Thread: Another Wall Street Plan for more CHEAP LABOR from ....

A Freudian Slip from the WSJ Wall Street Journal in this weekend's edition; how blatant can you get?
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A Way Out of the Immigration Mess
By MIKE KRAUSS (WSJ)
July 21, 2007; Page A7

From 1999 through 2005 I was a senior executive of a North American railroad based in Mexico City, responsible chiefly for intermodal traffic between locations in Mexico, the United States and Canada. For some years prior to that, and until only recently, I lived in a still predominantly rural area outside Mexico City, traveled widely in the country and worked often on the border. I have had both professional and personal contact with illegal immigration into the U.S.

Railroads that come out of Mexico must deal routinely with the "sleepers," as those who try to hitch a ride on the northbound trains are called. And in the small town outside of Mexico City where I lived, I knew any number of people who had tried and failed or tried and succeeded to make the more common journey on foot across the border which, I observed first-hand, is porous.

In order to resolve the crisis of illegal immigration into the U.S., it is important to understand who these people are and what they want. Overwhelmingly, they are young and healthy. [soundslike a slave trader?] It is not a journey for the old or frail. They are not all poor or uneducated. Many educated young Mexicans have no work. For every entry-level and mid-level managerial position my company advertised there were hundreds of qualified applicants. What drives them to make an always arduous, often perilous and sometimes fatal journey is the search for opportunity and more specifically, work. [according to PEW, 95% of illegal border crossers have a job in Mexico; some towns even complain that there are no males left to do any work in their village]

The other thing that must be understood is that there is presently no effective process in place to lawfully manage the numbers of Mexicans and, to a lesser extent, other Hispanics seeking to live or work in the U.S. [in other words ONLY LATINOS/MEXICANS ARE CONSIDERED]Through inaction and inattention Congress has manufactured a crisis.

The legal process is to stand for hours, often more than once, in a line outside the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. It's the kind of line I recall from my youth outside the local movie theater when a new Walt Disney movie opened. It seems to go on forever, with people waiting in the cold or rain or heat to bring a raft of papers and documents before an INS officer and take their best shot. By all accounts, it is not a pleasant experience.

No one may accompany the supplicant, so it is all hearsay, but what a careful listener will hear is that the officer does not really want you in the U.S. Basically, the applicant is required to prove to the officer that he or she has sufficient motives to return to Mexico. The result is that employed professionals or the well-to-do get visas for business trips, family vacations or shopping excursions. The rest -- the vast majority -- don't bother to try.

The story of one young neighbor of mine in Mexico is instructive and not atypical. Jorge, let's call him, was an intelligent and outgoing seventeen year old. We hired him to do some odd jobs at the house and over time became close to his family -- other members had also worked for us. He got a degree in mathematics from the local university and hoped to teach. But there were no positions.

Teachers do not retire in Mexico: They can't afford to give up the job. All that was available was part-time work grading papers and otherwise taking the load off senior teachers. It was low paying even by Mexican standards. The U.S., however, has a real need for mathematics teachers, especially those who speak Spanish and English, as he does.

Jorge went through the legal process. He set up a bank account, which he, like many youths from the town, had never had before. His father pulled together his income records to demonstrate the family's means and went to considerable trouble to put a piece of land in his son's name. It was all to no avail.

His application was denied because, said the INS officer, his English was so very good that he had obviously been illegally to the States to learn it. He tried to explain that he had acquired his excellent, American English in an intensive language course: four hours a night, almost every Friday night of the year for five years, playing cards with American businessmen.

Yeah, right. Denied. Jorge took the other route to the United States.

Jorge had one other thing in common with most Mexican immigrants, apart from the "get-up-and-go" that Americans used to admire. Legal or otherwise, they are focused. They are not coming to wander aimlessly about. They are headed for a specific town or city where some family member or friend from their village [now it is VILLAGE RE-UNIFICATION?]is now or has been, and where they will be received by an extended family that provides initial shelter and will show them the ropes. Think of it as a combination social service and employment agency, provided tax free.

The point is, the overwhelming majority of these people come here looking for work. And it is clear the U.S. economy has a place for them. In several industries it has a critical need: meat packing and food processing, agriculture, hotel and restaurant services or bilingual mathematics instruction, for example.

What can be done? In the short term, first the security of the border with Mexico must be guaranteed to the satisfaction of anxious citizens, the overwhelming majority of whom believe, correctly, that it is not now sufficiently secured -- although it strikes me that a garrisoned wall is unnecessary and offensive.

