2/26/2020 - Michelle Malkin Townhall.com
"We're
full, our system's full, our country's full!" That was President Donald
Trump last year at our southern border.
"Every
decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made
to benefit American workers and American families." That was Trump in
January 2017 at his inaugural address.
"The
influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and
makes it difficult... to earn a middle class wage." That was presidential
candidate Trump in 2016.
Contrast
those clarion "America First" statements with the apparent hysteria
of Trump's current acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who was caught on tape
telling a private audience of elites in England last week: "We are
desperate -- desperate -- for more people. We are running out of people to fuel
the economic growth that we've had in our nation over the last four years. We
need more immigrants."
Mulvaney
reportedly went on to push for "expanding" merit- and
employment-based immigration to fill all the high-skilled jobs that Americans
purportedly aren't capable of filling. By how much, for how long, in which visa
categories and under what conditions this "expansion" should happen,
Mulvaney is not reported to have detailed. (He will be featured at the
Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning. It would be nice if
someone asked him to elaborate, wouldn't it?)
"Running
out of people" is typical Beltway swamp talk from a big business lobbyist
trafficking in open borders "Chicken Little" alarmism. Has Mulvaney
opened a newspaper or browsed the internet in the last 10 years? How about the
last week? Over a 48-hour period, I compiled a Twitter thread of more than 50
stories of tens of thousands of recent U.S. worker layoffs in tech and other
high-skilled industries. Among the U.S. corporations and institutions
responsible for laying off, replacing, offshoring, and outsourcing tens of thousands
of American jobs:
Wayfair,
TripAdvisor, LogMeIn, Inc., Zume Pizza, VMWare, Shutterfly, Intel, Comcast,
Xilinx, 23andMe, NortonLifeLock, AT&T, Macy's, Walgreens, Uber, Lyft, UCSF
Medical Center, Baptist Health, Sysco, WeWork, American Family Insurance,
Tennessee Valley Authority, Amway, UPS subsidiary Coyote Logistics, Comcast,
Lime, Bird, Unicorn, Getaround, Cerner, Oracle, Samsung US, Edmunds.com,
Textron Aviation, Morgan Stanley, Spirit AeroSystems, Mozilla, UiPath, Plexus,
Cisco, Ancestry.com, Clover Health, State Street Corporation, Anthem,
Transamerica, Verizon, MassMutual, Disney, Carnival, Abbott Labs, EmblemHealth,
Harley Davidson, Cargill, Eversource Energy, Best Buy, Southern California
Edison and Qualcomm.
The
most recent entry in my U.S. worker layoffs thread came in Monday from Expedia,
which announced it is laying off 12% of its information technology workforce
(roughly 3,000), including 500 employees at its Seattle headquarters. Tip of
the iceberg. As leading American workers' employment attorney and Protect US
Workers advocate Sara Blackwell points out, "so many companies are able to
conduct this awful business model under the radar." And they get away with
it because it's legal, workers are silenced, and most Americans "just do
not care because it does not yet touch them personally."
Do
we "need more immigrants," as Mulvaney claims? Marie Larson, an
American mom who founded the American Workers Coalition with Barbara Birch and
Hilarie Gamm, told me: "I talk to Americans almost daily who are being
discriminated against, who keep getting laid off by Indian managers, who have
to train their foreign replacements to get the much-needed severance packages,
who have to pull kids out of college because they can't afford it, even having
to sell their houses. These are STEM workers, who got the 'right' degrees and
did everything they were supposed to do, only to have our government turn their
back and sell out to big businesses push for even more H-1Bs." Tech firms
cut 64,166 American jobs in 2019, up 351% from 14,230 in 2018.
Are
we so "desperate" for more bodies to "fuel economic
growth?" Let's recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330
million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants
are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million
new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000
temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and
H-4 programs. That doesn't include spousal visas or the more than half a
million foreign "students" now working through the stealth guest
worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows
foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment
of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to
demonstrate labor market shortages.
"We"
ordinary Americans don't need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty
house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and
endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They've been cooking up manufactured
worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the
1980s, when the National Science Foundation's Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage
based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
Remember:
The only persistent tech worker shortage in America is a shortage of workers at
the wage employers want to pay. Beltway swampers gnashing their teeth over
barren American worker recruitment pools are full of it.
Michelle
Malkin's email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com.
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