Steve Sailer sees illegal immigration as a big driver of the housing boom that recently crashed.
Similarly, in trying to explain this decade's socioeconomic logic, you end up with thought processes like this:Q. Why did we need so many illegal immigrants?
A. To build all those McMansions out in the distant exurbs.
Q. Yes, but why did so many Americans want to move to the exurbs?
A. To escape all the illegal aliens flooding their neighborhoods and schools.
Q. Okay, so then why did we need so many illegal aliens?
A. To build all those McMansions out in the distant exurbs.
Everything just spins around and around, like those chrome wheel rims, those insanely expensive hubcaps that were the signature useless extravagance of this decade.
But now that the boom has crashed in part due to rising fuel prices Americans are becoming less able to move away from poor criminals and poorly performing schools overrun by our imported and growing lower classes. The coming world decline in oil production is going to force our middle class back toward cities. I'm expecting a new boom in building jails as the new form of construction aimed at allowing the middle and upper middle classes to live near cities. Also, home schooling and private schooling will become more popular. Though even at $10 per gallon some will find commuting from distant suburbs cheaper than private school tuition. The more kids you have the more a Prius and gasoline make sense as a way to escape cities and near suburbs. People with school age kids will be most reluctant to abandon the exurbs.
Steven Malanga describes rising black opposition to Hispanic immigration and what it costs blacks.
This Latino “tsunami,” as Los Angeles–based Hispanic-American writer Nicolás Vaca calls it, has intensified the well-founded feeling among blacks that they’re losing economic ground to immigrants. True, early research, conducted in the wake of the big immigration reforms of the 1960s, suggested that the arrival of newcomers had little adverse impact on blacks—one study found that every 10 percent increase in immigration cut black wages by only 0.3 percent. But as the immigrant population has in some places grown six or seven times larger over the last four decades, the downward pull has become a vortex. A recent study by Harvard economist George Borjas and colleagues from the University of Chicago and the University of California estimates that immigration accounted for a 7.4 percentage-point decline in the employment rate of unskilled black males between 1980 and 2000. Even for black males with high school diplomas, immigration shrank employment by nearly 3 percentage points. While immigration hurts black and white low-wage workers, the authors note, the effect is three times as large on blacks because immigrants are more likely to compete directly with them for jobs.
Blacks don't get deported as the Hispanics flood in. The blacks are still here in even worse shape than they were before. It is ridiculous to think we all come out ahead when our most impoverished group becomes even more impoverished and more idle.
Blacks used to be able to get jobs in janitorial work. It is low status work. But it is real necessary work. In LA the blacks have been replaced by Hispanics.
A case study of Los Angeles janitorial services cited in a Government Accounting Office report captures the enormity of the shift. It began in the late 1970s, as several small firms began hiring Mexican janitors at low pay, prompting building owners to drop contracts with the companies that employed blacks in favor of the cheaper upstarts. As the immigrant-dominated firms grabbed more business, industry wages slipped from a peak of $6.58 an hour in 1983 to $5.63 an hour in 1985. The number of black janitors in L.A. plummeted from about 2,500 in the late 1970s to only 600 by 1985. Today, the city’s janitorial industry, like apparel manufacturing and hotel services, is almost entirely immigrant.
We've already got the consequences of globalization where lower paid manufacturing work such as in the garment industry has mostly been sent abroad. For the remaining low paid work to get shifted over into the hands of a newly arrived group just makes a bad situation worse.
Body shop work used to earn a decent hourly wage in LA but no more.
Former mechanic Anderson felt the effects of low-wage immigrant competition in his old line of work. “I used to sell parts to body shops, and I knew Americans who were making $20 an hour repairing dented fenders,” he says. “Now, 95 percent of South Central L.A. body-shop jobs are held by recent immigrants making $7 or $8 an hour.” Says Joe Hicks, former chair of Los Angeles’s Human Relations Commission and now head of the nonprofit Community Advocates: “It’s hard to find a black face on a construction site or in a fast-food restaurant around here any more. People from the black community have noticed.”
The poor folks are going to vote for Robin Hood taxes that will make the open borders libertarians quite unhappy. Yet many of the libertarians will avoid connecting the dots, being strong in faith.
Blacks are getting ethnically cleansed from LA.
The Latino influx into formerly black-majority urban neighborhoods has sparked deadlier kinds of conflict. While most violent crime in these areas is still black-on-black or Latino-on-Latino, interethnic violence is mounting, and in some locales, much of it—perhaps surprisingly, given high overall black crime rates—is Hispanic-on-black. In the heavily mixed-race community of Harbor Gateway in Los Angeles, for example, Latinos now commit five times more violent crimes against blacks than vice versa. Countywide numbers are just as startling. Though blacks make up just 9 percent of L.A. County’s population, they were the victims of 59 percent of all racially motivated attacks in 2006, while Latinos committed 52 percent of all racially motivated attacks.
The problem for blacks looking to leave is to figure out where to go to. Huge growth in Hispanics in the Old South makes those states less appealing though probably still the best bet.
US dollars sent abroad don't buy as much back in the home country.
Cambridge, Mass. - Working in the kitchen at a mid-priced restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., Jose Lucas managed to cover all the expenses of his wife and three kids in his native Brazil. But that changed when the real appreciated 60 percent against the US dollar in the past three years.
"I had to get more hours at work so I could send more money," says Mr. Lucas. "I used to work 40 hours a week. Now, I work 56." So far, the extra hours have made up the difference.
Across the US, the falling dollar value has sent ripples through immigrant communities that send money to family overseas. As some currencies for developing countries have risen substantially against the dollar, many immigrant workers are increasing their workweek by up to 20 hours or taking second jobs. If the dollar's slide continues, the US may become less attractive to migrant workers, analysts say.
Although it's too early to tell whether this will cause a major shift in immigration, a number of migrants in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia are already choosing Spain over the US.
Fewer will come. Low wage jobs in the US don't generate enough extra income to make it worth the effort. But since some of those here are sending home more dollars I wonder what the net effect has been so far. But in the longer run the weaker dollar will reduce immigration and increase the number who return.
In spite of the self-serving calls of fruit and vegetable farmers for more imported cheap laborers the farming industry does not show signs of a labor shortage or of high wages due to a labor shortage.
For several years stories in the media have reported a farm labor shortage. This study examines this question and finds little evidence to support this conclusion. First, fruit and vegetable production is actually rising. Second, wages for farm workers have not risen dramatically. Third, household expenditure on fresh fruits and vegetables has remain relatively constant, averaging about $1 a day for the past decade.
Among the findings:
- Production of fruits and vegetables has been increasing. In particular, plantings of very-labor intensive crops such as cherries and strawberries have grown by more than 20 percent in just five years.
- The average farm worker makes $9.06 an hour, compared to $16.75 for non-farm production workers.
- Real wages for farm workers increased one-half of one percent (.5 percent) a year on average between 2000 and 2006. If there were a shortage, wages would be rising much more rapidly.
- Farm worker earnings have risen more slowly in California and Florida (the states with the most fruit and vegetable production) than in the United States as a whole.
- The average household spends only about $1 a day on fresh fruits and vegetables.
