The federal government should not have immigration policies that threaten Americans’ jobs and wages, Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) told Punchbowl News.
If Congress seeks to import workers, “we need to do it smartly, in order to once again ensure that those new workers aren’t competing with our existing workers for jobs, competing for wages and salaries,” Young told Punchbowl’s Anna Palmer in a January 25 interview. “This is how we’ll build majority support for immigration reform,” said Young, who is up for election this year.
Young’s comments in the little-noticed interview highlight the political problem created by the House Democrats’ surprise addition of expansive migration measures to a bill intended to help U.S. companies compete with China’s state-backed industries.
Young played a critical role in passing the Senate’s version of the anti-China bill. The Senate bill spends more than $110 billion to boost research in a much-touted effort to help U.S. businesses compete with China’s government-backed economy. His bill passed the Senate’s 60-vote threshold with just a handful of votes to spare.
The House passed a very different version on February 4. The House bill would spend $250 billion on a wide variety of Democrat causes — such as funding for the United Nations — and it includes several migration provisions that would reduce the jobs and wages available to people in Young’s home state.
The bill’s migration sections would allow U.S. investors and companies to hire an endless stream of foreign replacements for mainstream Indiana graduates. The bill also provides the coastal investors with more foreign workers to fill the worksites that investors prefer to build near their coastal homes in their coastal states — and so very far away from the many young people in Young’s Indiana or the GOP’s Midwest.
The Democrats’ green card giveaway was repeatedly blasted by GOP leaders, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who said:
They call it the American Competes Act. But make no mistake. It’s a bill that concedes to China. The American Concedes Act is Democrats’ desperate answer to their string of self-created crises. While it contains some provisions supported by Republicans. Speaker Pelosi is holding these good ideas, hostage by using this 3,000-page bill as a vehicle for the party’s far-left agenda. Almost every page of the Democrats’ Concede Act has a provision that helps China but hurts America.
Now here are just a few excerpts. On page 1,689, it provides a new unlimited green card program for the Chinese Communist Party to exploit.
The green card giveaway was also slammed by Young’s fellow Hoosier, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN). A January 31 statement from Banks’ Republican Study Committee said the Democrats’ bill:
Creates a new visa cap carveout program that would be even less secure than the existing visa program s that are already riddled with fraud. Shockingly, an unlimited number of members of the Chinese Communist Party are eligible to take advantage of the new visa program to carry out their malign activity here in the States ( page 1689 )
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is also speaking against the Democrats’ career-giveaway plans. “The partisan bill from the House has also added provisions related to immigration, from creating new types of visas to removing green card caps,” Cornyn said on February 4. “The [alternative] Senate bill needs to be the template for what is ultimately done by the conference committee and what is ultimately passed by the United States Congress.”
The 18 Republicans who voted for the Senate’s anti-China bill included Sens. Young, Cornyn, Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Steve Daines (R-MT), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Jim Risch (R-ID), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Roger Wicker (R-MS).
Many Republicans voted against the measure because it does not protect against aggressive Chinese spying and technology theft, say Senate critics, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).
After the House passed their version of the bill with the visa giveaway, Young released a statement on February 4, saying:
As we head to a conference process, my hope is that the final legislation will reflect the Senate bill and give House Republicans a much better option to support. The Senate-passed bill focuses on directly confronting China and getting legislation like USICA across the finish line will ensure the United States leads the world into the future.
The green card language was touted by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), whose district includes part of Silicon Valley. Investors in her region use many imported visa workers to minimize geographically-inconvenient investments in other states, such as Indiana .
Advocates, including Lofgren , say the House bill allows the “best and brightest” foreign graduates to get green cards, jobs, and then citizenship if they work to get science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) doctorates in American or foreign universities.
But the fine print of the bill shows it would give green cards to a wide variety of ordinary foreign graduates, including chemists, doctors, engineers, statisticians, accountants, tax experts, software developers, and computer security experts.
The bill’s language sets no limits on the number of foreign migrants who can get green cards and then U.S. jobs and careers, nor does it set any minimum standards for the skills of those migrants.
Roughly 1.5 million non-immigrant, mid-skill, foreign contract workers — such as H-1B workers — have been imported and hired by CEOs to fill white-collar careers that would otherwise be held by U.S. graduates. The mass inflow of cheap and compliant foreign workers distorts the nation’s professional sector by empowering CEOs , suppressing U.S. salaries, undermining professionalism, slowing innovation, and diverting job-creating investment towards the coasts, such as Silicon Valley and New York.
