Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania
By failures of border security, a lack of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States and huge numbers of visas for high tech workers, the lives and livelihoods of Americans and their children, are being stolen by America’s corrupt political elite who are doing the bidding of those who provide them with huge “Campaign Contributions” (Orwellian euphemism for bribes) pursue legislation that is diametrically opposed to the best interests of America and Americans.
MICHAEL CUTLER
NLRB Complaint: Google and Accenture Violated Labor Laws by Laying Off Contractors Who Voted to Unionize
Yellow workers dealing with lost hours, no severance pay after freight company shuttered operations and declared bankruptcy
Are you affected by the Yellow bankruptcy, or do you work at another freight carrier? Tell us your story by filling out the form below. All submissions will be kept anonymous.
Following Monday’s bankruptcy announcement by freight trucking company Yellow, resulting in the loss of 30,000 jobs, the World Socialist Web Site spoke with several workers from the company’s dock and warehouse in Columbus, Ohio. Out of concern for the workers’ ability to be hired at another company, we have changed their names for this story.
David is a warehouse worker, who had been working on the dock loading and unloading trucks for less than a year. Last month, David spoke with the WSWS about the horrendous conditions in the warehouse and the disrespectful way management treated workers.
Joe, a truck driver with over 20 years experience, has been driving for Yellow Freight for a little over five years. He estimates that there are about 70 drivers working out of the Columbus facility, including 50 line haul drivers like himself, 10 city drivers and 10 drivers that work in the yard.
Workers at the Columbus warehouse and hub were not informed that they are being laid off or terminated. In fact, more than one week since the company shuttered operations they have yet to be contacted by the company on their status. Workers only found out that they were out of a job on Sunday, July 30th when they arrived at the warehouse and found the gates padlocked shut.
Another worker at the Columbus hub wrote into the WSWS to say: “I worked for Yellow for seven years in Columbus, Ohio. This whole thing is ridiculous because they never gave us a phone call or anything. We all went to work to see the gates locked. Management from the top down are cowards. If they were to reopen I would never go back to work there.”
“I just started receiving text messages,” said David, who wasn’t scheduled to work that day. “People are so mad that they weren’t told, they were just thrown on the street. We didn’t get severance pay. People are owed vacation pay. We are out with nothing.”
Joe, the line haul driver, works nights. “I didn’t get notified, I drove by the gate, and it was barricaded. All we have is our last paycheck. There are a lot of people with kids here and they depend on this job; not just for pay, but for their insurance too. A lot of my friends are having a very hard time. Many people live paycheck to paycheck to keep up with bills.”
Joe explained that they fired the person who does the payroll before she had finished entering the payroll. “They called our payroll lady Angela and fired her on the spot. She hadn’t finished the payroll, I know one driver that lost 15 hours. There are also guys who had five or six weeks vacation that they’ve lost.
David added, “People have lost their vacation time, their personal time. They are not getting paid for what they are owed. People lost their medical insurance. People lost everything.”
Without an official notice of layoff, workers have not been able to file for unemployment. Joe reported that he tried to call, but “I wasn’t able to get through. So many people are trying to file.”
“This is why people need severance pay,” he repeated.
David pointed out that management received severance pay, but not the workers. “I spoke with a supervisor, and he told me he received severance pay, but we didn’t. He didn’t like the situation.
“I’d like to know why they haven’t paid their employees severance pay. They paid the supervisors but not the employees, which is very unfair. We did the hard work, not the supervisors. The executives don’t know how to operate a forklift. They are not the ones doing the work. We are.”
David also felt that both the company and the union knew this was coming and didn’t tell the employees. “They should have given us a 60-day notice, they knew they were going to do this. They should have given people notice.”
Referring to the fact that the Teamsters called off a strike last month, claiming it had reached a deal to give the company time to pay into its pensions, he said: “They were just using people to clear the docks. But they knew they were going to shut down and people should have been notified.
“Management knew this was coming. They all took their vacation. I knew this was coming and I tried to warn people, but the union kept telling them that everything was going to be alright. The union knew what was going to happen. But they didn’t care, they got their money too.
“With all the money the union collected, they should have been fighting for us. They kept this all hush-hush.
“They were telling us to keep working but it’s all a big hoax. Yellow just wanted to clear the docks. It was a big hoax to use the little bit of people that were still coming in to clear their docks. I’m not happy with the union, but this is not going to hurt them, they have plenty of money.”