- Labor costs comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. Thus, if farm wages were allowed to rise 40 percent, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be only about $8 a year.
- Mechanization could offset higher labor costs. After the “Bracero” Mexican guestworker program ended in the mid-1960s, farm worker wages rose 40 percent, but consumer prices rose relatively little because the mechanization of some crops dramatically increased productivity.
- Labor-saving mechanization can be difficult for one farmer, since packers and processors are usually set up to deal either with hand-picked or machine-picked crops, but not both. Government has a key role to play in facilitating mechanization.
We can stop the influx of illegal aliens and we can deport all the illegal aliens already here without damaging the US economy. A reduction in the supply of cheap low skilled labor would increase the rate of innovation in farm equipment design. The rate of growth of productivity would be accelerated if illegals were deported and manual labor wages increased as a result.
Hordes of Mexican and Central American farm workers just lower the wages of farm workers and stifle innovation in agriculture. Plus, these low skilled and poorly paid workers create health, welfare, and educational burdens we all have to pay for. Cheap labor for farmers is subsidized labor. The labor is subsidized with taxes on all of us.
Those illegal immigrants we subsidize with health care and education send a lot of money home.
But after years of strong increases, the amount of migrant money flowing to Mexico has stagnated. From 2000 to 2006, remittances grew to nearly $24 billion a year from $6.6 billion, rising more than 20 percent some years. In 2007, the increase so far has been less than 2 percent.
That quadrupling speaks volumes about Clinton and Bush Administration laxness toward illegal immigration.
Tougher border and interior enforcement of immigration laws has helped stop the remittance growth. But the downturn in the housing market has thrown a lot of illegals out of work too.
Migrants and migration experts say a flagging American economy and an enforcement campaign against illegal workers in the United States have persuaded some migrants not to try to cross the border illegally to look for work. Others have decided to return to Mexico. And many of those who are staying in the United States are sending less money home.
Remittances seem like a good way to measure immigration law enforcement. If the influx of illegals reverses we should see a big downturn in remittances. The fact that remittances have only stopped growing means that the immigration law enforcement improvements haven't gone far enough.
Businessweek, using the politically correct term "undocumented immigrant", reports on how recent raids have driven many illegal aliens out of farm work.
A climate of fear is spreading among undocumented immigrant workers, causing turmoil in industries dependent on their labor. In August the Homeland Security Dept. announced that employers would be required to terminate workers who fail to produce valid Social Security numbers. Implementation of the new rule is delayed pending the outcome of a lawsuit brought against the government by the umbrella labor union group, the AFL-CIO.
But while the new rule has yet to take effect, its impact is already being felt by farmers like Torrey. An estimated three-quarters of agricultural workers in the U.S. are undocumented, and growers are starting to feel the paralyzing effects of losing their workforce. They say that unless the government implements workable reforms, the future of the U.S. as a food-producing nation is in jeopardy.
This demonstrates how immigration law enforcement against fairly small numbers of illegal aliens can compel much larger numbers of them to leave. Raids conducted across many industries in an area could drive the bulk of the illegals from an area. This happened with Pakistani illegals in the New York City area when federal agents targeted them after 9/11. Most of them fled back to Pakistan before they were caught.
The farmers who want hordes of low paid and low skilled illegal immigrants use labor far in excess of the amount of economic value they produce. Farmers use 2% of the workers but produce less than 1% of the total economic value of the US economy. We shouldn't subsidize the farm corporations with Third World laborers. What is the point of having an industry in the United States that pays so poorly that Americans do not want to do the bulk of that industry's work?
Agriculture does not play the role it once did in the U.S. economy, of course. Though the amount of farmland used has remained fairly steady over the past century, changes to the structure of farms and improvements in productivity have cut the number of people involved dramatically. In 1900, for example, 41% of the U.S. population was employed in agriculture, while that number now stands at less than 2%. Farmers hire workers for about 3 million agricultural jobs each year, but only one-quarter of that workforce is legally authorized. Agriculture also makes up a lower share of the U.S. gross domestic product than ever, accounting for less than 1%.
The farmers enjoy big subsidies on their crops. Plus, they get ethanol subsidies. On top of all this, their illegal alien workers cost us far more (e.g. in education and health care for them and their kids) than they pay those workers in salaries. Enough already.
An end to the use of illegal alien workers would reduce the vegetable crops more than the grain crops since grain crops are less labor intensive. In time the vegetable and fruit crops would recover since an end to cheap illegal alien labor would spur more rapid development and deployment of innovations for automation of farm work.
They've been fired for their trouble.
NEW YORK -- The deliverymen of Saigon Grill labored for years at the bottom of Manhattan's food chain. Biking swiftly down the avenues in biting cold and searing heat, they schlepped up high-rises and walk-ups with bags of steaming noodles and shrimp fried rice.
Then they surprised their bosses -- and others in this seen-it-all town -- by serving up something unexpected: a revolt.
The 30 men -- all immigrants, including undocumented workers frustrated with the poor conditions and low wages that are often a fact of life in America's underground economy -- banded together in an effort to unionize. They demanded an end to what they say were salaries less than half the minimum wage, and to penalties that included $20 fines for late deliveries and $50 for shutting the restaurant's glass doors with a bang.
How about some labor law enforcement against a restaurant that will pay less than minimum wage? How about immigration law enforcement with deportation for these illegals?
The Washington Post refer to illegal aliens by the Orwellian left-liberal term "undocumented immigrants". They haven't been documented yet.
But the number of immigrants, documented and undocumented, represented by unions surged to 2 million last year, up from 1.6 million in 1996, according to a study by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute that is scheduled for release next week. By comparison, the number of union-represented U.S.-born citizens dropped to 14.8 million last year, down from 16.5 million in 1996, the study said.
Undocumented? So if the US government identified them all and wrote their names on documents that listed them all as illegal aliens who should be deported would the Post start referring to them as documented? Not unless that meant they gained the legal right to stay here.
While commenting on a book about poverty Tyler observes that descendants of immigrants do not respond to the same incentives as productively as the first generation does.
The more the poor regard themselves as lagging the rich (rather than doing better than, say, their peers back home in Gujarat), the more stupid risks they will take. That's why poor immigrants are more value-maximizing than the poor that have lived in America a long time and adapted to American norms and expectations. The immigrants don't regard their burdens as insuperable and they are on standard downward-sloping marginal utility curves.
Immigrant groups who do worse than the US average in education and achievements will have kids who will compare themselves to the middle and upper classes and become demoralized. The poor second and third generations who see no reasonable way up will take bigger risks and engage in more destructive behavior. The first generation immigrants who come Mexico or El Salvador will compare themselves to people in Mexico and El Salvador. Therefore they will feel relatively successful. But their kids will compare themselves to the average in America and feel woefully inadequate, frustrated, and very low status. They won't see long hours at menial jobs as the road to success. They'll see those jobs as the road to perpetual low status.
We should not allow in people who will do poorly. When we let such people in we are just creating a larger class of people at the bottom who will look upward resentfully at the people who earn more money than they do.
An article in MIT's Technology Review reports on yet another promising agricultural robot that demonstrates we can eliminate the need for low skilled labor in agriculture.
