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Im-Politic: Shutdown Lessons – So Far

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

border security, border wall, China, Congress, Democrats, E-Verify, election 2020, establishment Republicans, government shutdown, illegal alien crime, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, North Korea, Paul Ryan, Populism, Russia-Gate, shutdown, Swamp, Trade, Trump

Since the fight isn’t over by a long shot, it’s chancy at best to try to figure out many of the biggest implications of President Trump’s decision to reopen the shut down parts of the federal government despite getting no new funding for a Border Wall or any new physical barriers aimed at strengthening border security. Still, here’s what looks reasonably clear at this stage of the struggle:

>First and foremost, the shutdown situation, context, and therefore even the verdict were set in stone more than two years ago by the Russia collusion/election cheating charges, by the opposition (mainly passive) to President Trump’s immigration agenda of the establishment Republicans still so prominent in Congress (and not just in its leadership) during the Trump administration’s first two years, and the resulting politics of impeachment.

That is, as I’ve written previously, from his first day in office, Mr. Trump needed to secure the protection of Congressional Republicans – including their establishment ranks. Therefore, he needed to prioritize their top issues, like Obamacare repeal and a tax cut heavily weighted toward business, rather than his top – populist – issues, like fixing America’s broken trade and immigration policies.

It’s true that in his second year, the President has ramped up the pressure on leading trade predator China and on other mercantile economies (with his steel and aluminum tariffs). But unlike the Border Wall, those measures didn’t require Congressional funding, or any form of approval from Capitol Hill. (The new trade deal with Mexico and Canada to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement seems to be moderate enough to at least have attracted mild endorsements from the Big Business-run Offshoring Lobby.)

And if establishment Congressional Republican leaders like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell weren’t going to go the mat for the Wall (which of course would also have required helping to persuade some moderate Democrats to come along as well) when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress, there was absolutely no way Mr. Trump could have generated Wall funding once the Democrats gained control of the House.

Incidentally, it’s being reported by at least one non-anonymous source with first-hand knowledge that the President himself provided some confirmation for this argument – by blaming Ryan for “having ‘screwed him’ by not securing border wall money when Republicans had the majority….”

>If you’re going to shut down the government, and especially if you’re planning to dig in your heels for the duration, shut down the right agencies. For example, if the issues are illegal immigration and law enforcement, don’t shut down the Department of Homeland Security – which is chiefly responsible for protecting the nation’s security in these areas. If you’re a Republican, don’t shut down the Agriculture Department, whose rural constituency is overwhelmingly Republican and conservative, and which was already unhappy enough with the President about China trade policies that had pretty much shut down America’s immense soybean exports to the People’s Republic. Also if you’re a Republican don’t shutdown the Federal Aviation Administration – because victims are especially likely to be businessmen and women and other relatively affluent voters – who provide lots of actual and gettable Republican votes.

>Consequently, the politics of shutdowns, and of some aspects of political populism, are becoming clearer than ever – especially if they’re long ones. And many of these should have been obvious from the start.

Most obvious, voters of all kinds – populists and non-populists alike – who are receptive to anti-government arguments get a lot less anti-government when the affected services affect them directly.

Less obvious, populist voters themselves say and act happy to see populist politicians act like disrupters when it comes to the mutually supportive networks of corruption and propaganda set up by establishment politicians, lobbyists, consultants, think tank hacks, and mainstream media journalists in the Washington, D.C. Swamp The same goes for establishment policies they believe have brought them nothing but trouble, like mass immigration, offshoring-friendly trade deals, and pipe dream foreign wars and similar ventures.

What they don’t want disrupted is the steady stream of government services that make their lives easier – and even viable in the first place.

>For reasons like the above, it’s unimaginable that Mr. Trump will follow through with his threat to shut down the government again if he can’t persuade Democrats to compromise acceptably on Wall funding. His best hope for some kind of partial win is to portray himself as the reasonable party, and the Democrats as the arrogant, rigid extremists.

