JUST SAY NO TO COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM
In November,1863, Mr. Lincoln went to Gettysburg. He surveyed the fields of Pennsylvania where 50,000 Americans were killed in the struggle to set men free. And he left us with the charge to make sure that government of the people, by the people, for the people does not perish from the earth. In a spiritual sense, I believe we are still on that battlefield, because a government of the people, by the people, for the people would make wages go up, and they haven't gone up in real terms in 40 years.
Let us review our history. Barbados, the mother of the American Deep South, was founded in 1627. For the first 15 years pioneering was hard work. The land was cleared, and crops were planted for food. Cotton and tobacco were grown with indentured servants from Europe but the margins were low. In 1640 sugar was introduced as a cash crop with good margins. Everyone should have done well with a valuable product to sell. But the larger capitalists found that by importing African slaves they could drive down price of labor and increase their margins. Labor was never well rewarded in Barbados. This oppression of labor did not end with slavery. When slavery was stopped in Jamaica,the largest of the English sugar colonies, rather than pay the black former slaves an adequate wage for their back breaking work, the land owners began importing and oppressing workers from India. Left to their own devices, corporations will source labor wherever it is cheapest around the world and bring it home.
Inflation adjusted wages have gone down about 10 % since 1973. In the 25 years before 1973 wages doubled. If with enlightened leadership wages had continued to increase at 3 % per year wages would have tripled in the 40 years since 1973. If you make 14,000, the minimum wage, you would be making 42,000. If you make 30,000, you would be making 90,000. If you make 90,000, you would make 270,000. Climate did not fail us. Science did not fail us. Our leaders failed us.
They continue to fail us as they lose Iraq, turn Afghanistan into a heroin farm, and rack up a trillion dollars a year in national debt. They fail us when they lie to us about our healthcare. And now our corporate leaders want comprehensive immigration reform. Capital values workers only according to their scarcity. Father Luis, a young Spanish priest, went to Guatemala in the 1960's. He went to minister to the Indians in the mountains. Large numbers of his flock went down to work in the lowland plantations. He followed the workers to see how they were doing. He found them living in deplorable conditions, under a roof with no walls, sick with tropical diseases. They had difficulty buying the medicines to treat their diseases and were dying in great numbers. As he looked at the plantation, he saw a fine building with air conditioning.
"Does the owner live there?", he asked.
"No.", came the reply.
"Does the overseer live there?", he asked.
"No." ,came the reply.
"Well who does live there?", he asked.
"The horses.", came the reply.
"The horses?", he asked. "How do the horses have a fine building with air conditioning and the farm workers have no protection from mosquitos?"
"When a horse dies it costs money to import another from the United States."
"And the workers?", he asked.
"When the Indians die, more come down from the mountains." , came the reply.
The North American Free Trade Agreement can be thought of as law written by capitalists to allow more workers come down from the mountain to drive down wages. The central valley of California, some of the richest land on the planet, would be the poorest state in the union if it was a separate state. This is the plantation system, no longer able to import completely disenfranchised workers, slaves, from Africa, now importing partially disenfranchised workers from Latin America. Slaves can be thought of as workers with no political rights. Illegal immigrants, have the ability to sell their labor to the highest bidder but lack political and legal rights to enforce contracts and vote for better conditions are somewhere between free labor and slaves. Mr Gingrich and others have proposed giving undocumented workers a right to work but not to vote. Proposals like that of Mr. Gingrich to formalize a servant class should be vehemently resisted as an assault on free labor. Capitalists are using globalization to arbitrage wages to the lowest possible level. Essentially they aim to set global wages where labor is under the greatest duress- typically where people are in the greatest pain. This could value humans below horses- it has happened before. Actually, their plan to drive down wages is working. Median US wages have been going down since 1973.
In 1993 Huffbauer and Schott predicted that NAFTA would "create 170,000 net new jobs in the foreseeable future." This was based on a predicted trade surplus of 7-12 billion with Mexico. Ross Perot on the other hand used common sense and predicted a giant sucking sound as American jobs moved to Mexico. The economic experiment was run and as of 2010 the United States had a trade deficit with Mexico of 97.2 billion and a net loss of 682,900 jobs. More than half of these jobs were in manufacturing. Computers and electronic parts represented 150,000 of these jobs and motor vehicles accounted for 108,000 of these jobs. In 2010 more auto jobs were created in Mexico than in the United States. Shockingly, there has been no wage convergence with the average hourly salary in Mexico now 2 dollars an hour versus a US minimum wage of 7.25. By its results, one could judge that NAFTA was an agreement by corporate elites for corporate elites.
Comprehensive immigration reform will not be written by advocates of workers to raise salaries in Charlotte or Cleveland. It will not be written to help raise wages for workers documented or undocumented in the Central Valley of California. It will not be written so that wages go up in Caracas, Calcutta, or Cairo.
