This schism - between deplorable populists and corporatists - has been in the making at least since trump rode down the elevator. The deplorable army (led by Trump, with lieutenants like Cruz, Gaetz, Hawley, Greene, Noem, Paul, Cotton, et al) want an end to immigration, an end to abortion and women's rights, an end to gay marriage and LG…
This schism - between deplorable populists and corporatists - has been in the making at least since trump rode down the elevator. The deplorable army (led by Trump, with lieutenants like Cruz, Gaetz, Hawley, Greene, Noem, Paul, Cotton, et al) want an end to immigration, an end to abortion and women's rights, an end to gay marriage and LGBTQ rights, promotion of white privilege, restricted minority rights, a ban on Muslims, guns guns guns, an end to globalization and a Christian theocracy installed in government institutions. Corporations just want to make money, with as few taxes and regulations as possible. The corporate backers of the GOP are mostly in favor of gay rights, minority rights and women's rights, and very much in favor of immigration and globalization. Corporations are mostly opposed to Christian dominion-ism and the proliferation of guns. Since Reagan, there's been an unspoken alliance between these two camps. Corporations have ignored the gun-humping, bible-thumping, nativist, racist platform of the populists in the GOP, in return for tax cuts and de-regulation. Now corporations are realizing that supporting deplorables is bad for business. Poor, poor Mitch. The GOP has risen to power by distracting the rubes with rants about gays, god and guns, while collecting corporate $$ billions to win elections. It's coming apart...so sad.
Immigration is more nuanced than you indicate. And the worst of it is that we are in danger of losing the Senate and the House over immigration. FYI, I'm a Bernie Sanders Dem, from a family of Dems. My great uncle, Phillip Hornbein, a union lawyer, was de facto head of the CO Dem Party for most of the first half of the last century.
Very briefly, there is way too much immigration--too much for environmental sustainability, as we already have four times the population that would be sustainable with current consumption https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/
and too much to allow American workers to get decent pay because there is an oversupply of cheap labor, which devalues these workers. (here's a concise, clear explanation)
Democratic reps on the Texas/New Mexico border have warned about this, as David Leonhardt wrote 3/21 in the NYT
"Some Democrats are unhappy, too. Biden’s policy “incentivizes droves of people to come, and the only way to slow it down is by changing policy at our doorstep,” Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas told The Washington Post. Henry Cuellar, another House Democrat from Texas, said the administration was sending “a terrible message.”"
To understand where immigration is problematic, it's important to know the numbers. from 1990-present immigration added 43 million to the US population, equivalent to two New York States plus 3 million. That was on top of native increase of two more NY States. (Do you ever wonder why traffic keeps getting worse, why schools and emergency rooms keep getting more crowded? Why tick-born diseases have become more common? Now you know.)
The Biden plan would add a New York State every decade.
When Barbara Jordan ran a commission on immigration under Pres Clinton (to those too young to remember, she was an African American Democrat from Texas who made her name on the House Watergate Committee), she recommended cutting immigration nearly in half, to half a million and change annually. At this point, I think it needs to be cut down a lot further, to 250-300k, given how global warming is already reducing Earth's and the US's carrying capacities.
Here's what I'd consider a reasonable immigration compromise. Legalize dreamers and those who have lived in the US more than five years with citizenship for the former, and green cards for the latter. A national, mandatory E-Verify, with heavy fines for companies that knowingly hire people here illegally and/or jail time for their CEOs. Strict limits on annual immigration of 250-300k, regardless of numbers of immigrants relatives who want to come in, numbers of refugees, people already in line for immigration, etc. Our country badly needs to reduce its population, or at least stabilize it.
If this is done, we won't need a $15/hour minimum wage. Wages will rise as companies compete for workers. Emergency rooms will get a lot less hectic. Sprawl will become less of a problem. Traffic will stop getting worse. Schools will do a better job educating students (A friend who is one of the top hard scientists in the US--whose name you'd probably recognize--was appalled to learn, in the mid-'90s, that his daughter, in a majority immigrant public school in one of the California university cities, was in the 34th percentile nationally in math. "Not to worry, the teacher told him, "your daughter is the star of the class") (Daughter is now tops in her field.)
David, there's a lot to unpack (and correct) in your post on immigration. Yes, as you say, there are a lot of Dems who are anti-immigration. They're often basing that opposition on misinformation, and scapegoating immigrants for other problems.
First off, we are a country of immigrants. Immigrants built (and continue to build) America. It's not like immigrants are an add-on, they are us, we are all immigrants, immigrants are our foundation. Secondly, anti-immigrant sentiment in various guises goes back 200 years. People have been arguing forever that there's no more room, that immigrants bring disease ("tick borne illnesses" - you really want to go there?), that they steal jobs, that they crowd our schools and hospitals - these arguments are neither new nor accurate.
