Michael Bloomberg: Government Should Import ‘an Awful Lot More’ Immigrants
26 Nov 201932
4:25
Democratic 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg says he will recruit “an awful lot more” immigrants “to take all the different kinds of jobs” in the U.S. economy.
The immigrants can “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy,” Bloomberg told reporters without naming the American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues that would be improved.
Bloomberg’s comments reflect the views of wealthy investors who gain stock market wealth when the government imports more workers, welfare-aided consumers, and extra renters into communities created by Americans and their children.
In his comments, Bloomberg echoed the 1960s claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country build by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg, who owns roughly $55 billion in assets, has long supported mass migration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians pushed for passage of the Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
In 2019, the group is pushing for the S.386 law that would help investors by encouraging many more Indian graduates to take white-collar jobs from American graduates.
Bloomberg’s group is also pushing for legislation that would provide an endless supply of H-2A visa workers to investors in the agriculture sector. The wage-capped workers would likely displace Americans, reduce pressure on investors to buy high-tech farm machinery, and convert many agriculture towns into “company towns” dominated by a single employer.
NC GOP @SenThomTillis wants to reward India's workers who take US jobs from American graduates. He's backing @SenMikeLee 's @S386 bill which gives citizenship to Indians for taking Americans' jobs. Big subsidy for US investors, big loss for NC graduates. http:// bit.ly/2rp19J3
The U.S. already imports many immigrants — roughly one million per year, even as four million Americans turn 18 and prepare to join the workforce.
“We need an awful lot more immigrants rather than less,” Bloomberg told reporters after he filed the paperwork needed to join the Democratic Party’s primary in Arizona:
We have to go out and actually try to recruit immigrants to come here. We need immigrants to take all the different kinds of jobs that the country needs – improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy.
Bloomberg — who has a personal wealth of roughly $55 billion — then blasted President Donald Trump’s campaign to block the wave of Central American migrants sparked by the establishment’s tacit support for mass migration:
I think what Donald Trump has done, of ripping kids away from their [migrant] parents, is a disgrace. I think of what we’re done, where we don’t know who we’re taking in, and we don’t help people when we’re here, is a disgrace. I think talking about deporting 11 million people is so outrageous to try to explain to your kids what that was all about. Our immigration system is broken and we’re not doing anything to fix it.
In 2013, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said .
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
In contrast, Trump’s opposition to Central American migrants and to amnesty bills sought by the establishment has helped to nudge up wages for blue-collar Americans, especially in the midwest battleground states, according to a November 26 report posted by Bloomberg’s news service:
Personal income growth has been surging in some political U.S. battlegrounds, including a third of the counties in Pennsylvania — which Donald Trump narrowly flipped in 2016 and may need to win re-election next year.
In the president’s first two years in office, a total of 325 counties representing nearly 6% of the U.S. population experienced their best annualized income gains since at least 1992, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. And 127 of those are located in perennial swing states, including Ohio and Iowa.
Good news: GOP Reps. voted against wage-cuts and job outsourcing.
Bad news: GOP Reps only voted against the cuts b/c they were wrapped in a farmworker amnesty which would cut GOP jobs in 2026.
Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers
President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.
“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall– shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.
Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.
“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written . “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”
Record 44.5 Million Immigrants in 2017
Non-Mexico Latin American, Asian, and African populations grew most
Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center.
On September 13, the Census Bureau released some data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) that shows significant growth in the immigrant (legal and illegal) population living in the United States. The number of immigrants (legal and illegal) from Latin American countries other than Mexico, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa grew significantly, while the number from Mexico, Europe, and Canada stayed about the same or even declined since 2010. The Census Bureau refers to immigrants as the "foreign-born", which includes all those who were not U.S. citizens at birth. The Department of Homeland Security has previously estimated that 1.9 million immigrants are missed by the ACS, so the total number of immigrants in 2017 was likely 46.4 million.1
Among the findings in the new data:
· The nation's immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 44.5 million in July 2017, an increase of nearly 800,000 since 2016, 4.6 million since 2010, and 13.4 million since 2000.
· It is worth noting that the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), released the same week but collected in March 2018, shows 45.4 million immigrants, an increase of 1.6 million over the prior year. While the CPS is smaller than the ACS, the newer survey may indicate the pace of growth has accelerated.
· As a share of the U.S. population, the ACS (used in the remainder of this report) shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprised 13.7 percent or nearly one out of seven U.S. residents in 2017, the highest percentage in 107 years. As recently as 1980, just one out of 16 residents was foreign-born.
· Between 2010 and 2017, 9.5 million new immigrants settled in the United States. New arrivals are offset by roughly 320,000 immigrants who return home each year and natural mortality of about 290,000 annually among the existing immigrant population.2 3
· In addition to immigrants, there were 17.1 million U.S.-born minor children with an immigrant parent in 2017, for a total of 61.6 million immigrants and their children in the country — accounting for one in five U.S. residents.4
· Of immigrants who have come since 2010, 13 percent or 1.2 million came from Mexico — by far the top sending country. However, because of return migration and natural mortality among the existing population, the overall Mexican-born population actually declined by 441,190.5
· The sending regions with the largest numerical increases from 2016 to 2017 in the number of immigrants living in the United States were South America (up 233,696); East Asia (up 226,728); South Asia (up 216,495); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 149,846); the Caribbean (up 121,120); and Central America (up 71,720).6
· Looking longer term, the regions with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were East Asia, (up 1,118,937); South Asia (up 1,106,373); the Caribbean (up 676,023); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 606,835); South America (up 483,356); Central America (up 474,504); and the Middle East (up 472,554).
· The decline in Mexican immigrants masks, to some extent, the enormous growth of Latin American immigrants. If seen as one region, the number from Latin America (excluding Mexico) grew 426,536 in just the last year and 1.6 million since 2010 — significantly more than from any other part of the world.
· The sending countries with the largest numerical increases in immigrants in the United States between 2010 and 2017 were India (up 830,215); China (up 677,312); the Dominican Republic (up 283,381); the Philippines (up 230,492); Cuba (up 207,124); El Salvador (up 187,783); Venezuela (up 167,105); Colombia (up 146,477); Honduras (up 132,781); Guatemala (up 128,018); Nigeria (up 125,670); Brazil (up 111,471); Vietnam (up 102,026); Bangladesh (up 95,005); Haiti (up 92,603); and Pakistan (up 92,395).
· The sending countries with the largest percentage increases in immigrants since 2010 were Nepal (up 120 percent); Burma (up 95 percent); Venezuela (up 91 percent); Afghanistan (up 84 percent); Saudi Arabia (up 83 percent); Syria (up 75 percent); Bangladesh (up 62 percent); Nigeria (up 57 percent); Kenya (up 56 percent); India (up 47 percent); Iraq (up 45 percent); Ethiopia (up 44 percent); Egypt (up 34 percent); Brazil (up 33 percent); the Dominican Republic (up 32 percent); Ghana (up 32 percent); China (up 31 percent); Pakistan (up 31 percent); and Somalia (up 29 percent).
· The states with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were Florida (up 721,298); Texas (up 712,109); California (up 502,985); New York (up 242,769); New Jersey (up 210,481); Washington (up 173,891); Massachusetts (up 172,908); Pennsylvania (up 154,701); Virginia (up 151,251); Maryland (up 124,241); Georgia (123,009); Michigan (up 116,059); North Carolina (up 110,279); and Minnesota (up 107,760).
· The states with the largest percentage increases since 2010 were North Dakota (up 87 percent); Delaware (up 37 percent); West Virginia (up 33 percent); South Dakota (up 32 percent); Wyoming (up 30 percent); Minnesota (up 28 percent); Nebraska (up 28 percent); Pennsylvania (up 21 percent); Utah (up 21 percent); and Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, Washington, and Iowa (all up 20 percent).
