(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Tech’s Cheap Labor Quest Just Got More Brazen & Fact-Free

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(What' Left of) Our Economy, Bloomberg.com, CCP Virus, Cheap Labor Lobby, CompTIA, coronavirus, COVID 19, H1B, immigrants, Indeed Hiring Lab, information technology, job openings, Jobs, labor shortages, recession, tech, tech jobs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, unemployment rate, visas, Wuhan virus

Just went you think that many major U.S. business groups and their members couldn’t get any greedier or out of touch or both, check out this news on the immigration front: Some of the biggest of these organizations, containing most of the country’s most gigantic companies, have just sued the Trump administration seeking to freeze or block visas for immigrant workers in various job categories.

In other words, they’re trying to swell the American workforce with foreign workers at a time when literally tens of millions of Americans who want them can’t find jobs. And adding insult to injury, in the midst of this jobs-pocalypse, these companies are justifying their demands by claiming they face labor shortages. The obvious objective: pump up the national supply of workers, and thereby drive down the price – i.e., wage – these workers can command.

Worse, their contentions that they can’t find the employees they need continue to include the tech sector, even though the U.S. economy’s CCP Virus-induced downturn has been so bad that it’s spurring major job-shedding even in those industries and occupations. (The final word in the previous sentence is meant to remind that many non-tech businesses employ workers with tech specializations.)

According to the one of the major plaintiffs, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,

“Our lawsuit seeks to overturn these sweeping and unlawful immigration restrictions that are an unequivocal ‘not welcome’ sign to the engineers, executives, IT [information technology] experts, doctors, nurses and other critical workers who help drive the American economy.”

Indeed, the plaintiffs insist that these kinds of workers are currently so scarce in the United States that if the restrictions remain in place, they’ll need to secure them by investing more in their foreign operations.

These shortage claims, whether involving labor or skills, are anything but new, and have been bogus even in good economic times – as proved in devastating detail by this recent Bloomberg.com analysis of the tech sector’s longstanding drive to import more workers under the H1B visa program. Thus you should be Laughing Out Loud at the notion that the human assets companies need simply don’t exist in the 50 states during American economy’s worst stretch since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But the shortage-mongers (who I like to call collectively the Cheap Labor Lobby, since) aren’t only fighting common sense, or even simply a U.S. President’s broad authority to control foreign entry into the country. They’re fighting the data.

For example, CompTIA, which describes itself as “the world’s leading tech association,” reports that information technology “occupations in all sectors of the [U.S.] economy declined by an estimated 134,000 jobs” between June and July. And although the organization judges that such employment is up by more than 203,000 since the CCP Virus broke out in America, the 4.4 percent tech unemployment rate it cites – however much lower than the economy -wide jobless rate – is still much higher than the 1.3 percent it estimated in July, 2019.

In addition, the widely followed consulting firm Indeed Hiring Lab has found that between mid-May and late July, “tech job postings have trended below overall job postings” in the United States, and as the graph below shows, the gap is getting much wider. Also clear: Since mid-May, these tech job postings have been stagnant at this very low level.    

The information technology sector of course has long been one of the U.S. economy’s biggest bright spots, so far be it for this tech dinosaur to offer it advice. But I still can’t help but wonder how much better it could do if it didn’t spend so much time spreading misinformation about the country’s labor markets.

Im-Politic: Immigration Realists Should Love this Corporate Cheap Labor Lobby Immigration Study

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Business Roundtable, Cheap Labor Lobby, China, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, national security, Open Borders, OPT, Optical Practical Training program, student visa, tech jobs

You have to hand it to the Business Roundtable (BRT) – an organization comprised of the CEOs of America’s largest companies. It’s not often that a lobby group puts out a study that undercuts its own message in no less than three ways. But that’s exactly what the Roundtable has accomplished with its new report warning about the consequences of Trump administration actions deemed likely to reduce the numbers of foreign students that come to study in the United States.

The focus of the BRT’s concern is the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which allows foreign students to work temporarily for employers for years after their graduation. The Roundtable and other supporters of issuing lots of these visas portray them as a valuable way for domestic U.S. businesses to improve their (and the nation’s) competitiveness by increasing their access to the best talent on the planet. As a result, they argue, programs like OPT boost these students’ incentives to study in the United States and thereby become eligible to enhance its well-being to begin with.

Opponents charge that OPT hands employers yet another means of hiring less expensive foreigners over equally capable but more expensive native-born workers, and thus suppressing wages for all workers in the technology-heavy industries in which these visa holders are highly concentrated. OPT and programs like it have also been criticized (including by the Trump administration) for enabling large numbers of students from China gain cutting-edge tech skills that Beijing can ultimately used to undermine American economic and national security interests, and for providing these students and the Chinese government with golden opportunities to spy on American industry.  

The BRT’s case for the biggest possible OPT program rests entirely on its supposed economic benefits. But these exclusively economic arguments are their own Achilles Heel.

First, the damage the BRT claims the U.S. economy will suffer from a hypothetical (but in my view, reasonably assumed) 35 percent reduction in OPT visas by 2020 and a consequent 60 percent decline in participation in OPT by 2020 is laughably small. Chiefly, by 2028, according to the BRT, the economy will be a cumulative $52 billion smaller in inflation-adjusted terms than otherwise, and the cumulative number of jobs lost by native-born Americans will hit 255,000.

