
Posted: Oct 19, 2019 12:01 AM
America's September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969, according to the most recent Department of Labor report.
The tight labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For example, New Seasons Market, a West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom Equipment, a Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.
For the first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of workers enjoyed faster wage growth than their higher-paid peers.
Unfortunately, this positive trend could be short-lived. Corporate special interests are whining about a labor shortage -- and are spending millions to lobby for higher levels of immigration, which would supply companies with cheap, pliable workers.
Hardworking Americans need their leaders in Washington to see through this influence campaign and stand up for their interests. Scaling back immigration would further tighten the labor market, boosting wages and helping the most disadvantaged Americans find jobs.
The U.S. economy is the strongest it has been in years. Employers added 136,000 new jobs in September, marking 108 months of consecutive job growth.
But there's still more progress to be made. Approximately 6 million Americans are currently looking for jobs but remain unemployed. Another 4 million desire full-time positions but are underemployed as part-time workers. Millions more, feeling discouraged about their bleak prospects, have abandoned the job search altogether. Indeed, among 18 through 65-year-olds, 55 million people aren't working.
Many of these folks have limited or outdated skills. Others have criminal records or disabilities. So they might require a bit more training than traditional job applicants.
Rather than put in this extra effort, some big businesses want to eliminate their recruiting challenges by importing cheap foreign workers. These firms have instructed their lobbyists to push for more immigration, which would introduce more slack into the labor market.
The CEO of the Chamber of Commerce recently claimed that America needs a massive increase in immigration because we're "out of people." Chamber officials said their lobbying efforts would center on sizeable increases to rates of legal immigration.
The National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, recently released a proposal which would effectively double the number of H-1B tech worker visas, import more seasonal low-skilled laborers on H-2A and H-2B visas, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And the agriculture industry is lobbying for a path to legalization for illegal laborers and is seeking to expand "temporary" guest-worker programs to include stable, year-round positions on dairy farms and meatpacking plants -- jobs that Americans will happily fill for the right wage. The Association of Builders and Contractors, Koch Industries, and dozens more companies have called for similar measures.
There are already 45 million immigrants in the United States -- 28 million of which are employed -- and counting. More than 650,000 people crossed into the United States illegally in the past eight months alone, already exceeding last fiscal year's totals. And the U.S. government grants an additional 1 million lifetime work permits to immigrants every year.
Those figures will skyrocket even higher if business groups get their way. Such an expansion would hurt hardworking Americans.
The majority of foreigners who cross the border illegally or arrive on guest worker visas lack substantial education. Naturally, they seek out less-skilled jobs in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service -- and directly compete with the most economically vulnerable Americans. The labor surplus created by immigration depresses the wages of native-born high school dropouts up to $1,500 each year.
Several proposals under consideration in Washington could alleviate American workers' woes.
A recent bill from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) would mandate all businesses use a free, online system called E-Verify, which determines an individual's work eligibility in mere seconds.
The system would make it extremely difficult for employers to hire illegal immigrants, roughly 40 percent of whom have been paid subminimum wages at some point. Without a pool of easily abused illegal laborers, businesses would raise pay for Americans.
Several senators also recently introduced the Raise Act, a bill that would reduce future levels of legal immigration.
It's time for our leaders in Washington to scale back both legal and illegal immigration. By doing so, they can further tighten the labor market and force businesses to bring less-advantaged Americans back into the workforce.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."

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

 

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

 

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

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24

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

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


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

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



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Free Trader Paul Krugman Admits Failure of Globalization for American Workers: ‘Major Mistake’

Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
 13 Oct 2019780
3:21

Economist Paul Krugman, the longtime defender of global free trade and a member of the failed “Never Trump” movement, now admits that globalization has failed American workers.

In a column for Bloomberg titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” Krugman admits that the economic consensus for free trade that has prevailed for decades has failed to recognize how globalization has skyrocketed inequality for America’s working and middle class workers.
Krugman writes:
In the past few years, however, worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to ask now what we missed. [Emphasis added]
The pro-globalization consensus of the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little to rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably even correct, to think of these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake — one in which I shared a hand. [Emphasis added]
Krugman, though, writes that he and his fellow free trade economists “had no way to know” that globalization of the American economy or a surge in trade deficits “were going to happen,” though the anti-globalization movement had warned for years of the harmful impact free trade would have on U.S. workers — including Donald Trump.
In an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, economist Alan Tonelson said that Krugman’s acknowledging that he and the free trade economic consensus has been wrong is “better later than never,” but “the damage has already been done.”
LISTEN:
“There’s been an even more startling, in fact jaw-dropping, development on that front. Paul Krugman, the famous Never Trumper, the famous pro-free trade economist, the Nobel Prize winner just published an article … saying that for the past 20 years, he and his other globalist, free trade economist friends have been substantially wrong about the effect of globalization, particularly more trade with low income, low wage countries like China,” Tonelson said.
“They’ve been substantially wrong about its effects on the American economy and American workers in particular,” Tonelson said.
Meanwhile, decades of free trade have spurred mass layoffs, unemployment, and offshoring of high-paying American jobs while surging trade deficits. Since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5 million American jobs from the American economy. Millions of American workers in all 50 states have been displaced from their jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.



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