Scientists in Denmark are developing an agricultural robot for identifying and eliminating weeds. While this might seem like a relatively easy task, it actually requires a lot of machine intelligence to pick out the weeds among the crops. The robot is still in the early stages of development, but the researchers hope that it will ultimately lead to a reduction in the amount of herbicides used by farmers and therefore cut costs.
Called Hortibot, the semi-autonomous robot is a navigational platform designed to have different agricultural tools fitted to it to either mechanically remove weeds or precision-spray them with herbicide.
The cheap labor lobby argues the United States must let in huge numbers of low skilled illegal aliens from Mexico to do grunt work. But necessity is the mother of invention. Take away the supply of cheap (really subsidized) labor to farmers and then the market will produce many more robots to do every job in farm fields.
This robot can identify rows of crops and navigate the rows.
At a recent Field Robot Event, held in Wageningen, in the Netherlands, Hortibot was able to follow furrows and autonomously turn in the appropriate direction when it reached the edge of the crop rows.
The ability to recognize different kinds of leaves in order to selectively spray herbicides only on weeds reduces chemical use and reduces the need for labor. The navigational ability has applications beyond spraying of herbicides. Initial crop planting and harvesting both would benefit from autonomous machines that can navigate farm fields and stay oriented in row direction.
This robot still needs a human handler to watch it in case it gets off track. But cameras mounted on such robots could allow a single handler to sit at a desk and track multiple robots watching for mistakes that require manual correction.
Hey there immigration restrictionists, your opposition to importation of a large and growing low skilled labor force has spurred growers associations to fund development of fruit picking robots.
As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.
The robotic work has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, and pushed forward by the uncertainty surrounding the migrant labor force. Farmers are "very, very nervous about the availability and cost of labor in the near future," says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa.
If we can defeat the Imperial Senate's immigration amnesty bill and deport all the illegal aliens we will see a boon in investments in robotic technology to automate manual labor. This will raise living standards and improve the quality of products and services. The Imperial Senators are effectively Luddites who prefer a large human servant class to robots.
Thanks to Ivan Kirigin for cherry picking this story for me.
Mickey Kaus (who does great coverage of the immigration battle) pointed out a foolish thing Senator Ted Kennedy (D Mass) had to say about the price of labor for plucking chickens.
"I would like the chicken pluckers to pay $10 or $15 an hour. They do not do it. They are not going to do it. Who are you trying to kid? Who is the Senator from North Dakota trying to fool?
These are the realities, the economic realities. No one has fought for increasing the minimum wage more than I have. But you have got realities that employers are not going to pay it."
The way to raise the wages of chicken pluckers is to reduce the supply of low skilled laborers.
Remember when the Democrats were the party that wanted to restrict the supply of labor in order to drive up wages? That's what unions do. Nowadays, the upper class Democrats appear to be more worried about getting cheap gardeners, cheap nannies, and cheap maids. Plus, the Democrats have allied themselves with the owners of capital to drive down the value of labor versus capital. Mickey wonders if Ted supports the import of cheap laborers to break strikes and unions.
Weren't Democrats (especially liberal Democrats) the people who wanted chicken pluckers--and others doing lousy jobs at the bottom of the pyramid--to be paid $10 an hour? Yet here we have the putative lion of liberalism declaring this modest goal (less than $3/hour above the new scheduled minimum wage) to be impossible. Employers just won't do it! They'll hire illegals instead. But what if the flow of illegals is curtailed--something Kennedy's immigration bill promises to do. Why not see if a tight labor market can boost wages above the new $7.25 minimum--instead of caving and providing employers with cheap temporary "guest workers" from abroad? If chicken pluckers organized and their union went on strike demanding $10 an hour, would Kennedy ask them who they were "trying to kid" (and support breaking the strike with "temporary" employees)? They told us in the '60s that Kennedy was the tool of the bourgeoisie!
Maybe Ted Kennedy just isn't capable of logical consistency in his thinking? Maybe long chains of cause and effect (those involving more than 2 steps) are just beyond his ken?
I say we should look a lot more at track records of people who advocate policies. For example, George W. Bush has been so wrong on Iraq regime change, Iraqi democracy, Palestinian democracy, and assorted other subjects that discounting his advice of the "just trust me" sort seems very wise. Similarly, when Ted Kennedy spouts obvious nonsense about the unskilled labor market while advocating for a massive illegal alien amnesty it is very useful to remember how monumentally wrong Ted Kennedy was about the 1965 labor law revision.
In 1965, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., was chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization.
He ushered through the Senate the immigration policy of President Lyndon B. Johnson, stating Feb. 10, 1965:
"I want to comment on ... what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. ..."
Kennedy continued:
"Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [this bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area. ..."
Kennedy assured:
"Thirdly, the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates or those with contagious disease. ... As I noted a moment ago, no immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge. ..."
His enormous wrongness goes on beyond my excerpt. This is a man whose position we should listen to in order to find out what not to do. Ted's for it? You should probably oppose it. Ted and Dubya are both for it? Rarely do indicators line up so strongly to tell you to march in the opposite direction.
Businesses would have us believe that the law of supply and demand in economics fails to work in the labor market. But a new study in Canada finds that an increased supply of labor from immigrants lowers wages of the natives.
Immigrants to Canada are depressing domestic wages by increasing the pool of people competing for jobs, according to a study released yesterday.
The Statistics Canada study found that when an influx of migrants raises the labour supply by 10 per cent, wages fall by between 3 per cent and 4 per cent.
Abdurrahman Aydemir, co-author of the Statscan study, said that doesn't mean new immigrants are necessarily finding jobs in their chosen field. "Even if they are sending in their résumés and applying, that increases competition and in turn wages."
The natives are gullible enough to get fooled by propaganda and to let their government and businesses to conspire to lower their wages.
The disproportionately large numbers of highly-skilled immigrants coming to Canada has had the biggest impact on the earnings of highly educated workers, the study said. Canadians with postgraduate degrees saw their real weekly wages tumble 7 per cent between 1980 and 2000. During that time, immigration helped boost the number of Canadians with more than an undergraduate degree by 5.7 per cent to 38.2 per cent.
Plus, you get to pay more for housing and drive on more crowded highways and breathe more polluted air.
Canada gets more skilled immigrants.
In 2001, roughly four in 10 people who came to Canada had more than an undergraduate degree, compared with about one in five in the U.S.
This probably isn't just due to Canada's points system. Canada has the advantage of not having Mexico on its southern border.
The US Senate has reached a political deal with US Senate Democrats and some US Senate Republicans for a massive illegal alien amnesty encompassing 12 million or more illegal aliens and their families. Ted Kennedy led the Democrats in creating this potentially disastrous legislation.
The crux of the complex plan announced by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Democrats' chief negotiator on the deal, would give currently illegal immigrants a path to U.S. citizenship by allowing them to apply for permanent residence after working for eight years in the U.S. Applicants would have to pay penalties of $5,000 and would have limited ability to bring in family members. Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, called the compromise "the best possible chance we will have in years to secure our borders and bring millions of people out of the shadows and into the sunshine of America."
