Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Math: Obama + Reid + Senate Democrats = Few Jobs and Lower Wages




*  *  *  *  *  *

Tonight I would like to talk about the influence of special interests on our nation’s immigration system.

How did we get to the point where elected officials, activist groups, the ACLU, and global CEOs are openly working to deny American workers the immigration protections to which they are legally entitled? How did we get to the point where the Democratic party is prepared to nullify and wipe away the immigration laws of the United States of America?

Just yesterday Majority Leader Reid wrote in a tweet something that was shocking. He said: “Since House Republicans have failed to act on immigration, I know the President will. When he does, I hope he goes Real Big.”

Let this sink in for a moment.

The majority leader of the Senate is bragging that he knows the president will circumvent Congress to issue executive amnesty to millions, and he is encouraging the president to ensure this amnesty includes as many people as possible.

(And the White House has acknowledged that 5 to 6 million is the number they are looking at.)

Has one Senate Democrat stepped forward to reject Mr. Reid’s statement?

Has one Senate Democrat stepped forward to say: I support the legislation passed by the House of Representatives that would secure the border and block this executive amnesty?

(Have they ever said they support that?)

Have they ever said: I will do everything in my power to see that the House legislation gets a vote in the Senate so the American people can know what is going on? No. All we hear is silence.

This body is not run by one man. We don’t have a dictator in the great Senate. Every member has a vote. And the only way Senator Reid can succeed in blocking this Senate from voting to stop the president’s executive actions is for members to stop supporting him.

Every senator needs to stand up and represent their constituents — not big business, not the ACLU, not activist groups, not political interests, but the American interests, the workers’ interests.

In effect, the entire Senate Democratic conference has surrendered the jobs, wages, and livelihoods of their constituents to a group of special interests meeting in secret at the White House. They are surrendering them to executive actions that will foist on the nation what Congress has refused to pass and the American people have rejected. They are plotting at the White House to move forward with executive action no matter what the people think and no matter what Congress — through the People’s House — has decided.

Politico reports that “White House officials conducted more than 20 meetings in July and August with legal experts, immigration advocates and business leaders to gather ideas on what should be included in the order.”

So who are these so-called expert advocates and business leaders?

They are not the law-enforcement officers; they are not our ICE officers; they are not our Border Patrol officers; they are not the American working man and woman; they are not unemployed Americans. They weren’t in the room. You can be sure of that. Their opinions weren’t sought.

No, White House officials are meeting with the world’s most powerful corporate and immigration lobbyists and activists who think border controls are for the little people.

The administration is meeting with the elite, the cosmopolitan set, who scorn and mock the concerns of everyday Americans who are concerned about their schools, jobs, wages, communities, and hospitals.

(These great and powerful citizens of the world don’t care much about old-fashioned things like national boundaries, national sovereignty, and immigration control — let alone the constitutional separation of powers.)

Well, don’t you get it? They believe they are always supposed to get whatever it is they want. They are used to that. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, one report says they have spent $1.5 billion since 2007 trying to pass their desired immigration bill — $1.5 billion.

They tried and tried and tried to pass the bill through Congress, but the American people said, "no! no! no!"

So... they decided to just go to the president.

They decide to go to President Obama, and they insist that he implement these measures through executive fiat. And Senate Democrats have apparently said: Well, that is just a wonderful idea. We support that. Just do it. Go big. But, Mr. President, wait a little bit. Wait until after the election. We don’t want the voters to hold us accountable for what you are doing. We want to pretend we in the Senate have nothing to do with it.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

* FOLKS... IT'S ALL TRUE! EVERY WORD!

One of the groups that have joined the chorus of special interests demanding executive action on immigration is FWD(dot)us - run by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

(He just turned 30, and I understand he is worth about $30 billion.)

Mr. Zuckerberg has been very busy recently. One of his fellow billionaires, Mr. Carlos Slim — maybe the world’s richest man — invited Mr. Zuckerberg down to Mexico City to give a speech. What did Mr. Zuckerberg promote in his speech? Well, this is a report of it: “We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”

* A NATION OF LEGAL IMMIGRANTS... A NON-WELFARE STATE OF LEGAL IMMIGRANTS... THAT'S WHAT ZUCKERBERG LEFT OUT!

Well, the “masters of the universe” are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and fenced-off estates.

* TRU DAT!