The China bill is strongly backed by business groups, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group for West Coast investors. “According to FWD.us estimates, 100,000 international student graduates of U.S. colleges and universities each year would like to stay and work permanently in the U.S.,” the group said in a new report .
That 100,000 number is roughly one-eighth of all Americans who graduate each year from four-year colleges with degrees in healthcare, business, science, biology, software, math, or engineering.
Zuckerberg’s investor allies at FWD.us are not just looking for extra workers — they want more migrants because they also serve as consumers and renters . The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at the other sites . The 2013 founders included Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Matt Cohler at Benchmark, and Breyer Capital CEO Jim Breyer.
FWD.us is leading the 2022 push for more migration and amnesty . partly by promoting pro-migration media coverage.
Punchbowl was founded in January 2021 by three journalists and a former Facebook PR official, Rachel Schindler. According to Punchbowl:
Prior to joining Punchbowl News, Rachel led Facebook’s strategy, planning and operations for the global news team. For three years, Rachel specialized in growing revenue-sharing products with media companies around the world.
Punchbowl’s Palmer asked Young, “One last question on that, though. I mean, you kind of talk about the reskilling: What we can be doing domestically, but what role does immigration reform have on these and the workforce needs that we’re talking about here?”
Young responded with a zig-zag, first saying immigration “has an essential role to play,” before saying it must not be used to suppress wages. “I should add that, realistically as a matter of politics and I think a matter of good policy, any immigration reform proposals are going to have to be paired with border security measures to get it done,” Young added.
Young also thanked chipmaker Micron Technology “who has supported this [media] event.” Most of Micron’s facilities are in California and other coastal locations. The company has opened facilities in India, from where the company has already imported many H-1B visa workers and OPT graduates for U.S.-based jobs that could be filled by American graduates in the Midwest.
But Young reassured Punchbowl that Americans can do the job:
If we can harness the talent of rank and file Americans, I really believe we can outgrow and out-innovate other countries. And that, of course, has very important national security implications, especially as you think about our strategic competition with China .
VIDEO
Young’s pro-American January 25 insistence that migration should not damage Americans’ opportunities makes sense for him.
He is facing the electors in November even as more voters recognize how migration reduces investment in the heartland by delivering endless foreign labor to coastal investors and employers. His comments about wages and jobs are a quiet admission that American immigration politics are deeply driven by pocketbook politics , even as other GOP politicians pander to donors by only touting border chaos and crime.
Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.
That economic strategy has no stopping point , and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs .
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states . The growing gaps mean that midwestern states lose investment, jobs, and wealth to the migration-inflated coastal states.
In turn, the loss of wealth means that heartland states get far less mention in commercial culture than they got in prior decades:
VIDEO
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing , anti-establishment , multiracial , cross-sex , non-racist , class-based , bipartisan , rational , persistent , and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.
Big Tech, Koch Network Cheer Biden’s Amnesty to Flood U.S. Labor Market JOHN BINDER
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations are cheering on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would pack the United States labor market with more foreign visa workers for business to hire over American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
— Amazon Public Policy (@amazon_policy) February 18, 2021
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to
lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the
amnesty plan a “critical moment for
immigration policy” and a “substantial step
forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are out of work today and hundreds of thousands of U.S. graduates enter the labor market every year looking for white-collar professional jobs with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
Meta Will Allow Solicitation of Human Smuggling on Its Platforms Policy comes amid surge in Facebook groups devoted to human smuggling
Immigrants detained in McAllen, Texas / Getty Images Joseph Simonson • February 1, 2022 4:45 pm
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Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, privately announced on Monday that users can use its platforms to solicit human smugglers, a decision that goes against demands by anti-human trafficking groups that urged the tech giant to crack down on the practice.
In an internal announcement of Meta's "human smuggling policy" obtained by the Free Beacon , the company concluded that a crackdown on human smuggling solicitations would hamper the ability for people to use the platform "to seek safety or exercise their human rights." The company said it will maintain its current policy, which prohibits users from offering human smuggling but allows them to solicit smuggling services.
Meta said it reached its policy decision after five months of deliberation that sought out "global perspectives and a broad range of expertise." No specific organizations or groups are named, although Meta said they included "NGOs working with migrants" and "former border enforcement officials." Ultimately, more stakeholders advised the company to allow the solicitations, it said.