For corporations which want to pay their engineers and software developers lower salaries the proposal would double to triple H1-B visas.
One positive aspect of the bill comes from restrictions on chain migration.
In perhaps the most hotly debated change, the proposed plan would shift from an immigration system primarily weighted toward family ties toward one with preferences for people with advanced degrees and sophisticated skills. Republicans have long sought such revisions, which they say are needed to end ``chain migration'' that harms the economy.
Family connections alone would no longer be enough to qualify for a green card - except for spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. Strict new limits would apply to U.S. citizens seeking to bring foreign-born parents into the country.
Care for the parents typically gets dumped onto American taxpayers.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation estimates this amnesty could cost American citizens $2.5 trillion.
Giving amnesty to illegal immigrants would increase the costs outlined in this testimony. Some 50 to 60 percent of illegal immigrants lack a high school degree. Granting amnesty or conditional amnesty to illegal immigrants would, overtime, increase their use of means-tested welfare, Social Security and Medicare. Fiscal costs would go up significantly in the short term but would go up dramatically after the amnesty recipient reached retirement. Based on my current research, I estimate that if all the current adult illegal immigrants in the U.S. were granted amnesty the net retirement costs to government (benefits minus taxes) could be over $2.5 trillion.
The $2.5 trillion cost estimate understates the cost for several reasons. First off, that does not include the cost to people who are victims of crime and the cost of avoiding crime victimhood. Second, it doesn't include costs from successive generations of low IQ descendants of the amnestied first generation of low IQ immigrants. Third, it doesn't include the higher cost of housing as higher population densities push up housing prices. Fourth, it doesn't include the health costs of pollution due to higher population densities. Fifth, it doesn't include the deadweight cost of higher taxes to subsidize the immigrants.
The higher taxes will slow economic growth as will other effects of having a lower IQ society. You might think only lower IQ people will receive lower salaries. But the slope of a curve of per capita income versus national average IQ is too steep for only low IQ people to pay a price for having lower IQs. Countries which have low average IQs pay less to higher IQ technical workers as compared to countries which have higher average IQs.
The US Senators are hopeless cases. Some represent capitalists who want cheap laborers. Others just want to pose as acting on noblesse oblige. Still others want to bring in more Democrats as voters. For a variety of reasons the best interests of the commonwealth are not their chief concern.
We have reached the time where we need to send letters, emails, faxes, and phone calls toward our Representatives in the House. The Senate slime are firmly in the devil's camp. Time to make massive efforts to persuade our House reps and the public at large that we need real border enforcement and a huge reduction in immigration.
It’s not that the senators seek the destruction of America as a concrete historical entity. It’s that, as liberals, they have no concept of America as a concrete historical entity. And that is why there is no real deliberation. There can only be real deliberation and debate if there is something substantive to talk about. But for our leaders, there is no substantive thing called America that is at stake in this immigration bill. There is just a varied collection of special interests, human needs, and economic issues, all filtered through constituent pressures, and all overlaid by the Prime Directive to be tolerant and non-discriminatory.
Those who believe in a "proposition nation" think of America more as a secular religion which anyone can and even should join. I lack their secular faith and find it repellant.
Nedzad Dzihic, a 37-year-old Bosnian immigrant, did not marry Edina Zurko. Instead, according to court documents, she used him as a ticket to Canada and then dumped him almost as soon as she arrived, on Feb. 25, 2003.
An embarrassed Mr. Dzihic promptly informed Citizenship and Immigration Canada, according to the documents filed Friday in Ontario Superior Court of Justice. He says he never saw her again and assumed the government had deported Ms. Zurko.
Instead, Mr. Dzihic was shocked last year to get a bill from the Ontario government to repay thousands of dollars his former girlfriend has been collecting since she went on welfare in June of 2006.
Mr. Dzihic is suing the national and provincial governments to halt their attempts to collect money from him. Gotta say, I'm ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, I think people who bring others into a country should be financially responsible for them. On the other hand, if the original reason for bringing a person (e.g. a marriage that never happens) ceases to exist then why does the government allow the would-be immigrant to remain in the country and collect welfare?
The Canadian government has a serious flaw in its immigration policy. The Canadian government should not allow people to come into Canada based on a reason they can abandon shortly after they arrive. Marriages to foreigners ought to have some sort of vesting period before a spouse gains permanent residency rights. But people who bring in foreigners should be on the hook for some of the costs. They should put up a bond which they lose if the person they bring in becomes a criminal or needs expensive medical care or creates other costs for society.
This idea of placing more costs on those who bring in foreigners should get extended into the realm of the labor market. In the United States employers who bring in visa workers should be required to buy medical insurance and to put up bonds that they lose if a worker they bring in commits criminal acts or damages the property of others.
In the United States some immigrants bring their parents over and then dump the care of their parents onto the welfare system. Some who do this are quite affluent and successful Asians. Such people should be required to prepay years of future medical insurance and the government should bill the children for any welfare services the parents used.
People and companies who dump costs on taxpayers are part of general growing problem where profits get privatized and costs get socialized. We need to stop treating legal residency and citizenship as prizes we give to lucky foreign winners.
Empty stations on the harvest lines are more common this year throughout this swath of Arizona farm country, says Rademacher, who serves as president of the Yuma Fresh Vegetable Association. The reasons are many: a 40,000-person limit on the number of foreign guest workers allowed into the US, tighter borders that are discouraging illegal crossings, and rising demand for day laborers in other industries, such as higher-paying construction work.
The shortage of farm workers has been driving wages higher. Last season, base pay for day laborers working in this area was $6.50 an hour. Now it's $8.50. Rademacher says it may go higher because farmers here can't attract enough employees.
Growers want passage of the AgJOBS bill in Congress so that a flood of immigrant labor can drive down their labor costs. Never mind that the rest of us will pay more for police, schools, prisons, Medicaid. and other social programs. Never mind that less skilled and lower wage natives will see their incomes fall. The farmers want what is good for them at our expense.
If we stopped all legal and illegal immigration of low skilled workers then many industries would invest more in automation and the rate of increase in worker productivity would rise. We'd enjoy higher living standards and a less costly welfare state. Plus, our crime rates would be lower.
A single day reading the Los Angeles Times is enough to see the problems caused by the changing immigrant-driven demographics of California. Due to a court ordered increase in pay psychiatrists are flocking to the California penal system.
ATASCADERO — Court orders mandating drastic pay increases for health personnel in California prisons have led to an exodus of workers from state mental hospitals and left the facilities struggling to provide adequate patient care.
Staff shortages at Atascadero State Hospital, where psychiatrist vacancies stand at 70%, have caused the facility to all but freeze new admissions.
All the state's mental hospitals, which like the prisons are also under federal scrutiny, report staff departures for prison jobs that now pay about 40% more. And they fear that many more staffers will leave.
Your government at work, wreaking havoc.
The pull to the prison system is strong. A psychiatrist at Atascadero can make between $13,000 and $14,000 a month, but those in the prison system can make between $19,000 and $21,000 a month.