(*WINK*)

I have another article from late last fall that was printed in Business Insider about Mr. Zuckerberg’s actions. The headline is Mark Zuckerberg Just Spent More than $30 Million Buying 4 Neighboring Houses for Privacy. The article says, Mark Zuckerberg just made an unusual purchase. Well, four purchases. Facebook’s billionaire founder bought four homes surrounding his current home near Palo Alto, Mercury News Reports. The houses cost him more than $30 million, including one 2,600 square-foot home that cost $14 million. (His own home is twice as large at 5,000 square-feet and cost half as much.) Larry Page made a similar move a few years ago so he could build a 6,000-square-foot mansion. But Zuckerberg’s reason is different. He doesn’t want to live in excess, he just wants a little privacy."

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

So Mr. Zuckerberg — who has become the top spokesman for expanding the admission of foreign workers — championed the Senate immigration bill for which all of our Democratic colleagues voted. One of the things the bill did was double the supply of low-wage foreign workers brought into the United States for companies such as Facebook.

Many of us have heard for a long time the claim that there is a shortage of STEM and IT workers. This has been the central sales pitch used by those making demands for massive increases in foreign-worker programs across the board — programs that bring in workers for every sector in the U.S. economy. But we know otherwise from the nation’s leading academics, people who studied this issue and are professionals in it. I have a recent op-ed here from USA Today which reports that there is actually not a shortage but a surplus of Americans who have been trained in the STEM and IT fields and that this is why wages for these fields have not increased since 1999.

* ASK ANY 50 YEAR OLD STEM/IT WORKER WHO HAS BEEN DOWNSIZED IF WE SHOULD BE BRINGING IN YOUNG FOREIGN WORKERS TO TAKE AVAILABLE JOBS THAT OUR OWN WORKERS SHOULD HAVE! (IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY... GREED... EXPLOITATION OF FOREIGN WORKERS AND ABUSE OF AMERICAN WORKERS AND WOULD-BE WORKERS!)

If you have a shortage of workers in a field such as information technology or science and mathematics, wages go up, do they not? If wages are not up, we don’t have a shortage. Rich high-tech companies are using the H-1B visa program to keep wages down and to hire less expensive workers from abroad. Indeed, the same companies demanding more guest workers are laying off American workers in droves.

* E*X*A*C*T*L*Y

I would like to read some excerpts from that op-ed published in USA Today. The article was co-authored by five of the nation’s experts on labor markets and the guest-worker program. I think it tells a story that has not been refuted. We have partisans and advocates who have been claiming there is a shortage in these fields, but the experts say no. And since they have been speaking out on this issue, we have seen no real data that would dispute what they say in this article dated July 27, 2014:

Headline: “Bill Gates’ tech worker fantasy.”

Sub-headline: “Silicon Valley has created an imaginary staffing shortage.”

"Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a 'shortage' of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates."

(Yet within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs.)

The five writers of this article — referring to themselves — go on to say: "None of us have been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages."

The article was written by Ron Hira, Paula Stephan, Hal Salzman, Michael Teitelbaum - who has recently written a book on this subject - and Norm Matloff.

These are labor-economics experts who have studied these issues for years.

Many of them have testified before Congress.

And they say: "None of us have been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages."

What a statement that is.

They go on to write — they all signed this article together — that "if a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies try to attract scarce workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields." (The “predominant source of new hires” in information-technology fields is guest-worker programs from abroad.)

They go on to say: "Those supporting even greater expansion seem to have forgotten about the hundreds and thousands of American high-tech workers who are being shortchanged — by wages stuck at 1998 levels, by diminished career prospects, and by repeated rounds of layoffs.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

They go on to say: "There is an ample supply of American workers who are willing and qualified to fill high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether the supply is two or three times larger than the demand."

* MORE...?

They go on to say: "Unfortunately, companies are exploiting the large existing flow of guest workers to deny American workers access to STEM careers and middle-class security that should come with them. Imagine, then, how many more Americans would be frozen out of the middle class if politicians and tech moguls succeeded in doubling or tripling the flow of guest workers into STEM occupations."

That is exactly what the bill before this Senate — the bill the House of Representatives rejected — would have done. It would have doubled the number of guest workers coming into America just to take jobs — coming in for the very purpose of taking a job that we need Americans to be taking.