These numbers may sound big, but keep in mind: They represent not annual losses but the estimated total damage over ten years from OPT cutbacks. And they’re laughably miniscule given that the United States currently produces goods and services (the activity that generates the “size of the economy,” or gross domestic product, figure) at an annual, rate of nearly $18.7 trillion in real terms, and that this economy is currently supporting nearly 150 million jobs.

Second, logically speaking, the reverse proposition is also true: If the economic losses resulting from cutting back on the OPT program are so infinitesimal, then so is the economic contribution made by the program at its current size. In fact, it’s reasonable to conclude from the BRT report that if OPT was eliminated completely, the U.S. economy (rightly) wouldn’t even notice.

Third, the BRT’s complete neglect of the national security dangers posed by the OPT program looks like an implicit confession that they’re considerable. Are the BRT’s CEOs telling us that they shouldn’t be considered at all? That reducing them is worth no cost at all? That enhancing national security isn’t even worth the itsy-bitsy price that the BRT itself reveals OPT curbs would entail? 

Of course, none of these conclusions reflects well on the Roundtable, or on the corporate Cheap Labor Lobby of which it’s a card-carrying member. That’s why I’m hoping that immigration and national security realists share it with as many recipients – including government decision-makers – as possible. If this is the best that the Open Borders movement’s Big Business branch can do to tout the OPT program, it’s fate will quickly be sealed.

Im-Politic: The Wall Street Journal Slimes both Trump and TR on Immigration

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assimilation, Cheap Labor Lobby, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jason L. Riley, nativism, progressives, racism, The Wall Street Journal, Trump Theodore Roosevelt, xenophobia

Silly me. I read the headline for Jason L. Riley’s newest Wall Street Journal article, “What Trump and Teddy Roosevelt Have in Common” and assumed he was talking about trade. That is, I thought Riley knew what he was writing about.

I’ll sure never make that mistake again! For Riley’s column was not about the economic nationalism that Roosevelt unmistakably championed – including tariffs – and that President Trump says he’s trying to put into effect. Instead, the subject was immigration – and “almost wholly incomplete” is a charitable description of Riley’s portrayal of TR’s outlook.

According to Riley, Roosevelt was a combination xenophobe and partisan hack who wouldn’t even distinguish immigrants from first generation Americans, and who sought to curb arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe in particular because, like all Republicans, he “was concerned that too many of these latest arrivals ultimately would vote Democratic.”

Consequently, Roosevelt allegedly was all too happy to endorse the common nativist stereotype of the latest wave of immigrants as (in Riley’s words), “vermin [having] human heads with swarthy complexions, and [wearing] hats or bandannas labeled ‘Mafia,’ ‘Anarchist’ and ‘Socialist’” – not to mention assassins like Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants who had gunned down President William McKinley in 1901.

Sound familiar? As made clear by the column, that was Riley’s intent. But whatever you think of President Trump, or current or recent immigration policy, there can be no question that Riley’s portrayal of TR renders the former president practically unrecognizable.

The heart of the legitimate case that Roosevelt harbored many of the prejudices that would shape American immigration policy between 1924 and 1965 entails the former president’s own oft-stated worldview. Entirely consistent with the main currents of progressive reform thinking of his era, he believed that different peoples of the world occupied (as one scholar has put it) “different civilization levels,” and those occupied by Americans and Europeans were at the top. Just as consistent, therefore, was Roosevelt’s support for simply cutting off immigration from China and Japan.

At the same time, his concerns may not simply have been racial. According to one scholar, as Roosevelt saw it:

“the entire ‘coolie’ class from China threatened labor relations because Chinese laborers were lured to the American shores under false pretenses and were forced to work for low wages. The deal made with Chinese labor was bound to result in a lowering of the standard of living and cause future problems. Roosevelt’s response was to close the door for Asia.”

Indeed, he reached an agreement with the Japanese government, in 1907, to resume limited immigration from Japan to the United States proper, and more extensive flows into the American territory of Hawaii. This bilateral deal also specified that the San Francisco Board of Education’s post-earthquake re-segregation of Japanese and Korean schoolchildren (with Chinese!) be reversed.

Further complicating the picture: Roosevelt’s definition of political undesirables was not limited to southern and eastern Europeans. He was just just as worried about “German-Americans active on behalf of imperial Germany in World War I.” More broadly, he by no means assumed that those ostensibly more desirable northern and western Europeans would assimilate effortlessly into American society and culture. They would need to make active efforts to give up their Old World political and religious loyalties.

And although Roosevelt’s promptings led Congress to establish in 1907 the Dillingham Commission, whose voluminous reports laid the groundwork for the ethnically restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, with the exception of the Asians, the former president, according to another scholar, “advised against discriminating on the basis of national-origin or religious beliefs.” (Asians still excepted of course.) He also opposed requiring immigrants to pass literacy tests, which were proposed largely to discriminate against newcomers from the non-English speaking world.

In addition, to a great extent, Roosevelt’s championing of urban economic and social reform stemmed from his encounters in New York City with the impoverished lives and oppressive working conditions of recent immigrants – especially from southern and eastern Europe.

