With so many groups having self-serving interests in the rise
in US immigration the chance of getting impartial information is
slight. Here is my attempt to provide some data, along with my
personal opinions.
First lets discuss two of the popular themes:
- “Immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans.”
If this is true than why isn’t the unemployment rate going up?
And how is it that most new immigrants find work? There may be a
changing dynamic in the work force, but this mantra doesn’t
explain it. The data shows that the unemployment rate various
over time, but recent changes in immigration don’t correlate with
the trends. This will be shown below.Unemployment Rate
- “Immigrants are pushing the cost of labor down.”
Immigration has only risen sharply within the last 10 years.
NAFTA started in 1994.
The stagnation in the wages and earnings of the working class
has been going on since before Reagan. The rise in the wealth of
the top 5% has grown significantly in the past 20 years. The
lower sectors have not.
- “Securing our borders will stop illegal immigration.”
The INS estimates that roughly 40% of the illegal immigrants living in the U.S.,
originally entered the country on non-immigrant visas
(such as H-1B, L-1, etc.). These non-immigrants have
become “illegal” immigrants by overstaying their visas. These people didn’t jump
a fence or swim across the Rio Grande, they flew in and entered legally. Building
a wall won’t change this. Tracking these people would require a national identity
card that would have to be presented before many transactions could be completed.
In much of the world, for example, one has to surrender one’s passport when
booking a hotel room or register with the police as a foreign visitor. Is that
what people mean by securing the border?
My take on the issues:
- NAFTA has caused economic dislocation in Mexico which is
forcing more people to migrate. Imports of corn have decimated
the local agricultural sector and the brief rise in outsourced US
manufacturing has ceased as these factories have now moved on to
Asia.
- The decline in unionization is what is responsible for the
loss of earnings power. When union participation dropped wages
stagnated. There is a delay in the effect caused by the existence
of multi-year labor contracts.
Countries which still have strong unionization show less
disparity in the distribution of wealth.
- Societies in decline find scapegoats to blame for their
problems. These are always the weak, and never the cause of the
problem. They are a good distraction, however.
The real issue is not immigration, but the loss of political
and economic power by the working and middle classes. One can
argue whether the US as a whole is in economic decline, or
whether we have just become economically imbalanced. Whichever it
is, immigration is not the problem. Poor economic, social and
industrial policies are.
Other essays of mine on related issues:
Sources used in this essay:
Pew
Trust Paper (PDF)
Oxfam
Paper (PDF)
Misery
Index
This essay is posted on my web site here:
Immigration “Facts” Debunked
Total agreement from this quarter. However, the unions were able to keep working class wages artificially higher than their value during most of the post war twentieth century.
With the advent of globalization of the economy (made possible primarily because the internet and spread of IT/ telecommunications knocked down all remaining barriers between countries)the working class in the US, unions and US manufacturing businesses have suffered as a result of cheaper competition from other countries.
NAFTA has created dislocation, and economic benefits to the middle class, however Mexico faces even more acute economic issues than US—its working class cannot be supported by its economy. Thus, they come here looking for work, which puts more pressure on the US working class. Its another form of globalism.
Bottom line is, the working class in this country is in BIG trouble.
US Unions same. Unions only hope is to internationalize the organizing of membership across global industries WORLDWIDE.
The world is becoming global. Nation states are dying (albeit so slowly its hard to recognize). The solutions to the problems and dislocations presented by capitalist globalism will by necessity need to be global themselves because national responses will not work.
The concept of “value” is a difficult one. One theory says that things have an intrinsic value, the other says that value is whatever the market is willing to pay.
If unions were able to keep wages beyond their “value” then the unionized companies would have failed. GM and Ford, for example, made their biggest profits during the years when unions had the most strength.
What we are seeing now is a worldwide decline in the power of organized labor. This is being used to pit one country’s labor force against another and drive down wages in the industrialized west. Workers in newly unionized industries like janitors, home health care workers and hotel employees have seen their wages increase. And many (a majority?) of these workers are immigrants. This is further evidence that organization, not immigration, is the key to the wage issue.
my comment is based on whatever the market will bear.
Union organizing yes. But it will by necessity need to become a globalized union movement which cuts across national boundaries and DOES NOT pit one nations workers against anothers.
The unions must globalize just like the capitalist owners have.
