Dec

9

Bill Rafter, thanks for your interesting posts.

I think you will be interested in the attached chart showing native-born compared to immigrant gains (or lack of gains) in employment. It is the work of a perceptive fellow like yourself who tracks such comparison from gov. statistics (whose name I have for the time being misplaced) and who reports on the vdare.com website.

As you can see from the chart, all net gains in US employment since Obama took office have gone to Foreign-born, while net employment of native-born Americans has not increased during this period.

In addition to being worrying in itself, this may well tie into your finding that while employment has increased, payroll taxes (and therefore wages) have decreased, presumably because of substitution of lower-paid immigrant workers for higher paid native-born workers.

As an illustration one can think of the US construction industry, which used to employ large numbers of middle income workers. Now as I understand it the industry largely employs immigrant Hispanic workers at far lower salaries. One can think of a number of other industry examples.

Gary Rogan writes:

In traditional economic terms substituting cheap foreign-born labor for native-born American labor is manna from heaven: the cost of goods for everyone goes down, so what's not to like? But when those displaced workers go on disability and when they vote themselves food stamps and "free" healthcare, it's not working out so well, is it? This sounds like a Luddite-type argument, and it is, but Luddite argument are valid when the number of displaced workers reaches some critical mass. People are not copper or oil, if they are desperate they resort to desperate measures. The industrial revolution produced Marx, and it was only because the positive effects of that revolution overtook the negatives quickly enough that there wasn't a Marxist revolution in England at the time.

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

Er, no. Gary should stick to his guns on the subject of migration. The reason there was not a Marxist revolution in Britain/England in the 19th century is that people emigrated from the British Isles in sufficient numbers to populate Canada, Australia, New Zealand and double the white-skinned population of the United States. You can add to those numbers the millions of Britons who went overseas to manage/rule/work for the Empire in Africa and Asia and the Caribbean. The argument for "free trade" made by Cobden and others was that the attempts to support prices for British landowners was literally starving the "native-born" population of Britain. They were right, of course; what even they did not anticipate was that, by allowing goods to come into and out of Britain without quotas and with "honest" tariffs (ones that could not be manipulated to hold the goods hostage to official approval) the free trade produced the financial revolution that made London the center of the world's capital markets. That financial revolution and the ability of Brits to do wonderful things with maths are what sustained Britain and still do, not the industrial revolution. The best scholars are now in agreement that Britain's economic rise over the rest of the world came much earlier, before combustion-driven machinery had even begun to take hold - in the 18th and early 19th century. By 1850 and certainly by 1870 Britain's "industry" had been overwhelmed by American, French and German innovation and mechanization.
 


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