- Government-mandated immigration policy is maintaining
a system that falls hardest upon Americans at the bottom of the economic
ladder, those who have little schooling and must rely on low-skilled work
to make a living. The rich get richer as the job market becomes more favorable
to employers and the poor get poorer as the low-skilled labor pool is filled
with still more desperate immigrants. The harmful effects of overimmigration
hits mainly on those already at the bottom ÷ the poor, the low-skilled
and working-class African-Americans. Around 300,000 immigrants arrive annually
who have less than a high-school education. Forty percent of California's
immigrant community has fewer than 12 years of school, while the future
job market will require hi-tech skills.
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- Representative Lamar Smith's House Immigration Subcommittee
held hearings in March 1999 that addressed how mass immigration affects
the lives of working Americans. Some of the information in this article
comes from this testimony of experts before Congress. [See the sidebar
for excerpts from Rep. Smith's excellent opening statement.]
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- Rep. Smith informs us that, according to the National
Academy of Sciences, "Each immigrant with less than a high school
education will cost American taxpayers $89,000. That is, the government
benefits consumed by each immigrant will exceed taxes paid by $89,000."
With 300,000 such immigrants entering annually, that means a cost of $27
billion for each year's group over their lifetimes. This money could be
better spent on education and training for American citizens who need these
benefits; it is money that could be spent on preserving Social Security
and extending healthcare to the tens of millions of Americans not now covered.
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- HISTORICAL CONTEXT
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- Divide and conquer is hardly a new technique of employers
against workers to drive down wages and break union organizing. Employers
have made a practice of pitting immigrants against African-Americans since
before the Civil War. Starting in the 1820s, Europeans began to displace
free black workers in the U.S. Employers preferred immigrants who would
work long hours for low pay. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass remarked,
"Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly
arrived immigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him
a better title to the place."
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- Some Americans today find the hard-work success story
of the immigrant to be an affirmation of the American dream. There are
certainly enough of these tales in the press. However, one rarely sees
the other side of the equation in the media about the American who can
no longer find work in gardening, roofing, auto repair and many other fields
that once provided a living wage for families. As wages are depressed by
an oversupply of cheap low-skilled labor, less-educated homegrown workers
find it more difficult to find jobs that will support them.
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- RELENTLESS IMMIGRATION
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- Why does Congress accept millions more uneducated immigrants
while low-skilled Americans of all colors find an increasingly shrinking
job market? The answer is of course the big campaign checks from business
interests. The pro-immigration ethnic lobby (La Raza, MALDEF, etc.) figures
strongly too, as it seeks to extend its political power by demographic
warfare.
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- While national unemployment has fallen to historic lows,
unemployment rates for unskilled workers are nearly three times the national
rate. The rising tide of prosperity is not lifting the working class boat
÷ the rising tide of immigration is sinking it. Immigrants account
for half of the increase in the workforce in the 1990s. Indeed, the percentage
of foreign born in America in 1970 was 4.8; the 2000 Census showed the
number is 10.4 percent and rising with no end in sight.
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- WHAT JOBS WILL AMERICANS DO?
- It is offensive to hear the business press prattle on
about all the jobs that Americans won't do. The Wall Street cheerleaders
never ask who did those jobs before the immigration onslaught. Americans
did them, back when blue-collar employment paid a living wage.
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- The list of "jobs Americans won't do" grows
ever longer with millions more immigrants in the workforce. It now extends
beyond unpleasant physical labor to include computer programming. President
of the Electrical and Electronic Engineers Bruce Eisenstein made the remark
that programming was "work that Americans don't really want to do."
as a justification for bringing in more foreign workers. That would be
news to many technical workers who send out hundreds of resumes after being
laid off for cheaper H-1B foreign labor.
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- People who work for a living should be alarmed. No one's
job is safe.
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- http://www.limitstogrowth.org/WEB-text/who-hurt.html
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