"We observed that a slight majority of stakeholders favored allowing solicitations of smuggling services for reasons associated with asylum seekers," the memo reads. "We decided that this was indeed the best option since the risks could be mitigated by sending resources, whereas the risks of removing such content could not be mitigated."
In order to "mitigate the risks" from allowing migrants to seek smugglers on its platforms, Meta said it "proposed interventions such as sending resources to users soliciting smuggling services." It did not elaborate on what those resources may be or whether they would end up effectively discouraging human trafficking. The company said it would allow "sharing information related to illegal border crossing."
The commitment to the controversial policy demonstrates the tech company's willingness to bow to left-wing activists even if it means facilitating illegal activity. An April 2021 report from the Tech Transparency Project identified a surge in Facebook groups devoted to human smuggling. Meta's new policy comes as more migrants attempt to illegally cross into the United States than at any point in the country's history.
Meta spokesman Drew Pusateri confirmed the platform would continue to allow solicitations for human smuggling after its consultation with outside experts.
"We regularly engage with outside experts to help us craft policies that strike the right balance between supporting people fleeing violence and religious persecution while not allowing human smuggling to take place through our platforms," Pusateri said. "At this time, we have no policy changes to announce."
Republican lawmakers have criticized Meta's practice of tolerating human smuggling on its platforms. In May 2021, Rep. Kat Cammack (R., Fla.) wrote a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg sharing posts she found on Facebook from potential human smugglers.
"It is unacceptable for an American company to allow a criminal enterprise to use your platform to freely encourage and facilitate criminal activity," Cammack said in the letter.
In response, Meta maintained the platform prohibits "content that either offers or assists with human smuggling" and said it deleted the content highlighted by Cammack.
Meta acknowledges in the memo that its decision comes with "tradeoffs." Allowing the solicitation of smuggling services "can make it easier for bad actors to identify and connect with vulnerable people." It also added that "law enforcement and government bodies … raised concerns that permitting this type of content on our platforms facilitates illegal activity and puts migrants at serious risk of exploitation or death."
Both Republicans and Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have condemned human smuggling operations that bring migrants into the country across the southern border. In July 2021, the White House announced a new "Human Smuggling and Trafficking Task Force" to "disrupt and prevent migrant smuggling and human trafficking operations."
Migrants who enlist the assistance of human traffickers to come across the southern border are often subjected to sexual assault or other forms of violence. A May 2017 report from Doctors Without Borders found 31.4 percent of female migrants who traveled through Mexico into the United States had been sexually abused.
"Migrants and refugees are preyed upon by criminal organizations, sometimes with the tacit approval or complicity of national authorities, and subjected to violence and other abuses—abduction, theft, extortion, torture, and rape—that can leave them injured and traumatized," the report reads.
Tech Workers Flee San Francisco ALANA MASTRANGELO
Employees of tech companies in San Francisco, California, can’t leave the city fast enough, fleeing for the potential tech hubs of tomorrow such as Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida. One former San Francisco exec said: “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been fielding inquiries from top executives in the tech world, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a report by NBC News .
The report added that the mayor has also met with former Google Chairman and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt, and the chairman of Palantir, Peter Thiel, among others.
“There is absolutely no doubt that a big part of the reason why they are moving is that they feel that there is an inhospitable environment for regulation and taxation,” said Suarez.
Miami is not the only city experiencing this type of migration, as tech employees from San Francisco are fleeing to other states offering them better opportunities as well.
Tech workers living in San Francisco had once believed that the high rent, high taxes, long commute to work, and rude neighbors were worth it if they could live in “the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world,” reported SFGATE .
But now, in the wake of the pandemic, tech workers can’t flee the city fast enough, as spending months working remotely in other towns has shown them that the quality of life can be higher elsewhere.
“Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school,” noted SFGATE.
And so they fled to more affordable places, like Georgia, and states with no income taxes, like Texas and Florida. The report added that the number one choice of relocation for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas.
John Gardner, the founder and CEO of the remote personal training startup Kickoff — who fled San Francisco for Miami Beach — told SFGATE that he can’t help but wonder, “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
As for Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, the tech worker said that he and his wife moved into a $1.3 million house that he “only saw on video for 20 minutes.”
“It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money,” added Rothermel.
Justin Kan, who co-founded Twitch, tweeted to his followers in August last year, asking them where he should move.
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” asked Kan.
We're selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?
— Justin Kan (@justinkan) August 17, 2020
“Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society,” responded Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir.
Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.
