Tea Party: Best Friend of American Workers?

What’s
Wrong Today:

From Mike
Allen and Jim Vandehei in Politico:

In private conversations, top
Republicans on Capitol Hill now predict comprehensive immigration reform will
die a slow, months-long death in the House. Like with background checks for gun
buyers, the conventional wisdom that the party would never kill immigration
reform, and risk further alienating Hispanic voters, was always wrong — and
ignored the reality that most House Republicans are white conservatives
representing mostly white districts.

Republicans are talking
about passing a “border security only” bill as a prelude to doing anything on a
path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in this country. But a
“border security only” bill won’t pass the Senate, so immigration
reform is dead.

Could
it be that the Tea Party members in the House are actually more pro-American
worker than their Senate colleagues? After all, the Senate’s comprehensive
immigration bill (S.744) really betrays workers. How, you ask? The bill is more about globalization
and labor arbitrage for major US corporations than it is about a path to
citizenship. Lobbyists and the Senate have simply used the plight of
illegal Hispanics as a rubric to pass their underlying agenda, which is to meet
the Corporatists’ demand for cheaper labor.

In
the Senate bill, the undocumented actually get a raw deal. It would take
at least 13 years to obtain citizenship and during that period, they would pay
taxes and social security but their status is as guest workers. It is estimated
that 1.6 million additional foreign guest
workers will be added to the labor force in the first year, assuming S.744
became law.

That
is close to the total number of new
jobs created in the US each year.

More guest workers in
US jobs is driving corporate support for comprehensive immigration reform: Microsoft
and Facebook have demanded more H-1B Visas and other tech visas, even though
there is no
tech worker shortage. The Economic Populist blog analyzed
the National Science Foundation statistics and showed the US has way more
skilled workers now than can be employed. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a
detailed study also proving there is no tech worker
shortage.

From the EPI study:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Our
examination of the IT labor market, guestworker flows, and the STEM education
pipeline finds…that the United
States has more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM
occupations:

EPI also found that in
computer and information science and in engineering, US colleges graduate 50% more students than are hired
into those fields each year.

EPI found after reviewing
studies of wages and employment in the STEM and IT industries, that over the
past decade IT employment has gradually increased, but it had only recovered to
its 2000–2001 peak level by the end of 2010 and that wages have remained flat,
with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels.

Our politicians talk
about STEM jobs (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), as the holy
grail of high wage jobs. In any month since the start of the Great
Recession, there are about 3.6 million jobs available in the US. But our
multinational corporations continually talk about a talent shortage. They claim
the shortage may be as many as 6-7 million STEM jobs. How can there be a talent
shortage that is 2x the jobs available? If there was a STEM jobs shortage, wouldn’t wages rise?

Bloomberg reported that corporations got all of their cheap labor
agenda through the Senate. One interesting trick has already been named the Facebook
Loophole:

The Senate bill has
one more coercive trick up its sleeve. In what’s called the “Facebook
loophole,” companies with lots of H-1B employees can get around the rule
requiring them to prove they tried to hire Americans — if they sponsor at
least 90 percent of their H-1B workers for green cards.

In essence, this
loophole makes it perfectly legal to fire US workers and replace them with
foreign guest workers. All corporations have to do is file a claim they
intend to sponsor their imported labor for green cards. The Senate bill raises the annual
cap to 115,000 from 65,000. It can rise over time to 180,000 as long as the
jobless rate in management and professional occupations is below 4.5%;
currently it’s 3.7%.

The Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) scored S.744 and the conclusions were that the bill will
lower per capita GNP. The
CBO’s work assumes that the population will rise by 10 million over the same
time period, while most estimates show an increase of 35 million workers over
10 years.

Relative to what
would occur under the current law, S. 744 would lower per capita GNP by 0.7% in
2023. CBO’s best case estimates also show that average wages for the entire
labor force would be 0.1% lower in 2023.

The bill isn’t
helping average wages, or our economy. So who is it helping?

Ironically,
the best hope for American workers now lies with Tea Party Republicans, who do not
have what we would normally call a labor friendly agenda. But, they hate Mr.
Obama and Hispanics enough to produce the unintended
consequence of saving jobs for Americans while meeting their goal of derailing
comprehensive immigration reform.

Strange isn’t it:
more immigrants from Mexico steal jobs from Americans but more immigrants
from India are necessary for our economy.