11/28/2005
One must marvel at the campaign that a handful of neoconservatives were able to create around September 11. They were able to commit vast resources to a war based on falsified intelligence and to set aside in the interest of executive power the essential civil liberties that define America as a nation. A fabricated threat was all that was needed in order to deep six habeas corpus, due process, warrants, and privacy, shatter America’s reputation, especially among Muslims, and place the US several hundred billions of dollars deeper in the hands of its Asian bankers.
Compare this to the lack of response to a real threat: massive legal and illegal unassimilated immigration. Vdare.com provides abundant information concerning the costs to Americans of unwarranted immigration. Taxpayers are footing school, medical, crime and welfare bills for illegals. Construction and other workers are losing wages and jobs to the flood of immigrants that greatly expands the labor supply. America is losing its language and cultural unity. Mass immigration has created a Tower of Babel.
Americans and their elected representatives fell for a fake threat while ignoring a real one.
Opponents of mass immigration have not been able even to use fear of terrorists to establish better control over our borders. Bush was able to commit vast US resources to protecting Israel’s and Iraq’s borders while ignoring our own.
Considering Americans' failure to deal with immigration despite the physical evidence before their eyes, how will Americans be able to deal with the virtual immigration that is destroying the American Dream?
Low wage Americans have lost many jobs to Mexican immigrants. But virtual immigrants in India, China, the Philippines, Eastern Europe and Russia are taking the professional, high value-added jobs that comprise the ladders of upward mobility in American society.
There are several hundred thousand unemployed American engineers whose jobs have been outsourced (or filled by foreigners brought into the US on various work visas). Job outsourcing threatens practically the entire range of middle and upper middle class jobs: legal research, accounting, stock analysis, radiology, IT, drafting and architecture, research and development, and even innovation itself. Prestigious engineering schools report a decline in enrollments as job opportunities shrink. Civil engineering seems the only safe engineering field left for Americans, except for those few with top secret clearances who can get jobs doing government contract work.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that few of the jobs created in the US over the next decade will require a university education. With few opportunities for graduates, it is reasonable to expect a decline in America’s institutions of higher education.
Americans don’t see virtual immigrants as they are working offshore in their home countries and communicating with their US employers via the Internet. Americans do not experience virtual immigration until their jobs are outsourced.
Moreover, virtual immigrants have massive sources of American support: corporations that maximize profits by arbitraging labor and the politicians that they control, libertarians and "free traders" who see freedom and the invisible hand of the market working through virtual immigration, and "one world" globalists.
Federal Reserve policy and the way unemployment is measured have masked the economic deterioration caused by virtual immigration. The Fed’s low interest rate policy created a housing boom that inflated home prices and permitted home owners to continue consuming by refinancing their homes and spending the equity. This spur to consumer demand is qualitatively different from the support to consumer demand that results from a growth in high productivity, high value-added jobs.
The unemployment rate measures people actively searching for a job. People who have dropped out of the work force due to discouragement are not counted.
Last July the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published a study which concluded that much unemployment is masked by a large decline in the labor force participation rate. A main reason for discouragement is that job seekers cannot find jobs comparable to those they have lost. The study concludes that if the unemployment rate is adjusted for the decline in labor force participation, the US employment rate could be as high as 8.7 percent, a far cry from the 5 percent measured rate that is being hyped as evidence that all is well with the US economy. [Additional Slack in the Economy: The Poor Recovery in Labor Force Participation During This Business Cycle, by Katharine Bradbury]
America is becoming a third world country not only because of mass unassimilated immigration from third world countries, but also because of the loss to virtual immigration of the high productivity, high value-added jobs that characterize a first world economy. Virtual immigration is more deadly, because it lacks an observable physical presence even as it dismantles the ladders of upward mobility. If Americans cannot deal with what they can see, how will they deal with what they cannot see?COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts is the author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.