— Joe Lonsdale (@JTLonsdale) August 17, 2020
“You start to feel stupid,” said Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup, of living in San Francisco. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
Boydas and his family ended up moving to Austin, where they were able to buy a five-bedroom home on an acre of land for the same price they were paying for their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, California.
‘We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Boydas also noted that his bills are lower, too, such as the water bill, trash bill, and the cost of dining out at a restaurant with his family — adding that he didn’t even know that there were no income taxes when he moved.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error — there’s no tax line here,” said Boydas. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.'”
The report added that there are currently 33,000 members in a Facebook group called “Leaving California,” as well as 51,000 members in its sister group, “Life After California.” In the groups, people share photos of moving trucks, and links to property listings in new cities.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” said Terry Gilliam, the founder of both Facebook groups.
Bear Kittay, the co-founder Good Money, echoed those sentiments, and even acknowledged that some people may find themselves relocating to “a place that is more conservative.”
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” said Kittay of San Francisco.
“A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity,” he added. “And maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo , and on Instagram .
HOME TO DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse. By Steve Baldwin American Spectator What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEAGLS). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household. Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming. Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
THIS IS WHAT SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM HAVE DONE TO THE ONCE GOLDEN STATE NOW A COLONY OF MEXICO!
FNC’s Carlson: Kamala Harris Is Bringing California-Style Governance to the Country — ‘You Should Pay Attention to That’
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/12/24/fncs-carlson-kamala-harris-is-bringing-california-style-governance-to-the-country-you-should-pay-attention-to-that/
JEFF POOR
Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson warned the same leadership that has brought woes to California is coming to Washington, D.C. in the form of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
According to Carlson, California officials were using race tensions as a way to distract from the shortcomings of that governance.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: We make a lot of fun of the State of California on this show, you may have noticed, but we’re not really joking. California matters and not just because it’s our biggest state. What happens there is at some point almost certain to happen where you live.
Find a national trend that didn’t begin in California. There may be some, but there aren’t many. So if you want to know the future, or if you want to prevent it, look west. California is a roadmap for the rest of us and very often warning.
With that in mind, here is the bottom line on California. It’s falling apart.
Over the course of just the last several decades, California has gone from one of the richest places in the world to the poorest state in our country. More than a third of California’s population now hovers around the poverty line.
Even before COVID, over four million Californians were collecting food stamps. More than 150,000 people in California are homeless. They are everywhere. They’re living on the streets, in parks, under overpasses, in tents on the sidewalk.
Here’s Los Angeles just last month.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): The homeless crisis in Los Angeles is getting worse local say with some encampments so big residents call them McMansion Tents. They’re driving away businesses, too; many of which are already struggling financially because of the pandemic.
This comes as the city sees a spike in violence with a 32% increase in shootings since last year. While police say financial stress from the pandemic is largely to blame, some criticize the leaders for once again being unable to control the issue.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: California didn’t always look this way, even recently. This is a human tragedy. It wasn’t caused by God or nature. It was caused by the selfishness and the stupidity of bad leaders and their bad policies.
If these leaders were judged by their performance, what they do, no big city politician in the State of California would have a job tonight. They know that, so they are working hard to make certain they’re not judged by those standards — rational standards.
Instead, they inflame racial wounds to try to keep the population distracted and divided, to keep the attention away from them and their failures.
Here, for example, is the shamefully incompetent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, just this summer.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D), LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: When I talked about killers, I said, our collective — our collective burden here in this society is that we let black men and women die. I pointed at myself, we collectively have a choice of whether we will be those who heal or whether we will continue being the killers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes. Whenever they start talking about collective responsibility, you know what they are really saying is, take the gaze away from me. It’s not my fault.
Garcetti wasn’t more specific when he talked about, we, the killers. It turns out there are killers in his city. They’re not collective. They’re individuals. They’re criminals. And there are a lot of them.
Under Eric Garcetti, crime in Los Angeles has skyrocketed and many innocent people have died as the result of that. But he is not mourning that. He is not giving speeches in their memory or apologizing for the policies he supported that led to their deaths, and neither by the way, is the city’s new head prosecutor, a man called George Gascon.
Gascon was elected with the backing of George Soros. Soros was the single largest donor to his campaign. He wouldn’t be the District Attorney without George Soros. And so George Gascon has, from his very first day in office done the bidding of his backer, Soros.
He has now announced he will be using the pretext of COVID to release still more criminals into the City of Los Angeles. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AL SHARPTON, MSNBC HOST: Do you have a plan of giving priority in terms of vaccinations in the LA County correctional facilities?
GEORGE GASCON, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: I don’t control the vaccination. But the point that we do have is we’re working to you know, expeditiously release as many people as we can, especially those who have been proven to be at high risk, vulnerable people and obviously people that are not a threat to society.
So we are going to try to remove as many people from that confinement. Justice is really about public health and keeping our community safe.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, OK. So there’s the Soros puppet giving us a lecture on what justice means. Justice is not punishing the guilty, keeping the dangerous away from your children, it is not about enforcing laws. No, justice is making certain that criminals get critical government services before you do, before your parents do.
And that right there, that piece of tape and the attitude behind it distills the emerging politics of California, politics that you should be deeply afraid of, because when they come to your town, they’ll wreck your life.
And if we were to put it in one sentence, it’s this: those who contribute the least get the most. Got it? But don’t you dare complain about it, shut up and hate yourself in silence. That’s an order.
Meanwhile, California’s elected leaders divide the spoils. That’s their job: taking what other people built, giving it to themselves and to their supporters. And they divide the spoils, as is now official policy in the State of California in the most divisive, immoral possible way, along lines of color.
Here is Congresswoman Maxine Waters explaining what kind of person Governor Gavin Newsom should pick to replace Kamala Harris in the United States Senate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): He has a decision that he has to make, and I think that it will be a black woman. I think he understands that, you know, when Kamala Harris leaves, you know, the Senate, that’s only one black woman who was serving, and certainly it would be, you know, kind of, you know, unfair not to have at least another black woman replace her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: This really is the high point of stupidity in this country’s history. Who cares what color your senators are, who cares what gender they are, you want good government, you want wise competent people in charge of the country, but that’s not what you’re getting because those aren’t the criteria.
In the end, you should know the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom appointed a man called Alex Padilla to replace Kamala Harris in the Senate. And when he did, no one debated whether Padilla might be a good senator, whether he might improve the schools or lower the cost of housing or brings bring jobs back. Instead, they argued about his race. That was the only thing they cared about.
Here’s the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, who by the way is an utter buffoon, most famous not for improving San Francisco, but for defying her own lockdown orders in order to dine at the French Laundry in Napa.
Here’s that person explain that Padilla is a bad choice, because he is the wrong color.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR LONDON BREED (D), SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: When you think about the history of this country, and the challenges that exist for African-Americans, especially African-American women in the Senate, definitely, this is a real, you know, blow to the African-American community, to African-American women, to women in general. It was definitely a surprise.
And it’s an unfortunate situation as we are trying to move this country forward and making sure that black lives truly matter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so you have been a terrible mayor, you have hurt the city, which again, you did not build, you didn’t make San Francisco an impressive place that people wanted to move to. You made it worse. So you’ve disqualified yourself from any comment on government ever for the rest of your life. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is, the rest of us who sit by and let people say things like this on television without thinking and saying, whoa, wait a second, color and gender are irrelevant to good government. Thinking that way is poison. We’re not putting up with this garbage anymore.
We’re implicated in the destruction of the country if we sit back and let decisions get made along those lines. It’s such a destructive sideshow.
Meanwhile, the physical reality, the State of California, which is an actual place with tens of millions of actual people, 40 million, our most beautiful state, our most economically important state falls apart. No one is paying any attention because they are debating the color of the new senator.
But the electrical grid is failing. The power flickers on and off like a third world country. The state’s forests are so mismanaged, they keep catching fire and burning uncontrollably.
Climate change isn’t doing that, bad management is doing that.
Women — we care about women, really? Because women can’t jog in public parks for fear of being attacked by the mentally ill homeless. Does anyone care about them? No.
And for the privilege of all of this, for living in a state that’s literally collapsing around them, the residents of California pay the highest and the most burdensome taxes in the country. So guess what people who can are doing? You know the answer, they are leaving.
California’s largest export used to be advanced aerospace products. That was the economy of Southern California, that and the movies. They’re all gone now. Now, the state’s main export is population.
More than 40% of Bay Area residents tell pollsters they want to leave. Really? And that’s one of the happiest places in the state. And it’s no wonder the average rent price in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco fell 20% in the last year. Why is that? Because no one wants to live there.
