Month: June 2012

When
Bill Clinton ran for the Presidency the first time, it was reported
that a sign with a four word slogan was hung on the walls of his
campaign office.  That sign simply said, “It’s The Economy, Stupid!”

The point was that those who were running the campaign understood
that voters would be most interested in who would do the most to improve
the American economy.  Back in school most of us found the study of
economics to be a boring but essential class and so we dutifully did our
homework assignments, read the required textbooks and studied for the
exams in the hope that we would get decent grades in a mundane subject.

When we graduated from school and entered the adult world of jobs and
mortgage payments it became crystal clear that while it may well be
true that “Money is the root of all evil” money was vital for us to live
the sort of lives that we dreamt of when we were growing up.  Suddenly
economics did not seem to be as unimportant as it was when we were back
in school!

The apparent wisdom of that phrase, “It’s The Economy Stupid” was
borne out when the votes were cast and Bill Clinton won his first term
as President of the United States.

Today the economy is once again seen as a major issue.  The economy
has tanked and millions of American workers are unemployed or
underemployed.  More Americans than ever before are living below the
“poverty line.”  Record numbers of American homes have been lost to
foreclosure leaving abandoned homes in neighborhoods that already have a
glut of vacant homes and homes that are for sale at prices that are,
all too often greatly reduced prices.  Many homeowners who are still
making mortgage payments now owe more on those mortgages than their
houses are worth.  Euphemistically, such houses are described as being
“under water.”  All of these factors continue to exert downward pressure
on the value of many houses across the country creating a vicious
cycle.

What is almost never discussed on the various news programs is the
fundamental fact that while each week reports are issued about how many
new jobs have been created or about what the latest unemployment
statistics are, there are currently millions of jobs being held by
foreign nationals (aliens) who are taking jobs Americans desperately
need in order to survive!

Illegal aliens tend to take the bottom rung jobs where they work for
substandard wages, often under conditions that are so substandard as to
be patently illegal.  Day laborers often supplant American tradesman on
construction sites.  My own dad was a construction worker- he was a
plumber.  When asked what he did for a living he would proudly proclaim,
“I am a plumber by trade!”  This meant that he had spent years serving
in an apprenticeship program and after years of learning his trade,
finally qualified to be a tradesman.  The same could be said for other
hard working American construction workers who toil on construction jobs
doing dangerous, physically demanding and filthy work as carpenters,
bricklayers, electricians, steel workers, roofers and other such
tradesmen.

In order to maximize profits there are home improvement contractors
and other employers who have laid-off American tradesmen and now hire
illegal aliens to maximize profits.  The quality of the work that is
done by the day laborers does not come close to the quality of the work
that honest to God tradesmen do, but the profit margins for those
unscrupulous employers increased and enabled them to underbid those
ethical employers who hired American tradesman.  Eventually the only way
for most employers to remain competitive (and survive) was to emulate
the practices of their competitors and hire illegal alien day laborers.

American professionals such as computer programmers and engineers are
not fairing much better.  Today corporations that may refer to
themselves as being “American companies” are actually multinational
corporations that only say a pledge of allegiance to the bottom line! 
They outsource manufacturing jobs overseas and whenever possible seek to
hire foreign workers to take jobs in the United States by gaming the
H-1B Visa Program and other such programs that enable high tech foreign
workers to replace American workers.

Incredibly, on April 30, 2009 Alan Greenspan, the former head of the
Federal Reserve Bank testified before a hearing that was conducted by
the Senate Immigration Subcommittee that was chaired by New York Senator
Schumer.  Here is, in part what Greenspan had to say in his prepared testimony for that hearing:

First, skilled workers and their families form new
households. They will, of necessity, move into vacant housing unit; the
current glut of which is depressing prices of American homes. And, of
course, house price declines are a major factor in mortgage foreclosures
and the plunge in value of the vast quantity of U.S. mortgage-backed
securities that has contributed substantially to the disabling of our
banking system. The second bonus would address the increasing
concentration of income in this country.  Greatly expanding our quotas
for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser
skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our
skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted
for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created
privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at noncompetitively
high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating
such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.

It is astounding that he had the chutzpah to call for making American
workers compete with foreign workers to drive down wages of American
workers!  It is astounding that he referred to American workers as the
“Privileged Elite!”  What is even more astounding is that these remarks
were made at an open hearing and that a video of Greenspan making these
outrageous remarks can be seen by going online and reviewing the Senate announcement of that hearing. 
Yet there was no news coverage of the hearing or of Greenspan’s
remarks.  There were no protests by any Americans.  In fact, the sound
of silence was nothing short of deafening.

Prior to the Second World War, the enforcement and administration of
the immigration laws was the responsibility of the Labor Department.  It
was understood that the key to success for America and Americans was to
provide good jobs at decent wages for Americans who were willing to
acquire the education and skills to earn more money.  This gave rise to
the Middle Class that was synonymous with the “American Dream.”

Clearly the time has come for our immigration laws to be effectively
enforced to get Americans of every race, religion and ethnicity, back to
work on jobs that will enable them to pay their mortgages, send their
kids to college so that they will qualify for jobs that won’t be done by
imported foreign workers who game the visa process.

The effective enforcement of our immigration laws would provide the
quickest fix to our nation’s faltering economy.  The time has come for
our politicians across our nation to hang a new plaque on their walls
that reads, “It’s Immigration, Stupid!”