Second, we need to reform the legal process and direct the flow through a series of modern-day Ellis Islands, preferably in the interior of Mexico,[OK, AGAIN, MEXICANS ONLY NEED APPLY] ... fully staffed and funded to serve as welcome centers that will identify the newcomers, find out where they are headed, and try to match them up with legal employers in the U.S. In the new process a determination can be made if these are temporary workers or people who want to become Americans. They can then be monitored and assisted appropriately. When these two steps are accomplished, it will then be possible to revisit the legalization process for those who are already established in the country.

Of course, as I think it over, perhaps these proposed processing centers ought not be called "welcome centers." We wouldn't want to give the wrong impression. How about, Immigration Identification, Security and Control Centers? That ought to push all the right buttons on the talk-radio dial.

But for the long term, only raising the living standards of the Mexican people will staunch the flow. The U.S. and Canada together, but chiefly the U.S., need to invest in Mexico on the scale of a Marshall Plan, or as West Germany invested in East Germany at the reunification, and for the same reason. Huge disparities in the living standards of societies living in close proximity inevitably invite migration to the more prosperous society. The wider the gap, the greater the flow.

This investment in Mexico will have two other benefits for the U.S. Like the Marshall Plan, it can be structured to create opportunities for American businesses and expand markets for U.S. goods and services. And it will give the Mexican government an incentive to fix a policy that effectively exports its unemployment to the U.S.What are the chances? It is difficult to say, but I am not voting for anybody for president, U.S. Senate or Congress in the 2008 elections who does not advance some kind of similar plan.

Mr. Krauss, a writer, was formerly an executive for a railroad based in Mexico City.
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Well, there is ZERO chance this most-asinine "Plan" will be adopted. It is clearly an Immigration Plan of Mexicans, by Mexicans and for Mexicans. This is so blatantly DISCRIMINATORY if not RACIST, that even the WSJ could not see it. This would sanctify, legalize and institutionalize de facto discrimination in favor of Latinos/Mexicans.What happened to DIVERSITY? Where are the Asians, the North and South Aricans, South Americans, Europeans in this? Ted Kennedy and his socialist buddies in Congress established the DIVERSITY LOTTERY precisely to entice other than Europeans to come. So now it is ONLY or MAINLY Mexicans?

This is clearly written by a very myopic business interest, concerned ONLY ABOUT CHEAP LABOR, perhaps to drop wages for Americans some more.

The ONLY INCENTIVE that Mexico needs is the shock of a border closed to illegal transit of people and drugs. That will force them to act on their own behalf or face a revolt as is already happening in Chiapas and Oaxaca...

Then Krauss seems to recommend VILLAGE REUNIFICATION.... not just family re-unification. I wonder if he had been working in Poland if he would have the same idea about Polish?.... Obviously the US needs a COMPREHENSIVELY GLOBAL PLAN for bringing new immigrants FROM DIVERSE AREAS OF THE WORLD, if in fact we do need so many millions as they claim....

In order to resolve the crisis of illegal immigration into the U.S., it is important to understand who these people are and what they want. Overwhelmingly, they are young and healthy. [soundslike a slave trader?] It is not a journey for the old or frail. They are not all poor or uneducated. Many educated young Mexicans have no work. For every entry-level and mid-level managerial position my company advertised there were hundreds of qualified applicants. What drives them to make an always arduous, often perilous and sometimes fatal journey is the search for opportunity and more specifically, work.


He is right that some of these people are well educated and they are taking the jobs Americans can and will do. I have been telling people that for a long time. So many people don't believe it. They keep thinking all these people are just 'poor and uneducated'.

One man told me not long ago that those poor people come across the desert barefooted!!!!!!!!

No they come in designer clothing, with manicures and coiffed hair. They take jobs in banks, mid-management in American style grocery stores - management or ownership of the Mexican style stores. They work in insurance offices, in city halls, running upscale businesses.

We are not just being invaded by the poor and uneducated, we are being invaded by highly educated, 'upwardly mobile' as they used to say, young Mexicans.

The one thing he has wrong is about the frail and sick not coming. They come too. The journey could not be all that perilous since women make it with a baby in their arms and two by the hand. They make it and give birth within a month. Uncle Jose makes it needing heart surgery.

All kinds are coming - but from what I have seen, many, many of them are people with as much or more education that many Americans have and they are getting the jobs. Some of it because they work cheaper - some because they are bi-lingual.

In a small Texas town, they just advertised for an Accounts Payable clerk - must be bi-lingual. You guessed it, not many Americans in that town are bi-lingual.

We are stuck with some of them, our government is rubber stamping them for citizenship as fast as they can and we probably will have no success getting rid of anchor babies and their parents.

