Thread: Obama and Cheap Foreign Labor - The Real Story

rightsidenews.com
by Ray Peach
Saturday, 04 February 2012 08:30

On January 30th, Obama told a woman that her husband shouldn't be unemployed from the growth he has seen in the economy. Obama said he finds it “interesting” because he is getting “the word” that someone in her husband's job field “should be able to find something right away.” This has become a familiar theme where Obama said in his SOTU address, “I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can't find workers with the right skills.” He went on to say, “Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that — openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work. That's inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.”

What Obama is saying comes from a manufactured myth that there is a shortage of skilled workers, and that a supposed “skill-gap” is hurting our economy. Like the fraudulent assertion that illegal aliens take jobs that Americans won’t do, this is a ploy to displace American workers with cheap foreign labor.

However, the Republicans are no better as in California the leader of the Republican Party, Ron Nehring, used an H-1B visa to hire an assistant political director, saying they couldn’t find an American to do the job; while in Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder wants to remove all barriers to immigration. Proposals have been introduced in the House to reign in the abuse of work visas, but Republican Speaker John Boehner will not allow them to come to the floor for a vote.

The Reality of Hi-Tech Labor Statistics

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), last year the United States lost 19,740 computer jobs, 107,200 engineering jobs, and 243,870 science jobs. In spite of massive job losses, some 3 million guest workers were brought into the country, including about 100,000 engineers.

In California, a state that has disposed of tens of thousands of teachers, over 12,000 visas have been issued to supposedly meet the high demand for educators. It is incredulous to suggest that we have a labor shortage in the middle of a great depression.

What is truly amazing is that the majority of engineers and scientists working in the U.S. today are here on “temporary” visas; and the result has been a disaster, as over 70% of today’s development projects fail.

Where the myth that we need cheap foreign labor came from




Lester Thurow (b. 193 was the Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management for 30 years. He has advised presidents and taught socialism to our country’s management and political leaders, convincing them to work against the best interests of the United States. Among his many accomplishments, he predicted the Soviet Union would defeat Ronald Reagan, thus winning the economic contest; but a year later the Soviet Union laid in economic ruin after the principles that Thurow espoused failed. In 1986, Lester Thurow, Robert Reich, and others created the Economic Policy Institute. The board of directors for the institute includes: Richard Trumka (b. 1949), Ron Gettelfinger (b. 1944), and Andrew Stern (b. 1950). Trumka is the president of the AFL-CIO, Gettelfinger was the president of the United Auto Workers, and Stern was the president of the Service Employees International Union and a contributor to the Huffington Post. Together these three men used union money to back Obama and his policies; in return Obama made them the three biggest stockholders of GM and Chrysler by stealing the companies from their legitimate owners. In a nutshell, the Economic Policy Institute believes in a one-world command economy where every worker makes what is called a living wage. They spend union dues collected from American workers to support an organization that is dedicated to the deindustrialization of America. A living wage does not mean that everyone makes more money or enjoys a better standard of living. Instead, it means everyone is equally impoverished. The Economic Policy Institute makes no excuses, using China as their standard, where lucky workers live in state owned dormitories where they are charged for room, board, and medical care. By the end of the year, they end up owing the company (state) money.

Unlucky workers have it much worse. On January 10th some 300 Chinese Foxconn employees who manufacture X-box 360 machines, said they would kill themselves if working conditions were not improved. Foxconn is the world’s largest producer of electronics for companies such as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and a host of other companies.

Foxconn is the largest exporter in Greater China and the second largest exporter in the Czech Republic. Their factories have been described as forced labor camps, where the working conditions are so bad, that anti suicide measures are necessary to keep workers from killing themselves. (See the section on the revival of modern slavery in the book: Totalitarianism: How the Socialist Faith is Destroying America.)

Thurow’s position is hardly original since his Economic Policy Institute is associated with the Frankfurt School, the MIT Sloan School for Business, and the London School of Economics (these are discussed in the book). In support of the “Iron Law of Wages,” the Frankfurt School conducted experiments to determine what a living wage is. These experiments were performed on an obscure African tribe called the “Ik,” to determine what is necessary to insure “minimal biological survival”. The “Ik” were chosen to conduct this study for a number of reasons. One was that they are totally motivated by hunger, and the other is they readily give up their children at the age of two.

