Avoiding desperate employee competition

Anyone who has read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle knows how 19^th century northern industrialists treated immigrants like disposable property. They subjected them to terrible and dangerous working conditions for starvation wages, knowing that if they died or were too injured to work or managed to quit there would be replacements available from the next boatload of immigrants. Their American colonial ancestors had literally worked their indentured servants to death to get the maximum profit from them, knowing that they could buy a replacement indentured servant shipped from the English poor houses and jails at any time. Powerless, desperate immigrant labor has always been the capitalist’s dream. It was even more profitable than slavery, because you didn’t need to keep the immigrants alive.

I always find it strange when people who claim to be liberal and enlightened make a statement along the following lines. “This country has so many jobs that Americans don’t want to do! We should be happy that we have lots of unauthorized immigrants that are willing to do that work! We should support keeping them here and letting more come!” The view of life that underlies that statement is monstrous. It is easy to picture Hetty Woodstone, the ruthless Victorian industrialist on Ghosts, saying “Thank goodness for immigrants – there are so many jobs that Americans won’t do anymore!” and these people laughing at her brutal attitude, completely unaware that they are just like her.

Why don’t Americans want to do those jobs? Because they have terrible pay and working conditions. The workers do back-breaking and/or gross labor, which may involve being exposed to pesticides or doing other dangerous things, for substandard pay, often living in awful housing. Often employers will seek to take advantage of them sexually as well as economically. Nobody in America should be doing jobs with that combination of unpleasant work, bad conditions and bad pay. The view that it’s OK because there are people in other countries who are desperate enough to make a dangerous trek to enter our country illegally, and then are afraid enough of deportation to be unwilling to complain or unionize, is utterly inhumane.¹ Yet people parrot such statements all the time without even a whiff of shame.

Likewise, at the other end of the job spectrum employers have done an amazing job of propaganda in getting people to believe that it is great for them to bring in as many cheap college graduates as possible from India, China or elsewhere in order to undercut the US pay scale. Given their first choice they just export the work to poor and desperate countries, but if they can’t do that then they import the workers from those poor and desperate countries to here. Tech workers in India may be paid 10 cents on the dollar relative to American workers, so for them it is a great thing to work here and send money home, but it is a very bad thing for US employees. The financiers admit that they use immigration this way when they think they are just talking among themselves, as when Fed chairman Powell notes with satisfaction that high immigration rates reduced workers’ ability to get raises.

The financier propagandists also love to say that we need to import millions of desperate low-wage immigrants in order to save the social security system, because we need more people paying in to the system. That is a pure Ponzi-scheme con. Our social security system is designed, as it should be, to ensure that low-wage workers can have a reasonably comfortable retirement. It should even be more generous in that regard. But that means that the contributions from low-wage workers don’t cover their benefits when they retire. Low-wage workers receive annual social security benefits equal to 56.6% of their average wage. High-wage workers get annual benefits of 19.9% of their taxable wage. When we went from 200 million people in 1972 to 340 million now mainly by importing desperate low-wage workers, we violated the assumptions underlying the funding of social security. Now the parasitic financiers behind all that want to renege on the promise of a decent retirement for working people by letting social security fail, but first they want to run the Ponzi as long as they can by bringing in ever-increasing numbers of new Ponzi “investors”, i.e. desperate low-wage workers to pay into the system, with the financiers knowing that there will be no funds to cover their social security when the Ponzi collapses.

None of that has anything to do with race or heritage. If you are a US-born Hispanic with a high school degree, competition with an endless number of desperate immigrants is bad, even if they are blue-eyed people from the Ukraine. If you are a US-born Indian or Chinese heritage tech worker, competition with an endless number of desperate immigrants is bad, even if they are blue-eyed people from Poland. Just because most of us had ancestors who came from someplace else within the last 400 years (quite a lot of them, both black and white, involuntarily) it does not mean that we therefore have to say that if the several billion people in poor countries want to come into our nation of 340 million, it is a good idea to let them.

America hit its ideal population of between 150 million and 200 million by 1972. The 140 million new high-consumption residents added since then as part of our Ponzi-scheme economy have not made anything better for America or the planet and, as climate change increasingly shows its effects, the problem with having so many people pressuring our cities, countryside and environment is showing itself. It’s not a question of who the immigrants are, but simply that there have been so many of them. If our American-born population had expanded by 140 million during the same period, rather than contracting, it would have been just as much of a problem.

I lived and worked in Switzerland for a while. I was not allowed to work a day until I was given a work permit. My wife and I were fingerprinted and retina scanned and issued biometric IDs that we had to keep with us, and we registered with the police and had to be examined by the health authorities. When my work permit expired after 6 months, they tossed us out of the country. That is why our secretaries in Switzerland were paid as much as college graduates in the US, and why the janitors had comfortable lifestyles. It was similar when I lived and worked in China and in the UK.² We registered with the police and had to notify them if we changed our address. We were examined by the health authorities. We had residency papers and nobody could hire us to do so much as mow a lawn without our having to show our work permit and have authorization for that work. By the time we left the UK, my youngest had lived there for as long as he could remember, our older two spoke with English accents and had well-established friends and habits, we loved the house we were renting, and we all suffered culture shock when we came home to the US. But that was the deal. None of this had anything to do with ethnic antagonism of any sort. Sensible countries control immigration like that, and they ensure that the number and type of immigrants they take is beneficial to the country and its existing work force. They have a preference for temporary immigrants who can be sent home if a citizen becomes available to do the work that the immigrant was doing. They don’t take immigrants who will be desperate enough to undercut local pay or working conditions.

Laborism will control immigration by controlling employment. It will be a serious offense with serious enforcement to hire anyone for anything without seeing a reliable ID card verifying their authorization to work (which will be issued both to citizens/permanent residents and to temporary authorized immigrants) and entering the ID number in a convenient government website, along with information as to whether the person you paid also had employees helping with the work.

Immigration will be metered with input from existing American unions such as the United Farm Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers, construction and slaughterhouse and hotel workers unions, the people feeling the front-line effects of competition, as well as from unaffiliated American employees, to allow workers to gain strength to obtain better wages and working conditions. Temporary workers would be admitted (subject to such input) where they had commitments from local sponsoring employers, but subject to regulations requiring that they receive better-than-average pay so that employers retained incentive to find Americans to do the work. Employees, including these authorized immigrants, will be encouraged to complain about poor working conditions and will be protected from retaliation for doing so. Authorized immigrants will be introduced to American union organizers who will educate them about American work standards and protections, and because they will be authorized they will feel free to exercise their union strength. Foreign criminals and gangsters will be rigorously excluded so that American immigrant communities would be safe and family-friendly places.³

America has a moral obligation to accept a certain number of true refugees.⁴ However, laborist policy would also put an end to brutal American sanctions⁵ on the people of other countries and to needless foreign wars, so that the number of true refugees would plummet. Look at where our refugees have been coming from. They are not from Myanmar or the Sudan or other places with dangerous conditions that America had nothing to do with. They are from countries that we have interfered with, or countries like China that our financiers would like to interfere with. People won’t need to try to flee to our country if we don’t ruin theirs. America’s foreign policy has been conducted on behalf of international financiers who want to destroy any foreign government or people that does not bow to their will, using unrelenting propaganda through the financier-owned media and politicians to get the American people to support it. If we instead follow the advice of George Washington and our other revolutionary founders to have a foreign policy that is fair and friendly to all, the world will be a less desperate place, American workers will be more prosperous and more secure, and we can have a fairer and more sensible immigration policy.

To defeat the power of compound interest, we must use compound effort. Please subscribe as a supporter (it’s free, and I won’t send you any e-mails other than these posts) and pledge to recruit at least 5 other people who each pledge to recruit at least 5 others. Recruit family, friends, co-workers, church members, union members, lodge members, people in your organizations, strangers. We can do this, but we each need to put in the effort.

1. And it’s forbidden in the Christian and Jewish religions. Exodus 22:21 “You must not exploit or oppress a foreign resident”.

2. Neither China nor the UK had the same visible benefit from these restrictions as Switzerland. China still had poor people from the countryside pouring into the cities for work, and the UK was overloaded with immigrants from the old empire and the newly expanded EU that they had to accept in large quantities.

3. Neoliberals tend to take the racist and classist view that because poor neighborhoods tend to suffer from high crime rates, that means that poor people like criminals and want the government to leave criminals alone. Poor people are mostly law-abiding. No law-abiding person wants to have their person or property threatened by criminals.

4. Many people claim refugee status but have zero interest in moving to a less wealthy country, as evidenced in part by the fact that they pass through several other countries on their way here. A true refugee is one who is fleeing some horrifying situation such that they would be happy to be allowed to settle in India or the Philippines so long as they were safe and could find some way to earn a living.

5. In 1996, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked “We have heard that a half million children have died [from US sanctions on Iraq]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”. Her response was “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” Sorry, but nothing is worth killing 500,000 innocent children. Those sanctions were on a country that had never attacked us, and had never attacked anyone else without our government’s express permission. Our government thought it was “worth it” because the country did not obey the international financiers. This is typical of US sanctions programs.