>In that vein, expect continued, and even more frequent administration activity spotlighting crimes by illegal aliens – especially in the districts and states of key lawmakers. But success is also likely to require claims (which are entirely credible, in my opinion) that illegal aliens steal jobs from native-born Americans and/or drive down their wages, and that the leading victims include minority Americans.

>One particularly effective tactic would be for the administration to push for mandating that businesses use the E-Verify system to prevent illegal aliens out of the national job market. E-Verify is currently being used on a voluntary basis by many companies (not including most Trump-owned companies), and by all accounts is extremely accurate. (That is, it snares virtually no innocents in its electronic net.) But its use so far has been voluntary, meaning that companies that blow it off get legs up on their competition by virtue of easy access to bargain-basement illegal employees.

>Another potentially effective talking point that the administration has strangely ignored: focusing on the sheer numbers of foreigners who’d be likely to swamp U.S. borders – and the country’s asylum system – without more effective physical barriers. The administration and all of its spokespeople and media supporters should keep asking the question of Democrats: How many tens of millions of these would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers can the United States afford to admit?

>If these Trump efforts fail, declaring a national emergency looks like the President’s best bet to reestablish credibility with his base and perhaps with fence-sitting voters and Members of Congress, and even some legislative opponents.

Such a move could also go far toward putting the most politically damaging aspects of this issue behind him. After all, there’s little that opponents can do about such a national emergency declaration other than try to tie it up in the courts. And Mr. Trump could – credibly, in my opinion – respond by using information about illegal aliens crime to accuse them of endangering their countrymen and women’s security. So even if rulings by friendly judges hold up actual Wall construction, Mr. Trump’s political position could benefit.

>The President also could well be tempted to score political points by pressing harder to win some foreign policy victories. A China trade deal and significant progress in limiting the nuclear weapons threat posed by North Korea are the two most obvious candidates, but presidential over-eagerness could seriously undermine major American interests.

I’m most worried about the administration’s dealings with Beijing, given the talk out of China of ending the current trade conflict for the foreseeable future by buying lots more American goods and services. More Chinese imports from the United States would be welcome – no mistake about that. But not if the price is letting Beijing off the hook for its ambitions literally to steal and subsidize its way to global supremacy in key technologies that not so coincidentally have big defense implications.

>Finally, re shutdowns themselves, the policy of requiring furloughed workers to do their jobs without getting paid strikes me as completely unacceptable. In other circumstances like this, at home or abroad, these practices are called “forced labor” or “wage theft.” And they’re rightly condemned. Nearly as bad, these furlough practices help pro-shutdown politicians curry favor with their supporters while mitigating or at least postponing the harm to the public – including those supporters.

In other words, if you’re for a shutdown, make it a real shutdown. For any agency whose funding is cut off, the workers stay home – and the jobs they do don’t get done. If that means chaos ensues and public safety is put at risk, too bad for shutdown-ers. They’ll own it.

>Speaking of owning it, that’s the situation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now finds herself in not only regarding border security but every issue that comes up in national affairs. In particular, when you show you’ve gained enough power to win political battles, you also show that you’ve gained enough power to frustrate initiatives that may be unpopular among your caucus in Congress, or some of your caucus, but that may be popular with everyone else. So forget about the the idea that Pelosi is now free to conduct a campaign of all-encompassing resistance to the Trump agenda, and to dictate terms of those proposals that she is willing to consider.

>And finally, that’s one of the many reasons it’s way too early to predict how the shutdown fight will impact the next presidential election. The main additional reasons: There’s still a long ways to go before that campaign achieves critical mass, and any number of events could turn the political calculus upside down. And similarly, it’s glaringly obvious that the Trump era news cycle – along with the national attention span – is already the shortest in recent memory – and could well keep getting shorter.