In 2003, Thurow published the book, Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build a New and Lasting Global Prosperity, where he drops all pretence about the goals of free trade and globalization. In it he says, “The world is moving from an industrial era based upon natural resources into a knowledge-based era based upon skills, education, research and development... Businesses located anywhere can manage activities everywhere. National economies are slowly dissolving to be replaced by a global economy.”

Thurow attacks Christianity and American citizens saying, “On the far right, the fear is immigration and the threats it poses to national culture and ethnic homogeneity. Antiglobalizers see the nation to which they are attached, and with which they identify, slowly disappearing. As it does, they lose their sense of importance as someone different and better than someone else... Isolated national cultures,” he says, “are headed toward extinction if they are not already extinct.” Thurow claims that Christianity is the chief obstacle to globalization, blaming Christians for the Oklahoma City bombing, although Timothy McVeigh was a self-proclaimed atheist.

In Making Globalization Work, former Columbia Professor Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (b. 1943) actually brags about the supposed China miracle, claiming that he has “lifted a hundred million people out of poverty.” As chief economist for the World Bank under Bill Clinton, Stiglitz stated this is the goal for the entire world, not just China. For his brilliant insight, Stiglitz received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics; but as described in the book, the reality of cheap labor is much darker.

The Myth of “Jobs Americans won’t do”

Not all jobs can be easily outsourced to China or India; for those that can’t, the U.S. government works to bring cheap foreign labor into America, both legally and illegally. The two excuses are a supposed shortage of skilled labor, and that we need cheap foreign labor to do the jobs Americans won’t do. Politicians and Journalists are constantly harping on the need for a temporary work visa program; but the position is blatantly false as there are over 20 different “temporary” worker programs. In addition, some 70% of the Hispanic population in California, and Texas, came from Mexico illegally, and they can’t all be doing jobs Americans won’t do. The truth is the U.S. open border with Mexico permits millions of underclass workers to depress wages and benefits, doing jobs that Americans typically do perform, but at higher wages and benefits than the aliens typically demand. For skilled jobs, 31 percent of all illegal immigrants who actually work take service-occupation jobs, 19 percent are in construction, and 15 percent are in production, installation, and repair jobs. For unskilled jobs, illegal aliens bring crime, disease, and poverty – stressing social and education services beyond the breaking point.

Increasingly if you don’t speak Spanish, don’t even bother to apply. Spanish is slated to be the primary language for education in California, and is the primary language in many U.S. Cities including Miami. While job requirements often stress the need for strong communication skills, increasingly this does not mean English.

The Race Card and Immigration Law

Of course, when we demand that immigration laws be enforced, the inevitable race card makes its appearance. The problem is there is no such thing as a homogeneous Mexican race, anymore than there is an American race. In fact, the U.S. Government lists people as non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic white, Hispanic black, and Hispanic white, so that equating Mexicans who immigrate illegally to blacks who were persecuted for the color of their skin is a fraudulent one at best. The reality is that the word Mexican describes a nationality, not a race, which makes this a foreign invasion, not the persecution of those who have a legal right to live in this country.

The realities of illegal immigration were demonstrated in California on June 26th, 2011, at the Gold Cup finals between the U.S. and Mexico. Held at the Rose Bowl in California, some 80,000 Mexican fans booed and chanted obscenities at the U.S. team, denigrated the American National Anthem, and trashed the American flag. In contrast they cheered the Mexican team, flew the Mexican flag, and announced the game entirely in Spanish. Reporter Bill Plaschke of the LA Times embraced the display, concluding: “it was uniquely American”, extolling the virtues of multi-culturalism.

Guest Worker Programs Impact on US Labor

The most commonly used temporary work visas are called H and L visas, but these are government programs, so there is nothing temporary about them. These visas have sub categories, the most common of which is the H-1B visa used to bring hi tech people to America, such as mathematicians, chemists, engineers, and programmers. The second most popular is the L category, which is used to bring in business workers, office managers, and secretaries. There is also a P visa for foreign athletes and entertainers.