I stand by my statement. The US working class, relatively overpaid for their efforts and protected for years by union bargaining, are in deep trouble longterm, especially those affiliated with manufacturing jobs.
I dont have an answer. Clearly, not everyone can or wants to go to college. It doesnt seem theres much other choice in order to succeed in the world economy nowadays
Interesting diary.
I have only one real caveat.
Why do you believe the accuracy of your first two graphs?
The “unemployed” are NOT just those who are driven to prostrate themselves in front of the welfare/unemployment distribution system. Many MANY “unemployed”…those who take gov subsidies as well as those who do not…are in fact GAINFULLY employed in the underground job market . In various more or less criminal enterprises as well as in sheer under the radar work.
Those early morning gaggles of Central American men that you can now see in almost every area of the country? Just standing around at 7 AM, waiting? The thousands of trucks that come to pick them up to do construction and landscaping work? The various thousands of sidewalk vendors? The “illegals” working as maids and gardeners? The Gypsy cab drivers and unofficial commuter van drivers? The sewing machine ladies doing much of the tailoring work in the neighborhoods? The “now they’re there, now they’re not” short order cooks and busboys? The bicycle and foot and private car food delivery and messenger services?
MILLIONS of employed “unemployed”.
Bet on it.
Your chart of “unauthorized immigrants living in the US”? Laughable on the face of it. If they are “unauthorized”, do you really think that they are standing still waiting to be COUNTED?
Please!!!
NO one has those figures.
And further…please do some research on just who and what really finances organizations like The Pew Trust. They are just the left wing of the right wing, Liberal Disinformation Department thereof.
You commented on my diary Anti-Immigration? No. Simply Racist. “There seems to be much heat but little light in this thread, so I’ve posted some facts in this diary Immigration “Facts” Debunked.”
Artificial light is not to be trusted.
Little real heat, cold comfort.
AG
It is impossible to carry on a debate when one side refuses to accept the data presented. It’s a no win situation. Not only is the data presented allegedly wrong, but the ability to find better data is impossible.
There are many ways to measure employment, unemployment, under employment and discouraged workers. I just chose one with an easy to read graph. The fact that you don’t wish to acknowledge that there may actually be experts in this area who are able to derive these statistics does not mean they are not available.
You have just moved your heat from your original thread to this one.
My “heat” is based on the only facts that I truly have available to me. My own ongoing personal experience. I speak regularly with literally hundreds of non-mainstream workers, most of whom are from minority groups of one kind or another, and I myself have lived in thoroughly racially mixed neighborhoods…the REAL minority neighborhoods in America, and one of the main reasons that I have stayed in NYC…for most of the past 40 years.
And in my own personal experience and that of my neighbors and friends…literally HUNDREDS of people, maybe more like thousands over the course of a lifetime…ain’t hardly NONE of us been visited by the Man to get information about our employment habits, and if he DID show up, we either didn’t answer the door or lied our asses off to him.
Because we know him for what he is.
White, black, brown or green. Just another house nigger working for Massa Man.
Not accept the validity of figures collected by a “Trust” (HELL no!!! I do NOT trust them.) that was founded by (and remains intimately connected with right to this very moment) Sun Oil?
You BETCHA I do not trust them.
Check THIS out!!!
By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!
In the 1930s, J. Howard Pew was on the American Liberty League’s Advisory Council and its Executive Committee. He also made donations to the League ($20,000), the Sentinels of the Republic ($5,000) and the Crusaders ($4,000). Other Pew family members also donated generously, particularly to the Sentinels of the Republic.
When Joseph Newton Pew, the founder of Sun Oil (now Sunoco) died in 1912, his son Joseph Howard Pew, who had started working for the company in 1901, became its president. Under Howard’s leadership, Sun Oil grew 40 fold. Its success owed much to war. It supplied most of the lubricating oils used by Allies in WWI and was a leading supplier of WWII aviation fuel. J.H. Pew also directed Sun Shipbuilding. Its first ship, built in 1917, was just in time for America’s entry into WWI and it built about 550 more ships over the next sixty years. In the 1920s, it built oil tankers for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. During WWII, it built about 40% of America’s oil tankers and some of its cargo ships were converted for military use. After WWII, Sun Ships repaired Navy destroyers, scrapped aircraft carriers and even built a ship for a 1973 CIA mission to retrieve a sunken Soviet sub.
