Friday, December 8, 2023

Immigration Is The Litmus Test

It used to be that support for the Second Amendment was one of the best ways to tell a real American from a fake-American. But I think that there is a better correlation between being a real American and opposition to immigration. For years, I've explained that immigration is largely responsible for stagnating wages. It has become apparent over the last several years that record immigration is largely responsible for driving up housing prices, especially in the largest markets. Peter Turchin has explained in his book, End Times, that immigration is the key factor driving the "wealth pump" that is used to suck money out of the middle-class and inject it into the elites. Keep that in mind as you consider these two articles:

Haley told supporters in October, “We need to go to our industries and say, ‘What [workers] do you need that you don’t have?’ … Then you bring people in that can fill those needs.”

 And I've seen other comments from her supporting H1B visa programs and other similar programs to legally bring in foreign workers (and, therefore, replace American workers). And I'm being serious about replacing American workers. One of the common arguments for such programs is that the U.S. doesn't produce enough STEM graduates and that is why all these Chinese and Indian tech managers need to import Chinese and Indian tech workers. But that isn't true. In an article from Real Clear Science last year, it reported:

 "America is not facing a deficit of STEM-educated graduates," Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, wrote in his his recent book, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s. "It is true that there is intense demand for and a shortage of people with certain specific degrees – especially in data analytics, machine learning, and AI. But overall, America produces each year roughly 50 percent more STEM graduates than there are STEM job openings."

When Haley asks "what workers do you need that you don't have" she isn't asking about filling empty slots, but workers that will work for as little as possible. There are two reasons for this: low wages help make the elites wealthier; and Haley (whose birth name was Nimarata Nikki Randhawa) is the children of immigrants from India and so has ethnic reasons for wanting to expand the importation of more Indian tech workers.

So here we have major politicians from both parties urging more immigration and competition for jobs. They are not outliers but represent the norm in both parties. 

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