The question of the US population and environmental impact is much bigger, and more nuanced than "we can't have immigration because of environmental sustainability". It's true that Americans consume far more resources than people living in many other countries. That has nothing to do with immigration. Eliminating immigration isn't going to reduce global warming. We Americans need to change our lifestyles, not blame immigrants.
Data show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the population as a whole. They're not the ones crowding our schools, or emergency rooms (there's a pandemic going on, don't you know). They tend to avoid hospitals and emergency rooms (they're younger, and they want to avoid detection by authorities). Rather than creating an imaginary crowding problem, immigrants can help solve a declining population problem. There are parts of the country that are emptying out, and need people to move there. They need immigrants.
The economic arguments for and against immigration are also less black-and-white than you imply. Immigrants do take jobs that otherwise might go to Americans, like farm work and working in meat packing plants. At the same time, immigrants help the economy grow. Every immigrant is a consumer - they buy goods, they pay taxes. Their net impact on the economy is generally positive. And, importantly, immigrants tend to be younger, which means they're able to pay our Social Security and care for our rapidly aging population. Many economists argue that we need to increase immigration, for the strength of our long-term economy.
JR, I've been following this issue VERY closely for more than two decades.
First of all, you are wrong to characterize me, and other democrats who would reduce immigration, as "anti-immigrant." And you are wrong to characterize us as scapegoating immigrants. My problem isn't with immigrants per se. It's with the huge numbers of them. (You obviously did not read my post carefully, where I said 250-300k would be a reasonable number of immigrants. I'm guessing you don't even know how many people are coming into our country every year.) But we've been having too much immigration for more than 40 years. It's a matter of ***numbers***. This is the nuance that you don't seem to get.
Too much immigration leads to increased global warming because we are the major industrialized nation with the greatest per capita GH emissions. The average immigrant's emissions rise 3-4fold after arrival here. (Think about the consumption in the countries they come from. Not nearly as great as ours.)
My comment about tick-borne diseases was not meant to imply that immigrants bring those diseases to the United States. The problem is overpopulation. It disrupts normal ecological relationships, and the relative lack of such disruption which when I was a kid in the '50s and '60s meant that tick borne diseases were almost unheard of. They were still not all that common through the '80s. They have become far more common as the population has grown from 248 million in 1990 to the current 328 million. (I've interviewed people who study tick-borne diseases.)
Did I say anything about immigrants stealing jobs? I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth. I don't fault immigrants for trying to come here. My problem is with our government, especially the GOPers who undermined unions, in no small part by voting for more immigration under Reagan and Bush--because they like the cheap labor that makes their big biz friends rich! But it's Econ 101 that the greater the supply of a resource, the less its value. That means that when you're importing a million-plus workers annually, workers' wages stagnate or plummet, which is why meat packers, who got a good union wage north of $20/hr a generation ago are now getting barely minimum, under atrocious working conditions.
Which brings up your point about jobs Americans won't do. There are no jobs Americans won't do. But imagine yourself beginning as a meat packer in, say, 1980, at twenty-something dollars an hour. If you stuck with the work, you'd have been down to minimum wage some time in the '00s. By the way, some US companies actually imported cheap foreign labor to replace American workers. You can read about that here, in The Atlantic
As for crowding emergency rooms, there were a lot of articles in the NYT on that in the '00s.
As for growing the economy, there's no question that adding people grows GNP. But what matters to you and me is not gross domestic product, but PER CAPITA gross domestic product. The only people whose per capita GDP goes up are the most recent immigrants and business owners.
As for immigrants being younger than Americans, the difference in average ages is only a couple of years. And half of all immigrants--the low/no-skilled ones--have such low earnings that they are a net fiscal burden. So they're not going to contribute to your social security.
You are talking about issues where you seem to lack any knowledge. Invoking the pandemic as if that were my reason for saying immigrants are crowding ERs when I've been watching this issue for over 20 years is one of the signs of that. Why don't you read the links in both of my posts on this article, which could at least get you started.
The scary thing is that Biden's immigration policies, as I pointed out in my previous post (see links) are likely to lose us the House and the Senate. Unless you educate yourself on at least that part of this issue, you're going to help steer us towards the disaster of giving control back to the GOP.
There are about 30 million legal immigrants living in the US today, who became naturalized citizens over the past 50 years but weren’t born here. There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants living today in the US. How many immigrants are “too many”? What are the calculations that go into that number?
It seems only fair that, to decrease global warming, we do everything we can to keep as many people as possible living in subsistence conditions. Why not reverse immigration, and send Americans to live in poverty in Central America? That would reduce the GHG emissions of every emigrant by 75%. Or maybe we acknowledge that everyone should be afforded a decent standard of living, and we do the work to accomplish that sustainably.