Im-Politic: How Trump Can Clean Up His (Needless) Immigration Mess

29 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

2016 election, amnesty, anchor children, border security, deportation, Donald Trump, E-Verify, Hillary Clinton, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, public assistance, Sanctuary Cities

Donald Trump has been getting it from all sides because of his recent, contradictory statements on immigration policy, and whatever the motives, the criticisms of the Republican presidential candidate are richly deserved for one fundamental reason: You don’t need to be an Open Borders fan or a total deportation hardliner to recognize that, with just over two months left till Election Day, Trump should at least have the main details of his approach down cold. It’s painfully clear that he doesn’t.

Even worse, if you’re a Trump supporter, the core precepts of a sensible and politically appealing alternative to current immigration policy – and to the even more permissive version being pushed by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton – are anything but rocket science. And this description even applies to policies for dealing with the nation’s current illegal immigrant population, the dimension of immigration reform widely thought to present policymakers with their most difficult, even agonizing, choices, and that’s given Trump the greatest difficulty over the last week.

Trump has announced that he’ll be giving a speech on immigration this Wednesday, and if he has any hope of clarifying his views in a way likely to win more votes than it loses, here’s what he’ll have to do.

To start, Trump needs to remember that the kind of mass deportation he’s referred to in TV interviews was not part of the immigration blueprint he released a year ago – and for very good reasons. Surely at one point he and his team recognized the logistical nightmare, budget-busting costs, and public relations disaster this idea entailed.

Then the candidate needs to remember that he and his team recognized that the nation is by no means therefore stuck with the various versions of soft or quasi-amnesties with which he’s flirted in recent days. For that immigration blueprint made a compelling, though only partial and implicit, case for addressing the great majority of the illegal population that has been otherwise law-abiding through attrition. That is, rather than trying actively to kick millions of men, women, and children out of he country, Washington would concentrate on steadily reducing this population by turning off or weakening the two big magnets collectively responsible for their presence.

The first of course concerns jobs, and the Trump blueprint identifies most of the answer – mandating nation-wide use by employers of the E-verify system, a computerized means of identifying job applicants residing in America without proper authorization. As I’ve reported, where it has been used, E-verify boasts an outstanding record of success. And its effectiveness could be supercharged by requiring that businesses pay truly painful penalties for violations.

The second big magnet encompasses various kinds of public assistance currently being extended to illegal immigrants, but the Trump blueprint covered only some of the bases. Yes, de-funding sanctuary cities would help bring to an end the extra layer of legal protection perversely provided throughout the country even for criminal aliens. But the statement should have also expressly prohibited any state from providing driver’s licenses and public college tuition benefits for illegals.

Even these measures would leave intact two big illegal immigrant drains on the public purse – their families’ use of hospital emergency rooms and public schools, and their eligibility for and use of transfer payments and entitlement programs like Obamacare (especially by “anchor children,” who are born in the United States and thus automatically enjoy full citizenship rights). The Trump blueprint glosses over the former issue and would handle the latter by ending birthright citizenship.

In principle, I support preventing illegals from trying to strengthen their legal status in America by creating these human faits accompli. But I also foresee a huge constitutional fight that would take years at best to resolve. As a result, it makes the most sense to rely mainly on turning off the jobs magnet in order to persuade illegals to leave the United States. Clearly, many would remain, counting on their ability to receive public assistance via the anchor children route. But using an E-Verify-type system to crack down on welfare use gained through falsified documents would pare illegals’ numbers further. And the new barriers to finding American jobs would help prevent future surges in their ranks – especially if the U.S. economy’s growth picked up enough to boost employment opportunities greatly.

Obviously, this attrition strategy wouldn’t placate either extreme on the spectrum of immigration policy views. But along with the serious border enforcement Trump has consistently promised, it would achieve the crucial aims of bringing the illegals population down to much more economically manageable levels, and keeping it there. And attrition would do so in the “fair” and “humane” way that Trump understands a critical mass of American voters – rightly – are seeking.  

