Armageddon (23 page)

Democrats want illegal immigrants to vote but not to work (so as not to rile their union supporters) while some establishment Republicans want them to work (for low wages) but not to vote! Liberal Democrats, like those who support Bernie Sanders, are getting the point that the establishment backing for open borders is motivated by a wish for higher profits and lower labor costs.

When establishment politicians like George W. and Jeb Bush back amnesty for illegal immigrants, they often say they favor immigration because our country was founded by immigrants and speak of keeping an open door to the rest of the world. But the truth is that their corporate sponsors and contributors see it as a way to keep down wages for tens of millions of American families. Even worse, the establishment Left says that opposition to immigration is racist, creating a facade of tolerance behind which to hide their desire to hold down wages and incomes for their employees.

There is an eerie resemblance between today's immigration debate and the abolitionist views of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln said there could be no upward mobility for wage-earning Americans as long as five million slaves could be forced to work for free. Now
there will be none—and has been none—as long as 12 million illegal immigrants are willing to work for next to nothing. Why was Abraham Lincoln both antislavery and procapitalism? Why was he a Republican in the first place? Born to a subsistence farm family, he saw that since his father and family ate all they grew that they were locked on the farm for all their days on Earth. He left the farm as a boy and went to work on Mississippi riverboats, freed from the never-ending treadmill of subsistence farming by the miracle of cash wages. But how could he get wages when slaves could do the job for free? He realized that slavery imperiled the gains for others who wanted to follow his lead. Slavery had to go for working class Americans to be free. What was true in Lincoln's time is also true in ours. And so illegal immigration has to stop for wage-earning Americans to move up.

For all the liberal protestations of empathy for the working-class poor and their willingness to soak businesses by raising the minimum wage, it is only by cutting the flow of illegal immigrants that we can offer American workers real upward mobility. Liberals like to spread the myth that illegal immigrants take jobs Americans don't want. Like what? Landscaping? Dishwashing? Cleaning hotel rooms? Construction? Data from the Center for Immigration Studies explodes this canard. The fact is that Americans
do
want these jobs. In fact, they take them when they can.

Native-born US citizens comprise

• • 55% of maids and housekeepers
  
• • 58% of taxi drivers and chauffeurs
  
• • 63% of butchers and meat processors.
  
• • 65% of grounds maintenance workers
  
• • 65% of construction workers
  
• • 71% of porters, concierges, and bellhops
  
• • 75% of janitors
  

What Americans don't want is the dirt-poor wages the illegal immigrants are willing to accept in these occupations. And the fact that illegal immigrants are willing to work for so little is just more evidence of how they depress wages and incomes for the rest of us.

Increasingly, the unemployment and stagnant wages brought by massive immigration—legal and illegal—is being visited on well educated Americans seeking well paid jobs. Obama has acted vigorously to expand immigration and its inroads into the American job market.

On New Year's Day, January 1, 2016, President Obama issued an executive order vastly increasing the number of green cards that will be issued to foreign college graduates seeking employment in the United States.
Breitbart News
reported that Obama's new “181-page rule focuses primarily on giving work-permits to foreign college-grads who will compete against Americans for white collar jobs, despite the large number of American graduates now stuck in lower-wage positions and struggling to pay off college debts. The rule will also make each foreign graduate much cheaper for U.S. employers to hire than many U.S.-born college grads.”
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Immigration lawyer John Miano predicts that Obama's action will lead to 100,000 new green cards every year.
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The new regulation comes on top of the 800,000 new two-year work permits that were issued to “dreamers” in 2012. (“Dreamers” are foreign migrants who were brought here by their illegal immigrant parents.) In 2013, Obama added about 2 million extra foreign workers to a US economy stagnating under persistent low wage levels.
Breitbart
explains that “roughly 650,000 foreign graduates are working in the United States for roughly 5 years each under the H-1B program. Roughly 120,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges are working in the United States for two years each via the OPT program, often called the ‘mini-H-1B program.'” Obama's new executive order means that most of those foreign
graduates will not have to “return home after several years, so American companies can continue to avoid hiring U.S. workers in their place.”
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So up and down the wage and education scale, Obama's policies—with Hillary's support—are denying jobs to Americans while opening up new opportunities for foreigners. Of course, behind each foreign job applicant is a business eager to hire him or her to cut payroll costs. Not only can immigrants be asked to work for lower wages, but they need not be offered health insurance under Obamacare. With employers facing a fine of $3,000 per uninsured worker, what better built-in incentive to hire foreigners who need not be covered? Democrats hope that most of these businesses show their appreciation by giving money to Hillary's and the party's campaigns. But to ask these workers who are losing jobs and wages to illegal immigration to vote Democratic to allow more illegals in is the height of arrogance.

Liberals are fond of saying that conservatives are against illegal immigration because we are racist. But race and ethnicity have nothing to do with it. We will never be able to restore the American dream to reality until we stop letting our wealth drain away through illegal immigration.

There are 7 billion people in the world and most of them want to come here to live. Why wouldn't they? With the opportunity and freedom we have here, they'd be foolish not to. And with generous benefits awaiting them here, why not give it a try?

Republicans need to stand firm for:

1. a. Border security; a wall to keep illegal immigrants out. Walls work. Israel has kept the suicide bombers at bay for a decade with walls.
   
2. b. Deportation of all illegal immigrants. Liberals like to say that you can't go door to door and round up 12 million people. They say this would be like the Gestapo. But Obama deported 438,000 people in 2013. If we raised that total to
   one or two million a year, the rest would read the writing on the wall and leave.
   
