Establishment support for legal mass immigration is allowing and concealing large-scale illegal discrimination by U.S. employers against American blue-collar workers, says a new report.
In American Affairs, Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax and D.C.-based researcher Jason Richwine describe many underreported academic studies which show immigration-enabled discrimination;
study after study reveals that employers display a clear and avowed preference for Hispanic and Asian immigrants over low skill natives of all backgrounds for a host of entry-level jobs across a range of industries in a variety of geographic locations.
Those attitudes were exemplified in a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against a bakery company in Houston, Texas. According to the Houston Chronicle:
The EEOC settled a … Hispanics-only hiring case last year for $1 million against Lawler Foods, a commercial bakery in Humble. The agency accused the bakery of favoring Hispanic workers and telling black, white and other applicants it would not hire them. The company was able to create a Hispanic-dominated workforce for its production line by relying on Hispanic employees to recruit friends and family, and advertising for Spanish speakers when the company had openings, according to the EEOC lawsuit.
Wax and Richwine say these problems can be addressed if elites recognize the harm caused by their pro-immigration priorities and if sidelined American blue-collar workers also recognize their own shortcomings.
Cutting off the flow of low-skill immigration could force a renewed commitment to getting Americans back to work—a commitment that must include, among other things, aggressive job recruiting and training by employers, reviving the social expectation that prime-age men must work, ending the “college for all” mindset that devalues blue-collar occupations, and strengthening work requirements as a condition of aid …
Why restrict immigration? Replacing American workers with fresh waves of low-skill immigrants is not a viable long-term strategy for our country. Despite some immediate economic benefits for employers, large shareholders, and consumers, albeit with substantial offsetting fiscal costs, mass importation of low-skill workers is both demoralizing and risky in the longer term …
Sustained mass immigration is also in bad faith, because it facilitates a wholesale evasion of hard realities. Too many low-skill Americans are poorly socialized to work and considered undesirable by American employers. The current immigration status quo allows this to be papered over. Changing the status quo will force this situation to be confronted and addressed. Society and workers themselves must face up to native workers’ perceived, and actual, inadequacies, and also to the need to take the low-skill jobs that exist and are available.
White-collar Americans are also suffering discrimination because employers prefer to hire young foreign graduates who will work long hours at low pay in the hope of the valuable prize of citizenship, say advocates. A ComputerWorld report about a 2016 lawsuit by four American plaintiffs said:
David Neumark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, analyzed Infosys’ U.S. workforce for the plaintiffs and wrote a 76-page report filed this week in federal court in Wisconsin, where the case is being heard …
One plaintiff was hired by Infosys to work on a $49.5 million Affordable Care Act, government-funded development project for the District of Columbia. There were about 100 Infosys employees working on the healthcare project, but only three were American, the lawsuit claimed. The plaintiff alleged harassment, and was denied promotion, the complaint said.
Neumark brought a statistical analysis to the discrimination claim. Specifically, the economist wrote, “from 2009 through 2015, 89.39% of Infosys’ United States workforce was South Asian while only 11.45% of the United States’ Computer Systems Design and Related Services industry was South Asian.”
President Donald Trump’s deputies are taking some steps to deter and penalize anti-American discrimination.
Also, Trump’s popular immigration principles call for the passage of the RAISE Act, which would help American workers by halving the supply of new immigrant workers. The act would end the visa lottery and the “chain migration” laws which allow new immigrants to award green cards to their foreign relatives, regardless of the relatives’ skills, education, ideology, and age.
Polls show that a lopsided majority of Americans oppose cheap-labor immigration which undermines U.S. workers.
Although industry-funded “nation of immigrants” polls pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants, the alternative “fairness” polls show that voters put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy. That political power of that fairness priority was made clear in during the GOP primaries and again in November 2016.
Each year, four million Americans turn 18 and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing almost 2 million work-permits to foreigners, by providing work-visas to roughly 500,000 temporary workers and doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor and spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.