The Buying and Fabrication of Middle America

The Buying and Fabrication of Middle America
Current mood: bitchy
Category: Life

Let's say America is your computer - and you have no firewalls (border control), no anti-virus software (guns) and you've found every port on your computer has been open all this time and every virus has infected your computer - the IT department (the politicians) jumped ship and you are stuck fixing the situation yourself.

This is the current state of America, folks!

We have to fix it ourselves!

We are being sold out by banks - who are probably backed by arabic, muslim people - people who want an end to America. Why do I say this? Because the center of America is being SOLD to people who aren't even citizens of this Country in exchange for slavery.

In the meantime, the slaves are being turned against Americans - it's a fact that mexican gangs have been approached by terrorist ties.

So we haven't been invaded, we have been sold. We are being sold! And the Government does nothing to defend us. It's up to us. Go buy a gun! If you have a gun, the Government will do as we say because they have to!

That's my advice to my Fellow Americans...

~Samantha

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Frank Morris: As immigration rates rise, blacks' prosperity drops

09:42 AM CDT on Wednesday, April 18, 2007

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-morris_18edi.ART.State.Edition1.4308cc3.html

For many African-Americans, today's debate over immigration evokes a bitter sense of deja vu. In 1965, a new immigration law restarted mass immigration just as African-Americans, emerging from long years of segregation, were poised to enter the economic mainstream.

In the decades since, millions of immigrants – legal and illegal – have settled here, causing the immigrant population to balloon from fewer than 10 million in 1970 to about 36 million today.

Black Americans have suffered economically in periods of high immigration. On the other hand, when immigration ebbed and labor supply was tight – during World War I, for example – African-American prosperity soared.

The current wave of immigration has been especially destructive, coming at a time of severe economic restructuring caused by globalization and outsourcing. Unlike previous immigration cycles, this massive influx continues with no natural end in site. What's more, since immigrants are likely to have little education, immigration is significantly adding to the economic challenges of the underclass by importing competitors for jobs.

The effects are predictable: Wages drop, working conditions deteriorate, and the native-born are crowded out of the job market. Education, medical care and other services are diverted to address new, unplanned-for needs. Whole industries have organized themselves in expectation of an unending supply of foreign labor.

The effects have been devastating to many African-Americans. A study from Northeastern University reports, "The existence of slack labor market conditions in recent years has created more direct competition for available jobs between immigrants and many subgroups of native workers." Of those "subgroups," African-Americans, especially less educated black men, find themselves squeezed out of entry-level positions that previously served as the first rung into stable work. Now those rungs are increasingly occupied by immigrants, both legal and illegal.

Even higher-skilled African-Americans are experiencing artificial competition from such programs as the H-1B visa, a cheap-labor program that computer companies are ferociously lobbying to expand.

Now President Bush and many in Congress are calling for "comprehensive immigration reform." All of the various plans would reward more than 12 million illegal aliens with legal status – i.e., amnesty – and further increase today's record-high levels of legal immigration.

Experience has proven that we should view such "fixes" with skepticism. In 1965, Americans were assured that the new immigration law would neither change the demographic makeup of the country nor increase the population. Likewise, the 1986 amnesty was touted as a one-time-only event; we now know that amnesty actually increases illegal immigration.

If the first responsibility of our lawmakers is to ensure that their actions do not harm their fellow Americans, then all of the "comprehensive" reforms fall short, because none provide genuine protection, relief or equity for our country's own disadvantaged citizens.

What can be done? Forcibly deporting all illegal aliens is neither practical nor desirable. Instead, inspired by the 1995 recommendations of Barbara Jordan's Commission on Immigration Reform, we must enforce the law, both at the border and in the workplace, and reject proposals to import more unskilled workers. The result will be a more gradual and manageable solution, with the illegal population shrinking over time, as fewer try to come and more who are already here give up and return home.

A sizeable portion of the black community continues to struggle with challenges of joblessness, incarceration and disparities in health and education. Though mass immigration is certainly not the sole cause of these problems, it is indisputably one of the major contributors – and something we actually know how to fix.

As the immigration debate heats up, groups like the NAACP and the National Urban League, which is meeting in Washington this week, have a duty to end their silence and speak out against harmful immigration proposals.

Otherwise, the interests of African-Americans could be trampled in the rush to amnesty.

Frank Morris of DeSoto is the former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and former dean of graduate studies at Morgan State University.

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How Guestworker Programs Harm American Workers

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters0787

Proposals for "guestworker" programs that would allow millions of foreign citizens to work in the U.S. guarantee that U.S. taxpayers will get the short end of the stick:

* Guestworkers displace American workers and lower American workers' wages and working conditions in certain job sectors.
* Guestworker programs are a drain on the tax system.
* Guestworkers rarely go home.
* Any guestworker program that involves "earned legalization" is an amnesty, a reward for law-breaking that is vociferously opposed by the American public.

