Sunday, December 1, 2019

SOARING WAGE INEQUALITY IN FEINSTEIN AND PELOSI'S STATE OF MEXIFORNIA - "Wage inequality has risen more in California cities than in the metropolitan areas of any other state, with seven of the nation’s 15 most unequal cities located in the Golden State."


"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."


https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-10/wage-inequality-is-surging-in-california-and-not-just-on-the-coast-heres-why

MARGOT ROOSEVELT
OCT. 10, 2019
Wage inequality has risen more in California 
cities than in the metropolitan areas of any 
other state, with seven of the nation’s 15 most 
unequal cities located in the Golden State.
San Jose, with its concentration of Silicon Valley technology jobs, had the largest gap of any California metro area between those at the top of the pay scale and those at the bottom. It ranked second in the nation after the suburb of Fairfield, Conn., home to wealthy New York financiers, according to a new analysis of 2015 U.S. Census data by Federal Reserve economists. San Francisco and Los Angeles also ranked high on the list.
More surprising, perhaps, is the inclusion of Bakersfield, where high-wage engineering jobs are juxtaposed with poverty-wage farm work.
The heavy concentration of California metro areas is a striking turnabout from 1980, when just three figured in the top 15.
As inequality has soared across the United States, most sharply since the 1980s, it has been the focus of widespread debate and become a hot political issue. But less attention has focused on dramatic geographical differences in inequality.
“Wage inequality … has risen quite sharply in some parts of the country, while it has been much more subdued in other places,” wrote Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who titled their report, “Why Are Some Places So Much More Unequal than Others?
“Rising inequality in the United States has largely been an urban phenomenon,” they added.
Large cities with dynamic economies tend to have higher wage disparities, while midsized cities with “sluggish economies” are less unequal because they attract fewer high-wage workers, the authors found.
Nationally, outsized executive pay has become a major issue. Under President Obama, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission ordered corporations to publicly report the ratio between what top executives are paid and what their median workers earn, drawing attention to big compensation packages. But the new tax law backed by President Trump and congressional Republicans cut income taxes for top earners.
The new Federal Reserve study only addresses wages and does not examine growing disparities in assets such as real estate and stocks, the focus of recent calls by progressive politicians to impose a wealth tax on the rich.
U.S. wages have grown “much more rapidly for highly skilled workers at the top of the wage distribution than for those in the middle or at the bottom,” the authors wrote. “A worker in the 95th percentile of the wage distribution earns more than three times what the median worker earns and more than seven times the earnings of a worker at the 10th percentile, well above what these ratios were just a few decades ago.”



Comparing wage data from 1980 to 2015 in 200 metropolitan areas, Abel and Deitz documented a disproportionate rise in inequality in the most populous cities, like Los Angeles, New York and Houston. By contrast, the pay gap has remained largely flat in midsized Midwestern and Southern cities, such as Wasau, Wisc., Fort Wayne, Ind., and Ocala, Fla.
The report focused on what the authors call the 90/10 ratio: the difference between the earnings of workers in the 90th percentile of wage distribution and those in the 10th percentile. But the disparities were reflected throughout pay levels.
“In 1980, there was virtually no relationship between city size and the level of wage inequality,” according to the report. “None of the 10 largest metropolitan areas ranked among the nation’s most unequal places.… By 2015, five of the 10 largest areas ranked among the most unequal in the country.”