Tick borne diseases have risen in the US because of climate change (warmer winters mean fewer ticks killed by cold), reforestation of the northeast and midwest (resulting in rising rodent and deer populations) and the growth of suburbia (more people living where the deer and the rodents are). Human population growth in New England (where I live) has been slow to stagnant over the past 25 years. Tick borne diseases here have grown significantly. It has nothing to do with immigration.
Wages in meat packing plants in the 1980s averaged $10 an hour, lower than said wages in the 1970s. Wages today average $10 to $13 an hour. https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1038 What drove down wages in the meat packing industry from 1970 to today was moving meat packing plants to rural areas (where cheaper workers live) and breaking unions, the same factors that drove down wages in the textile and furniture making industries. Not the use of immigrant labor, which didn’t really start to rise until the 1990s (after wages had fallen).
“Researchers found that 11 percent of adults living illegally in California had visited a hospital emergency room in the past year, a rate significantly lower than the 20 percent of U.S. born adults in California. That ‘negates the myth that undocumented immigrants are responsible for [emergency department] overcrowding,’ the researchers wrote in the latest issue of the journal Health Affairs.” It is true that undocumented immigrants go to ERs, because they don’t have Medicaid or health insurance. They do so at lower rates than the rest of us. We can’t blame the significant problems in our healthcare system on immigrants.
The average age of Americans is 38. “The average age of newly arrived legal and illegal immigrants has increased from 26 in 2000 to 31 in 2017. The newly arrived are those who have lived in the country for 1.5 years or less at the time of the survey.”
We have a rapidly aging population, with Americans having fewer kids, and with fewer young people to pay into Social Security. “According to New American Economy, undocumented immigrants contributed $13 billion into the Social Security funds in 2016 and $3 billion to Medicare.” Which they can’t access, because they can’t qualify for benefits.
We benefit from immigration, including undocumented immigration. Unless we educate voters on this fact, fear and ignorance are going to push voters to support xenophobic candidates.
The population of Massachusetts increased by half a million over the last 15 years to 7 million. It was a little over 5 million when I was a kid. And I can tell you whereas when I came back here in '99 I didn't have to worry about traffic in the middle of the day, now I do. And the sprawl has grown. I recently saw my doctor for a physical. In the middle of my appointment, her phone rang and she took it--something she'd never done before. I asked her why she'd had to take it. She said that a lot of people are now getting stuck in traffic on the way in, and call to see if they can come a little later.
$10 in 1980 equals $33 today.
Here's Northeastern University on the rise of tick borne diseases:
"Thanks to increasing urban and suburban sprawl, forests are being parceled into smaller pockets of vegetation. Parks and backyards in the suburbs are now the perfect size to sustain mice, but not quite large enough to sustain foxes. That means mice can run rampant with no natural predators to keep their population at bay. And with mice, come ticks."
Bringing in lots of immigrants was part of the union breaking strategy. And immigration had already started to rise in the '70s. From the Atlantic article I provided in my first post that you didn't read:
"The immigrant workers arrested in Mississippi the other day were earning about $12.50 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, during the late 1970s, the wages of meatpacking workers in Iowa and Colorado were about $50 an hour."
And if it hadn't been for mass immigration the wages would have remained high, because there wouldn't have been this oversupply of cheap labor.
My comments about emergency room crowding are not restricted to unauthorized immigrants, unlike yours.
I don't know where you're getting your figures on the age of immigrants as compared to Americans but they are wrong.
Your worries about social security ignore the fact that labor productivity has been increasing steadily, and that--according to recent articles in both the NYT and the New Yorker, automation may put half of all working people out of jobs over the next two decades. And like I said, half of all immigrants are low/no-skilled, and a net fiscal drain.
Contrary to what you say, according to Pew, over the next 45 years, there will be a native increase of 17 million. But it would be a blessing if our population dropped. The notion that the economy needs a growing population is a Ponzi scheme and not true. Right now, we're in the midst of one of the six or seven greatest mass extinctions in the history of our planet--caused by an exploding population. When animal and plant populations shrink, ecosystem services--clean air, clean water, pollination, fertile soil, and a host of others--become less, and that endangers humans.
And again, go back to my first post where I explain--with references--that too much immigration is putting the US at risk of losing a Democratic majority on Capitol Hill, and of keeping a Democrat in the White House. As the former guy administration demonstrated, the GOP in power puts our Democracy at risk.
Anyone can demonize immigrants. It’s easy. It’s also morally wrong to do so. As I’ve demonstrated, every one of your “facts” is partially true, and also misses or denies a significant part of the story.
