I love your beautiful country and I'm going there in a few months. I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. Like us, your population is aging. We all need more young people to work and pay into the system to support us. Even so for us, we're reluctant to take in immigrants, despite all the energy and innovation they have brought our country.
I love your beautiful country and I'm going there in a few months. I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. Like us, your population is aging. We all need more young people to work and pay into the system to support us. Even so for us, we're reluctant to take in immigrants, despite all the energy and innovation they have brought our country.
There's a recent book you should read, Back of the Hiring Line: A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, and Depression of Black Wealth.
Among the many examples, in 1980, most meat packers were Black, earning good middle class wages. By that decade's end, most were immigrants, toiling for barely above minimum wage, under atrocious conditions, where maimings and amputations were frequent. Similar conditions prevailed in other areas of low/no-skilled work.
The book is solid (296 footnotes), yet well written, covering the relevant academic economic history, black periodicals, statements from black leaders beginning with Frederick Douglass, whose sons were downwardly mobile due to mass immigration (companies would send ships to Europe to bring back white workers so they could fire the black workers, and the same sort of thing goes on today with companies bringing in H1-Bs), and gov't commissions on immigration reform. The latest of these, run by Barbara Jordan, the Black Texas Democrat who made her name on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, recommended cutting immigration numbers roughly in half, and strict enforcement of immigration laws, so that Blacks and other American workers could get decent jobs with decent pay.
The book also gives the lie to to the notion there are jobs Americans won't do. the author interviewed laid off poultry workers on the Eastern Shore, who'd been replaced by immigrants. Would they take their old jobs back? No, they told him. with the greatly reduced wages, they'd have to live in their cars, or many to a house.
Companies that need more workers should be raising their wages. Our labor participation rate is still quite low (meaning a lot of unemployed people are not looking for work).
I love your beautiful country and I'm going there in a few months. I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. Like us, your population is aging. We all need more young people to work and pay into the system to support us. Even so for us, we're reluctant to take in immigrants, despite all the energy and innovation they have brought our country.
There's a recent book you should read, Back of the Hiring Line: A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, and Depression of Black Wealth.
Among the many examples, in 1980, most meat packers were Black, earning good middle class wages. By that decade's end, most were immigrants, toiling for barely above minimum wage, under atrocious conditions, where maimings and amputations were frequent. Similar conditions prevailed in other areas of low/no-skilled work.
The book is solid (296 footnotes), yet well written, covering the relevant academic economic history, black periodicals, statements from black leaders beginning with Frederick Douglass, whose sons were downwardly mobile due to mass immigration (companies would send ships to Europe to bring back white workers so they could fire the black workers, and the same sort of thing goes on today with companies bringing in H1-Bs), and gov't commissions on immigration reform. The latest of these, run by Barbara Jordan, the Black Texas Democrat who made her name on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, recommended cutting immigration numbers roughly in half, and strict enforcement of immigration laws, so that Blacks and other American workers could get decent jobs with decent pay.
The book also gives the lie to to the notion there are jobs Americans won't do. the author interviewed laid off poultry workers on the Eastern Shore, who'd been replaced by immigrants. Would they take their old jobs back? No, they told him. with the greatly reduced wages, they'd have to live in their cars, or many to a house.
Companies that need more workers should be raising their wages. Our labor participation rate is still quite low (meaning a lot of unemployed people are not looking for work).
Reagan's 80's were a dark era for the middle class, many of whom naively supported the old fool. History repeats itself with Trump's base.
You're not kidding. It still reverberates.
It metastasized.