Sunday, December 22, 2019

AMERICA - NO JOBS FOR AMERICANS BUT PLENTY OF "CHEAP' LABOR INDIANS WHO THEN BRING OVER THE REST OF THEIR KLAN

The Lee-Durbin Big Tech Green Card Bill S.386
More foreign workers in de facto residency replacing U.S. workers,
but less diversity

 
Washington, D.C. (December 20, 2019) - Senator Mike  Lee (R-UT) has agreed to new provisions that will further distort the US labor market and displace American college graduates from jobs in order to secure Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) support for the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act (S. 386). The resulting bill goes well beyond dealing with the lop-sided waiting list caused by an influx of visa workers from India. It also creates a new form of long-term residency called "early filing," allowing those arriving on certain temporary visas to bypass the annual green card limits and stay indefinitely if they have an employer sponsor.

Under the bill, those on a long-term temporary visa who can secure a job offer requiring a college degree will, after a wait of 270 days, be able to obtain a three-year renewable work permit and permission to travel in and out of the country. It will be a status comparable to permanent residency with a green card, but without having to wait in line or be restricted by annual immigration limits. It will potentially apply to hundreds of thousands of people each year, including foreign students, exchange visitors, NAFTA workers, investors, and more.

Supporters of fast-tracking the visa workers who are now on the waiting list say that eliminating the per country cap is "number neutral" and will not increase the number of green cards awarded nor increase the cap on guestworkers. This is true, but because it gives visa workers a no-strings work permit that is not linked to a Department of Labor-approved work arrangement and specific employer, these workers will no longer be considered part of the numerically limited H-1B program, and those visa numbers will be available to employers to bring in new visa workers from abroad. In addition, the "early filing" work permits will undoubtedly attract significantly more applicants from abroad to come in on other temporary statuses that formerly offered no easy path to a green card. So while there might not be more green cards issued, there definitely will be more foreign workers in de facto residency.

Read the complete analysis of the new provisions: https://cis.org/Vaughan/Senate-S386-HR1044-Country-Cap#update
Archived articles on S386: https://cis.org/Archive-Senate-Action-Big-Tech-Green-Card-Bill-S386 
Fact Sheet on House companion bill HR1044: https://cis.org/Vaughan/Fact-Sheet-HR-1044-Fairness-High-Skilled-Immigrants-Act

Some of the flaws of the Durbin-Lee bill:
  • does not include reforms to ensure that visa workers are highly skilled or highly paid;
  • everyone with a qualifying job offer gets to stay with a renewable work permit;
  • does not explicitly prevent employers from replacing US workers with visa workers;
  • does not tighten the skills or occupational or educational standards for visas;
  • does not increase the total number of green cards;
  • increases the number of "temporary" visa workers who expect to stay; and
  • encourages more employers to lower their labor costs by hiring foreign workers who gain access to the labor market by obtaining a temporary visa. 

This bill would dramatically change our employment green card distribution system by eliminating a safeguard that prevents green card numbers from being monopolized by citizens of one or two countries.  Known as the “per country cap,” this provision ensures that the employment-based visas are available to a truly global pool of talent in a wide variety of occupational sectors.  It should not be scrapped; eliminating it would benefit one industry (Big Tech) and two groups of applicants (Indian tech workers and Chinese investors) and squeeze out all others.

Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, writes, “This bill is anything but fair to U.S. workers, because it strengthens and perpetuates a system that is actively displacing them. It offers a major concession to employers who have bypassed U.S. workers for decades, without reforming the system to reduce guestworker admissions or prevent employers from replacing U.S. workers.”
 