The most recent estimates show that California lost more than 135,000 people in the last year. Among those people, by the way, is Kamala Harris. She’s in Washington now, your capital, and she is bringing California-style governance to the rest of us. You should pay attention to that.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
Biden Deputies Claim U.S. Is a ‘Nation of Welcome’ — Discard ‘Nation of Immigrants' (CHEAP LABOR SERFS) PitchAP Photo/Rodrigo Abd 11:42
President Joe Biden’s progressive allies are dropping the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” narrative because they prefer to portray Americans’ homeland as a “Nation of Welcome” to all of the world’s migrants — legal, illegal, or quasi-legal.
The “Nation of Welcome” term is being adopted in a new mission statement announced February 9 by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency, which is part of Alejandro Mayorkas’ Department of Homeland Security:
USCIS upholds America’s promise as a nation of welcome and possibility with fairness, integrity, and respect for all we serve.
“We know that every time we grant an immigration or naturalization benefit, we are fostering the opportunity to help us build a stronger America,” said USCIS director Ur Jaddou ”And when we offer refuge to those in need of protection we are living up to our nation’s highest ideals. ”
New arrivals from Europe land in New York on board the SS Ernie Pyle, 21st September 1947. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The older “‘Nation of Immigrants’ [narrative] is no longer inclusive enough for the progressive left — they’re about including everybody except for Americans,” said Rob Law, a former top staffer at the USCIS for President Donald Trump. He continued:
“Nation of immigrants” was a statement that is arguably limited to those who have played by the rules and have some form of [legal] immigration status … [so it] doesn’t include all those Afghans that we just flew in the middle of the night, or the economic migrants showing up at the southern border.
The USCIS statement is notably silent about protecting Americans’ right to exclude illegal migrants from their communities and workplaces, Law added:
It is remarkably, completely devoid of any mention of the American people’s role in our immigration system, or even what USCIS does, which is adjudicating [contested] eligibility [for immigration benefits] … It is only about the perspective of the alien … it’s an open invitation, it’s a wink and a nod saying that “You’ll get in,” for as long as this administration is in charge.
Under Trump, the USCIS dropped the old “Nation of Immigrants” claim from its mission statement. “I’ll drive it home with a sledgehammer here: America’s immigration system is first and foremost, for the benefit of America. Period,” USCIS acting director Ken Cuccinelli told Breitbart News in August 2019.
The new “Nation of Welcome” narrative emerged in 2019 as progressives got enraged by Trump’s popular enforcement of the nation’s popular border laws.
“In nearly three years, the rise of a new form of treating “the other” has changed, perhaps forever, the possibility of becoming a true nation of welcome,” said a 2019 statement from America’s Voice, a long-standing, business-backed progressive lobby for more migration.
In 2020, the Center for American Progress lamented that the United States was “once an exemplary model … a welcoming nation to refugees.”
After Trump’s narrow defeat in November 2020, “now is the time to reaffirm our commitment as a nation of welcome,” said an Ohio pro-migration group.
By 2021, the term was being used in statements and speeches by Democratic politicians and advocacy groups, often to the exclusion of the older “Nation of Immigrants” narrative.
Once the city Afghans lost their half-hearted war against the rural Taliban in 2021 — despite 20 years of aid from their U.S. allies — Biden’s deputies announced “Operation Allies Weclome” to transfer city Afghans to jobs and homes in the United States.
The older “Nation of Immigrants” narrative was pushed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as national security, business, and ethnic groups demanded more workers, consumers, and voters for mixed economic, ethnic, and ideological reasons.
Hungarian immigrants arriving in America, looking from the deck of their ship towards the Statue of Liberty. (Three Lions/Getty Images)
Congress had reduced the immigration inflow in 1924. The reduction helped to create a high-productivity, middle-class, culturally stable society where families could be supported by a single breadwinner, and domestic divisions were being resolved by widespread prosperity.
Before the 1924 cutback, 800,000 migrants arrived in 1921. The inflow quickly dropped by more than 90 percent, to just 29,000 in 1934. Overall, the population of immigrant Americans dropped from 14 million in 1920 to 9.6 million in 1970. Immigrants provided just seven percent of the population in 1955, down from 15 percent in 1910.
During the same low-migration period, Americans’ inventions, productivity, and wealth boomed . According to PBS , U.S. investors and companies conjured the television in 1927, frozen food in 1929, nylon in 1938, the first digital computer in 1939, the atomic bomb in 1945, suburbia in 1947, the first commercial computer in 1951, the polio vaccine in 1957, the idea for the Internet and the actual moon landing in 1969, the video game in 1972, and much more.