Obviously, too many of TR’s attitudes on the allegedly superior and inferior qualities of whites and non-whites, and even of Europeans from different regions on the continent, are completely unacceptable by today’s standards. But a fair-minded analysis would also recognize that he was more than simply a “man of his [prejudiced] time.” In particular, unlike many of even his progressive contemporaries, Roosevelt didn’t seem to view these differing racial qualities as fixed forever by biology. He apparently believed that nurture could augment nature, and however condescending, this view unmistakably – if too implicitly – accepted the inherent equality of all.

Similarly, Roosevelt’s support for various immigration restrictions was based not on a desire to bar permanently all undesirables, however they were defined. It was based on a belief that inflows that were too great and too rapid would undercut the wages of American workers and threaten the cohesion of a country already undergoing a series of tumultuous transitions, and especially one that he and other progressives viewed as supremely important to a successful national future – the creation of a nation whose hitherto fragmented institutions (both public and private) would centralize enough to cope with the challenges of an increasingly complex and rapidly emerging economic and technological modernity.

So if a pundit or any type of analyst wanted to create a truly accurate picture of Roosevelt’s views on immigration – and their implications for America today – he or she clearly would have tried to communicate at least some of this nuance and (genuinely instructive, not exculpatory) context. But if the purpose was to produce a hatchet job aimed at serving the interests of the nation’s Cheap Labor Lobby, Riley’s column will do just fine.

Im-Politic: The Last Gasps of Immigration Snake Oil?

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border security, Cheap Labor Lobby, crime, felons, Hillary Clinton, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Migration Policy Institute, Norman Matloff, Obama, Open Borders, Trump, Washington Post

What if someone told you and the rest of the country that Washington has just decided to admit into the country a large group of foreigners and that you knew for sure that 7.45 percent of them would be convicted for crimes and that more than a third of these (2.73 percent of the total) would be felony convictions. In absolute terms, this works out to 820,000 and 300,000 illegal residents, respectively.

If you have a lick of common sense, you’d be outraged. Yet this is the exactly the case with America’s illegal immigrant population in recent decades. Along with another news item I’ve just found, reveals just how completely and dangerously loony America’s immigration policy has become under the Open Borders-obsessed leaders of the last two administrations, and why at least from this standpoint, Donald Trump’s election as president was so urgently needed.

Supporters of more lenient immigration policies might respond that, compared with the U.S. population overall, illegal immigrants look even more law-abiding. A 2010 academic report, for example, claimed that a total of 8.6 percent of the adults in the United States has been convicted for a felony – more than three times the above rate for illegals. Moreover, the number of these felons is growing faster than the population as a whole, so the gap could well be even bigger today.

Yet here’s where you need to look at the numbers intelligently – and make sure you’re comparing apples versus apples. First, the Census Bureau counts illegal immigrants when it gauges the population every ten years. So illegal immigrant felons have been contributing to the overall numbers.

Second, the first illegal immigrant felon figures I provided were for the entire illegal population. The illegal immigrant felon figures are for adults illegally living in the country. According to a widely accepted source of information about the illegal population – the Pew Research Center – some 28 percent of this group is outside the nation’s workforce, meaning those Americans who either are working, or unemployed but looking for work. So we can safely assume that most of these illegals are either minors or seniors – demographic sectors where you don’t find many convicted felons.

When you do the math, it turns out that the share of illegal immigrant adults with felony convictions equals some 3.79 percent. That’s still considerably lower than the share for the total American population, but closer.

Here’s the rub, though, and it’s based on a crucial point raised recently by one of America’s best thinkers on immigration policy today, Professor Norman Matloff, a computer scientist at the University of California-Davis who specializes in both immigration and the U.S. high-tech workforce, and the Asian immigrant community in northern California.

As Matloff has noted, the purpose of American immigration policy is supposed to improve the country. As a result, why has Washington looked the over way for so long as literally millions of foreigners, including large numbers of undesirables, made their way into the country? Even worse, felons pose especially clear and present dangers to pubic safety. No wonder so many voters were outraged by the federal government’s record on this count.

In addition, all the figures I’ve provided for illegal immigrant crime rates come from the Migration Policy Institute. Its website specifies that it favors “rights-based immigration and refugee policies” – which raises an orange flag concerning its objectivity to me. And that orange flag should turn bright red for everyone after reading through its list of donors – which includes the hitherto immigration-friendly U.S. government, the Mexican government, the foundation run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (a strong supporter of immigration policies that have undercut wages in the U.S. tech sector), and WalMart (a long-time pillar of the nation’s corporate cheap labor lobby). So it’s entirely possible that the real numbers for illegal immigrant felons are considerably higher.

Meanwhile, much stronger evidence for the abject failure of current American immigration policy comes from a new Washington Post report finding that “Central American families are flowing into the United States in growing numbers….” Not surprisingly, this Mainstream Media article tries to put the blame on Mr. Trump and his supporters:

“Trump has pledged to build a towering border wall and deport millions, proposals that have been sketched out so far only in broad terms.

“By winning the election, Trump may have inadvertently made his job even harder. His plans have become a selling point for the smugglers urging people to cross the border before a wall goes up, according to migrants and officials in the United States and Mexico.”

Even less surprisingly, the authors missed the real news here: Throughout his administration, President Obama has been making statements to the effect that “Overall, the border is less porous than it’s been any time since the 1970s.” So did Mr. Trump’s main general election opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. But as the Post article makes painfully obvious, both of them, as well as the Open Borders crowd generally, were blowing smoke.