Im-Politic: The New York Times Loses It on Trump and Immigration

22 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2016 elections, deportation, Donald Trump, E-Verify, H1B, ICE, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jobs, Republicans, September 11, tech workers, The New York Times, visa overstays, visas, wages

The New York Times‘ recent editorial trashing of Donald Trump’s immigration proposals was so over the top and intellectually dishonest that you’d think the paper’s editorial board members and owners’ main worry was losing access to the super-cheap illegal nannies and gardeners that support their one percent-er lifestyles. Certainly nothing else about Trump’s policies can possibly justify the vehemence with which The Times attacked him.

Predictably, the editorial focused on Trump’s position on deporting America’s huge illegal immigrant population, and the related issue of birthright citizenship. Trump does deserve some criticism on this score. As I’ve argued, aside from criminal aliens, he should be focusing not on active deportation but on a policy of attrition – discouraging illegals from remaining in the country by denying them both employment opportunities and government benefits. And although I agree with Trump (and many others) that the anchor babies problem is unacceptable, it does seem that Constitutional issues will prevent any solution for many years.

But as I’ve also pointed out, mass deportation wasn’t even a part of Trump’s plan, although he did endorse the idea in a media interview. Completely indefensible, by contrast, is the paper’s charge that every plank of Trump immigration platform is “despicable,” “cruel,” “racist,” and “xenophobic.” If anything’s despicable, its much of The Times’ own tendentious analysis.

Take the editorial’s treatment of Trump’s call to make mandatory the E-Verify system that was developed to enable employers to check the legal status of job-seekers. It’s currently a crime for businesses to hire applicants residing illegally in the country, but many illegals find work anyway largely because the documents needed to prove legal status are so easy for forge, and because so many businesses simply don’t care and believe that the government really doesn’t, either.

E-Verify is a federally created “internet-based system that compares information from an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration records to confirm employment eligibility.” The good news is that it’s free to use, it produces results quickly, and its accuracy rates are not only astronomically high, but improving, according to independent auditors of this program. Moreover, E-Verify enjoys overwhelming bipartisan Congressional support. The only significant problem associated with it is that in most of the country, its use is voluntary.

So here’s how The Times characterizes Trump’s view that every U.S. employer should be brought into E-Verify to ensure that a law that’s on the books, and that the paper apparently does not oppose, is effectively enforced: It would “impose a national job-verification system so that everyone, citizens too, would need federal permission to work.”

Only somewhat less inane is The Times‘ description of Trump’s plan to “triple the number of [immigration enforcement] officers”: It would “flood the country with immigration agents….” What the paper doesn’t tell readers is that this “flood” would amount to 10,000 new employees for the Enforcement and Removal Operations branch of the Homeland Security Department’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Talk about crying wolf.

Also falling into The Times‘ category of “despicable” Trump proposals:

>ending the phony “catch-and-release” practice applied to illegals crossing the border and detaining them until they are sent home;

>establishing criminal penalties for legal visitors to the United States who overstay any of the wide variety of visas offered by Washington (a group that has included at least two of the September 11 hijackers);

>stepping up ICE’s cooperation with local law enforcement authorities to increase the chances that illegals belonging to criminal gangs will be deported;

>and addressing employer violations and other abuses of the H-1B visa system for workers supposedly possessing special skills in technology or other areas, practices which needlessly cost American workers both jobs and wages;

The Times of course wasn’t content to savage Trump. It castigated other GOP presidential hopefuls who haven’t repudiated all of his proposals for “racing to the bottom” on immigration. But if the paper’s editorial writers are looking for demagogues on immigration, they should try a mirror instead.