It will be written to assure a cheap supply of labor for corporations. What this means is that when a single mother in Columbia, SC sacrifices to send her child to college to become a computer engineer, when he applies for a job at Facebook he will be competing directly with young computer experts from India and Belarus and his salary will be adjusted down accordingly leading to greater profits for Mark Zuckerberg.
These forces of corporate darkness use our humanity against us. One of the standard procedures for Genghis Kahn's Mongol Horde was to gather up prisoners from the countryside and make them fill in moats around castles so that the defenders were left with the awful choice of shooting their neighbors or submitting to the Mongols. Similarly, NAFTA was written to destabilize the small farmers of Mexico by making them compete against large mechanized US farms which has displaced 1.3 - 2 million Mexican farmers. These workers are then used by the corporations to drive down wages in Mexico and via immigration (legal and illegal) to drive down wages in the United States. By not enforcing our borders the corporations use the chaos of the world to drive down our wages.
They recruit well meaning people (Lenin would have termed such people as useful idiots, but that would be uncharitable)
to serve as advocates for illegal immigrants. The policy makers in fact recruit children to serve as the most pitiable victims of the policies these corporations themselves have pursued. Of course, what these corporations are driving for now is not primarily the ability to have cheap unskilled labor- they have that already with NAFTA- but the ability to destroy the wage scale for the skilled workers. The game plan can be summed up as:
1) Do not enforce the border and use unskilled immigrants to oppress low skill workers (reduce the dignity of work for the lower middle class).
2) Declare the system broken.
3) Write new laws under the guise of "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" to allow corporations to source skilled labor from around the world to oppress high skill workers (reduce the dignity of work for the upper middle class).
The power of these forces to corrupt is strong. Bill Clinton sold out the trade unions and he lives well in NY. Mr Obama, with an unemployment rate among black teenage males at 24.8 % is amazingly not enforcing the border and trying to get these kids jobs. He's come a long way from being a community organizer. It's probably not productive to wonder what motivates him but it is obviously not the plight of young black men.
Without the people strongly articulating our own interest we will continue on this path of mediocrity and ruin. Letting the moneyed interests price our labor at the 2 dollar per hour Mexican rate is not the way to greatness. Fortunately, our interests are straightforward.
We want to get paid for doing an honest days work. To that end, we need to restrict the labor supply by enforcing our border. We want to increase the need for our labor so we need to restrict imports until we have a balance of trade. (We have been running a trade deficit since 1976- remarkably near the point in 1973 when wages stopped growing). We need to pressure our leaders to look after our interests- we want our wages to go up 1 -3 % per year-and when they fail we need to select new leaders.
Let us review our history. Barbados, the mother of the American Deep South, was founded in 1627. For the first 15 years pioneering was hard work. The land was cleared, and crops were planted for food. Cotton and tobacco were grown with indentured servants from Europe but the margins were low. In 1640 sugar was introduced as a cash crop with good margins. Everyone should have done well with a valuable product to sell. But the larger capitalists found that by importing African slaves they could drive down price of labor and increase their margins. Labor was never well rewarded in Barbados. This oppression of labor did not end with slavery. When slavery was stopped in Jamaica,the largest of the English sugar colonies, rather than pay the black former slaves an adequate wage for their back breaking work, the land owners began importing and oppressing workers from India. Left to their own devices, corporations will source labor wherever it is cheapest around the world and bring it home.
Inflation adjusted wages have gone down about 10 % since 1973. In the 25 years before 1973 wages doubled. If with enlightened leadership wages had continued to increase at 3 % per year wages would have tripled in the 40 years since 1973. If you make 14,000, the minimum wage, you would be making 42,000. If you make 30,000, you would be making 90,000. If you make 90,000, you would make 270,000. Climate did not fail us. Science did not fail us. Our leaders failed us.
They continue to fail us as they lose Iraq, turn Afghanistan into a heroin farm, and rack up a trillion dollars a year in national debt. They fail us when they lie to us about our healthcare. And now our corporate leaders want comprehensive immigration reform. Capital values workers only according to their scarcity. Father Luis, a young Spanish priest, went to Guatemala in the 1960's. He went to minister to the Indians in the mountains. Large numbers of his flock went down to work in the lowland plantations. He followed the workers to see how they were doing. He found them living in deplorable conditions, under a roof with no walls, sick with tropical diseases. They had difficulty buying the medicines to treat their diseases and were dying in great numbers. As he looked at the plantation, he saw a fine building with air conditioning.
"Does the owner live there?", he asked.
"No.", came the reply.
"Does the overseer live there?", he asked.
"No." ,came the reply.
"Well who does live there?", he asked.
"The horses.", came the reply.
"The horses?", he asked. "How do the horses have a fine building with air conditioning and the farm workers have no protection from mosquitos?"
"When a horse dies it costs money to import another from the United States."