Munro: WashPost Excludes U.S. Graduates from Migration, Outsourcing Politics

Here are the families that walked for equality to Senator Durbin’s office in Chicago on October 10, 2019.
immivoiceVideos/YouTube
10:37

The Washington Post has finally produced an article about Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 green-card giveaway to India’s visa workers — but it excludes the voices of the many American graduates who are losing salaries and careers to the imported population of roughly 1.5 million foreign visa workers.
The editors and the author, Abigail Hauslohner, quoted two of the Indian visa workers in the United States, an India-born advocate for the visa workers, two lobbyists for employers, three immigration lawyers, the Koch-funded CATO advocacy group, and the author of the giveaway bill, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
But the article simply ignored the many diverse American employees who have protested, lobbied, organized, and called legislators to block Lee’s bill, which would reward at least 300,000 Indian foreign nationals workers for taking jobs from college-graduate Americans of all stripes. The Post’s article ignored the statistical evidence of harm to Americans, the reality of massive fraud, the many critics of the many white-collar visa-worker programs (H-1B, L-1, J-1OPTCPT, L-1, E-2, TNB-1H4 EAD, etc.), and also ignored the stories of many Americans who keep silent — or stay anonymous — because they are still bound by contracts with the employers who imported their India-born replacements.
The Posts see-no-dollars skew was unsurprising, partly because Hauslohner covers the concerns of migrants — not business trends, nor labor-supply questions, immigration economicslabor and workplace issues, or even career options for the many white-collar university graduates who fill her social circle.
But the Washington Post‘s role is also questionable because Hauslohner and her editors are employed by Jeff Bezos. His Amazon company is lobbying for Lee’s outsourcing bill, and his ambition to expand into the Indian market can be held hostage by the Indian government, which is also lobbying for passage of the Lee bill.
Hauslohner’s focus on immigrants skews the entire article away from the concerns shared by millions of American graduates and their parents.
She builds the article on the personal stories of four Indian migrants:
the backlog [for green cards] among this group is so acute that an Indian national who applies for a green card now can expect to wait up to 50 years to get one.
Yogi Chhabra, an IT professional in Louisville, says the backlog crisis has put his family in danger of being torn apart. Chhabra, 55, has lived in the United States for 21 years and has been in the backlog for nine. His oldest son, now 23, is a U.S.-educated mechanical engineer who has lived in Kentucky since he was 3, but because he aged out of eligibility two years ago, his son now faces the prospect of being deported to a country he has never known. “If he cannot find a job in eight months, he’ll have to leave,” Chhabra said. “It was just yesterday that he came home crying. We don’t know what to say to him.”
In October, the widow of an aviation systems engineer whose family lost its spot on the waitlist when he was killed in a 2017 hate crime published a commentary in the Kansas City Star, comparing Durbin to the man who killed her husband. The attacker shouted “get out of my country,” as he shot and killed Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian tech worker.
Indians need a solution now, [Aman] Kapoor said. “Every day, you see someone in the backlog is dying. Or kids are aging out,” Kapoor said. “People are very stressed out because of the backlog.”
Anand Vemuri, 46, an IT professional in New Jersey, is losing hope. His sons, now 16 and 13, came to the United States as toddlers. The family has been in the backlog for seven years, and he said he thinks he won’t get through by the time his older son ages out of eligibility.
She blames Congress for not handing out more green cards to the rising population of Indian workers, as if Americans’ laws must be redesigned to suit the Indian workers who choose to take Americans’ jobs in exchange for their employers’ promise of green cards. She also excuses the executives and investors for their deliberate policy of packing their job sites with Indians who choose to work for many years until they get their green-card payoff:
The wait is largely the result of an annual quota unchanged since 1990, and per-country limits enacted decades before the tech boom made India the top source of employment-based green card-seekers.
Hauslohner ignored her fellow Americans as she allows immigration lawyers to fret about the loss of jobs by foreign graduates — and the loss of fee-paying clients by immigration lawyers:
Because most of the backlogged Indians work in the tech industry, the shift would mean that high-skilled workers in other areas “like health care and medical research … will be shut out of residency for well over a decade,” [immigation lawyer Ira] Kurzban wrote. “Potential new Americans in basic science, engineering, chemistry, physics, artificial intelligence, climate change and many other fields who are not Indian nationals will be discouraged from ever coming to the U.S.”
Business groups are portrayed as the problem-solvers — even though they created the problem as they spiked their stock values by importing a cheap army of indentured workers who cannot quit until they eventually get green cards many years later:
Among those pushing for a quick resolution are business leaders, who worry that a congressional stalemate — doing nothing at all — could push Indian workers out of the United States and cause others to seek easier paths to citizenship in other countries.
She even makes a favorable reference to the high-immigration, low-wage policies urged by the Cato Institute’s advocates for investors:
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, declared [Sen. Dick] Durbin’s [RELIEF] bill “the best legal immigration reforms overall” and found that it would “virtually double” the total number of legal immigrants receiving permanent residence during the next decade while reducing wait times for everyone to less than a year.
Hauslohner dismisses any role in the debate for the entire economic class of American college graduates, despite her myriad college-graduate colleagues and their spouses, peers, friends, siblings, and children:
The backlog has led to competing bills in Congress and has pitted immigrants against immigrants, setting off accusations of racism and greed and exposing a deep cynicism about the prospects for any kind of immigration reform in a polarized nation.
Hauslohner also allows a business advocate to suggest — unchallenged — that Americans’ opposition to Lee’s cheap-labor bill is evidence of bigotry and racism:
The top priority should be removing the country quotas that are “fundamentally bigoted” — because they automatically “discriminate” against people with Indian citizenship, rather than judging them for their skill set — [lobbyist Scott Corley] said.