Im-Politic: Why Trump Has Just Nailed it on Immigration

16 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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Tags

birth citizenship, Chuck Todd, CNN, deportation, Donald Trump, E-Verify, executive amnesty, executive order, Gallup, illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media, Meet the Press, Mitt Romney, NBC News, Obama, Open Borders, polls, The Wall Street Journal

If you harbored any doubts that America’s immigration policy debate has become completely devoid of common sense, and that both the nation’s politicians, pollsters, and media seem determined to outdo each other to keep befogging the real issues and options, look no further than how all of the above treat the issue of deporting immigrants already in the United States illegally. It all adds up to a huge and unnecessary tragedy for American public policy. For a series of realistic deportation-related ideas advocated by immigration restrictionists for many years has always offered the nation by far the most efficient, least costly – and, yes, most humane – solution to the illegals problem.

The big news hook here of course comes from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s latest comments on the subject. To hear it from news organizations like The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, Trump has just come out in favor of rounding up this huge population – estimated at 11 million – and herding them back across the Rio Grande. Thus this morning’s Wall Street Journal headline, “Donald Trump Says He Would Deport Illegal Immigrants.” According to Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” who interviewed Trump for this morning’s program, the candidate’s objectives were considerably narrower – but still pretty ambitious: “[H]e plans to immediately rescind President Obama’s executive order that stopped the deportations of some younger undocumented immigrants who had entered the country as children.”

Yet even Todd lumped together several specific questions that desperately need to be unpacked. First, Trump acknowledged that “the executive order gets rescinded.” Revealingly, however, the new immigration policy plan that he’s just released, which has occasioned this latest round of coverage, didn’t even mention deportation, or even the president’s latest initiative. Trump has indeed mentioned deportation previously, but it appears that his priorities have changed. Why did Todd fail even to note this, either while talking with Trump or later in the program?

Just as important, a Trump rollback of the executive order by no means signals that he would start mass deportations on Day One of his presidency – or ever. Nor is there any reason to suppose that any of the other Republican presidential hopefuls who has opposed the Obama moves would unleash the legions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau (ICE). But ending what critics have rightly called executive amnesty is an essential first step for any eventual illegals strategy that doesn’t (a) simply accept their mass presence and (b) in so doing, inevitably strengthen the policy magnet that’s bound to attract many more with its message of leniency. As Trump himself told Todd (who clearly was in no mood to listen), “We have to make a whole new set of standards.”

Two other critical deportation-related matters ignored by Todd and the Journal. First, even the president for years believed that the (longstanding) immigration policy status quo before his executive order was the law of the land. As such, it reflected a national political consensus on the subject. And as such, it’s curious that anyone who’s not an Open Borders ideologue would view a return to this status quo – after a brief departure – as front page news, or even especially noteworthy from a real-world perspective (as opposed to a political perspective).

Second, the president’s initial, much more cautious, view of his immigration authority could soon be re-validated by the courts. So restoring the deportation status quo ante could be not only a substantive nothing-burger, but a legal and constitutional necessity.

Not that Todd, The Wall Street Journal, or the Mainstream Media as a whole deserve all the blame for deportation’s prominence in the immigration debate. Opinion polls have repeatedly cited the round up as the only, or one of the only, alternatives to paths to legal residency or citizenship in dealing with the illegal population. Here are just two examples from CNN/ORC, and from Gallup. And as suggested above, politicians have contributed to the confusion. In addition to Trump himself, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called his illegals strategy “self-deportation.”

Here’s the rub, though. Romney actually got it pretty near right on the substance. As he explained (futilely, of course):

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so we’re not going to round people up.”

The former governor continued: “The way that we have in this society is to say, look, people who have come here legally would, under my plan, be given a transition period and the opportunity during that transition period to work here, but when that transition period was over, they would no longer have the documentation to allow them to work in this country. At that point, they can decide whether to remain or whether to return home and to apply for legal residency in the United States, get in line with everybody else. And I know people think but that’s not fair to those that have come here illegally.”

Even better, Romney went on to address the need to turn off the jobs magnet:

“We’d have a card that indicates who’s here illegally. And if people are not able to have a card, and have through an E-Verify system determine that they are here illegally, then they’re going to find they can’t get work here. And if people don’t get work here, they’re going to self-deport to a place where they can get work.” And later on in the campaign, Romney specified that illegals should be denied public benefits.

That is to say, Romney in his own often-fumbling way, hit on by far the best fundamental way to handle the illegals problem – eliminating the incentives attracting them and keeping them here in the first place. And Chuck Todd and The Wall Street Journal to the contrary, that’s exactly the emerging focus of Trump’s illegals strategy.

His immigration blueprint would make the E-Verify system mentioned by Romney mandatory nation-wide, in order to prevent businesses from hiring illegals with impunity. It strangely did not specify that government benefits would be denied to illegals. But that explicit proposal probably isn’t too far down the road, as the Trump plan has noted that “The costs for the United States [of supporting illegal immigrants] have been extraordinary: U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc. Indeed, the annual cost of free tax credits alone paid to illegal immigrants quadrupled to $4.2 billion in 2011.”

Trump’s most controversial proposal is ending “birthright citizenship” – the longstanding practice of awarding U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants who are born on U.S. territory – which he has described as “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” But ending federal aid for Sanctuary Cities and other measures to crack down harder on illegal alien criminals and even those who overstay visas – who comprise roughly 40 percent of the illegal population – are bound to attract much more support with voters on both sides of the aisle.

One other important and encouraging feature of Trump’s plan that I’m sure the Mainstream Media in particular will overlook: As I’ve recommended, it dramatically shifts the focus of blame for America’s immigration policy mess from foreign governments (which, to be sure, aren’t blameless) to the real culprit: the nation’s corporate cheap labor lobby. Leading off the plan is the charge that When politicians talk about “immigration reform” they mean: amnesty, cheap labor and open borders. The Schumer-Rubio immigration bill was nothing more than a giveaway to the corporate patrons who run both parties. Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first – not wealthy globetrotting donors.”

And you thought the political establishment, and the political reporters who coddle them, couldn’t be more scared of Donald Trump?

Im-Politic: The Media’s Anti-Trump Trade and Immigration Canards

11 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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2016 elections, apparel, China, CNN, Donald Trump, E-Verify, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, Immigration, imports, Jake Tapper, Jeb Bush, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, Marco Rubio, Milliken & Co., North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, textile machinery, textiles, Trade, Washington Post

I don’t want RealityChek to turn into Donald Trump Defense HQ, but media coverage of the tycoon-turned-GOP-presidential-candidate remains such a transparent exercise in (ignorant) sliming, and so much of the mudslinging focuses on his trade and immigration policy positions, that I’ve got to return to the subject yet again.

This past week, countless pundits and reporters (and their editors) clearly have decided that they can at least slow Trump’s surge in the polls by portraying him as an economic hypocrite. Hence the burst of columns and stories slamming the candidate as a trade protectionist whose signature apparel products are made in China, and as an immigration xenophobe and racist whose construction projects employ illegal aliens. What they really show are classic examples of, in effect, blaming the victim. Here’s what I mean.

I first ran into this tactic in the early 1990s, shortly after starting to concentrate on trade policy issues upon being hired by the Economic Strategy Institute. One of ESI’s original corporate donors was Milliken & Co., a huge textiles manufacturer. And as its activities in supporting organizations critical of U.S. trade policy started to attract coverage, news articles and material from various hired guns of the nation’s offshoring lobby invariably mentioned that, although Milliken enthusiastically backed restrictions on imports that competed with its own products, it had no qualms using foreign-made textile production machinery in its factories. Obvious hypocrisy, right?

When I checked with the firm’s Washington, D.C. staff, though, I got an answer that somehow the critics never mentioned: The same American approach to trade that was threatening the textile industry had also destroyed domestic textile production machinery making. The main reason? These U.S. policies failed to recognize that foreign rivals were just as determined to monopolize global textile machinery manufacturing at America’s expense – through subsidies, dumping, and other forms of economic predation – as they were to monopolize the production of fabric itself via the same tactics. As a result, any U.S. company that wanted to continue turning out textiles and related products had little choice but to use imported production equipment.  I’m still waiting for the Mainstream Media to acknowledge its oversight.