Trump will no doubt face daunting obstacles towards keeping his immigration promises. But so far, it’s clear that none of them will involve the self-inflicted handicaps of cockeyed priorities and deliberately wishful thinking.

Im-Politic: The Day After, Part I

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2016 election, Bernie Sanders, Cheap Labor Lobby, conservatism, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jeb Bush, Mainstream Media, Marco Rubio, Obama, offshoring lobby, Open Borders, Paul Ryan, Populism, Republicans, Ross Perot, Ted Cruz, Trade

How did I go wrong on analyzing President-elect Donald Trump’s rise during this epochal presidential campaign? Let me count the ways.

My first post on this populist phenom expressed full confidence that he would never win the Republican presidential nomination – or even “come close.” Although I didn’t explicitly say it, I viewed the idea that he could win the White House as positively ludicrous.

After several of his insult barrages and other verbal bombshells, I was all but certain that his campaign was finished.

I had no doubt that, as with third party presidential candidate and fellow tycoon Ross Perot in 1992, his unwillingness to take advice – especially of the critical kind – would cripple his candidacy. Similarly, I believed that he would run his presidential operation the same way that many successful business leaders engage in politics – incompetently.

So I guess I’m qualified to be a Mainstream Media pundit! But seriously, since I got at least some things right – like translating Trump-ish into language that the chattering class should have been able to grasp – I’m not totally sheepish about serving up a first batch of thoughts about what all Americans either are chewing over or should be in the weeks ahead.

>For all the teeth-gnashing about the ugliness of the presidential campaign, and for all the responsibility for it that Trump deserves, imagine what the race for the White House would have been like without him. The Republicans would have nominated either a tool of the Cheap Labor and Offshoring Lobbies like former Florida Governor Jeb Bush or Florida Senator Marco Rubio, or a social conservative extremist like Texas Senator Ted Cruz. And none of them would have felt major pressure to pay attention to the Republican base’s anger about mass immigration, job- and growth-killing trade deals, or the income stagnation they fostered.

On the Democratic side, this kind of conventional Republican nominee may well have enabled Hillary Clinton to win that party’s crown without many nods to the populist positions taken by her chief rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders – including on trade policy, along with Wall Street reform.

What a clueless – and maybe dangerously clueless – campaign that would have been! In particular, with no political safety valve, the continuing buildup of working- and middle-class rage that both major-party standard-bearers would have kept blithely ignoring could have exploded much more powerfully.

>The Trump victory could be a milestone in not only American politics, but policy. Yet the potential may never become performance unless this most successful outsider in U.S. history meets a staffing challenge that has hung over his campaign since his strength starting being apparent. Specifically, where is he going to find the populist policy specialists and academics and business types and politicians to fill the hundreds of key cabinet and sub-cabinet posts where presidential ambitions can just as easily die a lingering death as produce real, on-the-ground change?

The institutions needed to nurture and train such cadres simply haven’t existed. Or they’ve been way too small (i.e., modestly funded) to produce the needed numbers and possibly the needed quality. After his first White House victory, President Obama dismayed many of his followers by appointing to key economic positions in particular the kinds of Wall Street-friendly Clintonians that he had raked over the coals during that campaign (including Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination that year). His response? As I recall at the time (and I’m still looking for a link), something to the effect “What choice do I have?”

Although Mr. Obama never intended to bring the substantive break with the past that his successor has vowed, Mr. Trump could find himself in the same position, and his administration could drift steadily, and even imperceptibly towards a more conventional, and indeed donor-class-friendly, form of conservatism.

>Finally, for today, the Trump triumph places the Republican party in its current form in just as much jeopardy as a narrow Trump loss.

Had Trump lost in a landslide, the GOP’s future would have been easy to predict: The Never-Trumpian Washington establishment would have loudly crowed, “I told you so,” and advanced an overpowering rationale for returning to its low-tax, small-government, free-trading, open-borders, global interventionist orthodoxy of recent decades.

But last night’s results could be the death knell of establishment Republicanism – at least as a viable political force. It’s entirely possible that this establishment’s corporate and similar funders could decide for the time being to keep afloat the think tanks, media outlets, lobbying shops, and political consultancies comprising the GOP/conservative establishment. Indeed, since Trump could flop disastrously, preserving this infrastructure in preparation for 2020 makes perfect sense.

But for the foreseeable future, this is Donald Trump’s Republican party (whether he has to staff his administration with lots of standard-issue Republicans or not). House Speaker Paul Ryan, who strongly opposes his own party’s president-elect on issues ranging from trade and immigration to entitlement reform to foreign policy, can talk all he wants about reestablishing party unity. But the key question surrounding such calls is always “Unity on whose terms?” Until Mr. Trump fails a major test of leadership (or even two or three), or until events beyond his control render him ineffective (like a weakening economy) he’ll be calling the shots.  

And however lavishly financed the party’s establishment may remain, this election has made painfully obvious that its grassroots are shrunken and browned out. Since one of the prime takeaways of this election cycle is that voters ultimately count even more than money, it will become increasingly difficult even for the donors to treat the Washington Republicans as a true national political movement, as opposed to a self-appointed clique of supposed leaders with embarrassingly few followers.

So there’s of course a chance that the Ryan wing (emboldened by some truly desperate plutocrats) might at some point bolt and try to reclaim the Republican brand as its own or launch a third party. But these well-heeled dissidents will face the strongest of tides with the weakest of paddles – the more so given Ryan’s acknowledgment that Trump’s unexpectedly strong showing helped the GOP retain both houses of Congress. 