Joe too felt that the Teamsters betrayed them.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Joe said. “I’ve never worked for a company that treats their people like this. The union is just as much of the problem as the company. Unless you’re in that little clique, you’ll lose out.
“The company will throw you under the bus and the union will throw you under the bus. The union is a joke. They take our money but they don’t do anything for us. We lost insurance, our paycheck and they’ve done nothing.”
Both David and Joe are hopeful that they will find other work, but are worried about their co-workers being able to find work.
“Other companies don’t want to hire us because we worked at Yellow,” Joe said. “I already had two interviews with another company. I was supposed to have a third interview. But somebody told them I have been driving for Yellow and now they won’t answer my phone calls.
“I’ve been driving for 20 years with a clean safety record. I would be somebody they would want to hire, so if they’re not it’s only because I had worked for Yellow. I have a perfect driving record, if they are not hiring me people are going to have a hard time finding a job.
David too has already been looking for work. David went to several other companies throughout the Columbus area looking for work.
“I went to PittOhio (a privately owned transportation company based in Pittsburgh) and they said half the people from Yellow have come over looking for work. Their pay is okay, but they don’t have the overtime option that you had with Yellow. This is very hard on people that they have to start over.
“I think it’s very unfair. The workers are getting the short end of the stick while the big wigs sit back and get rich.”
Are you affected by the Yellow bankruptcy, or do you work at another freight carrier? Tell us your story by filling out the form below. All submissions will be kept anonymous.
Yellow freight declares bankruptcy, in the latest assault on workers’ jobs
Two weeks after shuttering operations, freight company Yellow officially filed for bankruptcy on Monday.
The closure of Yellow and the elimination of 30,000 jobs is a massive assault on the working class by Wall Street, escalating a wave of layoffs this year. This is the latest in the continuing jobs bloodbath by the corporate oligarchy, which has eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs.
In the tech industry alone, nearly 225,000 jobs have been slashed so far. In January, Amazon announced that it would cut 18,000 jobs from its office staff followed by another 9,000 in March. Microsoft added to the carnage with 10,000 layoffs. Meta (the parent company of Facebook) announced another 10,000, and Google’s parent company Alphabet announced 12,000 job cuts. Dozens of other companies in the tech sector cut large portions of their staff.
The bankruptcy of Yellow is the largest single layoff this year and the largest for industrial workers since 2009, when General Motors laid off 47,000 workers. The bankruptcy filing all but finalizes the firing of 22,000 members of the Teamsters, who had not all been officially laid off by the company when it closed operations. Several workers reported that they had not received any communication from the company, and that without confirmation of their job status they were unable to file for unemployment or find employment elsewhere until the bankruptcy declaration.
Yellow’s collapse will not just affect those workers laid off. Thousands of truckers, warehouse workers, and office staff have just been dumped into the job market. One Yellow worker from Atlanta said dozens of workers showed up to interview for a position at a competitor who was offering 50 percent less than advertised. When workers said it wasn’t enough to live on, they were told if they didn’t take it someone else would.
This is the deliberate purpose of the bankruptcy. Trillions of dollars have been pumped into financial markets to prop up the capitalist economy during the pandemic, and the government regularly spends billions of dollars a week to fund its proxy war in Ukraine. This money is to be extracted from the working class through ever greater levels of exploitation.
The centerpiece of the Biden administration’s domestic policy has been to suppress wage growth through the raising of interest rates, aimed at triggering a surge in unemployment to use as a weapon against the working class. The official policy of the Federal Reserve has been to “get wages down,” in the words of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who lamented last year that “employers are having difficulties filling job openings, and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years.”
The pandemic had the effect of tightening the labor market and has triggered a massive and growing resurgence of the class struggle, with workers demanding wages that not only match inflation but that recoup the losses from decades of concessions.
In response, Wall Street is demanding a stronger hand in the exploitation of the working class. At workplaces around the country Wall Street will demand similar attacks on the working class, targeting wages, working hours, benefits and working conditions.
Roughly 150,000 auto workers have their contracts expire next month at the Big Three auto companies (General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—formerly Chrysler). Management will be demanding concessions as the industry turns to electric vehicle production that requires up to 40 percent less labor than gas-powered cars.
United States Postal Service rural letter carriers have seen their pay slashed by up to $20,000 a year under its new payment scheme. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy intends to eliminate roughly 50,000 jobs at the USPS through his “Delivering for America” restructuring program.
Meanwhile, workers at UPS are rebelling against the sellout contract negotiated by the Teamsters that fails to meet their demands.