"And the workers?", he asked.
"When the Indians die, more come down from the mountains." , came the reply.
The North American Free Trade Agreement can be thought of as law written by capitalists to allow more workers come down from the mountain to drive down wages. The central valley of California, some of the richest land on the planet, would be the poorest state in the union if it was a separate state. This is the plantation system, no longer able to import completely disenfranchised workers, slaves, from Africa, now importing partially disenfranchised workers from Latin America. Slaves can be thought of as workers with no political rights. Illegal immigrants, have the ability to sell their labor to the highest bidder but lack political and legal rights to enforce contracts and vote for better conditions are somewhere between free labor and slaves. Mr Gingrich and others have proposed giving undocumented workers a right to work but not to vote. Proposals like that of Mr. Gingrich to formalize a servant class should be vehemently resisted as an assault on free labor. Capitalists are using globalization to arbitrage wages to the lowest possible level. Essentially they aim to set global wages where labor is under the greatest duress- typically where people are in the greatest pain. This could value humans below horses- it has happened before. Actually, their plan to drive down wages is working. Median US wages have been going down since 1973.
In 1993 Huffbauer and Schott predicted that NAFTA would "create 170,000 net new jobs in the foreseeable future." This was based on a predicted trade surplus of 7-12 billion with Mexico. Ross Perot on the other hand used common sense and predicted a giant sucking sound as American jobs moved to Mexico. The economic experiment was run and as of 2010 the United States had a trade deficit with Mexico of 97.2 billion and a net loss of 682,900 jobs. More than half of these jobs were in manufacturing. Computers and electronic parts represented 150,000 of these jobs and motor vehicles accounted for 108,000 of these jobs. In 2010 more auto jobs were created in Mexico than in the United States. Shockingly, there has been no wage convergence with the average hourly salary in Mexico now 2 dollars an hour versus a US minimum wage of 7.25. By its results, one could judge that NAFTA was an agreement by corporate elites for corporate elites.
Comprehensive immigration reform will not be written by advocates of workers to raise salaries in Charlotte or Cleveland. It will not be written to help raise wages for workers documented or undocumented in the Central Valley of California. It will not be written so that wages go up in Caracas, Calcutta, or Cairo.
It will be written to assure a cheap supply of labor for corporations. What this means is that when a single mother in Columbia, SC sacrifices to send her child to college to become a computer engineer, when he applies for a job at Facebook he will be competing directly with young computer experts from India and Belarus and his salary will be adjusted down accordingly leading to greater profits for Mark Zuckerberg.
These forces of corporate darkness use our humanity against us. One of the standard procedures for Genghis Kahn's Mongol Horde was to gather up prisoners from the countryside and make them fill in moats around castles so that the defenders were left with the awful choice of shooting their neighbors or submitting to the Mongols. Similarly, NAFTA was written to destabilize the small farmers of Mexico by making them compete against large mechanized US farms which has displaced 1.3 - 2 million Mexican farmers. These workers are then used by the corporations to drive down wages in Mexico and via immigration (legal and illegal) to drive down wages in the United States. By not enforcing our borders the corporations use the chaos of the world to drive down our wages.
They recruit well meaning people (Lenin would have termed such people as useful idiots, but that would be uncharitable)
to serve as advocates for illegal immigrants. The policy makers in fact recruit children to serve as the most pitiable victims of the policies these corporations themselves have pursued. Of course, what these corporations are driving for now is not primarily the ability to have cheap unskilled labor- they have that already with NAFTA- but the ability to destroy the wage scale for the skilled workers. The game plan can be summed up as:
1) Do not enforce the border and use unskilled immigrants to oppress low skill workers (reduce the dignity of work for the lower middle class).
2) Declare the system broken.
3) Write new laws under the guise of "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" to allow corporations to source skilled labor from around the world to oppress high skill workers (reduce the dignity of work for the upper middle class).
The power of these forces to corrupt is strong. Bill Clinton sold out the trade unions and he lives well in NY. Mr Obama, with an unemployment rate among black teenage males at 24.8 % is amazingly not enforcing the border and trying to get these kids jobs. He's come a long way from being a community organizer. It's probably not productive to wonder what motivates him but it is obviously not the plight of young black men.
Without the people strongly articulating our own interest we will continue on this path of mediocrity and ruin. Letting the moneyed interests price our labor at the 2 dollar per hour Mexican rate is not the way to greatness. Fortunately, our interests are straightforward.
We want to get paid for doing an honest days work. To that end, we need to restrict the labor supply by enforcing our border. We want to increase the need for our labor so we need to restrict imports until we have a balance of trade. (We have been running a trade deficit since 1976- remarkably near the point in 1973 when wages stopped growing). We need to pressure our leaders to look after our interests- we want our wages to go up 1 -3 % per year-and when they fail we need to select new leaders.