Tomorrow I’ll be offering some further initial thoughts. Until then, like so many others, I’ll go back to catching my breath!

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Can the U.S. Chamber Put One & One Together on Trade?

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Cheap Labor Lobby, Donald Trump, free trade agreements, General Electric, Information Technology Agreement, ITA, Jobs, multinational corporations, national security, non-tariff barriers, offshoring, Ooffshoring Lobby, protectionism, tariffs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’ve long urged trade policy critics (including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump) to stop questioning the intelligence of globalization cheerleaders. Especially, when we’re talking about offshoring-happy multinational corporations and their hired guns in Washington, I’ve insisted, they’ve known exactly what they’ve been doing – pushing the trade and other international economic policies likeliest to reward the companies with the biggest profits in the shortest time-frame.

True, the longer-term effects have produced losses for many of them – especially since the immense imbalances resulting from these policies helped trigger the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession, which at least initially hit earnings and stock prices. But charges of stupidity don’t seem valid even in this regard, since most of the American economic system’s incentives discourage long-term thinking.

A new U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, however, could justify a rethink. For it’s a great example of an organization ignoring evidence that’s been staring it in the face for literally decades – and that’s become especially glaring recently. Moreover, it inadvertently validates the claim made by American politicians like Trump that major numbers of manufacturing jobs could be returned to the United States if Washington only mustered the will to do so.

The Chamber, of course, has been one of the most powerful mainstays of the overlapping corporate offshoring and cheap labor lobbies, and this morning released a study bemoaning the worldwide growth of what’s often called “techno-protectionism.” That is, more and more countries have been working harder and harder to promote their own domestic information technology industries through a variety of new regulations that the Chamber rightly notes have cloaked simple beggar-thy-neighbor aims in national security rationales.

In the Chamber’s words, “some national governments, by intentionally or unintentionally defining security concerns in an overly broad manner, are applying intense pressure on the [tech] sector to localize rather than globalize.” And the group has echoed numerous charges that China is a prime culprit.

The Chamber’s long list of these practices underscores points that I and many others have been making since even before trade and offshoring became hot-button issues. The first is that such non-tariff barriers, which are excruciatingly difficult for trade agreements to deal with meaningfully, have become much more important obstacles to international commerce than more easily identifiable and therefore vulnerable tariffs and quotas. The second is that, since foreign governments with secretive bureaucracies can erect and maintain these barriers much more effectively than the more transparent United States, trade agreements with these governments usually shaft America.

Yet groups like the Chamber have typically ignored or dismissed these concerns – largely because they produce so much overseas, and care so little about whether their products are Made in America or not. Indeed, their foreign factories and other facilities actually often benefit from the host countries’ subsidies and various forms of protection.

That’s why the Chamber so enthusiastically greeted the announcement late last year that Washington had negotiated a new global agreement to free up further trade in technology products. This broadening of a 1997 pact – the Information Technology Agreement, or ITA – was hailed by the Chamber as “welcome news for American companies and the workers they employ” because it would “end tariffs on approximately $1 trillion worth of high-tech products….” Consistent with my above analysis, none of the dozens of non-tariff barriers that distorted this tech trade was even mentioned.

Less than a year later, we see the Chamber complaining that these largely hidden trade barriers have not only remained so influential, but are spreading so rapidly that they “are now threatening to slow or even reverse” the “globalization of the [tech] sector.” Translation: Despite supposed landmark achievements like the ITA (and the long string of similar deals that preceded it starting with the North American Free Trade Agreement) protectionism worldwide has both remained in place and become so widespread that it’s now handcuffing self-styled global businesses that had hitherto boasted of their power to ignore borders.

In this respect, the Chamber is echoing a recent lament of General Electric’s CEO, who complained that localization pressures have become so pervasive and intense that his giant firm has no choice but to bow before them.

As I pointed out in covering this corporate confession, the global economy features one immense exception to this spreading protectionism – the United States. And ironically, it’s America that has the world’s greatest store of the kind of leverage needed to pursue this strategy successfully. Trump-ian politicians have been saying nothing more remarkable than that this leverage should be used. Reports like the Chamber’s today can only make it that much more difficult for Trump-ian opponents to dismiss this idea as delusional.

Im-Politic: Establishment Answers Voter Anger with…Immigration Hikes

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2016 election, Barbara Mikulski, Cheap Labor Lobby, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, H-1B visa, H-2B visa, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, L-1 visa, Obama, OPT, Optional Practical Training, productivity, technology companies, technology workers, Thom Tillis, visas, wages

Several times recently I’ve reminded America’s political establishment (and its journalistic enablers) that if they were really serious about eliminating the Trump-ist threat to their hold on power, they’d respond seriously to the legitimate security and economic grievances animating his growing legions of supporters. And just as often I’ve noted that the establishment keeps ignoring this advice.

This week, the situation changed fundamentally. Republicans and Democrats in Washington have decided to change their approach. Unfortunately, the new strategy apparently is to squeeze the struggling middle class and working class harder by bringing in more job- and wage-killing legal immigrants.