In 1933, when use of ethyl-gas blends began accelerating in the U.S., the American Petroleum Institute formed emergency committees. The Sun Oil Co. and others, paid radio stations to run propaganda that criticized alcohol fuel, and J.H. Pew told them to pretend that the paid ads were news items. In 1940, Pew threatened the New York Times that he’d withdraw his ad contracts and is credited with making that paper go Republican.
In 1947, J.H. Pew resigned as president, and his brother Joseph N. Pew, Jr., took over. But J.H. stayed onboard as an influential director of the company. In 1957, Sun Oil faced its first major foreign strike in Venezuela. Sun Oil profited from one billion barrels of that oil until 1975 when Venezuela nationalized the industry. (Sun now operates mostly in the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta and the North Sea.) Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett’s book Thy Will be Done, The Conquest of the Amazon, shows that from early 1900’s until the 1980’s the Pew family, Sun Oil Co., Weyerhaeuser, Standard Oil and Placid Oil worked with the CIA and Wycliffe/SIL (the largest U.S. missionary organization) to secure access to rich Amazonian resources. This plundering, largely for oil, resulted in near-genocidal massacres of indigenous peoples.
The Pew family’s main contribution to the American right has been its funding of a bewildering variety of extreme-right organizations, campaigns and publications. The Pew Charitable Trusts were created between 1948 and 1979 by Joseph N. Pew’s four children. J.H. Pew in particular was a major financier not only of the American Liberty League, and its front organizations in the 1930s, but a seemingly endless slew of ultra-rightring causes since then. Here are just a few of the organizations that he financed:
* National Association of Manufacturers: This fascist-linked network of industrialists was at the heart of many anti-New Deal campaigns and it continues to this day.
* American Action, Inc.: The successor of the American Liberty League in the 1940s.
* Foundation for Economic Education (FEE): Pew was one of FEEs trustees. He help fund this “think tank” which, from its start in 1946, fueled a get-government-off-people’s-backs philosophy. By 1950, it was under investigation for illegal lobbying activities. A radio commentator then called it “one of the biggest and best financed, pressure outfits in America…. the fountainhead for half-truths and distortions, designed to deceive the American public” and “a vicious anti-labor propaganda outfit [that] spreads its venom…to crush organized labor.” The CIO News sarcastically said the FEE’s goal was to “convince the average American that the country is going socialist…and that…social security, unemployment compensation, public housing, rent and other price controls are depriving him of his freedom to go hungry and unsheltered.”
* Christian Freedom Foundation (CFF): Pew started this tax-exempt outfit in 1950 with a $50,000 grant. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least $2.3 million in Pew money flooded in. Some was channeled into Third Century Publishers to fuel ultra-right Christian politics. In 1976, the CFF’s goal was to make America a “Christian Republic” by electing Christian conservatives to Congress.
* Christian Economic Foundation (CEF): In the 1950s, after failing to move the National Council of Churches to the far right, Pew helped create the CEF. In the 1960s, it sowed the seeds of the Christian Right by sending its free magazine, Christian Economics, to clergy across the U.S.
* John Birch Society (JBS): J.H. Pew was a longtime supporter and close friend of Robert Welch, who founded the JBS in 1959. For many years, it led America’s far-right, rabidly anti-communist pack. By 1963, funded largely by J.H. Pew and other oil and military corporations, the JBS had 1,000 chapters and 80,000 members.
* Barry Goldwater: In 1964, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater faced off against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Goldwater became the Republican presidential candidate and J.H. Pew was one of his top donors. In Goldwater’s campaign, he refused to distance himself from the John Birch Society, he called for a nuclear war against Vietnam, he fought hard against the Civil Rights Act and he got trounced by the relatively “moderate” Johnson, who won with the biggest popular vote ever.
* Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary: By merging two schools in 1969, J.H. Pew was instrumental in creating this right-wing Christian missionary training centre. Also involved was Billy Graham, whose magazine Christianity Today, was also funded by Pew.
* The Presbyterian Layman: This magazine was first published in 1968 by the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a fundamentalist group that is part of a campaign to move the churches’ policies to the far right.
Having spent seven decades with the company, J.H. Pew retired from Sunoco in 1970, and died the following year. Since his death, the Pew Family foundations continued to push their agenda by founding and/or funding such reactionary groups as:
* American Enterprise Institute: This conservative think tank was founded in 1943. It moved much farther right when donations increased 10-fold in the 1970s. It is now an arch-conservative lobby group with ties to Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Borke, Charles Murray, Elliot Abrams, Dick Cheney and his wife.