A scene on the streets of San Francisco.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In San Francisco, inflation-adjusted wages grew by 18% between 1980 and 2015 for the bottom 10% of the workforce. For those paid at the median — with half of wage earners making less and half making more — pay rose by 53%. And for those at the top, earning in the 95th percentile, pay rose a whopping 122%, according to the paper.
In Los Angeles, over the same 35 years, inflation-adjusted pay rose by just 3% for those in the bottom 10%, and by 18% for those at the median wage. For workers at the top, earning in the 95th percentile, pay rose by 69%.
Ranking 200 metro areas by pay disparities over time, Abel and Dietz found that San Francisco skyrocketed from 128th most unequal in 1980 to eighth in 2015. Over the same period, San Jose jumped from 70th to second and Los Angeles rose from 26th to 12th most unequal.
If the explosive inequality in the Bay Area is easily attributable to a massive expansion of high-paid tech jobs, the fact that Bakersfield ranked in the top tier for unequal pay in both 1980 (12th) and in 2015 (fourth) may be less obvious.
Cal State Bakersfield economist Richard Gearhart said inequality is pronounced in the city of 380,000 people because it has “a highly segmented labor market — either really well paying or really poorly paying. We don’t have a flourishing ‘middle-class’ economy for IT, managers, and finance.”
With robust oil and agriculture industries, the city has six-figure engineering and science jobs. But it also has some 40,000 local farmworkers, many of whom are paid on a piece rate, earning below the legal minimum wage, Gearhart added.
As for Los Angeles, Christopher Thornberg, a partner at the consultancy Beacon Economics, said the city has “high-income folks in entertainment and some in tech. But it also has an enormous low-skilled population working in restaurants, hotels, janitorial services and back offices.”
The fact that Los Angeles rose in the inequality ranking over 35 years can be partly attributed to “a huge influx of low-skilled Latin Americans into L.A. County since 1980,” he said. Moreover, he added, “L.A. was once an enormous manufacturing center. But since 1990, manufacturing jobs have dropped from about 850,000 to 350,000.”
According to the Federal Reserve study, growing inequality in large cities is driven by the contrast between rapidly rising wages of the best-paid workers, and far more modest increases for medium- and low-wage workers.
Several factors explain the trend, the report indicates:
·         Big cities have more need for skilled workers. Think programmers in San Jose and San Francisco, and finance executives in New York. On the other hand, as automation and globalization have cut the demand for middle- and low-skilled workers, cities such as Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, where thousands of auto and steel industry jobs disappeared, experienced wage stagnation.
·         What economists call “urban agglomeration economies” — the way that companies in related businesses cluster together in dense metropolitan areas — spurs higher productivity and higher wages. This clustering tends to favor higher-skilled workers, research shows. Think Hollywood.
·         The weakening of labor unions led to less worker bargaining power to create middle-class jobs. And the erosion in the inflation-adjusted value of the federal minimum wage over decades has kept pay low for those in the bottom tier, although many states are now raising pay floors.
·         Migration within the U.S. is changing the employment mix, with better-skilled professionals moving to cities to earn more. “Since the early 1980s, those with college and graduate degrees have flocked to large cities, while lesser-skilled workers have increasingly been priced out of such places, in large part because of high and rising housing costs,” the authors write.
In California, the migration trend has been pronounced. The state attracts a steady stream of college graduates, especially from the East Coast, even as many less-educated residents move to neighboring states — and to Texas — in search of a lower cost of living.
In 2017, according to the latest U.S. Census migration data, the Golden State lost a net 86,890 residents without bachelor’s degrees, and just 4,443 with four-year degrees. It gained 11,653 people with graduate degrees.


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



.
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.S


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.



Report: Immigration Encourages Job Discrimination Against Americans

Dave Einsel/Getty
29 Oct 2019118
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 

Lawsuit: Intel's Indian Managers Discriminated Against American | Breitbart



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.


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 

Census: Indian Visa Workers Drive Americans Out of Middle-Class Jobs




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.



NANCY PELOSI GOT RICH OFF ELECTED OFFICE AND SERVICING THE “CHEAP” LABOR LOBBIES - Jim Gilchrist asked the question about Nancy Pelosi’s ethics that should be on the minds of every law-abiding American – including those immigrants who are following the law to become citizens here the proper way: “Do we really need a House Speaker whose every action is calculated to enhance her own financial interests, instead of focusing on how porous borders will affect the security of everyday American citizens?”