The article goes on: “Another major, yet often overlooked, provision in the pending legislation (that's the bill President Obama is pushing for, the Gang of Eight bill) would grant automatic green cards to any foreign student who earns a graduate degree in a STEM field, based on assertions that foreign graduates of U.S. universities are routinely being forced to leave. Such claims are incompatible with the evidence that such graduates have many paths to stay and work, and indeed the ‘stay rates’ for visiting international students are very high and have shown no sign of decline. The most recent study finds that 92% of Chinese Ph.D. students stay in America to work after graduation.”

So there is this myth that we have thousands and thousands of students graduating from schools and being sent home. That is not accurate, according to the experts who study the data.

The article continues...

The tech industry’s promotion of expanded temporary visas (such as the H-1B) and green cards is driven by a desire for cheap, young and immobile labor. It is well documented that loopholes enable firms to legally pay H-1Bs below their market value and to continue the widespread age discrimination acknowledged by many in the tech industry.

The USA Today op-ed concludes by saying: "IT industry leaders have spent lavishly on lobbying to promote their STEM shortage claims among legislators. The only problem is that the evidence contradicts their self-interested claims."

So I would pose a question to Mr. Zuckerberg. I read in the news that Facebook is now worth more than $200 billion. Is that not enough money to hire American workers for a change? Your company now employs roughly 7,000 people. Let’s say you want to expand your workforce 10 percent, or hire another 700 workers. Are you claiming you can’t find 700 Americans who would take these jobs if you paid a good wage and decent benefits?

Let me just say one more thing: Facebook has 7,000 workers. Microsoft just laid off 18,000. Why doesn’t Mr. Zuckerberg call his friend Mr. Gates and say: Look, I have to hire a few hundred people; do you have any résumés you can send over here? Maybe I will not have to take somebody from a foreign country for a job an unemployed U.S. citizen might take.

(*SMIRKING WHILE NODDING*)

Median household income has dropped $2,300 since 2009. According to the National Employment Law Project, wages are down across all occupations.

A CBS report titled “Why American workers feel increasingly poor” writes of the NELP’s study...

"Real median hourly wages have declined across low, middle and high income levels from 2009 to 2013, the study found. No matter if workers were in the lowest bracket ($8.84 to $10.85 an hour) or the highest ($31.40 to $86.34) median hourly wages declined when you take into account the impact of inflation."

It goes on...

“Across all occupations, real median hourly wages slipped 3.4% since 2009. While even better-paid workers saw median hourly earnings erode, the worst hit segments were at the bottom” — the people who got hurt the most were at the bottom — “with declines in their wages of more than 4%.”

We have business CEOs, lobbyists, activists, immigration groups, and clever politicians who demand that we have to have even more workers brought into America even when we have a decline in wages and a decline in jobs. But what does the president do? His administration issues an executive order to provide foreign spouses,the citizens of other countries, not American citizens, with 100,000 jobs in the United States, precious jobs that many Americans would love to have. How many American spouses struggling to support their families would benefit from one of those jobs? How many single moms would benefit from a chance to earn a better paycheck?

* HOW MANY INDEED. (AT LEAST 100,000!)

Our Senate Democratic friends talk about paycheck fairness repeatedly. Yet they are supporting policies that take jobs and wages directly from American women by the millions!

* GOD HELP THIS ONCE GREAT NATION...

Immigration policy is supposed to serve the national interest and the people of the United States, not the interests of a few activist CEOs and the politicians who are catering to them. We have had 40 years of mass immigration combined with falling wages, a shrinking workplace, and exploding welfare rolls. We know that, don’t we? It is time to get our own people back to work, and our communities out of poverty, and our schools back on their feet.

Harvard professor Dr. George Borjas — who is probably the leading academic in this entire area and has been for many years — estimates that our current immigration rate results in an annual loss of more than $400 billion in wages for Americans competing with immigrant labor. Between 2000 and today the government issued nearly 30 million visas to temporary foreign workers and permanent immigrants, largely lower-skilled and lower-wage.

The basic social contract is that citizens agree to follow the law, pay their taxes, and devote their love and loyalty to their country, and in exchange the nation commits to preserve and protect and serve their interests, safeguard their freedom, and return to them in kind their first allegiance and loyalty.

The job of elected officials is to answer to the people who sent them to Washington — not to scorn them, not to demean them, not to mock them, and not to sell their jobs and dreams to the highest bidder.

I yield the floor.

No comments: