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American Dream Slipping Away

by Frosty Wooldridge Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004 at 11:18 AM

The American Dream Slipping Away from the Middle Class

October 25, 2004

In 1979, American meat packing plant workers earned .10 per hour with benefits doing the jobs that Americans, today, reportedly, “won’t do.” In 2004, illegal aliens fill the same jobs at .00 an hour with no benefits. They work the jobs that Americans won’t do! Because of indentured servitude wages, they also live 20 to a house and park five cars to a yard!

However, they’re moving into trades Americans used to do. With an added three million illegal aliens crossing our borders annually according to Time Magazine, September 12, 2004, “Who Left the Door Open?” there won’t be any jobs Americans “won’t do”—because there won’t be any jobs left that American middle class workers can do.

In Business Week’s May report, “Working and Poor,” by Michelle Conlin and Aaron Berstein, “In today’s cutthroat job market, the bottom rung is as high as most workers will ever get.”

Edward Plesniak, 36, lost his .68 an hour union job as a janitor when the contractor hired illegal alien labor. Plesniak earns .00 an hour with no benefits as a floor waxer.

As globalization quickens, the unskilled American worker suffers growing obstacles for a living wage. Not only is he competing with one million legal aliens added to the workforce annually in America, he/she must contend with three million illegal alien workers. Plesniak suffers with millions of Americans. That doesn’t include the 15 million unemployed Americans! It’s an aspect of Third World Momentum.

More distressing, America’s trades stomach an endless invasion of ‘willing workers’ depressing wages while taking jobs away from Americans across the board. Where are they coming from? “Some estimate as many as 95 percent of dry wall tapers represented by Chicago’s painter’s union are Mexican,” Geoff Dougherty, Chicago Tribune, reported. “They come from El Fresnito, Mexico.”

Chicago’s unions serving bricklayers and carpenters are being taken over by Mexicans living in this country, illegally. What has it done to Mexico’s towns? “The main problem is disintegrating families,” said Humberto Alvarez, president of the county of El Fresnito. “We see addiction, dropouts and other problems. The moment the father leaves, the family breaks down.”

While Mexico slathers itself in political grease via Vicente Fox’s inability to dislodge the corrupt, aristocratic upper class (he’s one of them), Fox sends 9.2 million of his poorest countrymen into America to grab the American Dream right out of the hands of Middle Class workers. His plan works, too. Fox’s drone workers return billion annually which is the second leading revenue for his nation’s coffers. All totaled, illegals send billion back to home countries annually. In the meantime, America’s Middle Class spends .4 billion educating an estimated 1.3 million illegal alien children. Additionally, Americans pay for health care, free lunch programs, housing assistance and language classes. Furthermore, American taxpayers contend with the 0 billion annual drug trade crossing over Mexico’s borders, aided by their military, which addicts millions of American kids. Not a bad deal for Fox and Mexico’s ruling class.

However, back in America, single parent mothers earning ,730.00 annually, are not eligible for food stamps or child-care assistance. It’s the reason America suffers the highest child poverty rate in the world. (Business Weekly, May, 2004)

An Associated Press story by Genaro Armas noted, “American black children in deepest poverty is up 50 percent in the past decade. The number of black children living in extreme poverty has risen sharply in recent years. About 932,000 black children fell into that category in 2001, nearly a 50 percent increase from the 622,000 classified that way in 1999 according to the latest figures from the Children’s Defense Fund.”

Worse, 50 percent of the African-American males in New York City are unemployed.

Few leaders make the connection that the outsourcing, insourcing and offshoring of American jobs brings America’s middle class to its knees. Last year, American Flyer, manufacturers of that little red wagon we all pulled as kids--suddenly pulled up stakes and now operates in China. Our trade deficit with China stood at 0 billion in 2003. No wonder! They’re making more profit at 50 cents an hour in a country with 1.3 billion people!

However, when Middle America lacks a paycheck, it can’t buy Domino’s Pizza, cars or step out to the circus. Americans can’t go to movies or take that vacation. They can’t send that first kid off to college.

It’s called the “Wal-Mart Effect.” Chains such as Safeway, Albertson’s and Kroger cut pay and benefits for workers as 40 Wal-Mart stores opened up in a five month period in southern California. Why? Wal-Mart pays less than half the union wages with few benefits. Sherry Kovas, with 26 years as a cashier, made .90 an hour but will be losing that wage quickly. “But I’m 44,” she said. “I’m too old to start over.”

Thus, the American Dream is now the Mexican Dream in our country. Trouble is, it’s destroying families in Mexico as it destroys American families in the country that created it. At the current rate of GATT and NAFTA via globalization as well as outsourcing, insourcing and offshoring, Americans will look back on the myth of what was once “The American Dream,” and wonder what happened to it and their families.

Why? With 80 million people added to the planet around the world annually, there is no end of the line for cheap labor as it implants itself and dislodges Americans from the American Dream.

Frosty Wooldridge is a teacher and author who has bicycled 100,000 miles on six continents to see overpopulation up close and ugly. His explosive new book is: “IMMIGRATION’S UNARMED INVASION: DEADLY CONSEQUENCES.” Copies may be obtained: 1 888 280 7715 www.frostywooldridge.com

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anti-immigrant folks got it upside down

by more rational Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004 at 6:11 PM

Generally speaking, the primary reason why laborers from Mexico (and China, and the islands) come to America is because businesses offer them jobs. When the economic situation worsens, like during the current recession, the overall migration declines. At times, it reverses. Usually, though, it just slows down.

The irony of all this is that the business owners tend to be Republicans, and the politicos yelling for tighter borders and criminalizing migration also are Republicans. The GOP has a big internal conflict between the capitalist class owners who run the party, and the working class immigrant-haters who deliver the votes. In the past, and probably in the future, Democrats and AFL-CIO will exploit this conflict and turn it into a split.

Economically, it's impossible to stop the migration, unless you resort to extreme measures, like murder. Even low American wages are twice that of those in Mexico, and ten times those in Haiti. Not only that, but many of the talented people in the third world immigrate to America for the same reason. So we have lots of doctors and scientists here from Mexico.

This "brain drain" helps keep these other countries poor.

The reason for the differential, though, is due to the expansion of capitalism. At this time, capitalism is centered around Europe and America. The wealth of the world passes through America, and at the same time, the places where the wealth is taken from experience *relative* poverty. It's relative, because overall, due to technology, the quantity of goods and food usually increases.

The distribution of this new wealth, however, is uneven. The laws of ownership that accompany capitalist expansion also create imbalances. That's why, even while we have enough food to get fat enough to require surgery to lose weight, there are still people starving in the world.

Proudhon said it best. What is private property? "Private property is theft."

This is illustrated well in the poorer countries, where, typically, property ownership is concentrated in a narrow strata of the upper classes. They own all the good farmland, and now, the factories, while millions of poor live on the streets or on inferoir farmlands, or are sharecroppers. Think of the situation for African Americans in The Gilded Age, USA, circa 1890.

Internally, African Americans migrated from the South to the North and West in the first half of the 20th century. They did it for the same reasons as todays "illegal immigrants" -- poverty at home (the push factor) and wages in the North (the pull factor). They went to cities like Chicago and Oakland, where there were already migrants (the network factor). And the end result was net growth in cities like Chicago and Oakland, and no net growth in the South. The South is still like the 3rd world of America. (The uneven distribution of wealth, precipitated by capitalists.)

http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/stories/0701_0131.html

The one bright moment in this, however, is the reverse migration of African Americans to the South. Some old whites might not like it, but affluent Blacks are moving to the South, doing roughly what many Mexican migrants do -- returning some wealth back from whence it came. They're undoing the uneven wealth distributions that capitalism creates. They see it as getting a nicer house for less money, in a slower-paced city.

I don't think it's undoing the distribution patterns, though. It's just a side effect of people having priorities (for a nice life) that clash with capitalism's priorities of accumulation, monopoly, and increased imbalances.

Within the working class, though, there is a real clash between native workers and immigrant workers, particularly undocumented immigrants. While resident alien immigrants potentially drop wages, they will never drop them as far as the undocumented competition will, primarily because the resident aliens have rights.

Resident aliens have the same work status as citizens. This means that they cannot be abused or underpaid easily, because they can sue. The undocumented cannot as easily assert this kind of right.

When there are people working for someone, and they have few rights, they should be called "slaves." The Bush guest worker program would have simply institutionalized this informal slave-like relationship between business and undocumented workers. The current H1B visa program, to some extent, is slave-like.

One way to address the wage issue is to give the undocumented more rights, particularly in lawsuits against businesses. If this threat exists, then wages for the undocumented will rise, and businesses will be less likely to hire them. And the migration might slow down somewhat.

Another way to address this issue is to give classes of workers the right to sue businesses until they are destroyed. For example, the vast majority of janitorial companies in Southern California hire primarily the undocumented. If a group of custodial workers with citizenship or green cards could get together with companies that hire them, and sue out of existence, the ones who hire only the undocumented, then the businesses would stop hiring the undocumented.

Generally, though, the working class have few attorneys on staff, so traditionally, other remedies have been used. These include lockouts, vandalism, and arson of the businesses.

They also included harrassment of or assaults on the undocumented workers. Unfortunately, that seems to be all that remains of working class efforts to protect their own jobs. (Once again, the capitalists have used racism to mobilize working class against the others in the class.)

In short - the key points:

- migration has always happened and always will

- migration tends to increase wealth, but also disparity

- the undocumented are the slaves of today, and need liberation

- the working class are fighting each other, instead of the businesses that won't follow the laws

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fresca

by uh..somehow I doubt that Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004 at 9:02 PM

"So we have lots of doctors and scientists here from Mexico. "

What, like 3 or 4 of the 8.

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yes

by more rational Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004 at 10:16 PM

There are, at least in LA. It's not as many as, say, Indian doctors, but it's significant. There's also a lot more affluent people coming over too. Many end up taking middling jobs, or operate businesses for other Latinos, but they're here.

Mexico is not as poor as India or the Philippines, so they retain more of their professionals. But, anyone in Mexico who's in the top strata of society - the university educated upper class - are working globally, and in America. You just can't tell, because they're so rich you might think they're white people. (Well, they often *are* white people, but that's a whole other issue. Anti-Mexican sentiment intersects with anti-Native-American racism.)

For them, it's more of the typical immigrant story: they come over, with a degree, or some kind of education, and work fixing cars, or construction, or cook, or sew, or in a factory. They don't have the language skills to get much higher, but their kids can end up doing okay.

Just look at the immigration laws, and you'll see how it works out. The middle class are allowed in. The poor are locked out, unless they are related to someone already here. The rich are welcome with open arms if they invest million of their money in a business.

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fresca

by well put Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 at 12:55 AM

Well put.

I suppose you're right. It is interesting how little education is valued, in general, by Mexican immigrants already here. And that is simply a statement of fact.

I also agree that half of the problem is the American emplyers who recruit this cheap labor, as well as the special interest groups who consistently pander to these illegals out of some warped political correctness.

The only innocent people in all of this are the immigrants themselves. I don't blame them for streaming over the border but we simply cannot afford on any level to continue to allow them free range.

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if they're already here, they're not immigrants

by more rational Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 at 3:21 AM

You make a semantic error there. If someone's already here, they're not an immigrant. They're American.

You should consider business practices the entire core of the "problem." The issue of status is strictly a legal one. The law doesn't really deal with cultural issues, at least not directly. It deals with business and labor issues.

Thus, whether the presence of Mexican immigrants increases the quantity and quality of Mexican food, or ranchera music, or celebrations of Sept. 16th, is not covered by law. Furthermore, it should not be covered by law.

The business issues, however, are covered by law. The immigration law is fundamentally a law about labor, and the right to work within this country. Business laws are primarily used to enforce how businesses behave with regards labor, and how they behave with other businesses.

Business laws are primarily enforced by lawsuits. Thus, the logical product of immigration and business law is to sue the businesses which violate immigration law the most, and put them out of business. Make the damages proportional to the fraction of workers who are "illegal", and before long, undocumented workers will be distributed throughout the labor market in numbers low enough that nobody can make money suing someone else for violating the law.

Also, who's going to defend a businesses' right to hire the undocumented? Nobody. No business is going to say "you have to protect my ability to pay lower wages by hiring someone who's not supposed to be working for me." They all say "OH I didn't know!" Yeah, right. Give me a fucking break. Some businesses won't hire Americans because we're not as eager to get ass-reamed as an undocumented worker.

That's why business interests support racists who scapegoat "illegal immigrants." They want to shift the anger away from themselves, and onto people who have few rights, and little political power. Legit businesses go along with it, because they like to pay less for labor.

Look at the linked article above, about African American migration to the midwest in the early 20th century. In the article, it says the media blamed Black migrants for the woes of working class whites. The upshot was that there were race riots and lynch mobs that sought out Black people, and burned them.

It's a haunting parallel to the way people talk about "illegal immigrants" today.

There are already militia mobs at the border that want to shoot at border crossers.

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OneEyedMan

by KPC Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 at 1:10 PM

shitpile: "And that is simply a statement of fact. "



shitpile, you wouldn't know a "fact" if it crept up behind you and dicked you in the ass.

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fresca

by not completely true Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 at 7:25 PM

"If someone's already here, they're not an immigrant. They're American. "

First of all, you're wrong about this. An immigrant is anyone born in one country who leaves to live in another. These people will forever be immigrants by definition.

Anyway, the business practices are not the whole of the problem. Merely half of it. A large number of illegal immigrants come here and don't work to begin with. The notion of every illegal immigrant being a noble hardworking honest family person is silly. No more valid than the notion of every American being that way.

Scores of illegals are simply here living of social programs and this is where the liberal philosophy accounts for the other half of the problem.

Rewarding these illegal immigrants with healthcare, bilingual schooling and inane proposals like drivers licenses that do not even identify the bearer as a non citizen are simply motivations to come here and build families on our dime, working, if at all, at such low wages that any taxes paid back into the system are negligent.

The driver's license proposal is a perfect example of liberal disingenuousness. When Schwarzenegger offered to sign the bill with the stipulation that then cards would look different in order to signify no citizenship all the liberals cried foul. Oh no! it's just like Nazi Germany and all that tired nonsense. Completely overlooking that we already have two distinct DL's...one for adults and one for minors.

Now clearly, these liberal advocates didn't just want DL's they wanted defacto citizenship as the DL IS the defacto document of citizenship.

That all one needs to register and vote is a DL is hardly lost on these liberal democrats.

No, the problem is equally shared by cost concious business owners AND liberals.

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liberals?

by more rational Friday, Oct. 29, 2004 at 2:49 AM

I'm not sure how liberals fit into this. If it serves them, a liberal will bash "illegals". Some environmentalists are notorious for hating minorities, and some unions are anti-immigration too. In contrast, Schwartzenneger has assiduously avoided the issue, so as not to alienate voters or his business supporters.

By the way, I was referring to the non-immigrants, not the immigrants. When you wrote "already here", I thought you were referring to Mexican Americans.

The drivers license issue was a trope, and a wedge issue. Until 1994, undocumented people could get drivers licenses in California. Back then, the license was only to certify a right to drive, and only secondarily a form of identification. Now, thanks to the efforts of the anti-immgrant faction, people think of the CDL as some kind of official state identification card. Great. Just what we need -- the DMV will have even more power.

It was bad enough when they wanted to merge SSNs with CDL numbers, into a nice, fat, unique identification key. (We stopped that, thank goodness.) They were also talking about another merge with social services so you'd have a single card for everything. (They didn't pass that either.)

The CDL could become as significant as a passport. From this card will flow "status." If you have it, you have rights. If you don't have it, you have no rights.

That's giving a LOT of power to the government.

In the name of true freedom, the CDL should just certify the right to drive. That's all. It should not even be considered a valid proxy for your birth certificate.

The right to work should be embodied in the Social Security Card. That's the tax number.

Now as for this assertion that undocumented immigrants come here and don't work: unreal. The reason they come here is to work. Once they settle in, a few will stop working, but almost every last one will work. Not only that, they won't complain, and they will tend to keep a low profile. They won't file lawsuits. They won't complain about the government. They will avoid the hospital, and even avoid talking to school people.

Immigrants and undocumented immigrants use public services at rates lower than the native born.

Here's an excerpt from the report linked, at the Urban Institute. It's a study about welfare reform in the mid 90s and it's effect on people using welfare services.

Background

With the enactment of the 1996 welfare reform act,(1) Congress imposed broad new restrictions on legal immigrants' access to public benefits, set new time limits on refugees' eligibility for many federal benefits, and introduced new bars on the access of "unqualified immigrants" to services.(2) But perhaps more important than these changes in eligibility are welfare reform's chilling effects which may discourage immigrants from using health, nutrition, or other types of benefits, despite the fact that many remain eligible. These effects originate, among other things, in confusion on the part of immigrants and providers about who is eligible for benefits and in fears relating to the application of the public charge doctrine.(3)

An earlier study by the Urban Institute found evidence of such chilling effects in Los Angeles County.(4) In that study, approved applications of legal noncitizen families for Medi-Cal and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) fell 71 percent between January 1996 and January 1998, while there was no decline among citizens. The drop occurred even though there was no change in legal immigrants' eligibility for these programs in California and denial rates in the county remained steady during the period examined.

In this brief report we use the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) to document national trends in immigrants' use of public benefits in the period following welfare reform. Specifically, we examine changes in participation between 1994 and 1997 reflected by the March CPS.(5) During 1994 changes in welfare rules were just beginning to be broadly debated. By the end of 1997, welfare reform had been in place for a year and a half, although full implementation was not complete. In addition, the CPS for both years provides comparable data on benefit use for the entire nation.

The current analysis builds on methods developed by the Urban Institute over the past decade that permit us to distinguish refugees, naturalized citizens, and temporary immigrants from other legally present immigrants.(6) Such distinctions are important for two reasons. First, conventional comparisons between the benefit use rates of natives and the foreign born mask substantial variation in rates and trends among substantively different segments of the foreign-born population. Second, following welfare reform, citizenship status has become an increasingly important determinant of eligibility for public benefits.

We should emphasize that most legal immigrants and refugees remained eligible for welfare and Medicaid benefits throughout the period examined (1994 through 1997).(7) The same cannot be said for federal food stamps, however: many legal immigrants' eligibility was supposed to end as of September 1997, while new noncitizen applicants became ineligible in October 1996. Finally, while most immigrants arriving after welfare reform's enactment are barred from federal means-tested public benefits for at least five years,(8) these "future" immigrants represented a small share of the noncitizen population at the time of the March 1998 CPS.

Principal Findings

* When viewed against the backdrop of overall declines in welfare receipt for all households, use of public benefits among noncitizen households (9) fell more sharply (35 percent) between 1994 and 1997 than among citizen households (14 percent). These patterns hold for welfare (defined here as TANF, SSI, and General Assistance), food stamps, and Medicaid.

* Refugees experienced declines (33 percent) that were at least as steep as those within the noncitizen population--despite the protections for refugees incorporated into welfare reform and the fact that few refugees had lost their eligibility for benefits by March 1998.(10)

* For low-income populations (i.e., with incomes below 200 percent of poverty), program usage also fell faster for noncitizen than citizen households.

* Welfare use in noncitizen households with children also fell faster (36 percent) than in households with children where all adults are citizens (23 percent).

* One result of these trends is that noncitizens accounted for a disproportionately large share of the overall decline in welfare caseloads that occurred between 1994 and 1997. While 23 percent of the drop in welfare caseloads can be ascribed to noncitizens, they represented only 9 percent of households receiving welfare in 1994.

* Welfare use among elderly immigrants and naturalized citizens did not appear to change between 1994 and 1997.

* When welfare use among all households is examined, noncitizen participation levels were higher than citizens' in both 1994 and 1997, despite rapid declines in noncitizen use rates. But when we look at poor households (i.e., with incomes under 200 percent of poverty), noncitizens' participation rates in 1994 were no different from those of citizens; by 1997, however, levels had declined so that noncitizens had lower participation rates than citizens (14.5 versus 17.9 percent). When we examine poor households with children, noncitizen rates were lower for both 1994 and 1997--falling to almost half of the level of citizens in 1997 (14.0 versus 25.8 percent).

* Neither naturalization nor rising incomes accounted for a significant share of noncitizens' exits from public benefit use.

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War with Mexico a certainty

by Sheepdôg Tuesday, Nov. 02, 2004 at 4:21 AM

Mexico is an inferior land who is bettter at outbreeding other nations.

What they need is an occupation, "temporary" forced sterilization ofbreeding age women, the assassination of Fox and friends and a solid border of land mines and drones armed with Vulcan cannons.

Deporation is a must, as are snipers along the border.

Of course, thanks to the sniveling, socialist pussies and pansies (private property is theft, said the commie) by 2050 the mexicans will have overrun America.

Whitey will have the last laff, tho. The superior Whites will live in huge domed arcologies while the mexicans live in their own shit and squalor, just like they do in the mother land now.

Fuck 'em.

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OneEyedMan

by KPC Tuesday, Nov. 02, 2004 at 5:33 PM
KPC

Jeez, you are an idiot....

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