* Heritage Foundation: Created in 1973 by Joseph Coors, a racist, homophobic, anti-labour brewer; right-winger Paul Weyrich; and industrialists Richard Scaife and Ed Noble.
* British-American Project for the Successor Generation: Founded in 1985 by devotees of Reagan and Thatcher, it grooms right-wing U.S. and British youth as leaders.
* The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research: Founded in 1978 by William Casey, who later became Reagan’s CIA director, it promotes privatization, deregulation and cuts to social welfare programs.
The Pew family foundations had assets of about $4 billion in 2002.
Sunoco reported a net income of $312 million in 2003.
And you have the gall to write “It is impossible to carry on a debate when one side refuses to accept the data presented” after presenting “data” sponsored by the very same forces that have driven this country ever further right for nearly 100 years?
As if it is MY fault that I do not roll over and play dead to these forces because their PR spinners have managed to make the “Pew Trust” appear to be some sort of liberal organization?
Give me a break!!!
Pew?
PHEW!!!
Where are YOU coming from?
Really.
Do you actually believe this garbage or do you have other agendas here?
In other words…are you stupid or just crafty?
Unbelievable.
AG
Thanks for this diary. I’ve long since come to the conclusion that since this issue will undoubtedly be big this fall, that we (as Dems or Greens or Liberals, etc.) need to find ways to address the issue in all its complexity. I keep thinking that the only way we can do this is by looking at what the right says are the “problems” and offering up solutions.
The myth that “they steal our jobs” must be debunked. I think you show a valid means of doing that, i.e., if they are taking our jobs, then why is unemployment down? (forget that BushCo is rigging the statistics that measure unemployment.)
The belief that “they are depressing our wages” is also untrue. Wal-Mart is depressing our wages. Which, of course, is just part of the whole destruction of union jobs. Shipping our jobs overseas is also having an effect on our wages.
The belief that they are destroying our economy by using services like schools and hospitals also needs to be addressed. The fact is, social spending is way down and merely a fraction of our economy. What is destroying our economy is the massive deficit and military spending. Bring it home that the billions that were lost in Iraq could have supported the schooling and health care for millions of people.
What about language? Many on the right and the left are recognizing that 1 in 4 kids don’t speak English, nor do they have any opportunity to learn it outside of school. Why not propose free English as a second language courses for adults and after school lessons for students?
Instead of simply saying that we support immigration, we need to come up with specific and realistic answers to these so-called problems, whether it be in the form of solutions to real problems, or debinking the myths that are being spread as problems.
Great diary!
As a matter of fact the issue of taxes vs services is also being misrepresented. Many illegal immigrants work with fake papers. The employers don’t look to closely since all they need to do to defend themselves is to claim that they were shown proper documentation.
Because all their workers are “legal” they collect income and payroll taxes from them. The illegals can never receive the social security and medicare benefits since they are undocumented. So they are actually paying taxes for services they don’t get. Estimates are that as much as 8% of the social security payroll tax comes from this source.
As to learning English. The US has absorbed much higher rates of immigrants in the past (1890-1910) and they managed to integrate. The first generation speaks English poorly, the second speaks well and by the third most can’t speak the language of the grandparents any longer.
Adding adult English classes would be a good idea in any case. Great literary humor was made of the experience from a previous age. Try reading “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N” by Leo Rosten for a good laugh. (Yes that is actually the title!) School districts with immigrant populations all have public school classes for the children in English.
so what will Bush say in his address tomorrow night.
With all the denials and or criticisms today about militarizing the border with National Guardsmen, we’ve a preview on the why,thanks to time diff with UK. Their papers are ahead of the event.
Bush posts troops at Mexican border to appease Right
Temporary, huh. I’ve a bridge in hell that’s for sale.
It is estimated that about 40% of illegal immigrants in the US got here on valid visas and then just stayed on after their visas expired.
Walls and troops won’t do anything about that. A similar issue concerns all those who come in on special visas like the H-1B program. These are skilled people who are hired to take jobs when “there is no existing resident” with the right qualifications. If you have every seen the pro forma ads that companies run to prove that they couldn’t find a suitable person you will understand what a scam this.
Those on the visas generally get less pay than a resident would and they can’t change jobs without losing their visa status. So looking for a new job is very tricky.