Psychiatrists used to peak at $160k per year in California prisons. But with the court order they can peak at $248k per year in 2007 and at mental hospitals they peak at $143,460 per year. The state mental hospital salaries haven't gone up enough to keep psychiatric staff. Vacancies were 17% in 1990, 34% in 2000, and now 70% as of January 1 2007 and rising. My guess is salaries didn't keep up as money was funneled into schools in a futile attempt to pull up very low Hispanic test scores.
High salaries for prison workers, police, prosecutors, investigators, crime lab scientists, and others in the criminal justice system pull smart people away from lines of work that create wealth. Lower IQ people commit crimes at higher rates than high IQ people. As I've argued previously, low IQ immigrants pull smarter people away from more productive work. Court ordered salary increases for prison workers accelerate that process.
California needs to spend billions to expand its prison system.
SACRAMENTO — Three decades of tough-on-crime lawmaking has sent California's prison system into a "tailspin," creating the most pressing crisis facing the state, the government's own watchdog panel declared Thursday.
In a blistering 84-page report, the nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission linked the problems plaguing the correctional system to political cowardice among governors and lawmakers fearful of being labeled soft on crime.
Immigration is driving California's population increase and the low IQ and low skilled immigrants commit crime at higher rates than the whites they are displacing. So the growing demand for prison staff, court workers, prosecuting attorneys, court-appointed defense attorneys, investigators, and other skilled workers is pulling higher IQ workers away from more productive occupations. Plus, the costs are a growing burden on higher productivity and higher income taxpayers.
The state's 33 prisons are packed to twice their intended capacity, with more than 16,000 inmates bunking in hallways, classrooms and other areas not designed as housing. Prison leaders say they will be out of room for new inmates by summer, and concern about riots is extremely high.
A federal judge, meanwhile, has given the state until June to relieve the crowding or face a possible cap on the inmate population, now about 172,000.
Though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled an ambitious $10.9-billion prison building and reform plan, its fate in the Legislature is uncertain, and most of the proposed solutions would take years to enact.
We have a choice. Spend more and pull smarter people away from wealth creation. Or spend less and get murdered, raped, robbed, and defrauded more often by criminals. Why not adopt a tough and enforced immigration policy that stops and reverses the influx of low IQ people? Why inflict these burdens on ourselves?
Elitist George W. Bush does not think we have a right to know when he makes deals that are bad for our interests. Bush wants to make America's retirement funding crisis bigger with benefits for Mexicans who make little, pay little in taxes, and cost in welfare and medical benefits and higher crime.
An agreement the Bush administration reached with Mexico on Social Security benefits would allow illegal aliens granted amnesty in the future to claim credit for the time they worked illegally.
The deal was reached in 2004 but never released publicly because it hasn't been submitted to Congress. The TREA Senior Citizens League, a Social Security advocacy group, recently obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act, and said it confirms the group's worst fears.
The document is a jumble of definitions and legal language, but a spokesman for the group said what's important is what's not in the text: It does nothing to prevent undocumented aliens who later get legal status from receiving benefits for the time they worked illegally. And that comes as the Social Security system's finances are about to be put under greater strain by the retirement of baby boomers.
Bush is like the Manchurian Candidate. He wastes American lives and money in a pointless war that actually harms US national security. He promotes immigration policies that will bankrupt the country with a continuing huge wave of low IQ immigrants who contribute little to the high tech industries that are the best part of the US economy and who are net liabilities. Bush acts as if we do not already have a big enough problem with an aging population and huge unfunded old age pension and health care liabilities. He wants to make the problem even worse. I think he'd prefer a future America with an Idiocracy populace which would be too stupid to ask all those challenging questions that vex him. Bush wants us to continue down a path that will produce a low trust society. Well, he's already succeeded. I do not trust George W. Bush. He's a disaster.
An article in the editorially pro-Open Borders Wall Street Journal conveys facts which very much contradict the Open Borders argument that we need cheap subsidized (we pay their medical, educational, and other costs) immigrant labor.
Immigration restrictionists, among others, point to the success of mechanical tomato harvesting when the Bracero guest worker program for seasonal Mexican farm workers ended in 1964. Since then, harvests of tomatoes that go into processed foods have quadrupled, while labor use has dropped by 72%, says the Western Growers Association, a California trade group.
Some other industries that rely on low-skilled labor also have mechanized. The poultry industry now uses machines to catch, kill, pluck and eviscerate chickens. The housing industry is moving more work onto factory assembly lines.
But labor economists say that's not much headway. "What struck me was how few examples there were of employers thinking ahead," says University of California at Davis economist Philip Martin, who spent a month last year looking for innovations that lessen U.S. reliance on illegal, low-skilled labor, and found almost none.
Take away the necessity that drives so much invention and industries will not innovate. If Washington DC would send a clear loud signal that the supply of subsidized cheap foreign labor is coming to an end then and only then would the row crop farmers get serious about making a huge step forward in automation.
Much of the problem, he says, is that guest worker proposals circulating in Washington are "sending the signal that the supply of unskilled labor will continue" to be high. That has largely dissuaded government and industry from investing in research and development, he adds.
The Agriculture Department -- which helped pay for the tomato-harvest research at UC Davis -- ended all funding for mechanization in 1979 after unions representing agriculture workers sued the university for endangering their jobs.
As Socrates said in Plato's Republic long before Benjamin Franklin strode this Earth:
" A State, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind". . ."let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention."
If Congress wants productivity of American industry to grow by leaps and bounds then it should cut off the supply of cheap imported subsidized foreign labor. Force industries to find ways to get tasks done with less labor and industries will invest in the engineering development to bring new labor saving equipment to market.
Also see Robert Samuelson and Steve Sailer on Philip Martin's views about agricultural automation and cheap labor.
Immigration agents raided 6 Swift & Co. meat packing plants in 6 states and rounded up over a thousand people. The result? Large numbers of US citizens queued up in line to get the new job openings created by round-up of illegals.
GREELEY - The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.
We keep getting told there are jobs we won't do. We keep getting lied to by companies and lobbyists who just want to pay less to get the work done.
Swift plants were raided in Hyrum Utah, Worthington Minnesota, Greeley Colorado, Grand Island Nebraska, Cactus Texas, and Marshalltown Iowa.
The raids have created job openings for white workers.
OMAHA - Fewer Hispanic immigrants are being hired to replace meatpacking workers arrested at Swift & Co. plants in Grand Island and Greeley, Colo., during last week's immigration raid, union officials said Tuesday.
Local 22 union president Dan Hoppes said Tuesday that 40 to 50 new workers have been hired at the Grand Island plant since the raids.
“The lion's share of those people were Caucasian,” Hoppes said.
9% of Swift's 15,000 meat packers were arrested.
Washington, D.C. — The arrest of workers at meatpacking giant Swift & Co. — the largest such raid in U.S. history — shows that the government is serious about cracking down on illegal immigration, officials say.
This time, federal agents were armed with criminal charges, accusing some workers of identification theft and forgery, and disrupted not just one work site but an entire company. Arrested were 1,282 Swift workers, about 9 percent of the work force at six plants.
The Feds were asking Swift for employee records in the months leading up to the raids. Swift started interviewing employees about whether they are here legally and managed to scare off or fire 400 illegals before the Feds did a formal raid.