We can throw data at each other all day long. That’s not important. What is, is this question: are we going to continue to be a country that welcomes “the tired, the hungry and the poor who yearn to breathe free”? Or are we going to become a stingy, selfish, narrow-minded country that turns its back on its heritage and its foundation? Every American generation has wrestled with this issue.
True, the GOP knows how to exaggerate and exploit fear of immigrants for political gain. That’s wrong, it’s indefensible. We will also be wrong if we cave to their fear, and join in demonizing immigrants.
Global warming is going to create climate refugees in the US, tens of millions who will flee California and the Southwest, for New England and other northern climes. That will greatly reduce our already overdrawn carrying capacity. What will another 90 million immigrants—Pew’s projection for the next 45 years, do to our ability to cope with that chaos?
As for letting everyone in who wants to come, we used to have a frontier. It's been gone for over 100 years. There are probably a couple of billion who would come here if they could. Where do you draw the line?
Half of our own citizens are tired, hungry, and too poor to afford a major car repair or a medical emergency, and many are a paycheck away from being evicted. Our working classes were doing a lot better in the first several post-war decades, before immigration numbers began swelling. You haven’t said anything to indicate that you are aware of them, much less care about them.
You probably don’t realize it, but you’re an American exceptionalist in your confidence that we can take people in without regard to numbers.
You also seem to be the left wing equivalent of a global warming denialist in your denial that mass immigration reduces the employment and wages of competing American workers. Cesar Chavez denounced illegal immigrants to INS because he understood that too much immigration would undercut his members’ wages. (Google it)
I can’t point to one thing you’ve said that doesn’t demonize immigrants. Tick disease? Immigrants. Traffic jams in Massachusetts? Immigrants. Climate change? Immigrants. Crowded emergency rooms? Immigrants. Your friend’s daughter’s grade inflation? Immigrants. The GOP recapturing Congress in 2022? Immigrants. For you, it’s immigrants, all the way down...
If I had the feelings towards immigrants that "demonizing" implies, I would have advocated earlier in this thread that there should be no immigration, rather than advocating 250,000-300,000 annually.
And if Pew was projecting that American fertility, rather than immigration, was going to add 90 million to the US population over the next 45 years, my focus would be on the need for Americans to reduce our fertility. But we are now barely over replacement.
My concern is overpopulation, not immigrants per se, and the US is badly overpopulated. My best friend is an immigrant, she knows my views well, and if I were demonizing immigrants--or if I were demonizing any group of people--she would not be my friend.
I’ve wondered about this aluminum plant n Kentucky. If it was such a great deal, why didn’t Alcoa ( an American public company) put a plant there? With such corruption, how can our public companies compete? We saw something similar with an Indian Titanium mine, bribed and gave contracts to the Russians. Boeing relys on titanium, aluminum, and carbon fiber to build airplanes. Internationally Oligarchs like Dimitri Firtash can bribe and blackmail corrupt politicians around the world to get what they want, subverting market forces and control global commodity prices. State run oil is the best known big one, but it’s everywhere, and this hurts western corporations the most.
I remember learning that getting aluminum from a recycled aluminum can takes 95 percent less water and energy than making a new aluminum can from bauxite ore.
JR, I read the article in NY Times about Chao family when it first appeared. Your first link about the proposed aluminum project in Kentucky is full leads. Thank you. It appears that Steve Mnuchin's involvement with the country's sanctions on Russia and the aluminum project call for more scrutiny. The project continues to be problematic. I posted a link here, the most recent on the subject that I could find:
He is too clever for this. He is all about plausible deniability. He would also not hesitate to throw his own mother under the bus if he remains unscathed. No scruples whatsoever.
This schism - between deplorable populists and corporatists - has been in the making at least since trump rode down the elevator. The deplorable army (led by Trump, with lieutenants like Cruz, Gaetz, Hawley, Greene, Noem, Paul, Cotton, et al) want an end to immigration, an end to abortion and women's rights, an end to gay marriage and LGBTQ rights, promotion of white privilege, restricted minority rights, a ban on Muslims, guns guns guns, an end to globalization and a Christian theocracy installed in government institutions. Corporations just want to make money, with as few taxes and regulations as possible. The corporate backers of the GOP are mostly in favor of gay rights, minority rights and women's rights, and very much in favor of immigration and globalization. Corporations are mostly opposed to Christian dominion-ism and the proliferation of guns. Since Reagan, there's been an unspoken alliance between these two camps. Corporations have ignored the gun-humping, bible-thumping, nativist, racist platform of the populists in the GOP, in return for tax cuts and de-regulation. Now corporations are realizing that supporting deplorables is bad for business. Poor, poor Mitch. The GOP has risen to power by distracting the rubes with rants about gays, god and guns, while collecting corporate $$ billions to win elections. It's coming apart...so sad.