3. c. An E-verify system to stop illegal immigrants from getting jobs. Cut off the jobs and the flow of immigrants will stop. Potential employers will have to hire Americans and pay them real American wages. It's about time!
   

Democrats need to grasp the essential reality that when they protest that the poor are getting poorer, the two key reasons are immigration and unfair foreign trade competition.

Increasing the minimum wage, the Left's standard solution to income inequality, will help only a few people at the bottom of the economic ladder. In the United States, the minimum wage is only $7.25. But the median wage is $17.09 and the mean wage (the average) is $22.71. Clearly, increasing the minimum wage, even to $15 per hour, is not going to help the majority of American wage earners.
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Last year, only 3.3 million people worked at or below the federal minimum wage. They made up just 4% of the 76 million hourly workers in the United States.
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Raising the minimum wage may be the right thing to do, but it's not a solution to income inequality.

The real solutions, curbing unfair trade practices and illegal immigration, are much tougher for the establishment of each party to achieve. They involve real sacrifices. The Republican candidate in 2016 must embrace policies designed to move up the incomes of the average worker—limiting immigration and fighting against unfair trade deals.

Nothing so defined the Hillary vs. Sanders battle for the Democratic nomination as their different views of Wall Street. The class resentment against financiers/billionaires leveraging federal guarantees and special tax privileges to profit from the global economy is a key force that can cripple Hillary, whether deployed by a Republican or a Democratic challenger.

95% of the income gains of the Obama presidency have gone to the top 1% of earners in our economy (families who make more than $400,000 household income per year), a level without precedent in modern history.
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Under Clinton, the equivalent figure was 45%, and under Bush, it was 65%. So while Bill Clinton did what he could to share the wealth, Obama has blatantly showered the ultrawealthy on Wall Street with his largesse. Our central task is not just to get voters to see the difference between Wall Street's incredible aggregation of income and Main Street's lack of progress but also to place the blame where it belongs, with the bipartisan establishment, including the Democrats to whom they are so loyal.

The concentration of wealth has escalated in recent years, but this is not due to increased earnings in the regular economy. It is almost entirely because of the rapid growth in both income and wealth of the Wall Street investor class and their Silicon Valley partners. This bicoastal accretion of wealth has left the rest of the country out in the cold, watching the money pile up in New York and California.

We Republicans must stress this point. We do so not to fan the envy of class conflict, but to focus on the unjust diversion of funds from the average American family to the very wealthy. This transfer occurs, not because of hard work or even shrewd investments, but because of wholesale subsidies, special privileges, immunities, guarantees, and tax advantages both parties have showered upon the wealthy in America. We must demonstrate that it is the establishment of both parties that benefits from this process and guarantees its perpetuation. Democrats are as responsible for it as are Republicans. And you can quote Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren . . . and Donald Trump on it.

Donald Trump has taken the lead on the Republican side in denouncing Wall Street and its denizens. “The hedge fund guys didn't build this country,” he says “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”
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This concentration of wealth is largely due to the runaway incomes in the financial sector that now account for one-third of all corporate
profits in the United States (double the figure of 30 years ago). It hasn't always been so. Throughout the 20th century until the 1980s, the average income of people in the financial sector was approximately the same as those in other businesses. But now it has ballooned to twice as much. The odyssey of the top 1% is a strange one.

They suffered more during the Great Recession of 2007–2008 than the rest of us did because they had more income from capital investments that crashed with the market. But then they came roaring back, gobbling up an obscene portion of national income.

During the Great Recession, the top 1% lost a third of its income, three times as much as the rest of the country. They bottomed out in 2009 when their share of the national income fell to only 13.4% (two years earlier, it had been 18.7%). As Gershwin says in
Porgy and Bess
, “A depression is when white folks are poor too.” Then, when the so-called recovery took hold, the very rich recouped their losses and soon went on a tear, piling up income faster than anyone had ever done before in our history.

The fiscal policies of the Obama administration, in particular those of the Federal Reserve Board, kindled a growth in income for the top 1% unrivaled in history.

By 2012, the top 1% was back, making 23% of the national income. Now, in the election of 2016, we must make the Democrats eat these Wall Street gains. We must make it clear that it was they, not we, who made Wall Street rich.

Obama, Hillary, and the rest of the Democratic establishment cannot pretend that increasing the minimum wage will be the answer to preventing this kind of rampant inequality. As noted, this increase will bring more income to 3.4 million working Americans. But the real answer is to redistribute income by eliminating the unfair advantages that have been given, largely by Obama and Hillary, to the richest people in our country.

We must not call for income redistribution, just power redistribution. The rapid appreciation in the income of the richest is not due to industriousness, risk taking, wise investments, or frugality, but
comes almost exclusively from massive subsidies from the Federal Reserve, protected by tax shelters and accounting gimmicks.

The first thing a foreigner learns about American politics is that the rich are Republican and the poor are Democrats. But that was before the politics of the Clintons and Obama built a passageway from the White House to Wall Street and then on to the Silicon Valley. Through this passage went massive campaign contributions to the Democrats and, in return, many special favors to the Manhattan bankers and the northern California entrepreneurs.

It is the greatest myth in our politics that Republican policies created and catalyzed income inequality. In fact, the responsibility resides mainly at the doorstep of the Federal Reserve Board, whose chairmen and a majority of whose members are appointed by the president.

Since the recession officially ended in June of 2009, the Federal Reserve Board has operated as, in the words of former budget director David Stockman, “a cash machine in the Wall Street casino,”
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letting its top operators help themselves to mountains of newly minted money with little accountability over how they spend it. The policy of quantitative easing (QE) deluged Wall Street banks with cash, supposedly to get them to lend it out to small businesses to create jobs. At least that's what the Fed said.