Data Source. On September 13, 2018, the Census Bureau released some of the data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS). The survey reflects the U.S. population as of July 1, 2017. The ACS is by far the largest survey taken by the federal government each year and includes over two million households.7 8
The immigrant population, referred to as the "foreign-born" by the Census Bureau, is comprised of those individuals who were not U.S. citizens at birth. It includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents (green card holders), temporary workers, and foreign students. It does not include those born to immigrants in the United States, including to illegal immigrant parents, or those born in outlying U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico. Prior research by the Department of Homeland Security and others indicates that some 90 percent of illegal immigrants respond to the ACS. Thus all the figures reported above are for both legal and illegal immigrants.
Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more in taxes
Many of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bloomberg, the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a lock on the nomination.
The immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and Sanders.
The second event was Warren’s announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1 billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.
Neither of these taxes would be passed by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated and suppressed.
But the modern-day lords and ladies who inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.
They do not fear Warren, a self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.
The levels of wealth wasted on this parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality :
It is very difficult to comprehend what a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.
And yet, there are 607 people in the United
States with a net worth of over a billion
dollars.
Bloomberg, a liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.
Last January he denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
Over the past several months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s Medicare plan.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,” complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms), said last week, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.
Hedge fund owner Leon Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s potential candidacy.
The New York Times , the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel, he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and Chrysler workers.
But for fawning toward the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column by the Times ’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”
Calling for “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs… Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened, they want a strong leader.”
This is under conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’ share has tripled since the 1980s.
In their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in 2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since 1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half, dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.
The United States is not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.
The ferocious response of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the nomination.
There is no way to address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast majority of the population.
The corporations and banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized to meet human needs, not private profit.
This is a revolutionary task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a conscious political leadership.
Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers
Getty Images
President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.
“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall– shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.
Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.
“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written . “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”
Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the capitalist system itself.
A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Billionaire ex-NYC Mayor
Bloomberg takes steps to run for
Democratic nomination
The New York Times reported Thursday that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York, is taking steps toward running for the Democratic Party 2020 presidential nomination.
The newspaper cited Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson as saying: “Mike believes that Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our nation. We need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated—but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that.”
Bloomberg reportedly filed on Friday to run in the March 3 Alabama Democratic primary. That contest, one of 14 taking place on what is known as “Super Tuesday,” has the earliest filing deadline of any state primary. The next deadline is November 13 for the New Hampshire primary, which is the second contest in the primary season, following the Iowa caucuses in February.
Press reports say Bloomberg has not made a final decision on whether he will join the current field of 16 Democratic aspirants. But his move marks a reversal of statements he made last March ruling out a presidential bid.
As a practical matter, there appears to be little chance of Bloomberg winning the nomination for himself. He would not appear in any debate because his campaign would be entirely self-financed and therefore would not meet the requirement of 200,000-plus individual donors to qualify. Press reports indicate that he would not seriously compete in the four initial contests in February—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina—where he has no campaign organization and voting begins in less than 90 days.
But he could run in the March 3–17 primaries, which will choose nearly two-thirds of the total number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Using his vast fortune for campaign advertising, he could possibly win a sufficient number of delegates to give him leverage in the event of a negotiated or brokered nomination. He would use it to block the nomination of Warren or Sanders.
The very fact that a potential run by a multibillionaire ex-politician garners immediate media attention and is instantly seen as credible testifies to the immense power exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy over American politics. Whether or not he decides to run, Bloomberg’s move is clearly calculated to shift the Democratic campaign further to the right.
The statement issued by Wolfson is an expression of skepticism toward the prospects of the current leading “centrist” in the Democratic field, former Vice President Joe Biden. While Biden still holds a lead over Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in national polls, his margin has shrunk and he is faltering in the initial primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden’s slump and the rise of Warren, who is competing with Sanders to capture growing anti-capitalist sentiment on the basis of demagogic promises and channel it back behind the Democratic Party, is increasing the fears within the ruling elite of a rising tide of working-class struggle. Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the capitalist system itself.