*
CALL LA RAZA NANCY TODAY! PUT THE HEAT ON HER!
EMAIL: NANCY PELOSI

CALL NANCY PELOSI Washington , DC - (202) 225-4965 San Francisco , CA - (415) 556-4862 EMAIL NANCY PELOSI sf.nancy@mail.house.gov
  
Gilchrist was reacting to my report several weeks ago in FrontPage Magazine that Pelosi – who owns non-union vineyards in Napa Valley where grape-picking depends chiefly on the availability of cheap foreign labor – is doing everything she can to help open the floodgates to more illegal immigration. And she wants the American taxpayers to pay their way. As even more proof of this than I previously reported, Pelosi does not want employers like her to be required to pay the cost of illegal aliens’ hospital care. She voted against a bill that would make employers liable for the reimbursements if an undocumented employee seeks medical attention. And she voted in favor of rewarding illegal aliens from Mexico with Social Security benefits.

*
Pelosi's Stake in Illegal Immigration
________________________________________

The Minuteman Project, founded by Jim Gilchrist (who is also the co-author of the book Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders), is made up of citizen volunteers who watch our border with Mexico and report illegal entry to the border patrol. For performing that thankless task in full compliance with the law, Gilchrist and his colleagues have been falsely maligned as fascists, racists, and even murderers. They have been driven off the speaker’s platform at Columbia University and vilified by Leftist politicians and their handmaidens in the liberal press.

So it was no surprise that the mainstream media chose to ignore a recent press release, issued by his publisher, in which Gilchrist asked the question about Nancy Pelosi’s ethics that should be on the minds of every law-abiding American – including those immigrants who are following the law to become citizens here the proper way: “Do we really need a House Speaker whose every action is calculated to enhance her own financial interests, instead of focusing on how porous borders will affect the security of everyday American citizens?”

Gilchrist did not stop there. He demanded an investigation into Pelosi’s “economic stake in just the kind of illegal alien exploitation that we deplore in Minutemen.” But you would never know it from the liberal media, who - while ignoring this demand - have had no compunctions in calling for Speaker Hastert’s head in the wake of the Foley page controversy.

Gilchrist was reacting to my report several weeks ago in FrontPage Magazine that Pelosi – who owns non-union vineyards in Napa Valley where grape-picking depends chiefly on the availability of cheap foreign labor – is doing everything she can to help open the floodgates to more illegal immigration. And she wants the American taxpayers to pay their way. As even more proof of this than I previously reported, Pelosi does not want employers like her to be required to pay the cost of illegal aliens’ hospital care. She voted against a bill that would make employers liable for the reimbursements if an undocumented employee seeks medical attention. And she voted in favor of rewarding illegal aliens from Mexico with Social Security benefits.

At the same time, Pelosi has led the Democratic opposition to any effective border controls or documentation requirements. She opposed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, signed into law by President Bush, and voted against final passage of a border security and enforcement bill in 2005 which required that all businesses must use an electronic system to check if all new hires have the legal right to work in this country. She voted against a bill to bar drivers' licenses for illegal aliens in 2005. This year she opposed legislation requiring presentation of a legitimate government-issued photo ID to prove eligibility to vote, claiming that “there is little evidence anywhere in the country of a significant problem with non-citizen voters.” She is dead wrong. For example, an accused terrorist by the name of Nuradin Abdi was just recently reported to have illegally registered to vote at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Nuradin Abdi was indicted earlier this year as part of a conspiracy to blow up the Columbus Mall.

How many other terrorist suspects may have slipped through the system because Leftists like Pelosi oppose any meaningful screens? Instead she continues to advocate our recognition of the flimsy, non-validated ID card that the Mexican consulates provide to illegal aliens before they cross over our border, called the “matricula consular”, which gives them phony documentation to set up bank accounts, apply for jobs, obtain social benefits, board airplanes, identify themselves to police, enter buildings that require IDs, obtain drivers’ licenses and then perhaps use those drivers’ licenses to try to illegally register to vote in our elections.

Pelosi also believes in giving sanctuary to illegal aliens. She opposed legislation to deny federal homeland security funding to state and local governments who refuse to share information they learn about an individual's immigration status with Federal immigration authorities. Pelosi’s hometown of San Francisco is one of the sanctuary cities she voted to protect for the benefit of illegal aliens. Pelosi even voted against strengthening our immigration law with regard to the deportability of alien terrorists.