Immigration is more nuanced than you indicate. And the worst of it is that we are in danger of losing the Senate and the House over immigration. FYI, I'm a Bernie Sanders Dem, from a family of Dems. My great uncle, Phillip Hornbein, a union lawyer, was de facto head of the CO Dem Party for most of the first half of the last century.
Very briefly, there is way too much immigration--too much for environmental sustainability, as we already have four times the population that would be sustainable with current consumption https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/
and too much to allow American workers to get decent pay because there is an oversupply of cheap labor, which devalues these workers. (here's a concise, clear explanation)
https://americancompass.org/the-commons/worker-power-loose-borders-pick-one/
What should really scare you about Biden's immigration plan is that a majority of Americans, including some Democrats, oppose it.
Both Politico and Thomas Edsall (NYT columnist) have written about this very recently.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/18/immigration-politics-democrats-469732
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/opinion/house-senate-2022-2024.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210331&instance_id=28676&nl=the-morning®i_id=57299399&segment_id=54559&te=1&user_id=2622f4c35fb33d018d00f0d31784bbd2
Democratic reps on the Texas/New Mexico border have warned about this, as David Leonhardt wrote 3/21 in the NYT
"Some Democrats are unhappy, too. Biden’s policy “incentivizes droves of people to come, and the only way to slow it down is by changing policy at our doorstep,” Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas told The Washington Post. Henry Cuellar, another House Democrat from Texas, said the administration was sending “a terrible message.”"
To understand where immigration is problematic, it's important to know the numbers. from 1990-present immigration added 43 million to the US population, equivalent to two New York States plus 3 million. That was on top of native increase of two more NY States. (Do you ever wonder why traffic keeps getting worse, why schools and emergency rooms keep getting more crowded? Why tick-born diseases have become more common? Now you know.)
The Biden plan would add a New York State every decade.
When Barbara Jordan ran a commission on immigration under Pres Clinton (to those too young to remember, she was an African American Democrat from Texas who made her name on the House Watergate Committee), she recommended cutting immigration nearly in half, to half a million and change annually. At this point, I think it needs to be cut down a lot further, to 250-300k, given how global warming is already reducing Earth's and the US's carrying capacities.
Here's what I'd consider a reasonable immigration compromise. Legalize dreamers and those who have lived in the US more than five years with citizenship for the former, and green cards for the latter. A national, mandatory E-Verify, with heavy fines for companies that knowingly hire people here illegally and/or jail time for their CEOs. Strict limits on annual immigration of 250-300k, regardless of numbers of immigrants relatives who want to come in, numbers of refugees, people already in line for immigration, etc. Our country badly needs to reduce its population, or at least stabilize it.
If this is done, we won't need a $15/hour minimum wage. Wages will rise as companies compete for workers. Emergency rooms will get a lot less hectic. Sprawl will become less of a problem. Traffic will stop getting worse. Schools will do a better job educating students (A friend who is one of the top hard scientists in the US--whose name you'd probably recognize--was appalled to learn, in the mid-'90s, that his daughter, in a majority immigrant public school in one of the California university cities, was in the 34th percentile nationally in math. "Not to worry, the teacher told him, "your daughter is the star of the class") (Daughter is now tops in her field.)
David, there's a lot to unpack (and correct) in your post on immigration. Yes, as you say, there are a lot of Dems who are anti-immigration. They're often basing that opposition on misinformation, and scapegoating immigrants for other problems.
First off, we are a country of immigrants. Immigrants built (and continue to build) America. It's not like immigrants are an add-on, they are us, we are all immigrants, immigrants are our foundation. Secondly, anti-immigrant sentiment in various guises goes back 200 years. People have been arguing forever that there's no more room, that immigrants bring disease ("tick borne illnesses" - you really want to go there?), that they steal jobs, that they crowd our schools and hospitals - these arguments are neither new nor accurate.
The question of the US population and environmental impact is much bigger, and more nuanced than "we can't have immigration because of environmental sustainability". It's true that Americans consume far more resources than people living in many other countries. That has nothing to do with immigration. Eliminating immigration isn't going to reduce global warming. We Americans need to change our lifestyles, not blame immigrants.
Data show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the population as a whole. They're not the ones crowding our schools, or emergency rooms (there's a pandemic going on, don't you know). They tend to avoid hospitals and emergency rooms (they're younger, and they want to avoid detection by authorities). Rather than creating an imaginary crowding problem, immigrants can help solve a declining population problem. There are parts of the country that are emptying out, and need people to move there. They need immigrants.
The economic arguments for and against immigration are also less black-and-white than you imply. Immigrants do take jobs that otherwise might go to Americans, like farm work and working in meat packing plants. At the same time, immigrants help the economy grow. Every immigrant is a consumer - they buy goods, they pay taxes. Their net impact on the economy is generally positive. And, importantly, immigrants tend to be younger, which means they're able to pay our Social Security and care for our rapidly aging population. Many economists argue that we need to increase immigration, for the strength of our long-term economy.