If you want your children to succeed or even have a job in the future - by all means - have them learn Spanish. As distasteful as that might seem - it is a matter of survival.

Remember what DD's favorite "economist" Allen Greespan said back in March....in a conference on US Competitiveness...

Income distribution is capitalism’s most vulnerable point; the system must have the trust of the people…unless the people who participate believe it is just… We can solve the problem with opening immigration to skilled workers. Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world, i.e. bring in enough skilled workers so that the supply of our domestically produced skilled workers would be supplemented with a major influx of foreign skilled workers that would essentially lessen the cost of US skilled wage levels and end the concentration of income

notice the last "dig".... lessen ...the concentration of income.... WOW!

Wall Street Journel = Neo-slavers.
US Chamber of Commerce = Neo-slavers
Council on Foreign Relations = Neo-Fascists

But for the long term, only raising the living standards of the Mexican people will staunch the flow. The U.S. and Canada together, but chiefly the U.S., need to invest in Mexico on the scale of a Marshall Plan, or as West Germany invested in East Germany at the reunification, and for the same reason. Huge disparities in the living standards of societies living in close proximity inevitably invite migration to the more prosperous society. The wider the gap, the greater the flow.

This is the SPP approach. What Krauss does not acknowledge is that the Marshall Plan worked because it was implemented in countries that had long experience with a solid middle class, it was firmly rooted in capitalism, and it was well-managed. These are all elements of the Marshall Plan that do not apply to SPP. If the SPP approach is used in Mexico, I am certain it will not raise the standard of living one iota, anymore than have the trillions of dollars this country has spent world-wide since WWII on foreign aid. This is because there are no incentives for the Mexicans to do one damn thing for themselves. Let the rich folks in Mexico re-distribute THEIR assets.

Poor Jorge. He knows math - isn't that enough to get a great job? Well, I joined the graduate dept at San Jose State University to become a math teacher. I already had physics and engineering degrees and I only wanted to teach k-9th grade. I was told it was a 2 year program (60 credits) and I wouldn't get paid for any of it, despite teaching the 2nd year. I came into there with 220 credits, and I was told I had to take "Theory of Numbers" among other ridiculous courses. I asked how will I live for those two years? This is a direct quote: "With your parents, like everybody else." I was 40 years old and recently divorced. I'm also Eng/Span bilingual! So I taught at a private school and the students told their parents I was the best math teacher they ever had - my passion for math shined through. Guess that wasn't good enough for the public school system.
BTW my son is in a Chinese immersion school - he has been singing Chinese songs to me. I say "goodonya" son because at least you'll be bilingual when the Chinese cash in our debt. Speaking Spanish has accomplished so little for me. We don't need to import any more people who prefer Spanish.

We don't need to import more people that speak Spanish, but many of them are not going home either and the need for being bi-lingual will be there. Take a look at any paper.

The question of the anchor babies will be tied up in court for years and years to come - and the government is minting new citizens as fast as they can rubber stamp the documents.

Chinese - that's good - and I would say it could be helpful. Spanish is necessary right now - if not for a job - for your safety. You need to know what they are plotting around you.

At a kids soccer game, the Mexicans were yelling in Spanish at their kids to grab the other kids arms, pull their shirts, trip them, kick them in the shins, etc. Who knew what they were saying - well the umpire (is that what you call them) did as he was Mexican also and did nothing - and my husband.

When my husband told my son what they were saying, my son stood up and he is 6 ft tall, looks like a wall, yelled for the umpire to stop the game. He told the umpire, loudly, if he couldn't keep this game going fairly, that he (my son) was going to stop it - and now.

The Mexicans were so outraged and were talking amongst themselves, saying some very scary things. My husband yelled the words they used to use in the Rio Grande Valley to denote INS spotter planes. Things got quiet and the rest of the game went fine.

Just minor -

modern-day Ellis Islands...

This sounds like the scheme that the otherwise good Rep. Mike Pence has been peddling.

what do you suppose will happen if and when we "legalize" millions of illegals? Do you think they will stay in those jobs that Americans won't do? maybe they won't do them either and go up the food chain, at every level underbidding Americans and Legal Aliens... downgrading wages for everyone.

so what then?... industry will have to find another way to bring in "illegals" whom they won't have to pay as much as the legal ones...

in other words a vicious circle that cannot be stopped with will power... but by a physical barrier and strict enforcement of non-immigrant visa terms as well as labor laws.... and of course, identity theft etc...

and yes, a MORATORIUM on LATINOS/MEXICANS.... until other nationalities have a chance to catch up..