It is not Warren or Sanders who concern figures such as Bloomberg, Bill Gates and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, all of whom have attacked calls by the two candidates for tax increases on multimillionaires and billionaires. These long-time Democratic Party operatives are known quantities with solid records in defense of the profit system and the global interests of US imperialism. Rather, the oligarchs fear the rising wave of strikes and protests in the US and internationally that these “left”-talking Democrats are seeking to contain and dissipate.
They see in proposals for social reforms paid for by increased taxes on the rich an intolerable infringement on their prerogatives. They also see a danger of fueling popular expectations and encouraging social unrest. They want to block any expression in the 2020 elections of popular anger over social inequality.
Particularly since Warren released her “Medicare for all” plan last Friday, the outpouring of negative comments and warnings from corporate executives and media pundits has increased. In the plan, which Warren is well aware will never be passed by either big-business party, she calls for a 6 percent tax on all wealth over $1 billion to fund a government-paid and government-run universal health insurance program.
Dimon complained on the financial cable channel CNBC this week that Warren “uses some pretty harsh words” about the rich, which “some would say vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms) said Wednesday, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies—I do think you risk that.”
Last January, Bloomberg, whose net worth is $53 billion, said an earlier proposal by Warren to tax wealth above $50 million at two percent was “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s antisocialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
New York Times columnist and multimillionaire financier Steven Rattner published an op-ed piece this week headlined “The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way.” Defending the “free enterprise system,” he wrote: “Thanks for providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your surge in the polls… Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated.”
Rattner was appointed by Obama to head his Auto Task Force in 2009, where he imposed an across-the-board 50 percent pay cut on new-hires at GM and Chrysler, along with thousands of layoffs and cuts in retiree benefits. He was forced to leave his post on the auto panel when he was cited on corruption charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg’s political career has demonstrated the fundamental identity between the two corporate-controlled parties that comprise the US two-party system. He has changed parties almost like he changes business suits.
Bloomberg was a Democrat until 2001, when he reregistered as a Republican to run for mayor of New York City because he could not win the Democratic primary. He was reelected as a Republican in 2005, reregistered as an independent in 2007, and won reelection in 2009, in a campaign in which he spent $70 million, a staggering sum for a mayoral race. He remained an independent until October 2018, when he reregistered as a Democrat, although he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and had a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.
Besides spending more than $200 million of his own money to get elected three times in New York, he poured over $110 million into the 2018 Democratic campaign to help the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, and he has pledged to spend $500 million in the 2020 elections.
A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Bloomberg viciously attacked city workers, imposing a five-year wage freeze after the 2008 financial crisis, demanding cuts in pensions and health care for retirees, eliminating more than 6,000 teaching positions, closing 20 fire companies and slashing youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.
He continued the brutal “stop and frisk” policing policy imposed by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and imposed concessions on school bus strikers who struck in 2013.
This is the man praised by Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” program. Hahn, now a “liberal” radio host, called Bloomberg an “excellent mayor for the city of New York,” and added that he “might be just what the doctor ordered to shake this thing up right now.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written . “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”
Mike Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
8:22
Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of Americans.
“This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg
told the
San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper than Americans.’
“If business were able to hire without restrictions from anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings, whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because] Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.
Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’ value,” he said.
“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to immigration,” he added.
President Bush described his “any willing worker” cheap labor plan in 2004,
saying :
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling. (Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane. And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First, America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.
In December 2018, departing House Speaker Paul Ryan
echoed Bush’s “any willing worker” goal, saying:
[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.
This “any willing worker” idea encouraged Ryan
to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration groups.
Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad, but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people in legally.”
In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans — despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage increases.
Bloomberg’s “best worker” pitch is not a problem for the Democrats’ 2020 base of “woke” progressives, said Krikorian:
He is running in the Democratic primary and there is an overlap between the plutocrat assault on national borders and the leftist assault on national borders. They come at the issue from the different starting points but they have the same enemy, which is Americans’ sovereignty. It is not obvious that his [pro-employer] immigration stance is going to be a turn-off to Democratic primary votes.. How different are the specifics of his immigration proposal from [Joe] Biden, Sen. [Bernie] Sanders or [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren?