In a public statement, Yellow management blamed the Teamsters for “literally driving our company out of business.” The exact opposite is the case. The union bureaucracy, working closely with the White House, has played a critical role in suppressing strikes and enforcing substandard contracts.
At Yellow, the Teamsters used the faltering company as a convenient foil for militant posturing. O’Brien made several public comments declaring that the Teamsters would no longer give concessions to Yellow after giving “billions of dollars” to the company in previous contracts.
But after the company refused to make payments to workers’ benefit plans, the Teamsters called off a strike at the last minute, claiming it had reached a deal to allow the company to make up its missed payment. In reality, this bought time for the company to wind up its operations and prepare for bankruptcy. When Yellow finally announced bankruptcy, General President Sean O’Brien issued a complacent statement calling it “unfortunate.”
The inaction of the Teamsters to intervene and defend the jobs of 22,000 members was a conscious decision. Any strike action by Yellow workers would have emboldened UPS workers, who are currently voting on the sellout contract. The Teamsters have instead allowed 22,000 union and 8,000 nonunion jobs to be sacrificed in order to maintain “labor peace.”
The Teamsters barely communicated with their own members at Yellow. One Yellow truck driver described going to the union office to ask about his job. A union official responded, “Job, what job? Yellow is closed, they just haven’t filled out the paperwork yet.”
Yellow’s collapse will be a feeding frenzy for the vultures of Wall Street. Yellow had over $2.25 billion in assets in December. Billions of dollars in equipment and real estate will be picked for scraps by its creditors, chief among them Apollo Global Management.
Apollo is a major private equity firm with nearly $600 billion in managed assets. It gave Yellow a $500 million loan in 2019, organized for the United States government to give Yellow a $700 million bailout in 2023, and is the leading creditor in Yellow’s debtor-in-possession bankruptcy, which will give the firm first choice when Yellow’s assets are sold.
Yellow’s $1.6 billion in debt is considerable, but its two main investors, Apollo and the US government, have trillions of dollars in resources. Apollo manages assets totaling nearly $600 billion, and the United States spends over 500 times Yellow’s debt on the military each year.
The jobs bloodbath at Yellow is a warning to the working class and a demonstration of the necessity for an independent class strategy to fight against this assault on jobs. Workers are in a fight not just against individual greedy employees, but against the financial oligarchy and the capitalist system itself, with the corrupt union bureaucracy acting as their loyal enforcers.
This counteroffensive must be fought through the construction of rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatus and the capitalist political parties. These committees, which have been established at UPS, the auto industry and other critical industries, are part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, which is fighting to build a unified international movement of the working class against the giant global corporations which exploit workers in every country.
The bankruptcy of Yellow is also a demonstration that private ownership of the economy is incompatible with the preservation of jobs and decent working conditions. The wealth of the financial oligarchs and corporate executives must be expropriated and the trucking industry reorganized as a public enterprise, run by the working class for the fulfillment of social need, not private profit.
The Worst Case Scenario Just Started (And Why the Financial System is on the Verge of Collapse)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLQ7FdFEr7k
DOCUMENTARY
RFK Jr.'s full press conference on border policy and documentary.
Q&A: Border Security & Documentary
Bidenomics: Small Business Outlook Remains Dismal For 19th Straight Month
The Biden White House has been struggling to get the American public to buy into its positive spin on the economy, which it has dubbed Bidenomics. On Tuesday, a survey of small businesses indicated why that is such a hard sell.
Small business owners have a “dismal” outlook about sales growth and business conditions, said Bill Dunkelberg, the chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business. The NFIB’s small business optimism index came in at 91.9 for July, up 0.9 points from the prior month but well below the index’s 49-year average of 98.
This was the 19th consecutive month below the average reading.
The share of owners expecting better business conditions over the next six months rose 10 points from June—but it remains historically very negative at a net -30 percent.
Twenty-one percent of owners reported that inflation was their single most important problem in operating their business, down three points from June but still a historically high reading.
The net percent of owners raising average selling prices dropped to a net 25 percent, the lowest since January 2021 but still high by historical measures. Fourteen percent said their average selling prices were lower and 40 percent said they were high. The NFIB said price hikes were most common in finance, retail, wholesale, and construction. A net 27 percent said they are planning on hiking prices in the future.
The NFIB survey is an important window on the economy, as small businesses are often a bellwether for changes in conditions and account for nearly half of private-sector jobs.