Keep in mind that the moves I’ll be describing have nothing to do with the debate over stronger curbs on illegal immigration, or over the fate of the country’s current illegal immigrant population (currently estimated at roughly 11 or 12 million). Instead, they concern measures to pump up the supply of workers available to domestic employers still higher at a time when wages for the typical household have stagnated for decade, meaning that business still occupies the labor market’s commanding heights. Moreover, the new legal immigrants won’t simply be coming into the worst-paying industries and occupations. A higher labor supply seems in order for “industries of the future” as well.

And also keep in mind: With a single exception I’ve found, none of these decisions appears to have been covered by the Establishment Media.

So I’m sure none of you read that when President Obama just signed Congress’ big omnibus spending bill into law, thereby ensuring no government shutdown for the medium-term future, he enacted into law a potentially huge increase in the numbers of unskilled immigrants sought on a seasonal basis by parts of the economy ranging from manufacturing to tourism. Visas for these foreign workers (called H-2Bs) had been capped at 66,000 annually, but evidently the Cheap Labor Lobby convinced legislators from both major parties that they faced crippling shortages of such employees, and persuaded (outgoing) Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and a Republican counterpart, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, to introduce a measure that felt their pain, and that was stuck into the spending bill at the last minute. According to their Alabama Republican colleague Jeff Sessions, the Senate’s leading immigration policy critic, and the AFL-CIO, the changes could triple or quadruple admissions.

As I’ve explained before, the labor shortage claim is patent nonsense, if only because the kinds of wage increases basic that economic tells us result from real labor shortages are nowhere in sight. Moreover, it seems that no one else on Capitol Hill or in the Obama administration thought to suggest to these employers that often in American history, business has responded to labor shortages perceived and real by improving their management acts to boost efficiency or to develop or invest in new machinery and technologies that could substitute for increasingly expensive labor. The latter approach, incidentally, was so common that it largely explains why the United States so quickly grew into a global science, technology, and manufacturing leader. Further, the productivity improvements that resulted keyed the nation’s longstanding world-beating performance on this score.

Nor did the Cheap Labor Lobby hear the equally obvious counter-argument that an industry or company that can’t raise productivity enough to offset higher wages simply doesn’t have a viable business model, and doesn’t deserve an immigration subsidy from Washington.

Another provision in the spending bill seems to limit the use of cheap immigrant labor by high tech companies by doubling the fees charged for using one category of foreign workers with supposedly special skills (the H-1B category), and more than doubling it for another category (L-1s). But there’s much less to these requirements than meets the eye, mainly because firms don’t have to pay the fees if they have fewer than 50 employees, or if they’re larger but fewer than half their workers already hold these visas. As a result, the fees will be highly concentrated in Indian-owned tech firms who make unusually heavy use of H-1Bs and L-1s. But their big American-owned counterparts, like Intel and Google and Microsoft, which also employ many of these foreign workers, will continue getting off scott-free.

In addition, the Obama administration has in the works a stealth increase in the supply of foreign tech workers. The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program has long permitted foreign students to work in the United States for twelve months after graduation. Since employers who use them don’t have to pay payroll taxes on them and since the program includes no minimum wage requirements, many technology firms have found these employees cheaper and therefore more attractive than American workers. At least as important, OPT workers can substitute for H-1Bs, whose use is capped at 65,000 annually.

In 2008, President George W. Bush extended the time-frame to 17 months for graduates with science and technology degrees (Congress’ approval wasn’t needed), but last year, a federal court overturned this policy on the grounds that the Bush decision taken without adequate public notice and comment. Nonetheless, the court also gave the government itself a six-month extension for the 17-month policy, and the same amount of time (until February) to seek the longer OPT period the right way. The Obama administration has not only decided to do so, but has submitted a draft proposal to extend the total time-frame to three years.

Some members of Congress have pushed back, but given the views not only of Trump supporters, but the public at large, it’s amazing (or not?) that such steps are even being contemplated. After all, polls consistently show that when it comes to levels of immigration (again, this has nothing to do with illegal immigration), Americans want them stabilized, or lowered – not increased.

So expect the current Election 2016 dynamic to continue. Growing numbers of voters will become angrier and angrier about their diminished economic prospects and threatened security, establishment politicians in both parties will ignore or actively reject the messages they’re sending, and both they and the equally establishment-oriented media will even more self-righteously condemn the rise of demagoguery in America.

Im-Politic: Why the Elites’ Trump Bashing Keeps Flopping

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2016 election, Bloomberg, Cheap Labor Lobby, China, Donald Trump, elites, free trade agreements, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, media, Mitch McConnell, Muslim ban, NBC News, Obama, political class, punditocracy, Rasmussen, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Timothy Egan, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, wages

Two weeks ago, I wrote that if opponents of Donald Trump really wanted to stop him in his tracks, they’d support seriously addressing the legitimate economic grievances of his supporters. The firestorm ignited by the Republican presidential front-runner’s proposal temporarily to bar non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States signals that legitimate national and personal security grievances need to be dealt with, too. After all, that would be a constructive response. Instead, most of the anti-Trump forces, especially in the nation’s elite media and political classes, have doubled down on the invective.  

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan’s latest offering was especially revealing in this regard. He both repeated the by-now standard denunciations of Trump as a neo-fascist, bigot, and xenophobe. But then he added an interesting wrinkle. Like some of his colleagues, he made a (typically condescending) nod to how “most” Trump supporters “do not see the shadow of the [Nazi] Reich when they look in the mirror. They are white, lower middle class, with little education beyond high school. The global economy has run them over. They don’t recognize their country. And they need a villain.”