Family income doubled between 1950 and 1970, according to the left-wing Center on Budget and Policy Priorities . But after Congress reopened the doors for immigration, family income stalled — rising only one-quarter from 1980 to 2020 — while the stock market grew by 40 times .
Advocates for more migration got their narrative and their political break in the early 1960s.
The Nation of Immigrants narrative was pushed in a 1964 book, “A Nation of Immigrants,” which was attributed to the assassinated President John Kennedy. “The abundant resources of this land provided the foundation for a great nation … [but] only people could make the opportunity a reality. Immigration provided the human resources,” the book said .
Maltese immigrants to the U.S. arrive in Brooklyn, New York on board a Yugoslav vessel, circa 1946. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The narrative was accidentally implemented by Congress and President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, without much understanding of the legislation. In 1990, as investors were exporting manufacturing jobs to Mexico and Asia, President George H. W. Bush doubled legal immigration, loosened the border, and imported a green card workforce for tech companies.
Decades later, the result is that immigrants and their children comprise roughly one in five people living in the socially chaotic, downwardly mobile United States.
Americans are recognizing the damage to their wages, housing, wealth, and politics — despite the multi-decade, near-uniform establishment support for mass migration.
For example, 32 percent of Americans said immigration makes Americans “worse off,” according to a YouGov poll from September 2021. That is up from 20 percent in June 2021. Also, 55 percent of Republicans said immigration makes Americans “worse off” in September 2021, up from 32 percent in June.
Only 37 percent of Americans believe that a “Nation of Immigrant” is a “sacred ” value, according to a 2021 study funded by immigration advocates. That score matched the 37 percent share of Americans who believe that restricting citizenship is a sacred value.
But the religious zeal of the pro-migration left is exemplified by Jia Lynn Yang, the top editor for domestic news at the New York Times, and the progressive author of a 2020 pro-migration book, titled “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide”:
The image of the Statue of Liberty, the Emma Lazarus poem at the statue’s base, the notion of America as an eternal “nation of immigrants,” — these make up an intoxicating part of this country’s mythology. Set against all the sins of America’s past — from slavery to the removal and genocide of American Indians — the arrival of open-hearted immigrants, grateful for a chance at a new life on our shores serves as a constant renewal of hope in the American project. If there is salvation for this country, it very well may lie in the underlying gratitude of a refugee whose life has been saved by the granting of a visa.
Yang’s parents migrated from Taiwan, and she wants to recruit more immigrants to remake Americans’ homeland around diverse “ethnic pluralism”:
For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [recent immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong. That task will not be easy.
Yang’s book ends with her denial of Americans’ moral right to have their own political, cultural, and economic jurisdiction in a turbulent world: “What difference is there between us, with our precious [legal immigration and citizenship] papers, and the people we see at our border who are dying to come in? There is none.”
Edward A. Albertis, 71 years old, direct descendant of the first Italian immigrant shows a young New Yorker Frank Poutone the plaque which was just inaugurated in Battery Park on June 05, 1960 during the celebration of the 325th anniversary of the arrival of the first Italian immigrant in the state of New York, in New York, United States. (AFP via Getty Images)
But Yang and her fellow globalists have declined to make that argument in public.
Instead, they have hidden their goals behind political cliches, disregard of Americans’ preferences , suppression of migration economics , and the mass-production of sympathetic stories about migrants’ family dramas. This political strategy makes sense because the polls , politics , and pocketbook economics are against their revolutionary goals.
Yang admitted to an interviewer in 2020 that if diversity by migration is the goal, “you’re going to have to really make that argument in a full-throated way … [and] that’s never been done before.”
But, she added, if pro-American reformers want to “argue that this current [multicultural] demography is a bit of an accident, they actually have a lot of ammunition in the history [of the 1965 immigration law] to make that argument.”
Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.
That economic strategy has no stopping point , and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs .
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states. The growing gaps mean that midwestern states lose investment, jobs, and wealth to the migration-inflated coastal states.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing , anti-establishment , multiracial , cross-sex , non-racist , class-based , bipartisan , rational , persistent , and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.
Bidenflation Triggers ‘Stunning’ Collapse of Consumer Sentiment to 10-Year Low Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images 3:08
Consumer sentiment plunged in the early weeks of February as consumers lost faith in the Biden administration’s economic policies, inflation rose to the worst level in 40 years, and the long-term economic outlook of American households fell to its least favorable level in a decade.