About 400 workers were fired or left the plants voluntarily in the fall after Swift demanded interviews of workers it suspected of being in the country illegally. Immigration officials criticized Swift for not notifying the government that the employees had left. The agency has been unable to find them.
You have to figure that during this time Swift also became pickier about who they hired. So the 400 departures probably understates how much their work force shifted toward legal workers before the raid. Also, some workers were sick, on vacation, or not working the shift when the raids happened. So many got away.
The departure of 400 illegal workers before the raid was enough to raise salaries by $1.95 per hour. Maybe the raid will force salaries up by another $1 per hour.
The United Food and Commercial Workers filed grievances over the company’s interviews, although after the workers left, the Marshalltown plant raised its starting wage from $9.55 to $11.50 in an attempt to fill the vacancies, said Jim Olesen, the union’s local president.
Swift has been getting ready for the raid by raising salaries.
Meanwhile in Nebraska, union officials said Tuesday that 40 to 50 workers had been hired at the Grand Island plant, one of six Swift plants raided by the ICE in a sweep that led to nearly 1,300 arrests. And funny thing — they say Swift has been improving its wages, benefits and bonuses since before the raids.
As United Food and Commercial Workers spokeswoman Jill Cashen told the Associated Press: "They're trying to staff up their plants, and they've been raising their wages the past few weeks."
It's not clear at this writing if Swift saw the raids coming. What's clear is that its upgraded compensation is drawing more non-Hispanic white job-seekers, who made up most of the new hires at Grand Island.
Swift officials tried to prevent the raid and even went to court to try to stop it.
Consider this: Swift & Co. executives have said they tried to work with immigration officials to prevent the raid and that - once they became aware of government interest in their work force in March - conducted internal interviews of employees.
More than 400 workers left the company. According to Swift's general counsel, at one point, Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators asked company officials to stop the interviews - which probably alerted workers a sweep was coming.
So Swift managed to scare off a few hundred illegals since they knew the feds were watching. To compensate Swift had to raise salaries by a couple of bucks an hour. But their processing plants did not stop running. The new salaries are still too low to buy medical insurance for a family. The jobs are difficult and unappealing. Yet they only need to offer $11.50 per hour to get them filled. The argument that the US economy can't operate without illegal alien labor is a big lie.
Here is a familiar pattern: Immigration law enforcement is causing many more illegals to self-deport before they get caught.
That's where a half-dozen processing plants between Worthington and Madelia employ hundreds of immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic.
"They're afraid to go to the bank, to the stores," Amaya said. "They don't take their things. They just pick up and go, and it's hard, because they work really hard."
Hours after the Worthington raid, much of the city's Hispanic community, estimated at 3,500 people -- about half of whom are thought to be in the country illegally -- began clearing out.
After 9/11 more intense immigration law enforcement caused tens of thousands of Pakistani illegals to deport themselves back to Pakistan before they got caught.
Worthington police Sgt. Kevin Flynn said officers frequently encounter the problem while responding to calls or making traffic stops. Illegal workers would identify themselves by their real names, but also carried documentation stolen from U.S. citizens.
"They'd just be real upfront with us," Flynn said. "And the documents they had were actual documents. They weren't forgeries or fakes of any kind. They were the real deal."
By Tuesday night, immigration agents had arrested 230 workers at the Swift plant. But Andrade and others in the community say maybe twice as many workers fled town, or plan to leave soon, to avoid the risk of being arrested.
Tens of thousands of people work in meat packing plants in the United States. They could all enjoy higher salaries, better benefits, and better working conditions if the Tyson, Swift, and Cargill had no more access to labor from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – The pear growers in Lake County waited decades for a crop of shapely fruit like the one that adorned their orchards last month.
"I felt like I went to heaven," said Nick Ivicevich, recalling the perfection of his most abundant crop in 45 years of tending trees.
Now harvest time has passed and tons of pears have ripened to mush on their branches, while the ground of Mr. Ivicevich's orchard reeks with rotting fruit. He and other growers in Lake County, 90 miles north of San Francisco, could not find enough pickers.
Stepped-up border enforcement kept many illegal Mexican migrant workers out of California this year, farmers and labor contractors said, putting new strains on the state's shrinking seasonal farm labor force.
Ron Guhname saw a CNN show about pears rotting on the ground due to lack of illegal immigrant workers to pick them cheaply. Guhname is unsympathetic to the complaints of the pear farmers.
I say serves you right: you got it coming when you make your living off of illegality, and when you impose all the costs of illegals on your neighbors.
In the comments at that link Steve Sailer asks whether the pears are rotting due to excess supply. It turns out that increased foreign pear and apple supplies have sent prices plummeting and acreage dedicated to them has been shrinking for years before the illegal alien supply started to get undercut.
Orchard acreage in Oregon has fallen about 20 percent over the past two decades, according to a new fruit tree inventory compiled by the federal government.
Apples, in particular, has taken a hit, with the 4,835 acres of apples in production in 1986 dwindling to 1,340 acres in Hood River, Wasco, Josephine and Jackson counties.
Increased foreign competition and oversupply have sent apple and pear prices plummeting. And as orchards are turned into golf courses, or preserved as parks, agriculture employment declines too, with the closure of packing houses.
All this was happening while the illegals were flooding into the country.
Recent years have seen a drop in pear prices.
The price for No. 1 grade pears last season was $215 a ton, compared with $210 in 2004, $246 in 2003, and $243 in 2002.
The price willl be higher in 2006 and 2007 than 2005 but still lower than 2003 and 2002.
Think the shortage of illegal alien labor is going to drive up the prices we pay for pears? Foreign competition is driving the price of pears, not labor costs. Pear farmers are faced with cheap labor in China that drives down the price of pears.
Ivicevich said production costs for his crop are about $2,500 an acre, with an additional $1,000 an acre needed to cover harvest costs. The past few years have been financially challenging, he said. Rising production costs, competition from China and weather conditions have all made it hard for Lake County pear growers to make a profit.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Wake Forest University School of Medicine researchers have found high rates of hunger in surveys of immigrant Latino families in eastern and western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia and Forsyth County.
"Although the United States enjoys a relative lack of hunger, there are segments of the N.C. population – Latino immigrants – with hunger more severe than areas of persistent poverty like Appalachia," said Sara A. Quandt, Ph.D. The overall hunger rate for the U.S. is 4.3 percent. The Wake Forest surveys found that rates of hunger among Latino immigrants ranged from almost twice the national rate (8 percent) to more than eight times the national rate (35.6 percent). The results were reported in the October issue of the Journal of Nutrition.
"About 40 percent of the respondents in each study reported worrying that food would run out and that food bought would not last," said Quandt, the lead author. That combination, less severe than "hunger," is viewed as "food insecurity" and includes such actions as relying on just a few kinds of food and cutting meal size for children and adults.
...
In Forsyth, 15.8 percent of those surveyed reported children had had to go all day without food in the past year and 21.8 percent reported that children were hungry because they couldn't afford more food. And yet the researchers also found that only 12.9 percent of those in Forsyth reported receiving food from a food pantry compared to 25 percent of those in eastern North Carolina.
