Jobless Claims Higher Than Expected, Climbing to 719,000
New weekly jobless claims rose 61,000 to 719,000 for the week that ended March 27, the Department of Labor said Thursday.
Economists surveyed by Econoday had forecast a decline to 680,000 from the previous week’s initial estimate of 684,000. The previous week’s level was revised down by 26,000 from 684,000 to 658,000
Jobless claims can be volatile week to week so economists like to look at the four-week average. This fell to 719,000, a decrease of 10,500 from the previous week’s revised average. That is the lowest level for this average since March 14, 2020.
Continuing claims, which get reported with a week’s lag, fell to 3,794,000 in the week ended March 20, a decrease of 46,000 from the previous week.
Including new programs for gig workers and small business owners, the total number of continued weeks claimed for benefits in all programs for the week ending March 13—the most recent data available—was 18,213,575, a decrease of 1,517,926 from the previous week
Claims hit a record 6.87 million for the week of March 27, more than ten times the previous record. Through spring and early summer, each subsequent week had seen claims decline. But in late July, the labor market appeared to stall and claims hovered around one million throughout August, a level so high it was never recorded before the pandemic struck. Claims moved down again in September and had made slow, if steady, progress until the election and the resurgence of Covid-19 infections when they rose again. In the last few weeks, however, claims have once again been moving steadily downward.
Many states eased or eliminated restrictions on businesses, including restaurants and bars, in March. Forty-three states are now mostly open. This has led to a surge of economic activity. As well, the American Rescue Act authorized $1.9 trillion of stimulus money, although only a small fraction of that has been spent so far.
But infections have recently been rising, which could be a drag on workers seeking employment and hiring.
The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending March 20 were in Massachusetts (+11,386), Texas (+7,599), and Connecticut (+4,170).
Sen. Joe Manchin Endorses Cheap-Labor Amnesty – ‘For the Children’
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said Thursday he would support a 2021 amnesty.
The statement was made at a migrant shelter in Laredo, Texas, and his comments closely matched the talking points provided by wealth investor groups. For example, Manchin played up the concerns of foreign children while ignoring the economic concerns of West Virginians.
Manchin announced his support as he warned more migrants are on their way to the border:
I’ll go back to Washington, I’ll be able to speak to the President … [I] will be able to speak to our colleagues and explain that ‘it is beyond time, past time to do immigration reform.
Immigration reform should be a pathway to citizenship. People have been here — they might have come here the wrong way but they came here for the right reason. They’ve been here, they’ve been productive. We have children that came here, that have no other home but America.
“I certainly believe Joe Biden is the one person who can put the compassion to doing this and doing it right. I truly believe that,” he added.
Manchin said the amnesty is needed to help the migrant children, it will not lead to an increase in crime, and the border can be protected by technology.
Manchin’s lurch towards amnesty is important, partly because it could give Democrats a 50th vote for amnesty — and an excuse to weaken the Senate’s filibuster rules that preserve the political power of small states in the Congress.
Manchin offered no economic and pragmatic reason for endorsing an amnesty, which suggests that he is facing massive lobbying pressure from his fellow Democrats and from the pro-migration business groups. Many amnesty advocates are seeking to reduce the labor-market power of Americans under an imported flood of many extra hard-working but low-wage workers, who also spur the economy as taxpayer-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters.
Any amnesty would have a huge economic impact, in part, because it would be packaged with a further immigration expansion that would reduce wage levels and minimize the incentives for coastal investors to create jobs in lower-status West Virginia communities.
“Everybody loses — except for the stakeholders, which are the different leaders and money people and companies that are lined up behind this thing,” said Bill Gheen, founder of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC. “American citizens — white-collar, blue-collar, white, black, and Hispanic — all will suffer terrible consequences,” he told Breitbart News.
The impact of cheap-labor migration on investors’ job-creation plans is highlighted by a report at an economic research site, SSTI.org. The report shows late-stage venture capital investments clustered in the states where investors and their new workers — legal and illegal migrants — prefer to live. For example, in the last three months of 2020, investors made investment deals worth roughly $2,028 per person in California, $936 per person in New York, $167 per person in Pennsylvania, $128 per person in Ohio, $52 per person in Kentucky — and 55 cents per person in West Virginia, which is ranked among the poorest states in the union.