The University of Michigan’s measure of consumer sentiment crashed to an initial February reading of 61.7, from January’s level of 67.2, the lowest reading since October of 2011.
Economists were expecting a reading of 67, so this was a much bigger decline than anticipated.
“Sentiment continued its downward descent, reaching its worst level in a decade, falling a stunning 8.2 percent from last month and 19.7 percent from last February,” said Richard Curtin, the chief economist of the consumer sentiment survey.
The component of the index that measures consumers’ views of current conditions dropped to 68.5 in February from 72 in January. The gauge of expectations fell to 57.4 from 64.1.
Cratering sentiment has been driven by weakening personal financial prospects, largely due to rising inflation, less confidence in the government’s economic policies, and the least favorable long-term economic outlook in a decade, according to Curtin.
One-third of consumers spontaneously cited the impact of higher inflation on personal finances. Nearly half of all consumers expect declines in their inflation-adjusted incomes during the year ahead.
Twenty-six percent of consumers expect their financial prospects to worsen, the highest level of negative sentiment in four decades.
Curtin said that the decline in the sentiment gauge indicates a sustained downturn in consumer spending.
“The depth of the slump, however, is subject to several caveats that have not been present in prior downturns: the impact of unspent stimulus funds, the partisan distortion of expectations, and the pandemic’s disruption of spending and work patterns,” Curtin said.
One surprising result in the survey was that Republican consumer sentiment improved a bit in February, although it remains far more negative than Democrat sentiment. Sentiment among consumers who identify as Democrats and political independents grew more pessimistic. Poor government economic policies were cited by 51 percent of consumers, an indication of the collapse of confidence in the Biden administration
Biden: 'I'm Going to Work Like the Devil to Bring Gas Prices Down' President Joe Biden speaks about lowering health care costs during a visit to Germanna Community College in Culpeper, Virginia, on February 10, 2022. (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) - "Inflation is up. It's up," President Biden told a gathering in Culpeper, Virginia on Thursday, the same day the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that inflation is running at a 40-year high, led by increases in food, electricity, and shelter.
Biden was in Culpeper to discuss his plan to lower prescription drug prices. But in what he called a "slight digression," he discussed the rising cost of daily living, including gasoline prices.
"And look, the fact is that we're in a situation now where, you know, you should have peace of mind," Biden said.
"I know food prices are up, and we're working to bring them down. As I said, I grew up in a family where a price at the pump went up, you felt it. And I understand."
Then the man who canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and campaigned on a promise to "transition away from the oil industry" said this:
You want to lower the cost of living for people, help them in those areas. So, there's more than one way for a family when it comes to raising their standard of living. I'm going to work like the devil to bring gas prices down, which I'm going to -- working to make sure that we keep strengthening the supply chains to bring the cost of energy and everything else, and the goods that come to America, down by helping the poorest 24-7, by changing a whole range of things.
You know what's happened with COVID? COVID has caused a significant increase in prices in the supply chain, because when a factory shuts down in another part of the world and you need that particular product in order to finish the -- and build whatever you are working on, the price goes up exponentially, like for cars.
But in the meantime, there's a lot we can do to give families extra breathing room.
Here Biden plugged his stalled "Build Back Better" plan, which is going nowhere in the Senate. Yet Biden called it a "law."
"And I might add, and I'd note this law, that this does not raise anyone's -- if you're making less than $400,000, you're not paying a single penny more in taxes, not a single penny more in taxes. And it does not increase the deficit because it's paid for."
Returning to his main topic, Biden said, "bringing down the cost of health care, bringing down the cost of prescription drugs is an easy thing for us to do. It can be done legally with the stroke of a pen."
Earlier in his speech, Biden said something similar:
You know, we're now in a position where we can cap co-pays for insulin at $35 a month. That's still a staggering profit, 3.5 times what it costs to produce the drug. You can do that with the stroke of a -- we can do that with the stroke of a pen.
In my Build Back Better legislation, that with [Rep. Abigail Spanberger's] leadership, passed the House of Representatives, we can do that. Now we just have to get it through the United States Senate, and we're close.
We can do even more to lower out-of-pocket prescription costs. Under my proposal, we will hold drug companies accountable for the absurd price increases. Here's how. Drug companies that increase their prices faster than the rate of inflation once the price is set will face a steep tax. This'll help us end the days when drug companies could increase their prices with no oversight, no accountability, and no responsibility.
We're saying to drug companies, you are finally going to become accountable when you raise prices on the American people, accountability.
