The Washington Post is shocked, shocked! to find that Americans are suffering from unemployment, tenuous job security, and a shaky economic future! But of course, WaPo’s compelling vignette of a collapsing country and a desperate people ignores the driving factor behind America’s decline — mass immigration and its devastating effects on American workers.
WaPo gives us the human face of the American workers that the Obama Administration is crushing under its Permanent Majority of uneducated foreign workers:
CHESTER, Pa. — The alarm rang on John Stewart’s phone at 1:10 a.m. Up at 1:30, he caught one bus north into Philadelphia a little after 2 and another bus, south toward the airport, half an hour after that. He made it into work around 3:25 for a shift that started at 4, for a job that pays $5.25 an hour, which he cannot afford to lose.
Stewart is 55, tall and thin and animated. [VDARE.com note: Mr. Stewart is black, which is why he’s more vulnerable to being displaced by immigrants. WaPo didn’t say that, but included a picture.]
"I can’t save money," he said recently, "to buy the things I need to live as a human being."
American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place. That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers such as Stewart."
The bipartisan Establishment’s solution: create more competition for these jobs!
More than six in 10 workers in a recent Washington Post-Miller Center poll worry that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s. Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry "a lot" about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey, which explores Americans’ changing definition of success and their confidence in the country’s future…
Job insecurities have always been higher among low-income Americans, but they typically rose and fell across all levels of the income ladder. Today, workers at the bottom have drifted away, occupying their own island of insecurity….
Americans’ economic perceptions often divide along political lines; supporters of the incumbent president are usually more optimistic about the job market and the health of the economy. But that’s not the case with this new anxiety. Once you control for economic and demographic factors, there is no partisan divide. There’s no racial divide, either, and no gender gap. It also doesn’t matter where you live.
What matters in this new anxiety, what unites the people who worry more now than ever, are income and education. Workers who earn less, and workers who didn’t graduate from college, fear losing their already weaker livelihoods more than anyone else.
This is something that the real immigration reform groups have been hammering on for years. Contra Luis Gutierrez and also most African-American leaders, black Democrats have nothing to gain from mass immigration–and illegals are not civil rights victims.
But, needless to say, a day with John Stewart isn’t going to have any impact on the WaPo’s editorial line.
Indeed, the Post really veers into self-parody when it describes how conditions didn’t used to be so bad for American workers.
[Stewart’s] first job — he doesn’t remember if it was in 1978 or ’79 — was cooking eggs and pancakes at a five-and-dime in New York City. He made $2.35 an hour, which would be a little less than $8 an hour today… It was an anxious time in the national economy, with inflation running high.
He worried hardly at all, about any of it.
"In the years back then,’’ Stewart explained recently, "if you left a job, you were able to find another job, within the next day or the same week…"
This time, finding a job took him five months. It’s sadly typical for this recovery: In October, more than 4 million Americans had been looking for work longer than six months. That was down from nearly 7 million people at the start of 2010, but still 1 million more than at any point in U.S. history before the Great Recession.
But, needless to say, WaPo did not mention that immigration is the key change. In 1979, the immigrant population was about 14.1 million, according to the United States Census of 1980. But ince then we added 25 million legal and illegal immigrants — this doesn’t count their American-born children — and the Schumer-Rubio 744 would like to make legal the 11 to 20 million illegal aliens here now.
Immigration advocates are essentially proposing to throw the John Stewarts, and other poor American citizens of all ethnic and racial types, under the bus.
How do we know this? The WaPo tells us so:
There is a reason workers like Stewart are so nervous in today’s economy… There are still 11 million Americans looking for work who can’t find a job. The unemployment rate is 7.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1980, except during recessions and their immediate aftermaths. Adjusting for inflation, average household incomes for the poorest 40 percent of workers have fallen steadily — by more than 10 percent, total — since 2000…
"It’s no surprise that security concerns are off the map now [among those workers] because the labor market is so bad," [Heidi] Shierholz [“an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute] said. "High unemployment hurts workers across the board, but it hurts workers with low and moderate incomes more."
And why is “the labor market so bad?” We are not told that. Yet WaPo unknowingly continues to lay out the case against mass immigration, especially because of its impact on workers with lower education:
"High-paying jobs for people who didn’t go to college just aren’t there anymore" in large numbers, said Melissa Kearney, an economist who directs the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.
As low-income workers tightly grip their current jobs, few are seeking the skills and education often required to land better-paying ones… Several economists say there’s a simple explanation for that gap: Poorer people can’t spare the time or money to go to school.
Do the authors of this piece (Email them) recognize their omission? Do they care? Was it edited out?
Donald A. Collins, is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own.