Donald Trump faces the same kind of problem. At some point recently, he decided that selling men’s business clothing and accessories could be a good money-maker. But when he looked for manufacturers, he discovered that most of the American apparel business had been displaced by imports. Just to give an idea of how great the damage has been, since the current phase of American trade policy began at the start of 1994 with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. garment production is down by nearly 78 percent in real terms. In many individual segments of this industry, losses have been much greater. For example, from 2005 through 2013 alone, American men’s neckwear output sank from a paltry $362.39 million to $127.38 million – a nosedive of nearly 55 percent.  (These figures are calculated from the databases of the Federal Reserve’s industrial production reports and the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Manufactures, respectively.)  

But none of this was apparently known to CNN’s Jake Tapper, to cite just one example. He plainly thought he had engineered a Pulitzer-worthy “gotcha” moment when, during an interview with Trump, he revealed that he was wearing a Trump brand tie that was made in China. Responding to the anchor’s accusation of hypocrisy, the candidate responded, “I say my ties, many times, are made in China, not all of them by the way, but a lot of them are made in China, because they’ve manipulated their currency to such a point that it’s impossible for our companies to compete with them. When it comes to outsourcing jobs, which is what this tie would be a representative issue of, one of the issues is that the people in China, the laborers, are paid a lot less, and the standards are worse when it comes to the environment and healthcare, and worker safety.”

And Tapper’s comeback after being schooled in the unmistakable macro-realities of doing business globally? An anecdote: “American Apparel makes stuff here–.”

But what about Trump’s use of illegal immigrant laborers to build his fancy apartment towers and resorts? The Washington Post clearly thought it had spotted another example of Trump fakery when it reported that “a Trump company may be relying on some undocumented workers to finish” a big D.C. hotel project. To his credit, correspondent Antonio Olivo gave Trump’s spokespeople ample opportunity to make the point that, as has become the norm in the construction business, big firms use independent contractors to supply laborers, and that it’s these companies’ responsibility to ensure that they’re properly documented. What was less clear – and this is the fault of Trump’s staff – is that very effective counterfeiting of the needed documents is commonplace, and that even the largest contractors aren’t able to verify them adequately, especially when labor needs to be supplied ASAP.

What the Post should have added, however, is that for more than a decade, the nation has had available a highly effective system for fighting phony residence papers – E-Verify. The good news: Even detractors admit that the internet-based system “catches 4.5 undocumented workers for every one U.S. worker wrongly identified.” The bad news: its use is still largely voluntary.

I haven’t been able to find a Trump statement of support for mandating E-Verify’s use, but is it remotely plausible that he’d oppose it? Doubtful, especially since such immigration enthusiasts like his rivals Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have praised the program – despite failing to say explicitly that they’d expand it to cover all employers.

Unquestionably, Trump’s campaign can be legitimately criticized on any number of grounds, and his trade and immigration positions are eminently debatable, too. But in almost entirely concentrating their attacks on Trump in uninformed trade and immigration-related cheap shots, the Mainstream Media is revealing much more about its own pro-establishment, anti-Main Street biases than about its target.

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Those Stubborn Facts

  • (What's Left of) Our Economy
  • Following Up
  • Glad I Didn't Say That!
  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
  • Im-Politic
  • In the News
  • Making News
  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
  • Uncategorized

The Snide World of Sports

  • (What's Left of) Our Economy
  • Following Up
  • Glad I Didn't Say That!
  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
  • Im-Politic
  • In the News
  • Making News
  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
  • Uncategorized

Guest Posts

  • (What's Left of) Our Economy
  • Following Up
  • Glad I Didn't Say That!
  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
  • Im-Politic
  • In the News
  • Making News
  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
  • Uncategorized

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