JR, I've been following this issue VERY closely for more than two decades.
First of all, you are wrong to characterize me, and other democrats who would reduce immigration, as "anti-immigrant." And you are wrong to characterize us as scapegoating immigrants. My problem isn't with immigrants per se. It's with the huge numbers of them. (You obviously did not read my post carefully, where I said 250-300k would be a reasonable number of immigrants. I'm guessing you don't even know how many people are coming into our country every year.) But we've been having too much immigration for more than 40 years. It's a matter of ***numbers***. This is the nuance that you don't seem to get.
Too much immigration leads to increased global warming because we are the major industrialized nation with the greatest per capita GH emissions. The average immigrant's emissions rise 3-4fold after arrival here. (Think about the consumption in the countries they come from. Not nearly as great as ours.)
My comment about tick-borne diseases was not meant to imply that immigrants bring those diseases to the United States. The problem is overpopulation. It disrupts normal ecological relationships, and the relative lack of such disruption which when I was a kid in the '50s and '60s meant that tick borne diseases were almost unheard of. They were still not all that common through the '80s. They have become far more common as the population has grown from 248 million in 1990 to the current 328 million. (I've interviewed people who study tick-borne diseases.)
Did I say anything about immigrants stealing jobs? I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth. I don't fault immigrants for trying to come here. My problem is with our government, especially the GOPers who undermined unions, in no small part by voting for more immigration under Reagan and Bush--because they like the cheap labor that makes their big biz friends rich! But it's Econ 101 that the greater the supply of a resource, the less its value. That means that when you're importing a million-plus workers annually, workers' wages stagnate or plummet, which is why meat packers, who got a good union wage north of $20/hr a generation ago are now getting barely minimum, under atrocious working conditions.
Which brings up your point about jobs Americans won't do. There are no jobs Americans won't do. But imagine yourself beginning as a meat packer in, say, 1980, at twenty-something dollars an hour. If you stuck with the work, you'd have been down to minimum wage some time in the '00s. By the way, some US companies actually imported cheap foreign labor to replace American workers. You can read about that here, in The Atlantic
https://tinyurl.com/3kwvetuw
And here: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html
As for crowding emergency rooms, there were a lot of articles in the NYT on that in the '00s.
As for growing the economy, there's no question that adding people grows GNP. But what matters to you and me is not gross domestic product, but PER CAPITA gross domestic product. The only people whose per capita GDP goes up are the most recent immigrants and business owners.
http://cis.org/NAS-Study-Workers-and-Taxpayers-Lose-Businesses-Benefit
As for immigrants being younger than Americans, the difference in average ages is only a couple of years. And half of all immigrants--the low/no-skilled ones--have such low earnings that they are a net fiscal burden. So they're not going to contribute to your social security.
You are talking about issues where you seem to lack any knowledge. Invoking the pandemic as if that were my reason for saying immigrants are crowding ERs when I've been watching this issue for over 20 years is one of the signs of that. Why don't you read the links in both of my posts on this article, which could at least get you started.
The scary thing is that Biden's immigration policies, as I pointed out in my previous post (see links) are likely to lose us the House and the Senate. Unless you educate yourself on at least that part of this issue, you're going to help steer us towards the disaster of giving control back to the GOP.
There are about 30 million legal immigrants living in the US today, who became naturalized citizens over the past 50 years but weren’t born here. There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants living today in the US. How many immigrants are “too many”? What are the calculations that go into that number?
It seems only fair that, to decrease global warming, we do everything we can to keep as many people as possible living in subsistence conditions. Why not reverse immigration, and send Americans to live in poverty in Central America? That would reduce the GHG emissions of every emigrant by 75%. Or maybe we acknowledge that everyone should be afforded a decent standard of living, and we do the work to accomplish that sustainably.
Tick borne diseases have risen in the US because of climate change (warmer winters mean fewer ticks killed by cold), reforestation of the northeast and midwest (resulting in rising rodent and deer populations) and the growth of suburbia (more people living where the deer and the rodents are). Human population growth in New England (where I live) has been slow to stagnant over the past 25 years. Tick borne diseases here have grown significantly. It has nothing to do with immigration.
Wages in meat packing plants in the 1980s averaged $10 an hour, lower than said wages in the 1970s. Wages today average $10 to $13 an hour. https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1038 What drove down wages in the meat packing industry from 1970 to today was moving meat packing plants to rural areas (where cheaper workers live) and breaking unions, the same factors that drove down wages in the textile and furniture making industries. Not the use of immigrant labor, which didn’t really start to rise until the 1990s (after wages had fallen).
