The Capitalist West is running out of workers. Well, at least, it’s running out of workers willing to work for wages the capitalists are willing to pay. What you’re seeing is an attempt to outsource manufacturing jobs to countries where labor is cheap, or failing that, to encourage foreign workers to come into Western countries and take over those low-paid jobs that domestic workers are tending more and more to refuse. Manufacturing is fleeing to the sweatshop belt, and service jobs are going to “guest workers”. Add to this the slowdown in birthrates and the general aging of the population, there is a worldwide labor shortage. In the Eurozone, workers from Asia, Africa and the Mideast are flooding in. Turks into Germany, North Africans into France, Commonwealth people from the former Empire into the UK, and of course, Central Americans and Mexicans into the USA.
As more and more foreigners come in to take low paying jobs, the level at which those jobs are defined as low-paying is creeping up as well. Asians trained at public expense in their universities are now moving into research and teaching positions here in the USA in academia and industry. Engineers and scientists are particularly well-represented, and American students are finding it increasingly more prohibitive to go to college, unless they go into hock and attend some on-line diploma mill specializing in bullshit business degrees.
There is no longer an Astronomy Department at USF where I went to school. I wonder how many of our little Jasons and Jennifers are enrolled in the undergraduate program in Physics, much less how many of them actually graduate. I guess most of them wind up in in Business Administration, or pick up degrees in lunatic disciplines like Real Estate Investment Counseling or Fashion Journalism.
Here is the faculty and staff of the Physics Department at USF. Check out those names.
Batzill, Matthias – Associate Professor
Chabot, Michelle – Instructor
Chen, Antao – Research Associate Professor
Chen, Wei – Professor
Criss, Robert – Instructor
Datta, Anuja – Research Assistant Professor
Giaever, Ivar – Eminent Scholar, Nobel Laureate, Physics, 1973 Chair
Gobeille, Douglas – Instructor
Haynie, Donald – Associate Professor
Hoy, Robert – Assistant Professor
Jiang, Xiaomei – Associate Professor
Karaiskaj, Denis – Assistant Professor
Kim, Myung – Professor, Fellow of Optical Society of America
Lisenkov, Sergey – Research Assistant Professor
Mackay, Kevin – Instructor
Matthews, Garrett – Associate Professor
Miller, Casey – Associate Professor
Mukherjee, Pritish – Professor & Chair
Muller, Andreas – Assistant Professor
Muschol, Martin – Associate Professor
Nolas, George – Professor, Fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science
Oleynik, Ivan – Professor
Pan, Jianjun – Assistant Professor
Pandit, Sagar – Associate Professor
Phan, Manh-Huong – Research Assistant Professor
Ponomareva, Inna – Associate Professor
Rabson, David – Associate Professor
Shi, Zhimin – Assistant Professor
Srikanth, Hariharan – Professor
Ullah, Ghanim – Assistant Professor
Witanachchi, Sarath – Professor and Associate Chair
Woods, Gerald – Instructor & General Physics Lab Director
Woods, Lilia – Associate Professor
Zhakhovsky, Vasily – Research Associate Professor
Zhou, Jiangfeng – Assistant Professor
The immigration situation in the US is further complicated by politics. For blue collar and service jobs, and in casual labor and agriculture, the market is dominated by Central Americans and Mexicans. The Republican Party has found itself between a rock and a hard place of their own making.
The Business Establishment wing of the GOP needs cheap labor, it not only lowers salaries, it forces wages down for American citizens as well as having more and more middle class manufacturing and clerical jobs either leave the country or become open to foreign workers, both legal and illegal. American business wants these people here, needs them, particularly in the West and South, which is why in the past the Republican Party has pretended to work for immigration reform. (Just enough to make it hard to get in, but not hard enough to keep anyone out). It’s not because they’re nice guys, it is in their financial interest to do so. The foreign worker will work for minimal wages, often pays no employer-matched witholding, and is not likely to agitate for higher wages or better working conditions, form unions, or go on strike. If he causes trouble he knows he can be deported, and the government partially subsidizes labor costs for their American employers by providing these workers with social services and welfare. It is a sweetheart deal, these are the ideal exploitable workforce.
But for the blue collar base of the Republican party, these foreigners are recognized as a real threat, who drive wages down, increase crime, consume resources, and alter the very culture itself in ways they find threatening. Americans are now learning the hard way how the Mexicans who lived in the American Southwest felt when the gringos annexed their country and started pouring in with lawyers, guns and money. Karma, as they say, is a bitch. Unfortunately, karma has a bad habit of punishing the wrong villains, too late.
The Democrats aren’t necessarily the good guys in this movie either. They don’t give a flying fig about the poor suffering Latinos and their “dream kids”, but they know that they represent an enormous potential pool of Demo-voters if they are given a “path to citizenship”. (Man, I love that phrase; once again, I wish there was a font for sarcasm). And their relatives and friends who are already citizens here are pounding the GOP at the polls now, and they are doing so increasingly every year.
So the Dems get to seize the moral high ground, while the GOP Daddy Warbucks wing tries to placate their racist blue-collar base with phony promises of “no amnesty”, walls on the border, a billion dollar migra and mass deportations, but refuse to opt out for the obvious solution to the problem: fine and jail businessmen who hire illegals. The Democrats can’t lose. The more the House stalls on immigration, the more Western states will turn Blue. Meanwhile, the illegals will keep streaming in, not by climbing over fences or crawling through tunnels in the desert, but in comfort, in air-conditioned cars, buses and jet airliners. They won’t be stopped at the border, they can always say they’re coming here to go shopping.
Once again, the Anglos are paying a heavy price for their laziness, stinginess and reluctance to pick their own cotton.