“With small business owners’ views about future sales growth and business conditions dismal, owners want to hire and make money now from solid consumer spending,” said Dunkelberg. “Inflation has eased slightly on Main Street, but difficulty hiring remains a top business concern.”
Forty-two percent of owners said they had job openings that were hard to fill, unchanged from June but remaining historically very high.
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FOR SUBSCRIBERS | August 8, 2023 |
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(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) |
This Is Not a Healthy Job Market |
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By Jeffrey Tucker |
Commentary Going into the weekend, we were again bombarded by crude propaganda from the Biden administration. The topic was the jobs report, which claimed another half-million jobs had been created. Plus, they cite the unemployment rate, which is 3.5 percent, shockingly low but it means absolutely nothing. It only counts the number of people in the job market who can find a job but excludes everyone else. That statistic is so useless at this point, it might as well not be collected at all. Labor force participation is still substantially lower now than it was before lockdowns, and fully 6.7 percent below a high reached in 2000. There is much broken in this market but nothing more so than the shell game going on right now in tallying full-time vs. part-time and multiple job holders. Here is where the decay is truly evident, and it is a problem that profoundly affects people’s lives. I dutifully dug through the latest report when it was first released in the morning, suspecting that something was wrong with the spin. But reading through the text put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nothing jumped out at me. I gave it a rest until the afternoon. A few economists on Twitter spotted a problem, so I had another look. Sure enough, buried deep in the data, we find something incredibly interesting and downright frightening. It turns out that between June and July, the United States lost half a million full-time jobs. That’s the largest loss in this category since the lockdowns. Where does this net job creation claim come from? Get this: the same data set reveals that there have been one million new part-time jobs created, for a net of half a million. Multiple job holders soared. Do you see what’s happening here? It’s no different than cutting a hamburger in half and claiming you just made 100 percent more food. People are losing full-time work and replacing such jobs with part-time jobs, with people taking two or three to attempt to match the income. In other words, this is a genuine calamity unfolding before our very eyes. And yet, absolutely no one in any official position dares mention it. |
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The trends are not headed in the right direction, if by that a vibrant job market with high-wage full-time employment. Instead, those jobs are gradually fading and being replaced by gigs and paycheck foraging. The Bureau of Labor Statistics completely obfuscated this alarming trend in their discussion. Even the data bureaus are now thoroughly politicized to the point that you can’t believe what they say. |
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(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker) |
As for the wages that people 16 and older are actually earning, they are now at the same rate they were before the lockdowns. The stimulus payment proved to be a short-term fix, a boost of nothing that was quickly taken away by inflation. Now matter what the White House says now—it’s basically all lies—wages have been in a prolonged state of stagnation ever since the great disaster of March 2020. Very likely, we have not really left that forced recession. There will be no soft landing because there is nothing to land. Most of the growth is fake and wages are stuck in real terms. |
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(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker) |
Whatever happened to progress? What happened to the idea of gradually living better than our parents? That vision is gone in America, especially among young people, replaced by a dour culture of just getting by. Let’s leave aside the data for now and dig into what life is like for today’s young college graduates. Much depends on training and experience but one case in my mind really sticks out because this young man did everything right from secondary through college and graduate school. He chose an Ivy education that was very expensive and focused on American and European literature, receiving very high marks throughout college, exactly as high-soaring SATs would have predicted. At 24 with a master’s degree, he is super well-educated and erudite, not to mention mannerly, mature, and earnest. But now he confronts the one thing that his education never prepared him for: getting a job out of college. It’s incredibly cruel how this works. Once the university has cashed your final check and handed you a degree or two, they completely wash their hands of you. He has discovered within a few weeks that the job boards like Indeed are completely useless. He sent off 100 well-formed applications with customized resumes. He heard back from 8 of them. Of those he received three interviews, only one of which called him for an in-person interview. That went well, he thought, but never heard back from them, not even so much as a polite no. They ghosted him completely. So here he is with high credentials, the best possible education, flawless manners and speech, and is unable to get a job that fits with his years of training. In the old world, a person like this would work for a high-end publisher or perhaps an encyclopedia publisher or a cultural publication. Those jobs are in high demand now because there are ever fewer of them. Every institution out there is also hiring from within