The farmers should embrace automation and stop bringing in illegal aliens whose health care, education of children, crime, and other costs are paid for by the rest of us.
Update: The whining farmers are losing their laborers to construction companies which pay more money.
As the border tightens, Mexican workers who once spent part of each year in American fields without a work permit fear that if they go back to Mexico, they will be trapped behind the border, farmers say. Instead, they stay in the United States, taking year-round jobs that pay more and are less backbreaking than farm work, such as cleaning hotels or working in construction in cities on the Gulf Coast devastated by last year's hurricanes.
"Frequently you hear, especially from California, complaints about construction companies actually recruiting workers from the sides of the fields," said Craig Regelbrugge, co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform.
I heard an anecdotal report about a big grower about 100 miles from where I live that was losing farm workers to construction companies hiring them to move to Bakersfield to build houses. So I'm not surprised to read this. Where do the farmers get off thinking they have a God given right to cheap labor?
Some farmers are automating.
Some farmers said they have invested in machines to take the place of workers, though some tasks, such as picking soft fruit, cannot be mechanized.
Soft fruit picking could be automated. It'd take some robotic technology with pressure sensors to prevent the pickers from squeezing too hard. It is not impossible.
WASHINGTON – The price tag for comprehensive immigration reform was not a key issue when the Senate passed its bill last May. But it is now.
One reason: It took the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) - the gold standard for determining what a bill will cost - until last week to estimate that federal spending for this vast and complex bill would hit $127 billion over the next 10 years.
At the same time, federal revenues would drop by about $79 billion, according to the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation. If lawmakers fix a tax glitch, that loss would be cut in half, they add.
That is just the first 10 years.
Real immigration reform: Deport the illegals, build a wall, and cut back on legal immigration.
Businesses who use cheap foreign workers do not mind these huge costs. Most of the costs will be paid by other busineses and private citizens. Use of the government to cost shift business expenses onto the rest of us has become a very popular activity for businesses in pursuit of bigger profits.
Testifying before the US Congress House Ways and Means Committee Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies summarized many immigration economics findings.
Note that the net fiscal burden on government is not the only source of economic costs of immigrants. Immigrant groups that commit crime at higher rates (e.g. Hispanics commit crime at over 3 times the rate of whites) impose economic losses on businesses and private individuals. Also, their higher rate of medical uninsurance imposes costs on hospitals and other health care provides and those costs get passed on those who pay medical insurance in the form of higher medical insurance rates.
Illegal immigrants area net burden on government coffers. If they were legalized the burden they impose would increase substantially.
I've just excerpted from a much longer article. Camarota also explains how immigrants do not help with the unfunded old age pension liabilities. The average age of immigrants is close to the average age of the existing population. Plus, the lower skilled immigrants earn less and therefore pay much less in taxes. They are not going to bail out Social Security and Medicare.
Lots of costs caused by immigrants do not show up in the form of taxes. Higher medical insurance rates are a major way that immigrant costs get shifted onto the middle and upper classes. To get a sense of the size of the costs getting transferred onto natives see my posts Medical Cost Shifting Onto Privately Insured Rises, Illegal Immigration Drives Up Number Of Medically Uninsured, and Immigration And Heavy Burden Of Medically Uninsured.
Former Democratic Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis and Daniel Mitchell, a professor of management and public policy at UCLA, argue that raising the minimum wage would effectively reduce illegal immigration.
There is a simpler alternative. If we are really serious about turning back the tide of illegal immigration, we should start by raising the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to something closer to $8. The Massachusetts legislature recently voted to raise the state minimum to $8 and California may soon set its minimum even higher. Once the minimum wage has been significantly increased, we can begin vigorously enforcing the wage law and other basic labor standards.
Millions of illegal immigrants work for minimum and even sub-minimum wages in workplaces that don’t come close to meeting health and safety standards. It is nonsense to say, as President Bush did recently, that these jobs are filled by illegal immigrants because Americans won’t do them. Before we had mass illegal immigration in this country, hotel beds were made, office floors were cleaned, restaurant dishes were washed and crops were picked — by Americans.
Americans will work at jobs that are risky, dirty or unpleasant so long as they provide decent wages and working conditions, especially if employers also provide health insurance. Plenty of Americans now work in such jobs, from mining coal to picking up garbage. The difference is they are paid a decent wage and provided benefits for their labor.
However, Americans won’t work for peanuts, and these days the national minimum wage is less than peanuts. For full-time work, it doesn’t even come close to the poverty line for an individual, let alone provide a family with a living wage. It hasn’t been raised since 1997 and isn’t enforced even at its currently ridiculous level.
A big rise in the mimimum wage would reduce the incentive for businesses to hire illegals because it would reduce the ability of businesses to reduce labor costs by using illegals.
The economic downside for the economy as a whole would be fairly small. People who are making $6 and $7 an hour receive such a low percentage of total income that doubling their incomes would have little impact on prices of goods and services. Fewer people would have jobs. But that would not make poor people poorer on average. They'd get more money when they did work.
Also, a reduction in the number of illegal aliens would reduce other costs for poor people such as by reducing the number of people making demands on government-funded medical services. Poor American citizens would therefore get better medical care. They'd also be less victimized by criminals.
Update: A rise in the minimum wage would also increase the quality of those who enter and stay in the United States illegally. Those who come would have to have better skills in order to justify their higher hourly wages. Otherwise they would not get hired. So with higher minimum wages less skilled immigrants would be more likely to self-deport and less likely to come in the first place.
While Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton think Hispanic immigration is a good thing a lot of blacks think their supposed leaders are betraying them. Blacks are aware they are being displaced by Hispanics.
LOS ANGELES – From where Johnny Blair Vaughn sits outside Lucy Florence Coffee House in the heart of Los Angeles's black community, he can feel the temperature rising over immigration.
The biggest reason, says the father of seven, is jobs.
"If you drive across this city, you will see 99 percent of all construction is being done by Hispanics.... You will see no African-American males on these sites, and that is a big change," says Mr. Vaughn, who has worked in construction for two decades. His two oldest boys, in their early 20s, have been turned down so many times for jobs - as framers, roofers, cement layers - that they no longer apply, he says.
I do not want the ranks of black unemployed to rise even higher. As my grandmother used to say, "Idle hands are the devil's workshop".
I think Vernon Briggs gets it right here:
"In this era of mass immigration, no group has benefited less or been harmed more than the African-American population," says Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University professor who researches immigration policy and the American labor force.
A new black coalition has formed to oppose mass illegal immigration.
Black leaders from across the country yesterday decried a guest-worker "amnesty" plan that would legalize millions of illegal aliens and threatened to sue the U.S. government if such legislation is passed.
"We're on the cusp of very critical legislation that centers on immigration -- both legal and illegal," Frank Morris Sr., chairman of Choose Black America, a new coalition of black Americans opposed to illegal entry, told reporters at the National Press Club in Northwest. "African Americans are going to be hurt if this legislation moves forward, [and] we are here to sound the alarm."
Blacks notice they are getting pushed out of some cities.
It just infuriates me that our children's education has to be shortchanged for a subculture that in many instances doesn't want to assimilate," said the Northwest resident, who is in her 60s and has watched the D.C. landscape change for more than 30 years.
