Uncle Milton: Unions didn't gain any real power in this country until the immigration doors were slammed shut in the 1920s. In the modern era (the last three decades) you don't have to look very far to see how cheap Latino labor has suppressed the wages of meat packers, janitors, construction workers, etc.Uncle makes a fantastic point here! The US labor movement only really got going after we seriously restricted immigration in the mid-1920's. We then massively loosened up immigration in 1965, at least racially speaking. At some point after that, we began to experience mass immigration.
When critiquing illegal immigration, I find it much more productive (and appealing or at least tolerated) by a wider audience when you bring up what it has done to wages and how employers have profited.
Now with the globalization of computer technology many things can be done overseas: accounting, programming, tech support, architecture. In theory, this is done for lower costs, but I know multiple cases were companies brought labor back to the US.
We hear all the time about how the US isn't producing enough engineers. What you don't hear as much is that the average engineer only stays in the field for about a decade instead of a 30 to 40 year career. Quite a bit of ageism in the field.
Our country's currency is being debased, our technology distributed (and frequently "borrowed" with no recompense in the process) to other nations, and unrestrained immigration (and attendant high birthrates of "migrants" subsidized by US taxpayers) are straining resources.
It's generally profitable to those in top 1/10 of 1% of wealth but not so great for everyone else. The concept of national sovereignty being the source of ones wealth seems to have been tossed out the window. At least Japanese and Chinese people seem to have a better grasp on the concept that a stable cohesive nation is your most important source of wealth.
Frosty Wooldridge notes that the 1965 Immigration Act resulted in immigration going from 170,000 - 1.1 million per year. That's a damn good reason to oppose it right there, even if you care nothing about the racial angle.
Mass illegal immigration from Mesoamerica started under Reagan in 1980, picked up tremendous speed after 1990 and has exploded since 2000.
The US union movement began to go into a serious decline around 1973 (Any relation to the 1965 immigration act?), about the same time that US wages started to seriously stagnate and wealth began being distributed upwards. Yes, even the Jimmy Carter "Atari Democrats" were in on this bullshit. We've now had 35 years of this insanity.
Plunging wages have combined with wildly increasing inequality, a flood of illegal immigration, an evisceration of our social democracy and what little Social Contract we ever had to produce 28 years of varying degrees of reactionary politics, with a brief intercession for a Eisenhower Republican Democrat named Clinton (actually, Ike was much more progressive than Bill Clinton).
Does any of this make sense? Of course not.
Why does a population where the bottom 60-80% are getting eviscerated march off and vote for the eviscerators every year? Well. They do it in the 3rd World. They used to do it in Latin America. Can you see where we are headed?
The ageism in IT is disgusting. You get about 10 years and then no one will hire you anymore because you are too expensive. 90% of new IT hires are going to H-1B job thieves anyway, and one of the Senate's paragons of Democratic liberalism, Barbara Mikulski, recently introduced a bill to greatly increase the number of H-1B job thieves to the US in order to destroy even more US jobs and lay off even more US workers.
Does that make sense? Of course not.
It only makes sense in a Democratic Party whose liberal wing has utterly abandoned US workers.
I disagree that the illegal immigration flood is only beneficial to the top .1%. Sure, they love it, but I think the entire top 20% benefits, and further, the entire US business class, from small business all the way to corporations, just loves it to death. Hispanic-Americans generally don't benefit a bit, and I insist that most of them are actually harmed by illegal immigration, but they line up on racial grounds anyway.
One of the worst things about Reagan-Thatcherism's TINA (There Is No Alternative) neoliberalism is that everywhere on Earth it has been tried, it has generally benefited only the top 20% of the population. The bottom 80% gets screwed no matter what. From 1980-1992 in the US, the top 80% gained a lot of money and the entire bottom 80% of the US population lost money!
It's been this way everywhere and as regular as clockwork. That's why Latin America is turning their back on this shit. They've had a couple decades of this poison and they are not buying anymore. These "dumb Latinos" are not as stupid as Gringos think they are! Hell, they are smarter than most White Americans.
Anyway, this nasty 20% bastard class has been created everywhere, and everywhere it has done quite a bit of damage. This class is deeply invested in neoliberalism and makes up the overwhelming majority of the professionals and movers and shakers in society. They seek to keep neoliberalism in place forever by whatever means they can.
Even in the UK, a nasty 20% elite has been created since Thatcher. They have nice new foreign cars and second homes in the country. The result has been the rightwing Labor governments of Blair and Brown. In Latin America, the masses actually voted these professional and business elites out, but it hasn't happened everywhere.
The notion of national sovereignty being the source of a nation's wealth is an interesting one, but I do not know where to start on that subject. Maybe someone else can chime in.
It's clear that in Corporate World, there is no national sovereignty anymore. The corporation is the ultimate traitor - it has no national allegiance whatsoever. How do drive around that nasty speed bump is a pretty difficult question.
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