Biden, Sanders, and Warren endorse wide-open borders as a form of charity towards unlucky foreigners fleeing from home country persecution. For example, a January 5
tweet from Biden
said :
Our Statue of Liberty invites in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Donald Trump has slammed the door in the face of families fleeing persecution and violence.
Bloomberg’s pro-employer view is coherent and likely sincere, said Krikorian.
Bloomberg aspires to a single global labor market, and everything else follows from that. A concern about improving the lot of less-skilled American workers is by definition contrary to that view because there is no such thing as an American labor market. There is only a global labor market. Domestic employers are not thinking about the consequences for people from Pennsylvania when they hire people from Tennessee, and Bloomberg wants that same approach across the entire world.
There is even an altruistic way of viewing that — which I assume guys like this have — that it improves the lot of Hondurans [and other migrants] who are coming here.
The issue is not that Bloomberg and his guys are factually incorrect. It is that their values are contrary to the values that most Americans hold – which is that we have a greater loyalty and obligation to our fellow countrymen than to foreigners. Guys like Bloomberg reject that [obligation] in principle.
But Bloomberg also wraps his economic demand for more immigrants in a progressive-style cultural message.
Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”
In December, Bloomberg
said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues do not meet his standards.
Bloomberg also echoes the Democrats’ claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country built by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg has long supported greater immigration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians then
pushed for passage of the failed Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans’ wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report
said .
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
For Bloomberg, Krikorian said, U.S. “employers have no greater obligation to fellow Americans than to Hondurans [or other foreign workers] … what Bloomberg is saying is that immigration laws should not interfere with the pursuit of shareholder value [because] employers can hire anyone from anywhere at any wage, period.”
Economy Immigration Politics Amnesty Donald Trump George W. Bush H-1B immigration Michael Bloomberg Migrants migration Nation of Immigrants visa workers wages
WEST HOLLYWOOD WELCOME MAT FOR ILLEGALS...
Not a single employer of illegals ever prosecuted in this LA RAZA SANCTUARY CITY where they print voting ballots in Spanish so illegals can vote for more!
Foreign Workers See Nearly 5X Job Growth of Americans
Foreign workers saw nearly five times as much job growth as native-born American workers did last month, Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals.
In November 2018, foreign-born worker employment increased 5.1 percent compared to the same time last year. Meanwhile, native-born Americans saw an employment increase of only about 1.2 percent year-to-year, almost five times less job growth as their foreign worker competitors.
The foreign-born workforce — those who are employed and looking for work — also had significantly higher gains than native-born Americans. Last month, the number of foreign-born workers in the labor force increased almost five percent. At the same time, native-born Americans in the labor force increased only 0.66 percent.
The labor force participation rate among foreign-born workers increased 1.2 percent, while the labor force participation rate for native-born Americans increased only 0.2 percent from year-to-year.
Though foreign-born workers have had significant gains in the last three months of President Trump’s economy, native-born Americans’ unemployment dropped by an impressive 12.5 percent while their foreign competitors’ unemployment decreased by 5.9 percent.
The fast-growing employment of foreign-born workers over American citizens is exacerbated by the country’s wage-crushing national immigration policy whereby about 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants are added to the U.S. population every year.
While legal immigrants continued being admitted to the U.S. to take blue-collar working-class jobs and many white-collar, high-paying jobs, there remain about six million Americans who are unemployed, 12 percent of whom are teenagers and nearly six percent of whom are black Americans.
There remain about 1.3 million workers who have been jobless for more than two years, 4.8 million workers who are working part time but who want full time jobs, and 1.7 million workers who want a job, including more than 450,000 workers who are discouraged by their job prospects.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Claims of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True
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 reported August 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%.
.
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
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 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 .
Claims of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True
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 reported August 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%.
.
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
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 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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