Whenever the government has empanelled experts to examine the idea of expanding existing guestworkers programs—such as the Commission on Agriculture Workers (1992), the Commission on Immigration Reform (1995), and the joint U.S.-Mexico Bi-National Study on Migration (1997)—they have recommended against them, citing negative impacts to wages and working conditions in the affected industries.
IT'S BEEN TRIED—AND IT FAILED

The U.S. has had large-scale guestworker programs before. Prompted by war-time manpower shortages and continued out of convenience, the Mexican Contract Labor Program in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s—better known as the Bracero program—brought millions of Mexicans to work in American agriculture.

This large-scale guestworker program resulted in increasing dependence on foreign labor, encouraged illegal immigration, and so severely deteriorated wages and working conditions for domestic farmworkers that it was branded a national shame and discontinued.1

Many Mexicans who worked in that program stayed on illegally when the program ended. The result has been the institutionalized lowering of wages and working conditions in seasonal crop agriculture, as well as a dependence on cheap labor rather than investment in mechanization.
HARM TO AMERICAN WORKERS

A guestworker program would perpetuate the lowering of real wages in sectors where there are today large numbers of illegal aliens. Additional foreign workers would push down wages and working conditions still further.

Indeed, guestworkers are already displacing American workers and lowering their wages and working conditions, as has been amply shown by their effects on agriculture and the information technology (IT) industry. In agriculture, migrant workers have displaced native workers in the peach industry,2 the cucumber industry, and the apple industry,3 among others. (In the melon industry, migrant workers not only pushed out unionized native crews but also caused the abandonment of labor-saving mechanized packing houses.4) In the IT field, study after study finds that guestworkers are paid between 15 to 33 percent less than natives, an effect that depresses wages for American workers in the industry.5

With a new guestworker program open to all industries—not just agriculture and IT—millions of native workers will find their jobs, their wages, and their working conditions threatened by competition from foreign workers.
MASSIVE HIDDEN COSTS

In the proposed guestworker programs, who would pay for the health care of the participants and their dependents—and how? Emergency health care for illegal aliens along the southwestern border is already costing area hospitals $200 million a year, with perhaps another $100 million in extended care costs.6 Will employers foot the bill when the illegal aliens become "guestworkers" and the bill for the millions of other applicants?

What about Social Security payments? Will employers have to pay them even though the guestworkers won't be eligible to receive benefits? Or will the program give millions of foreign citizens access to our already overburdened Social Security system? Or will employers just not have to pay Social Security at all, giving every employer in the country an enormous financial incentive to hire foreign guestworkers instead of native workers?

If guestworkers are permitted to bring their families, will employers pay for the schooling of the guestworkers' children, or will that cost be borne by taxpayers?
REWARDING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Some of the proposals currently under discussion would make illegal aliens eligible to participate in the program and allow "earned legalization," i.e., allow "temporary" guestworkers to become permanent immigrants. By definition, any program by which illegal aliens can become legal immigrants is an amnesty—and overwhelmingly opposed by the majority of Americans.

While advocates of guestworker/amnesty programs claim that such a program would "get control of" illegal immigration, past guestworker programs have not had such an effect.7 Furthermore, our current population of illegal aliens (eight to eleven million) is far larger than any guestworker program is likely to be. None of the proposals address the enormity of the problem, the American people's opposition to amnestying those who have broken our immigration laws, nor the additional 500,000 illegal aliens who enter the country every year.

Perhaps most importantly, history shows that any program that amnesties illegal aliens will encourage, not prevent, further illegal immigration, by sending the message that the U.S. doesn't take its immigration laws seriously and that, if only people can get into the country illegally, eventually they will be rewarded with legal status.

(Note: Proponents are likely viewing the guestworker/amnesty plan as a Mexico-specific deal, designed to appease our southern neighbor. But the demand for "fairness" from immigration advocates will undoubtedly result in the program being opened to all nationalities, giving them more motivation to immigrate illegally, and thereby increasing, not decreasing overall immigration.)
GUESTS WHO DON'T GO HOME

"The purpose of a guestworker program is to add workers to the labor force but not permanent residents to the population. The legacy of guestworker programs is universal-around the world, it is clear that there is nothing more permanent than temporary workers. Guestworker programs tend to produce immediate economic benefits to migrants and their families and to the employers who hire them, but they everywhere leave a legacy of distortion and dependence [in the labor market]." 8

—immigrant labor expert Philip Martin

History shows that "guestworkers" rarely go home. Why would we expect the participants in a new guestworker scheme to leave at the end of their participation in the program? If they can become legal aliens, they will stay, and if they can't, they are still likely to remain. After all, many of them will have already lived here as illegal aliens before participating in the program. What enforcement mechanisms will ensure that they don't simply remain as illegal aliens after their legal participation in the guestworker program is over? No "partial withholding of wages" will convince them to go home when they can continue to earn more money by staying in the U.S. illegally.