Jim Gilchrist cut to the chase with this devastating observation that the mainstream media does not want you to read:

"As we’ve shown again and again in ‘Minutemen,’ the Democrats aren’t just hypocrites, but are working actively to subvert our legislative system to their own ends. Their only goal is votes, votes and more votes, no matter where they come from, no matter if they’re cast legally, no matter whether the person casting them is dead, alive, a citizen or an illegal alien."

Pelosi sees Jim Gilchrist’s Minutemen Project as a threat to her pro-illegal alien agenda. More illegal aliens mean more votes for the Democrats and more grape-pickers for Napa Valley vineyards like hers. So she even voted against a measure that would have cut off the use of U.S. taxpayers’ funds to tip off illegal aliens as to where the Minutemen citizen patrols may be located! She obviously wants to see the Minutemen put out of business – permanently. She can count on the liberal press to distort the work of the Minutemen and to keep out of the public eye Gilchrist’s pointed questions about her motivations for helping illegal aliens during the run-up to the mid-term elections that may make her the next Speaker of the House.

Gilchrist, of course, is accustomed to being vilified and prevented by the Left from getting his message out. In early October, he was prevented from finishing his speech at the "Minutemen Forum" sponsored by the Columbia College Republicans. Gilchrist had spoken for just a few minutes and managed to utter the words “I love the First Amendment” when a group of radical protestors took the stage and interrupted him, displaying a big banner saying "There are no illegals." More protestors then stormed the stage. Chaos erupted and the audience members who had come to hear Gilchrist speak never got the chance, which was precisely the protestors’ objective. As reported online by the staff of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, “a mosh pit of triumphal students and community members danced and chanted outside, "Asian, Black, Brown and White, we smashed the Minutemen tonight!" They also put out a statement declaring:

“The Minutemen are not a legitimate voice in the debate on immigration. They are a racist, armed militia who have declared open hunting season on immigrants, causing countless hate crimes and over 3000 deaths on the border. Why should exploitative corporations have free passes between nations, but individual people not? No human being is illegal.” (Emphasis added)

We have come to the point in this country where a bunch of radical protestors get to decide who is and who is not a legitimate voice in the debate on as critical a public policy issue as immigration. Such Leftists think that migration in a borderless world is a basic human right. They want no barriers, no guards, and no proof of lawful residency. They certainly do not want the Minutemen watching the border and reporting illegal entry to the authorities.

Leftist slogans like “no human being is illegal” are red herrings. It is not the human being who is illegal; it is what the human being does that may be illegal. One’s conduct is the test, not simply who one is. Immigrants who follow our rules are welcome here. Those who do not abide by our laws have no right to be here. A person who breaks into your house without your permission does not deserve room, board and a job as a reward, even if the intruder may be much poorer than you. He has broken the law and deserves to be punished for what he has done. Our country’s boundaries and rules for entry and residency similarly define who is permitted to be here and how we choose to protect ourselves. We are a land of immigrants, but we are also a land of laws with certain core values. Those seeking to enter our country and remain here must learn to accommodate to our laws and values, not the other way around. That is the way prior generations of immigrants did it, including those who passed through Ellis Island. Why should the law be thrown aside now?

What we are witnessing is a frontal challenge to our nation’s sovereignty. Mexico’s Foreign Secretary wants to drag us before the United Nations for intending to build a fence on our side of the border with our money to keep out aliens who seek to enter our country illegally. They will probably get a sympathetic ear as some UN bureaucrats believe there should be no such thing as “illegal” immigrants in the first place. For the first time in our history, Americans are being asked to cede the right to decide how we define ourselves as a nation and protect our own borders to a globalist governance body. Will Pelosi lead her liberal loyalists as House Speaker to support the UN against America’s right to control its own borders? Do we really want to risk finding out?

It is high time, as Jim Gilchrist demanded in the press release ignored by the mainstream media, that Pelosi come clean under oath as to her personal stake in the illegal immigration issue before she can do even more damage as House Speaker.




No comments: