Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the immigration bill that is winding it’s way through the legislature, should be called “The wage suppression act of 2013.” Let’s face it, the United States does not have a shortage of workers, we have a shortage of jobs. The labor participation rate in the US is falling at an epic rate. The US is in fact the only industrialized country that has a falling labor participation rate. Couple that tidbit with the fact that unemployment is still high by historic standards, and one can only conclude, that for some reason jobs are not being created in America today. Now, to a person with normal thinking, when a country is hemorrhaging jobs, that would be a bad time to introduce millions of new workers… wouldn’t it? Unless the elite think that the reason jobs are becoming more and more scarce is because wages are too high. If that is the case then those in power would do what they can to lower the wages of workers, for example, bring in millions of new workers to compete for fewer and fewer jobs, IE the wage suppression act.
Are wages too high in the US today? If we look at wages for skilled and unskilled work in the US, adjusted for inflation, we find that wages are at a historic low. All wage categories, except upper management, bureaucrats, and politicians, have been on a slide down. Wages in the low skilled sector have taken the biggest hit but the high skilled sector has been stagnant for years as well. Engineers in the US, back in the nineteen eighties were at about one hundred thousand a year, and are still at that rate today. Many argue this is because companies like Microsoft, Google, Hewlett Packard, IBM, etc… have been hiring immigrants instead of American engineers. These firms claim there are no Americans capable of doing these high skilled jobs, and that is why these high tech companies are pushing so hard for immigration reform, but facts fly in their faces.
Today colleges and universities in the US are turning out record numbers of high skilled people. These new college grads are entering the workforce at a time when there are few jobs and less opportunities. As a case in point, ask the waiter next time you go out to eat, if he or she has a college degree. More likely than not they do. When a college graduate must wait tables, he or she dislocates lower skilled workers, and so lacking a job they fall out of the workforce. So, we must ask ourselves, why are so many skilled people working so far below their potential? Moreover, with wages so low and opportunities so rare, no wonder recent college graduates are depressed and angry, therefore they have the time and are willing to participate in the Wall Street protests.
This would seem to indicate that it is not wages that is negatively effecting job creation but some other factor. When Ronald Reagan was elected there was a similar dearth of jobs. Unemployment was high and wages had stagnated. The course Reagan put the US on was not one of raising taxes, regulation, government stimulus and creating new entitlements, what Reagan did was lower taxes, deregulate and ratchet down the entitlement mindset. Calvin Coolidge did the same thing. What was the results of these policies? High GDP growth, rising wages, lower crime, low unemployment and the creation of the term “yuppies.” If you don’t remember what a Yuppy was, it meant a young upwardly mobile person… an all but extinct species today.
Since Obama has taken office he has raised a whole slew of taxes, from income to fees and introducing a whole new tax regime, Obama care. His party has regulated everything they can find. Our banking system reels under the weight of Dodd Frank, and the trillion dollar stimulus went entirely to rich political hacks, who went bankrupt as soon as the government check cleared, with not a job to show for it. The Federal Reserve has printed trillions of dollars, to counter the negative effects of Obama’s policies, to no avail. The only people making out well are the uber rich, (you know, the people Obama claims to hate, but spends all his time on Martha’s Vineyard with), government workers and politicians. Washington DC is a boom town awash in money and power while Main Street USA crumbles.
So why import millions of new workers who will work for far less than Americans can? The only logical answer to that question is to lower the wages of Americans. Why would the government do that? To diminish the political power of the people and create disquiet in society. Remember, the worse conditions are for the people, the more power politicians get. Since power is their goal, not creating the conditions for a stable wealthy society, the unrest that… diminishing wages, resentment of immigrants, and the crime these beget, drives demand for more regulation, more government oversight, more police, more surveillance, in short, more power to government and the elite. Our compassion for the children of illegal immigrants, is being exploited to lower our standard of living, therefore enhancing the political power of the elite. This should come as no surprise, the new class’ goal has always been to reestablish the power they lost to the bourgeoisie a few centuries ago. Back to the good old days, when there were only two classes, the aristocracy and peasants.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