Instead of talking about voters’ primary worries about jobs and wages, Manchin’s talking points echoed the poll-tested advice of pro-migration investors, such as those pushed by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group, which urged politicians to avoid any mention of money, jobs, or wages while promoting amnesty bills.
For example, a March 9 FWD.us-funded polling memo advised worried legislators that:
It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.
“Adapting family separation messaging to the debate over citizenship is our most resonant message,” the FWD.us-funded memo said.
Manchin’s statement was quickly endorsed by Todd Schulte, the president of Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group:
Senator @Sen_JoeManchin is right —> https://t.co/E0xiwUSMGR
— Todd Schulte (@TheToddSchulte) April 1, 2021
Many Democratic and GOP politicians recognize that any amnesty may be very unpopular with swing voters. Numerous polls show that Americans say they want to welcome migrants — but overwhelmingly oppose labor migration that threatens Americans’ jobs and wages. In 2014, for example, after the Democrats pushed the Gang of Eight amnesty through the Senate, they lost five seats — and helped trigger Donald Trump’s run for the presidency.
In Laredo, Manchin argued that an amnesty will reduce suffering for foreign migrants, although he said nothing about how more cheap labor might impact his already-poor West Virginian constituents.
Foreign criminal gangs are “preying on human suffering, which is intolerable — should be — to all of us. How can we prevent that from happening?” he said, adding:
A lot of of our [GOP] colleagues come to the border but they don’t come as much to Laredo as they might go over to where the children shelters. That’s the one that tugs at your heart. I understand that. But think of all the criminal elements of preyed on those kids to get here. Think of all the sacrifices their families made. We should not put them in harm’s way, that should not happen. So we need to look at some of the pieces of legislation we’ve had and some of the rules we’ve had before, that have worked, some that haven’t worked.
“This is basically for the children,” Manchin said, after citing a theme of “Five Promise” that he says he often describes.
Business and their dependent allies on the left prefer to talk about migration via the 'nation of immigrants' framing.
But for business, it is all about the $$$ — and Americans increasingly recognize their $$$ is the target. https://t.co/zsEF4BLTfM— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 26, 2021
Just before he endorsed an amnesty, Manchin described the amnesty as a way to reduce crime against migrants:
Well, we’re going to have to be, what some people might interpret as being very difficult, very strong, very tough. And by being tough, we’re going to be tough on crime. We’re not going to allow crime to prosper on the backs of people or human suffering, and trying to get to this country under any condition, That’s not going to continue. We can’t let it.
Manchin suggested his constituents are unfairly afraid of migrant crime, but did not offer any border-related legal reforms to curb the growing problem that Americans do face from Mexican drug gangs:
I come from West Virginia, one of the least diverse states in the nation. There’s not a lot of mix, if you will. We have very little migrant immigration. And so the only thing that people — my constituents — will know is what they see on television … [I came here] To see see the human element and see it up close, in person, to be able to talk to [migrant] people, just a month ago who came here ….. to see how that kind of changes their lives, and they say they feel so much safer.
The scale of the Mexican drug problem was noted by a January 4 statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of West Virginia:
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – United States Attorney Mike Stuart announced today that Joel Gonzalez-Gomez, 31, of Chiapas, Mexico, was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison for conspiracy to distribute more than 50 grams of methamphetamine and illegal reentry of a removed alien.
“Five prior removals [from the United States]. More than a kilo of meth. 12 grams of fentanyl. 28 grams of cocaine. 3 guns,” said United States Attorney Mike Stuart. “Gonzalez-Gomez had come into our country illegally and continued to break our laws by peddling poison. He will now have more than 11 years in federal prison to think about the error of his ways.”
The border can be secured by technology, Manchin argued, without mentioning the prior promises about high-tech walls, or the many legal loopholes, side-doors and gaps that are used by President Joe Biden’s deputies to let many migrants walk through President Donald Trump’s useful concrete-and-steel border wall. Manchin said:
There should be basically the security of our border using all the technology that we have available. We have the most technological advances ever made before. I’ve just seen your towers and your radars and all that scanning, so much different what we had 10 years ago.