existing networks of which he is not part. It doesn’t help that nothing about him checks any of the boxes to enable him to become tokenized in the name of diversity compliance. That’s because he is a white male, which these days serves as a mark against him, as he was daily reminded in college. What’s the next step? There are plenty of jobs out there in the service industry. But taking such a job would mean having to recognize that the years of training in literature, language, and writing were a waste of time from a professional point of view. No one wants to do that. And journalism seems like a good path but the major media is entirely captured by ideological interests. There are not enough positions available in alternative media to support all those willing to go in that direction. I’m struck by the difference in the world he confronts versus what I faced when I left college with an economics degree. Truly, it never even occurred to me what I would do when I left. I chose a journalism path and ended up in a variety of positions in the nonprofit and for-profit world. But my main point is that there was never a lack of opportunity for me or anyone in my generation. We had it so good that we didn’t have a care in the world about getting a job. Times have dramatically changed. The labor market is undergoing huge shifts, away from the high-paying Zoom jobs that dominated the market for 15 years. We live with vast surpluses in those sectors, with every major business culling its ranks of the fanciest jobs that people once snagged solely due to credentials and connections. At the same time, there are vast shortages for workers who actually do real stuff in the real world. The adjustment is not going to be without tremendous pain. A major reason concerns the heavy regulation in the labor market itself. Unions are not as much a pressing problem. The key issue is regulation and compliance. Every business that wants to hire faces incredible costs at every step along with legal risks of litigation. Small business is the future of hiring but such enterprises are throttled with a thicket of rules, mandates, and a culture of fear. As a result, the entire sector is likely to be bogged down for years to come. It’s all an unnecessary tragedy but don’t expect the Bureau of Labor Statistics to report any of it. They are too busy burying the bad news in piles of numbers hardly anyone bothers to discover. Federal Data Shows 2 Million+ Foreign Grads in U.S. White-Collar Jobs President Joe Biden’s deputies are hiding a huge and growing population of at least 2 million foreign white-collar contract workers in the U.S. jobs needed by U.S. graduates and their families. “Americans should be outraged that the federal government is not disclosing the number of long-term, so-called ‘temporary’ workers who are here,” Jessica Vaughn, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. She continued:
The laws, regulations, and loopholes effectively allow U.S. companies to import are many foreign white-collar workers as they want, for as long as they want. This reality means that CEOs can easily import more foreign workers to prevent any rise in U.S. salaries. For example, the U.S. economy is shedding white-collar jobs, but lobbyists and journalists are pushing “labor shortage” claims for new jobs in government-funded chip factories in the Midwest. So far, Republican senators have blocked industry efforts to expand the flow of foreign workers into those factories. The State Department’s incomplete data reviewed by Breitbart News shows a population of at least 1.5 million foreign workers in U.S. white-collar jobs. That huge population is the output from almost two years of American business, healthcare, and STEM graduates, and it allows major U.S. investors to hold down salaries and minimize the ability of U.S. graduates to enforce professional standards for quality and security. “We have seen how it dilutes the clout of American workers because employers will either replace Americans who are doing certain kinds of work… and they can threaten to do so,” Vaughan said, adding:
The huge inflow also skews the geography of wealth, she said. The foreign workers “are not evenly scattered across the economy,” Vaughan said. “They’re concentrated in certain sectors that have figured out how to manipulate the visa system — technology, physical therapy, accounting … [and] university science,” she said. The inflow has also helped suppress the salaries of U.S. college graduates since the 1970s. For example, the inflation-adjusted hourly salary earned by U.S. graduates of four-year colleges has inched up from $32.21 in 1990 to $41.60 in 2022, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That’s an annual growth of just 0.9 percent, even as the cost of housing, education, and healthcare have climbed far faster. Bloomberg.com reported in January:
Starting salaries for U.S. computer experts are also falling, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported in February: “The average starting salary for bachelor’s degree graduates studying computer science is expected to fall by 4.0% compared to a year ago.” Most visa workers will work for lower salaries than American graduates. That is rational because any job in the United States is often better than a decent job in their home country. Moreover, CEOs know they can dangle the government subsidy of green cards and citizenship — easily worth $1 million — to extract the long hours of labor that they cannot extract from American graduates. The hidden army of foreign white-collar workers mostly threatens new American graduates. The Wall Street Journal reported in March:
 National Center for Education Statistics The salaries lost by U.S. graduates have been mostly diverted to profits and stock values. For example, a group of economists estimated in 2021 that President Donald Trump’s short-lived 2020 curbs on corporate use of additional H-1B contract workers nicked the stock market value of Fortune 500 companies “by about 0.45% — representing a total loss of around $100 billion.” Roughly 30 million Americans hold jobs in the healthcare, computer, engineering, science, or financial sectors. Many of these American professionals are swing voters, yet few politicians talk about the visa worker programs that take their wealth, careers, and jobs. Presidnet Joe Biden’s “approval among college grads slipped to 48%-42% in July from 52%-40% in June and 55%-37% in May,” Investors.com reported in July. Numbers The scale of the white-collar workforce inflow in 2022 is revealed by a State Department document. The document shows the number of 2022 work visas awarded to many categories of foreign graduates. Breitbart News added the annual inflow of uncapped E-2, H-1B, H4, J-1, L-1, O-1, and TN visas, to show roughly 543,000 arrivals in 2022. Most white-collar arrivals are allowed to stay and work for several years. For example, H-1B graduates can stay for three years, so the total number of working H-1Bs in the United States should be about 550.000. The E-2 managers can stay for five years, so the 2022 inflow of 50,000 arrivals suggests a resident population of 225,000. The L-1 visas can stay up to years, prompting a 2021 population of an estimated of almost 340,000 workers. Overall, the 543,000 arrivals in 2022 suggest a resident population of 1.5 million white-collar workers, not counting the workers’ spouses and children, and not counting the many workers who have converted their temporary visas into green cards. But many temporary workers can stay forever once their employers file a request for a green card. This wait-and-work population of visa workers has reached 700,000, according to a 2022 report by the pro-migration Cato Institute. The State Department, however, does not manage the Optional Practical Training or the Curricular Practical Training work programs. In 2022, those two programs provided work permits to an additional workforce of roughly 350,000 foreign graduates, including many working in Fortune 500 jobs. Many additional students take jobs within universities, such as in university laboratories. The data also excludes the inflow of TN workers from Canada. This loophole allows Canadians — including recent immigrants — to get approval at the U.S. border to take a wide variety of jobs via a little-recognized section of the NAFTA treaty. The department’s data also excludes the number of migrants who take white-collar jobs after overstaying their visas. Those numbers are difficult to track because the federal data does not hide white-collar overstays from blue-collar overstays. But the 2022 overstay report shows that officials allowed 50,000 foreign graduates and short-term workers in 2022 — such as H-1Bs workers — to overstay their visas. The State Department also does not track the number of people who take white-collar jobs after arriving with B-1/B-2 visitor visas. However, Breitbart News has learned from U.S. professionals and from Indian visa workers that many Indian graduates enter as tourists to get jobs in the layers of subcontractors working for Fortune 500 companies. Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security largely ignore this large population of white-collar illegals, even when their employers are exposed. City Journal reported in May 2023:
President Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, has tried to grow the population of foreign white-collar contract workers. For example, he expanded the J-1 program to let companies — not just universities — employ J-1 visa workers. He has also twice expanded the OPT program to let companies hire foreign child psychologists, landscapers, accountants, and many other categories of white-collar workers. He accelerated the award of work permits to the spouses of L-1 white-collar workers and E-2 managers. Many of the beneficiaries then take white-collar jobs alongside their spouses but are not included in the state department’s account. Mayorkas also discarded the 2020 reforms of the H-1B program that would have opened up more starter jobs to American graduates. The vast majority of the imported white-collar visa workers are lower-skilled migrants who are slotted into the career-starter jobs needed by young U.S. graduates. In many cases, foreign workers use the Internet to hire very cheap home-country experts who can do their daily workload in the United States — even when they are working with private data. Without starter jobs, many American graduates are sidelined into lower-pay, low-promotion jobs while foreign workers are promoted via kickbacks and ethnic hiring networks. For example, a 2021 study by the Census Bureau reported:
Some of the OPT and J-1 white-collar workers do not take jobs, or get sidetracked into menial jobs, such as in a dog-food factory. The total inflow of blue-collar visa workers is also huge — and even more difficult to track. They arrive via the H-2B seasonal program for about 120,000 workers, the uncapped H-2A program for agriculture workers, and the J-1 program for seasonal workers. Many white-collar E-2 foreign managers also import blue-collar workers via various illegal routes. These home-country illegal workers allow the E-2 managers to profitably operate their franchise hotels, 7-Eleven stores, and other retail outlets — while also paying high franchise fees to the investor-owned companies that own the brand names. Worse, the State Department data shows about 1.2 million active “border crossing cards.” They allow people who live in Mexico to work in U.S. jobs within 75 miles of the border. In 2020 Reuters reported:
“We have no idea how those cards are being used because [the government] doesn’t track them,” said Vaughan. Extraction Migration The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy. The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans. The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans. In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims. Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats. |