And as long as there are new illegal aliens or ones who remain after the end of their participation in the guestworker program, then there will continue to be a large supply of labor available at a cheaper price than U.S. labor or guestworker labor. What use will a guestworker program serve then?
INVITATION FOR FRAUD

In the last open amnesty, a much larger number of illegal aliens applied for—and received—amnesty than had been anticipated, partly due to massive fraud. An estimated 73 percent of the applications for legalization under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) were fraudulent, as were 40 percent of the applications for the associated special agricultural workers program.9 Millions of aliens are likely to "qualify" for a guestworker program by using false documentation of their eligibility, and eligibility will just as hard to disprove as it was in the IRCA amnesty.
AN OVERWHELMING BURDEN ON AN ALREADY OVERWHELMED SYSTEM

No one has yet explained how the millions of applicants would be given security checks or whether that's even remotely feasible, given an already overburdened immigration enforcement system. The existing immigration service, according to a Department of Justice Inspector General's report, is crippled by computer systems ineffective to the point of being useless, a severe shortage of detention space, inadequate systems for tracking aliens, no effective program for removing removable aliens even when they can be identified, application backlogs in the millions, and heavy over-reliance on contractors for the most basic functions.10 When the immigration system can't adequately perform its most essential mission, adding in the responsibility for security checks, tracking, and removal when necessary for millions of participants in a guestworker program will guarantee disaster.

The likely eligibility requirements for any guestworker/amnesty program—length of stay in the U.S. for current illegal aliens, and a clean criminal record and verifiable identity for all applicants—would be a verification nightmare. Immigration officials would have to deal with hundreds of thousands of more applicants a year, to say nothing of how we would verify eligibility for any of the eight million potential applicants already here illegally, particularly with many of them armed with false identity documents.
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

Even the Urban Institute, traditionally supportive of mass immigration in its various forms, has cast serious doubts on the idea of a guestworker program, arguing that for any program to function as it should, three conditions would have to be met:11 Illegal immigration would have to be nearly eliminated, employers of guestworkers would have to endure additional taxes and levies that would minimize foreign workers' competitive advantage over natives, and economic incentives would have to drive guestworkers to return to their home countries. It's highly unlikely that any of these conditions will be met, let alone all of them.

However, if Congress passes a guestworker program, the following additional provisions are essential in order to minimize harmful effects:

* provisions to ensure that no guestworkers are hired for jobs Americans are available to fill;
* employer-paid health insurance;
* employer-paid Social Security taxes for guestworkers even though the workers will not be eligible to receive Social Security benefits (because excluding them from this tax would provide an incentive for employers to hire guestworkers over native workers);
* a ban on bringing in dependents, who would provide a further drain on taxpayers; and
* a ban on access to taxpayer-funded social services of any kind, other than bona fide emergency medical care

1. Senator Edward Kennedy, Hearing on the Agricultural Guestworker Program, U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, June 24, 1998.
2. The Peach Industry in Georgia and South Carolina, Report of the Commission on Agricultural Workers, Appendix 1, S. Armendola, D. Griffith, and L. Gunter, 1993.
3. The Pickle Cucumber and Apple Industries in Southwest Michigan, Report of the Commission on Agricultural Workers, Appendix 1, E. Kissam and A. Garcia, 1993.
4. "Technology and Labor-intensive Agriculture; Competition Between the United States and Mexico," Labor Market Interdependence, edited by J. Bustamante and R. Hinojosa, 1992.
5. The State of Asian Pacific America, Paul Ong, LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1994, pp. 179-180; Balancing Interests: Rethinking U.S. Selection of Skilled Immigrants, Stephen Yale-Loehr and Demetrios Papademetriou, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1996; Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage, Norm Matloff, testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration, April 21, 1998 (as updated, September 10, 2002); Characteristics of Specialty Occupation Workers (H-1B), Immigration and Naturalization Service, July 2002; Building a Workforce for the Information Economy, National Research Council, 2001; The State of Working America 2000/2001, Economic Policy Institute, Cornell University Press, January 2001.
6. Medical Emergency: Costs of Uncompensated Care in Southwest Border Counties, U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition, September 2002.
7. "Does the U.S. need a guest farm-worker program?," Policy and Research Report, Urban Institute, 1995.
8. "The Mexican Crisis and Mexico-U.S. Migration," Philip Martin, University of California at Davis (Urban Institute 1995).
9. Katharine M. Donato and Rebecca S. Carter, 1999. "Mexico and U.S. Policy on Illegal Immigration: A Fifty-Year Retrospective." Illegal Immigration in America, ed. David W. Haines and Karen E. Rosenblum, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 112-129.
10. Top Management Challenges in the Department of Justice: 2002, Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, November 2002.
11. Urban Institute, op.cit.

Updated 10/02