Lester Thurow praises the H-1B visas because it allows the United States to “let companies import the highly skilled workers they needed to be successful.” Perhaps the most outspoken advocate of H-1B visas is Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and one of the richest people in the world. When he was told that the federal government would limit the number of foreign engineers he could bring into the country, he slammed them for not removing the limit.

Contributing to this propaganda is the Danish researcher Jacob Kirkegaard who published Globalization of America: The Role for Information Technology in 2006, and The Accelerating Decline in America’s High-Skilled Workforce in 2007. Kirkegaard worked for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Neo-Marxist associate of the Brookings Institute, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In an example of shameless propaganda, these books purport to prove the need for a more flexible H-1B program to meet the coming shortage of highly skilled workers – stating that unless drastic action were taken, America would not be able to meet its need for engineers. As a result hundreds of thousands of H-1B visas were authorized each year, where each participant can also bring his entire family. When combined with other guest worker programs this amounts to about 3 million workers a year, plus their families.

It should be pointed out that Kirkegaard is a foreign national, and couldn’t care less about improving the future of the United States.

Why Americans are leaving the Engineering Fields

In addition to visas, more and more American students were sold on the promise of a strong demand for scientists and engineers, flooding the universities and tech schools. Today, some 80% of college graduates cannot find jobs, causing unemployment to explode. Incomes have fallen so low that there is no upside to spending a lot of money and six years in engineering school to pursue a career, where Americans are not welcome. Today graduate scientists with PhDs earn about $35,000 / year while, according to Business Week, the average toll both operator makes about $45,000 / year (depending on the state, this can reach over $100,000 / yr). In contrast, a journeyman engineer in 1994, made about $70,000 / year.

The assertion that there are more jobs than workers is a Scam

To make their case for more foreign labor, globalist companies routinely run ads for positions they have no intention of ever filling, especially foreign owned companies. They then make the claim that they need more visas to meet their needs – lobbying congress for a higher quota. In reality, however, the need for better skilled employees never enters into it, because the visas are filled by random drawings – where skills are never even considered. More often than not, foreign labor is used to replace Americans in existing positions; and while visa fraud is rampant, little is done to stop it.

In 2010, Congress wanted to add a requirement to the TARP bailout that corporations who received U.S. Tax Payers money would be prohibited from using H-1B workers; but Obama refused to sign the bill, which was then changed to specifically allow visas for high income workers, making over $80,000 per year – a salary that these workers never actually see. Today the Obama administration ignores the quotas on guest worker programs, bringing in more and more foreign workers by manipulating immigration laws. As an aside, one of the arguments for the importation of foreign labor is that they pay taxes. The reality is that the law prohibits the withholding of any taxes – as they are exempt from all U.S. taxation.

While workers from India and China are promised large salaries to come here, when they arrive they discover they are actually indentured servants, as the company holds their visa in the corporate pocket. These people end up sharing squalid apartments, or living in an office, sleeping on the floor. This has become a part of the new global labor system, where chattel slavery has been replaced with a new slavery where the victim is not technically owned, and is discarded when he or she is no longer useful.

Conclusion

China is being described as capitalism without democracy, and is touted as the solution to the world’s problems, even though the U.S. hasn’t had anyone in the White House that believes in a free market economy since Ronald Reagan. Remove America’s middle class who support China’s economy by purchasing their goods, and China falls apart too. The creation of a new world order, composed of two classes, the ruling class and the working (slave) class is precisely what Marx wanted – regardless of the rhetoric.

Today we are witnessing the largest act of treason ever perpetrated by a government against its citizens since the fall of Rome. Both political parties perpetuate a giant fraud that is intended to do one thing, destroy the American middle class. If the country actually wants skilled U.S. workers, stop importing cheap foreign labor, and let the income for highly skilled workers rise to a point where the cost of a college education can be justified – something we call free market economics. Then drop the socialist dogma, and insist that schools actually teach math and science.

Obama and Cheap Foreign Labor - The Real Story | Politics and Economics Right Side News

Great article....