While endorsing an amnesty, Manchin suggested federal officials impose a 90-pause in migration across the border:
We’ve got a human crisis that I’m seeing here … So if that means shutting everything down for 90 days of how we have people coming to our country, sending that message that we’re not going to be taking people into this country until we get our ability to make sure we’re able to do it and do it right. Is that going to put the pressure [on Congress]? Or do we put a 90-day moratorium on ourselves to make sure we come up with a safe haven in the country so they can go there? Something has to be done and it has to be expedited.
“This problem is not going away, this problem will not cure itself,. I can assure you, and they’re coming in droves,” he added.
In 2013, Manchin endorsed the “Gang of Eight” amnesty. “In 2013, we did an immigration bill and the Senate passed it. I was part of that,:” he said. “The Republican party didn’t take the piece of legislation, it was a good piece of legislation. It really was.”
Shortly before Manchin voted for the 2013 amnesty, a last-minute report by the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the amnesty bill would reduce wage-earners’ share of new national income and would increase the share that went to investors.
“The bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, [so] average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO 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,” according to the report titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
FWD.us was formed in 2013 to help pass the 2013 amnesty. It is now pushing for the passage of a 2021 amnesty.
Bloomberg exposes the OPT-worker program that CEOs use to push many US graduates out of tech & Fortune 500 careers.
You'd think estb. journos would care about their kids' futures. But corporate media won't follow the $$ in migration politics.#H1B #OPT https://t.co/4PWGwSiXjq— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 13, 2021
Montana Gov. Gianforte Signs Bill Banning Sanctuary Cities: ‘Immigration Laws Will Be Enforced’
1:55Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) signed a bill on Wednesday banning sanctuary cities, which effectively act as safe havens for illegal immigrants, across the state, promising “immigration laws will be enforced in Montana.”
Per the law, local enforcement agencies will be required to abide by federal immigration law or face penalties for noncompliance. The law grants the attorney general authority to bring a civil action “to compel compliance by a state agency or local government.” Violators may have grants withheld and could face fines of “$10,000 every five days that the state agency or local government is not in compliance with the provisions,” per the measure.
“We are a nation of laws, and immigration laws will be enforced in Montana. Criminal, illegal aliens who pose public safety threats to our communities have no sanctuary in Montana,” Gianforte told the Daily Caller prior to signing the bill:
Montana Gov. Gianforte Sign… by Henry Rodgers
Gianforte’s move comes as the Biden administration continues to face a crisis on the southern border, which Republican lawmakers say Biden created by undoing many of Trump-era immigration policies, such as the Remain in Mexico agreement.
“It is a humanitarian disaster and crisis, and it is man-made. Joe Biden caused this with political decisions made in the opening weeks of this administration,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said during an appearance on Fox & Friends after visiting the border alongside several GOP colleagues.
“Last month — in the month of February — over 100,000 illegal immigrants entered the country — the highest rate of illegal immigration in 25 years,” Cruz added.
Joe Biden Portrays Populist César Chávez as Cheap-Labor Amnesty Advocate
5:38President Joe Biden is trying to impose a pro-amnesty, post-American political makeover on the anti-migration, pro-American, labor-rights hero César Chávez.
“Ever since Chávez died [in 1993], the left — and in this case — the corporate interests posing as the left, have been doing that,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Chávez used his United Farm Workers union to level the playing field for working Americans whose jobs were being illegally outsourced to cheap foreign labor, said Krikorian. Yet Biden is now pushing a farmworker amnesty bill that would legally replace hundreds of thousands of American agricultural workers with indentured, low-wage, disposable, and compliant visa-workers, Krikorian continued, adding:
It is an inversion of Chávez’s goal, which was to give [labor market] power to powerless workers in the tug-of-war between management and labor. It wasn’t socialism — it was making sure that workers were able to flex their muscles.
Biden pushed the left-wing makeover in a March 31 statement, saying: “I was proud to place a bust of César Chávez in the Oval Office, so that no one who enters that historic room may forget the powerful truths his farm worker hands imparted.”
The statement, titled, “Proclamation on César Chávez Day, 2021,” portrays Chávez as a supporter of illegal migration, saying (emphasis added):
As we work to recover and rebuild an economy that rewards hard work and brings everyone along — including the immigrants and farm workers he championed, as well as the essential workers carrying our Nation on their backs today — we have no finer role model than César Chávez.