"We are being pushed out of the way because there is a push to legalize an illegal act," she said. "I personally know fine educators who are losing their jobs because they can't speak Spanish. Well, in that case, pay them pesos."
This is a familiar pattern. When Hispanics come into an area some businesses and governments discriminate against English-only speaking natives because the employers want to have front line people who speak Spanish and English.
Choose Black America folks think the Hispanic deluge is a disaster for blacks.
Mass illegal immigration has been the single greatest impediment to black advancement in this country over the past 25 years. Blacks, in particular, have lost economic opportunities, seen their kids’ schools flooded with non-English speaking students, and felt the socio-economic damage of illegal immigration more acutely than any other group.
Here is information about some of the Choose Black America founders:
Ted Hayes -- Has worked tirelessly to attract national and international attention to the problem of homelessness in America. Ted is the creator of the Dome Village Community, a prototype shelter-housing facility located in down town Los Angeles. Ted Hayes has delivered his proposals on homelessness to the White House for the creation of a national homeless plan to eradicate homelessness in the United States. Ted has worked with national and international leaders in his effort to end the criminalization of Homeless persons in the United States.
Dr. Rosie Milligan -- In 1990, Dr. Milligan founded a publishing company, Milligan Books, where she has published over 100 new African-American authors in the past five years. Her publishing company is the fastest growing publishing company owned by an African-American female in the nation. Dr. Milligan is an entrepreneur and economic empowerment activist and owner of Professional Business Management Consulting Services - which provides consultation for new and small businesses and staff development training for corporations.
Kevin Fobbs -- Kevin Fobbs has more than 25 years of wide- ranging experience as a public relations consultant, business executive, political advisor, writer, and national lecturer. And is the founder of NuPac, the National Urban Policy Action Council, a civic and citizen action organization that focuses on community empowerment and promotes fiscally responsible compassionate conservative public policies. In addition, Fobbs is the Director for Government and Civic Affairs for Soul Source, a monthly full-color Christian news magazine.
Rev. Jesse Peterson -- Rev. Peterson is the Founder and President of the national non-profit organization BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny. He is the author of many books, and is frequently seen on major TV networks such as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Reverend Peterson is an advisory board member of Project 21, a national black conservative public policy organization
There is not enough demand for low skilled labor. International trade and automation are both decreasing the demand for manual labor and low skilled labor. In the face of these two trends it is stupid to import even more lower IQ and low skilled people to compete against the tens of millions already here who the labor market already attaches a low value on. This would be obvious enough for our elites to see and acknowledge in their deliberations. But they are all part of a joint lie where thinking true facts about human nature is a thought crime. Their secular religious madness has blinded them to the glaring truth.
“Utah will not be immune from the costs if Congress ultimately approves a new immigration law that does not account for agriculture’s needs for guest workers, like the bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last year,” said Leland Hogan, President of the Utah Farm Bureau Federation. “The consequences for American agriculture including Utah’s farmers, ranchers, food processors, nursery industry and landscapers will be dire.”
Failure to include a comprehensive guest-worker provision in any new or reformed immigration law could cause up to $9 billion annually in overall losses to the U.S. agriculture industry and losses of up to $5 billion annually in net farm income, according to the Farm Bureau study.
Referring to the article above a correspondent (who prefers to remain anonymous) says clearly the relatively small amount of money quoted in the study as saved by farmers using illegal aliens show that US agriculture can get along quite easily without cheap illegal workers.
The article below [above] was clearly written to promote guestworkers/Open Borders/illegal immigration/etc. However, the numbers point rather strongly in the other direction. The Farm Bureau estimates total losses of only $9 billion if illegal immigration was controlled/stopped. This is around 0.077% of U.S. GDP. Of course, the costs of illegal immigration dwarf this number. Note that the estimated net losses are even smaller, only $5 billion.
The other useful note is that only one sixth of the farm labor force is illegal (based on the article below [above]). Family members account for two thirds of the workers and lawful laborers another sixth. Obviously the illegal workers could be readily replaced with a few more hired workers and additional mechanization.
Farm subsidies are currently running around $18 billion per year (far less than most people imagine). Raising that amount to $25 billion a year to eliminate illegal aliens would be far cheaper than any of the guestworker programs currently under consideration. I don't advocate this course of action (expanding farm subsidies). However, the numbers show a clear lack of any economic rational for guestworkers/illegal immigration for agriculture.
The United States has a long and honorable tradition of family farms. Within reason it is a tradition that should be promoted, encouraged, and preserved. Stopping illegal immigration and enabling family farms to continue to rely on their own family labor to competitively produce agricultural products would be a net plus for our nation. Certainly we should not allow illegal immigration to drive family farms out of business.
My most fundamental objection to the "we can't get along without cheap foreign labor" argument is that low salaries are a strong indicator that poorly paying jobs have low economic value and loss of foreign workers to do those jobs will cost the US economy very little, if anything. Of course, absent the cheap foreign workers many of the jobs now done by illegals would still get done by Americans, albeit at higher salaries. Also, employers would make bigger use of capital equipment and of production methods that reduce labor needs.
The deportation of illegal aliens would have little impact on prices of agricultural goods because field hands are just one small cost among many costs in the chain of production that brings crops into stores. Farmers spend on fertilizer, tractors, seed, harvesters, fuel, water, insurance, taxes, marketing (big fruit vegetable farms have full time sales forces), and office work to do billing, ordering, and regulatory compliance.
Since illegals create many costs that are not directly paid by farmers (e.g. medical care, crime, education for children, etc) the farmers who hire illegal aliens effectively get subsidized labor which is partially paid for by taxpayers. Cut off that supply of labor and the small cost increases for fruits and vegetables will be more than made up in the system as a whole by reductions in costs to the rest of society in other areas.
A US Department of Agriculture web page puts the $5 billion figure above into perspective. An end to illegal alien labor on farms would reduce net farm income perhaps 7.8% if the Utah study is correct.
In 2005, net farm income is forecast to be $64.4 billion, down $9.2 billion from the record $73.6 billion estimated for 2004. Income is forecast down in 2005 only because in 2004 income rose $14.4 billion over the previous year to reach an unprecedented level. In 2004, both crop and livestock commodities experienced exceptionally favorable market and/or production conditions. Corn production set a new record and harvests of other crops were large. Prices for major crops declined late in the year and are forecast to be lower in 2005.
Most financial indicators for 2005 are forecast to fall between the levels of the two prior successive record years – 2003 and 2004. The value of production in the U.S. farm sector is forecast to be $249.2 billion in 2005, following successive record levels of $240.9 billion in 2003 and $270.5 billion in 2004. Farms are forecast to contribute $109.4 billion in net value-added to the U.S. economy in 2005, following successive record levels of $101.4 billion in 2003 and $118.0 billion in 2004. Farm operators are forecast to earn collective net farm income of $64.4 billion in 2005, following two successive years of record income, $59.2 billion in 2003 and $73.6 billion in 2004.
Net cash income is forecast to exceed the record level of 2004 because farmers postponed sales of portions of the bumper harvests from 2004 into 2005, anticipating that market prices will rise as the ma