“Researchers found that 11 percent of adults living illegally in California had visited a hospital emergency room in the past year, a rate significantly lower than the 20 percent of U.S. born adults in California. That ‘negates the myth that undocumented immigrants are responsible for [emergency department] overcrowding,’ the researchers wrote in the latest issue of the journal Health Affairs.” It is true that undocumented immigrants go to ERs, because they don’t have Medicaid or health insurance. They do so at lower rates than the rest of us. We can’t blame the significant problems in our healthcare system on immigrants.
The average age of Americans is 38. “The average age of newly arrived legal and illegal immigrants has increased from 26 in 2000 to 31 in 2017. The newly arrived are those who have lived in the country for 1.5 years or less at the time of the survey.”
We have a rapidly aging population, with Americans having fewer kids, and with fewer young people to pay into Social Security. “According to New American Economy, undocumented immigrants contributed $13 billion into the Social Security funds in 2016 and $3 billion to Medicare.” Which they can’t access, because they can’t qualify for benefits.
We benefit from immigration, including undocumented immigration. Unless we educate voters on this fact, fear and ignorance are going to push voters to support xenophobic candidates.
The population of Massachusetts increased by half a million over the last 15 years to 7 million. It was a little over 5 million when I was a kid. And I can tell you whereas when I came back here in '99 I didn't have to worry about traffic in the middle of the day, now I do. And the sprawl has grown. I recently saw my doctor for a physical. In the middle of my appointment, her phone rang and she took it--something she'd never done before. I asked her why she'd had to take it. She said that a lot of people are now getting stuck in traffic on the way in, and call to see if they can come a little later.
$10 in 1980 equals $33 today.
Here's Northeastern University on the rise of tick borne diseases:
"Thanks to increasing urban and suburban sprawl, forests are being parceled into smaller pockets of vegetation. Parks and backyards in the suburbs are now the perfect size to sustain mice, but not quite large enough to sustain foxes. That means mice can run rampant with no natural predators to keep their population at bay. And with mice, come ticks."
https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/05/10/ticks-creep-into-the-city-bringing-lyme-disease-with-them/
Bringing in lots of immigrants was part of the union breaking strategy. And immigration had already started to rise in the '70s. From the Atlantic article I provided in my first post that you didn't read:
"The immigrant workers arrested in Mississippi the other day were earning about $12.50 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, during the late 1970s, the wages of meatpacking workers in Iowa and Colorado were about $50 an hour."
And if it hadn't been for mass immigration the wages would have remained high, because there wouldn't have been this oversupply of cheap labor.
My comments about emergency room crowding are not restricted to unauthorized immigrants, unlike yours.
I don't know where you're getting your figures on the age of immigrants as compared to Americans but they are wrong.
Your worries about social security ignore the fact that labor productivity has been increasing steadily, and that--according to recent articles in both the NYT and the New Yorker, automation may put half of all working people out of jobs over the next two decades. And like I said, half of all immigrants are low/no-skilled, and a net fiscal drain.
Contrary to what you say, according to Pew, over the next 45 years, there will be a native increase of 17 million. But it would be a blessing if our population dropped. The notion that the economy needs a growing population is a Ponzi scheme and not true. Right now, we're in the midst of one of the six or seven greatest mass extinctions in the history of our planet--caused by an exploding population. When animal and plant populations shrink, ecosystem services--clean air, clean water, pollination, fertile soil, and a host of others--become less, and that endangers humans.
And again, go back to my first post where I explain--with references--that too much immigration is putting the US at risk of losing a Democratic majority on Capitol Hill, and of keeping a Democrat in the White House. As the former guy administration demonstrated, the GOP in power puts our Democracy at risk.
Anyone can demonize immigrants. It’s easy. It’s also morally wrong to do so. As I’ve demonstrated, every one of your “facts” is partially true, and also misses or denies a significant part of the story.
We can throw data at each other all day long. That’s not important. What is, is this question: are we going to continue to be a country that welcomes “the tired, the hungry and the poor who yearn to breathe free”? Or are we going to become a stingy, selfish, narrow-minded country that turns its back on its heritage and its foundation? Every American generation has wrestled with this issue.
True, the GOP knows how to exaggerate and exploit fear of immigrants for political gain. That’s wrong, it’s indefensible. We will also be wrong if we cave to their fear, and join in demonizing immigrants.
Can you point to where I’ve said anything to demonize immigrants? Is Nicholas Kristof demonizing immigrants in this article? https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/opinion/compassion-that-hurts.html
Global warming is going to create climate refugees in the US, tens of millions who will flee California and the Southwest, for New England and other northern climes. That will greatly reduce our already overdrawn carrying capacity. What will another 90 million immigrants—Pew’s projection for the next 45 years, do to our ability to cope with that chaos?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html
As for letting everyone in who wants to come, we used to have a frontier. It's been gone for over 100 years. There are probably a couple of billion who would come here if they could. Where do you draw the line?