Egan also just as typically charged that “Trump has no solutions for the desperate angst of his followers.” That’s patently false. Trump’s position paper on China, closely resembles the specifics-laden approach taken by many critics of America’s China trade policies in Congress – especially in Democratic ranks. And although his call for mass deportation is surely unworkable (and likely to be replaced by a completely realistic attrition strategy), Trump’s immigration position paper is similarly detailed and entirely practicable – albeit anathema to the corporate Cheap Labor Lobby and the guilt-saturated elitist mass immigration crowd on the Left.

But then Egan did something completely weird. He insisted that “Tearing up trade agreements is not going to happen.” But he himself offered no specifics as to why. After all, all treaties and similar agreements have “out” clauses. Abundant evidence shows that these deals and related policies have slowed growth (and therefore job creation) tremendously in this already miserable economic recovery. And opposition to the latest attempt to add to this destructive record – President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership – keeps mounting. Even so dedicated an outsourcer toady as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has just urged that Congress not vote on the TPP until after the election.

Which all raises the question: Is Egan ignorant enough to believe that a major course change for U.S. trade policy is still impossible? Or is he one of those boardroom liberals who’s trying to prevent one?

Meanwhile, the futility of trying to marginalize Trump at all costs becomes clearer by the day. The latest evidence comes from the current round of opinion polls. As I’ve often written, they’re often full of problems and this last batch is especially all over the map. But two of them (from Rasmussen and Bloomberg) show that Trump’s Muslim ban – which I oppose – has attracted significant and partly bipartisan backing, and the Rasmussen survey shows it enjoys a plurality.

Perhaps more revealing, NBC and The Wall Street Journal, which pegged backing for the ban at only 25 percent nationally, found in a pre-ban sounding that 54 percent of Americans believed that the United States admits too many immigrants from the Middle East – including more than a third of Democrats. And what does the public think of President Obama’s approach to terrorism and ISIS – which particularly in the former case the punditocracy seems to consider the gold standard? According to a new New York Times-CBS News survey, 57 percent disapprove.

The bottom-line here appears pretty clear. Mainstream political and media elites are increasingly convinced that Trump has “crossed lines” that must never be crossed, and data keeps appearing that, thanks largely and understandably to their clueless insistence that standard approaches are working as well as possible, the lines themselves are moving dramatically.

Following Up: Glimmers of Progress on ISIS and on Covering Trump

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2016 election, Afghanistan, airstrikes, Al Qaeda, amnesty, Ashton Carter, boots on the ground, Cheap Labor Lobby, Donald Trump, Following Up, Immigration, ISIS, Middle East, offshoring, offshoring lobby, Republicans, Ross Douthat, special forces, terrorism, The New York Times, Trade

Since I have no evidence that either anyone with President Obama’s ear or New York Times columnist Ross Douthat reads RealityChek, I can’t take credit for important insights each one has arrived at in recent days. Even so, it’s gratifying that both America’s latest decision on tactics for fighting ISIS, and Douthat’s new column on dealing with the rise of Donald Trump in American politics, both echo points I’ve been making here for many months.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that the Obama administration would send to Iraq American commandos from a unit whose mission has been capturing or killing top terrorist leaders overseas. Carter euphemistically called the commando team a “specialized expeditionary targeting force.” But its deployment represents the most important and useful escalation of the fight against ISIS that the president has approved – and potentially a move toward a strategy I’ve long described as America’s best hope for neutralizing this and similar terror threats.

The conventional wisdom is correct in observing that airstrikes alone are no lasting solution against ISIS and comparable groups. In order to defeat the terrorists on foreign battlefields – thereby preventing them from striking the American homeland – terrorist-held territory will need to be recaptured and then secured, and only significant ground troops can achieve that objective. The conventional wisdom is also correct in observing that the more these boots on the ground are dominated by troops from Middle Eastern countries, the less likely it is to provoke a backlash from local populations.

But as I’ve noted, the conventional wisdom is completely loopy in assigning any chance that Middle Eastern countries will rise to this occasion. For local conflicts pit so many religious and ethnic forces against each other, and thus have so many dimensions, that each local power invariably has numerous other agendas than defeating ISIS – including those they consider more important.

So the beginning of wisdom in countering ISIS begins with realizing that no major locally dominated ground campaign is in the offing, and then searching for substitutes. The best that I can think of is focusing not on decisively defeating terrorists on the battlefield, but on keeping them off balance enough to deny them the secure control of territory needed to create bases for planning strikes on the United States, and to prevent their leaders from spending significant time for planning – as opposed to running for their lives.

In conjunction with strengthening border security, such an approach would concentrate on interests that are truly vital to America – protecting the homeland, as opposed to the pipe dream of pacifying or reforming the Middle East. And unlike those aims, it has the added virtue of being achievable at acceptable cost and risk. And as I’ve also noted, this very strategy showed real promise in Afghanistan, where it long neutralized and actually did “degrade” Al Qaeda, to use a favorite Obama term.

Mr. Obama’s decision to send commandos after ISIS leaders means that one leg of my preferred strategy is being put in place – though their numbers may not be adequate. Intensified airstrikes could represent the second leg – though their intensity may still not suffice. If only genuine resolve to secure America’s borders wasn’t still sorely lacking.