We need to get a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers signed in to law — and we are thankful to @POTUS for his strong commitment and honored to be in this fight with @UFWupdates. https://t.co/DchYTk1e2l
— Todd Schulte (@TheToddSchulte) March 31, 2021
In recent years, Democrats and their media allies have described illegal migrants as “immigrants.” More recently, the influential FWD.us advocacy group has pushed the claim that Americans are morally obliged to share their citizenship with the low-wage illegals who pushed Americans out of “essential” jobs, including delivery drivers, restaurant cooks, and janitors.
Sen. Mike Crapo steps back from his support for the House farm amnesty.
The deal would hammer rural towns in Idaho & elsewhere by replacing Americans with low-wage visa workers who take their wages home each year.
Local GOPers know where the votes are. https://t.co/zsEF4BLTfM— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 24, 2021
In reality, Arizona-born Chávez was a strong advocate for American workers, especially the American Latinos who worked in the low-tech California agriculture of the 1960s and 1970s.
He pushed for enforcement of anti-migration laws because he knew farmworkers would never pay higher wages — or even invest in machines to help Americans harvest crops faster — so long as they could hire cheap temporary labor from Mexico.
But the federal government has done little to stop the inflow of illegal migrants for farm companies that rely on ancient stoop-labor farming techniques, instead of using productive American-built machinery:
Heat illness can and does kill farm workers every year. As we feel the effects of climate change, farm workers are exceedingly vulnerable to extreme temperatures.
Access to rest breaks, water and shade would save countless lives across the country. https://t.co/1dEGfxAvyQ
— United Farm Workers (@UFWupdates) March 30, 2021
“He opposed undocumented immigrants to the point of urging his followers to report them to la migra,” wrote Gustav Arellano, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Arellano’s March 29 column continued:
… he once lashed out at Dolores Huerta — who had urged him to use more sympathetic language for immigrants in the country illegally than “wetbacks” — by saying, “You [Chicano liberals] get these hang-ups.… They’re wets, you know. They’re wets, and let’s go after them.”
In a March 30 column for AmGreatness.com, Krikorian wrote:
But if Chávez’s bust could talk [to President Biden, it] might alert the president, “We have had no enforcement by the Border Patrol.” (From Chávez’s 1969 congressional testimony explaining his boycott campaign.)
The labor leader’s likeness might whisper in the president’s ear, “If my mother was breaking the strike, if she was illegal, I’d ask the same thing.” (In response to a question at a 1979 event, “Do you feel uneasy being allied with the reactionary groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, in calling for stricter enforcement of immigration laws?”)
Or it might express frustration over the lack of immigration enforcement by asking, “What the heck’s going on? It’s just, it’s a complete breakdown of the law. They’re not doing anything.” (From the same 1979 event.)
Both Krikorian and Arellano spotlighted Chávez’s violations of modern conservative preferences and woke pieties.
Krikorian said:
He wasn’t a conservative. Let’s not get it wrong: He was a labor guy. He wasn’t totally against amnesty for people — he once said he wanted it for people with family and roots in the U.S. So you don’t want to oversell him — but he understood the basic issue of labor demand: Infusions of foreign labor — legal or illegal — undermines the bargaining power of American workers, especially those who are the poorest and most exploited.
Arellano wrote from the left:
[Biographer Miriam] Pawel asked a former Arizona UFW leader who had parted ways with Chávez long ago whether he still thought of him as a great man. “Palms up, he held his right hand above his head and lowered his left near the floor,” Pawel wrote. “On balance, he said, the good outweighed the bad. It was not even close.”
Reporters should call Biden out for the deformation of Chávez, said Krikorian:
Media fact-checks who were working overtime during the Trump administration have an obligation to set the record straight on Chávez. … But on Chávez’s birthday, especially when his memory is being manipulated for political purposes, the media has an obligation to at least put that in context.
The media accepts CEO claims that the guest-worker programs are a fix for a US worker shortage.
But the evidence shows CEOs use the programs to secede from the US labor market, esp. at professional top & the unpleasant-to-manage bottom.#H2A, #H1B https://t.co/INemIvKCzq— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) February 17, 2021
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