Sen. Mike Lee & Dick Durbin tout their new @S386 bill.
The visa-to-voter bill gives many migrants a new status - "Early Adjustment" - to help them bridge the wide gap b/w 'visa-worker' and 'legal immigrant voter.'
Bad for citizens, great for investors. http://bit.ly/2s2D7nI 



Unsurprisingly, the Washington Post writer and editors also pretended that Breitbart’s extensive and groundbreaking coverage of the issue since July 2018 remains unnoticed by anyone of consequence:
The crisis of employment-based green cards burst into the open in October [2019] after a narrow bill to address the issue nearly passed the Senate in a unanimous consent motion, after sailing easily through the House. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) stepped in and blocked it.
In fact, the Washington Post and other establishment outlets remained silent while Breitbart covered the news, such as the downward adventures of GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder, whose push for passage of the outsourcing bill contributed to his defeat in 2018.
Hauslohner, however, is cut from the same cloth as nearly all other reporters at establishment media sites.
Few American journalists follow the dollars through the immigration debate, few comfort the afflicted American workers, and few afflict comfortable investors. Instead, the vast majority of journalists relax with progressive activists and business executives as they observe the college-graduate version of cannery row play out below them.
But Americans’ stories deserve to be published.
One victim of the H-1B outsourcing trend was Donna B. She is now retired to a small town in Arizona and earns so little money that she is not required to pay off the $50,000 in student loans she still owes from her software education in 1989.
Divorced and with five children, “I was 36 years old when I started [in 1989],” she told Breitbart News. After her first job in Connecticut, she moved to Arizona by 1993, where she met her first Indian H-1B workers. “They did not mix with any of us and could not speak English,” she said.
In 2002, “I had my first layoff, and I could not find a job anywhere for four years,” she said. She applied for a job in Boston to repeat the same work she had done in Arizona, but “I could never get an interview, I was being stalled, and nothing happened.” She eventually landed a job at Caremark but was laid off in 2010 after the company merged with CVS. “The next year, they brought in Indians to do exactly what I had been doing,” she said.
“I never found a job after that … I applied for tons of jobs, tons … I never got a response except ‘Thank you for applying.’”
“Many of the job interviews were conducted [by phone] with Indians from the outsourcing companies, each of whom had a personal economic incentive to fill jobs with cheap Indian H-1Bs, not with Americans, she said. “I’ve gotten calls, and I’ve gotten emails from Indians [when applying for jobs]. … It just goes nowhere,” she said.
“Last year, I retired, so my retirement is peanuts,” said the former Connecticut resident. “I live in a tiny town called Arizona City, which doesn’t have mail service.”
Maybe covering Americans’ stories about immigration economics is a job only Breitbart journalists want to do.

NYT's Tom Edsall says Trump's immigration-reform voters are 'snakes and vermin.'
Edsall usually tries to understand ordinary Americans' concerns. But he & his elite peers live in a bubble & just don't see immigration's huge economic damage to Americans.http://bit.ly/2YQO7Aq 



Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com





MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html

“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR


Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires

JOHN BINDER

The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder


Tucker Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding

Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”


Tucker Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech

Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI

"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it."

“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.


In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
December 20, 2019 
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities. California hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably TexasTennesseeNevadaColorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe NationU.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.


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