This morning, The New York Times‘ Douthat provided more reinforcement for recent RealityChek posts on the presidential campaign. He wrote compellingly (and it’s worth quoting in full) that:

“[F]reaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far — the deep disaffection with the Republican Party’s economic policies among working-class conservatives, the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration, the accurate sense that the American elite has misgoverned the country at home and abroad.

“If Republicans don’t want Trump the phenomenon to turn into an actual movement, if they don’t want the intimations of fascism in his appeal to cohere into something programmatically dangerous, then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step — a way to repress the problem rather than dealing with it, to dismiss discontents and have them return, stronger and deadlier, further down the road.

“The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream ‘Hitler!’ on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.”

I made similar arguments last Saturday, and can only say “Amen.” Here’s hoping that Douthat’s good sense will start spreading to his fellow journalists (including at The New York Times) – and more important, to both other Republicans and Democrats. But I have my doubt, since the corporate Offshoring and pro-amnesty Cheap Labor Lobbies remain so influential over both parties, and since many Democrats and liberals in particular seem to value ever greater immigration inflows over the interests of native-born workers. So you can expect me to keep calling out those who prioritize Trump demonization over ensuring that America’s economy starts working for the great majority of Americans once again.

Im-Politic: How Polls Skew Their Results on Immigration and Amnesty

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amnesty, attrition, Central America, chattering class, Cheap Labor Lobby, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, legalization, magnet effect, Mainstream Media, Open Borders, path to citizenship, polls, The Washington Post

The Washington Post editorial board seems pretty confident that if U.S. immigration policy faithfully reflected the views of the majority of the American people, it would come down decisively for the first option in the “bottom line question – should illegal immigrants stay or go.” Too bad the Post writers either didn’t read the collection of polls they cited, or decided to cherry pick the results. For these same surveys show how crimped the debate permitted by them and their Mainstream Media and chattering class colleagues has been. Moreover, many of their findings point to immigration policy perceptions and priorities that are much more Trump-ian than the Post and other amnesty supporters would like.

The Post is correct in noting that most respondents in most polls asking the question support either (a) granting illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, provided that certain conditions are met (like paying fines and back taxes, and learning English); or (b) awarding them legal status short of citizenship (also usually with conditions). But it’s stunning to see how completely polling organizations have ignored two major anti-amnesty considerations in the choices they present.

In particular, of the 70 surveys in the set used as evidence by the Post, none indicates to Americans that amnesty, active deportation efforts, or simply continuing the illegal immigration status quo are far from the only options available to policymakers. In fact, not a single one of these polls mentions attrition as a strategy for dealing with the illegals problem.

It’s true that such an approach would leave many illegals resident in the United States. But measures like denying these immigrants most government benefits – including driver’s licenses and access to the financial system – and enforcing existing laws against hiring them (which is overwhelmingly backed by Americans) – would undoubtedly reduce their numbers significantly. The more sluggish the U.S. economy and its creation of all manner of jobs remains, moreover, the more effective attrition would be. And this policy would arguably be much cheaper than at least one condition typically attached to amnesty-like proposals – conducting “background checks” on all illegals who apply. Just to remind, their total numbers are pegged at about 11 million.

Equally important, only one of the 70 surveys in this compilation even mentioned to respondents a major anti-amnesty argument: the likelihood that such lenient American policies would create a powerful magnet effect and lure many more immigrants into the country. This survey was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in late-July, 2014, and focused on the surge of Central American child migrants that began trying to cross U.S. borders in spring and summer of that year.

One of the first questions the Institute asked was whether Washington “should offer shelter and support [to the children] while beginning a process to determine whether they should be deported or allowed to stay in the U.S. [or whether America] should deport them immediately back to their home countries.” “Shelter and support” while investigating their circumstances beat “deport them immediately” by a wide 70 percent to 26 percent margin. But then, quite a few questions later, respondents were asked whether they agree that “The U.S. should NOT allow children coming from Central America to stay because it will encourage others to ignore our laws and increase illegal immigration.” Fifty-nine percent “completely” or “mostly” agreed; only 39 percent “completely” or “mostly” disagreed – a big turnaround.

It’s also worth noting that children are understandably an immigrant group that’s bound to elicit considerable sympathy. Imagine how the public might respond when told by pollsters that citizenship or legalization offers could greatly boost inflows of all kinds of immigrants.

Also supporting the notion that mentioning the magnet effect would dramatically change poll answers on amnesty-like policies: This group of 70 polls consistently shows that large majorities of Americans favor reducing legal immigration or keeping the annual numbers where they are, rather than increasing it. So it seems logical that the U.S. public would reject citizenship or legalization policies if it learned they may well greatly increase the country’s overall foreign-born population. (At the same time, these polls make just as clear that most Americans believe that immigration’s benefits to the country – in terms of diversifying it and adding talent – outweigh costs such as lost jobs or greater welfare payments or diluted traditional values.)

No wonder, then, that Open Borders types in the Mainstream Media and in politics are so upset at Trump and others who favor more restrictive immigration policies. And no wonder they work so hard at sliming them as racists, nativists, and know-nothings. If Americans ever found out their real options on immigration policy, the demand for approaches that prioritize the interests of most of the native-born population first – rather than those of the Cheap Labor Lobby, Democratic Party wannabe ballot-stuffers, elitist liberal guilt-mongers, and self-righteous one-world-ers – could become irresistible.