Half of our own citizens are tired, hungry, and too poor to afford a major car repair or a medical emergency, and many are a paycheck away from being evicted. Our working classes were doing a lot better in the first several post-war decades, before immigration numbers began swelling. You haven’t said anything to indicate that you are aware of them, much less care about them.
You probably don’t realize it, but you’re an American exceptionalist in your confidence that we can take people in without regard to numbers.
You also seem to be the left wing equivalent of a global warming denialist in your denial that mass immigration reduces the employment and wages of competing American workers. Cesar Chavez denounced illegal immigrants to INS because he understood that too much immigration would undercut his members’ wages. (Google it)
I can’t point to one thing you’ve said that doesn’t demonize immigrants. Tick disease? Immigrants. Traffic jams in Massachusetts? Immigrants. Climate change? Immigrants. Crowded emergency rooms? Immigrants. Your friend’s daughter’s grade inflation? Immigrants. The GOP recapturing Congress in 2022? Immigrants. For you, it’s immigrants, all the way down...
If I had the feelings towards immigrants that "demonizing" implies, I would have advocated earlier in this thread that there should be no immigration, rather than advocating 250,000-300,000 annually.
And if Pew was projecting that American fertility, rather than immigration, was going to add 90 million to the US population over the next 45 years, my focus would be on the need for Americans to reduce our fertility. But we are now barely over replacement.
My concern is overpopulation, not immigrants per se, and the US is badly overpopulated. My best friend is an immigrant, she knows my views well, and if I were demonizing immigrants--or if I were demonizing any group of people--she would not be my friend.
Where is the book about Mitch? When will justice throw the book at him? Any thoughts JR?
There were rumors of Mitch being investigated because of a "bribe for killing sanctions" scheme with a Russian oligarch who then built an aluminum plant in Mitch's home state (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-a-mcconnell-backed-effort-to-lift-russian-sanctions-boosted-a-kentucky-project/2019/08/13/72b26e00-b97c-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html). He's also come under scrutiny, along with his wife (Trump transportation sec'y and heir to a shipping fortune) for favoritism for his father-in-law's shipping company and the Chinese (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/us/politics/transportation-secretary-elaine-chao.html). Mitch is a sneaky one, always managing to stay just this side of blatant corruption (as far as we know). And his power protects him. Wouldn't it be so fitting to have AG Merrick Garland investigate and prosecute Mitch? Talk about turn-about being fair play. I'd love to see that.
Thanks, JR. I knew about his wife and her family. I'll reads the links. Oh that corny saying, 'Hope springs eternal'. At least, it is spring.
Mitch is such a bad person that his three daughters are long estranged from him.
I’ve wondered about this aluminum plant n Kentucky. If it was such a great deal, why didn’t Alcoa ( an American public company) put a plant there? With such corruption, how can our public companies compete? We saw something similar with an Indian Titanium mine, bribed and gave contracts to the Russians. Boeing relys on titanium, aluminum, and carbon fiber to build airplanes. Internationally Oligarchs like Dimitri Firtash can bribe and blackmail corrupt politicians around the world to get what they want, subverting market forces and control global commodity prices. State run oil is the best known big one, but it’s everywhere, and this hurts western corporations the most.
Russians haven't funded Mitch's AL mine to nowhere. Do you think if other guy won the WH, this would still be the case?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-17/russian-backer-halts-funds-in-new-blow-to-u-s-aluminum-project
Does an aluminum plant create environmental problems?
Yes. All mining does one way or another. Nature does deal well with high concentrations of anything. Water quality is the first threat around mines.
Does not (ops!)
I remember learning that getting aluminum from a recycled aluminum can takes 95 percent less water and energy than making a new aluminum can from bauxite ore.
JR, I read the article in NY Times about Chao family when it first appeared. Your first link about the proposed aluminum project in Kentucky is full leads. Thank you. It appears that Steve Mnuchin's involvement with the country's sanctions on Russia and the aluminum project call for more scrutiny. The project continues to be problematic. I posted a link here, the most recent on the subject that I could find:
https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/aluminum-company-pleads-for-more-time-to-build-ky-plant/article_bc49816e-722d-11eb-8d1d-237f4faddb3a.html
You might check Bloomberg News for more info if you are interested.
Thanks for these links, Fern!
He is too clever for this. He is all about plausible deniability. He would also not hesitate to throw his own mother under the bus if he remains unscathed. No scruples whatsoever.
When it comes, I hope it's the entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica or something equally voluminous.
Love the punchy and pungent way you say it!
Precisely