Why Do Trump's Republicans Hate Immigrants?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The stakes are enormous if Republicans succeed in removing most of the estimated 11 million undocumented worker (only half of which are from Mexico and the Latin countries), and cut legal immigration in half, as they have promised to do. Economic growth will plummet, since it is mainly based on growth of the working age population, as well as labor productivity, which has also fallen since 2000.” Harlan Green Huffington Post

Huffington Post

I wrote in 2017 that for most of the past half-century, adults in the U.S. Baby Boom generation – those born after World War II and before 1965 – have been the main driver of the nation’s expanding workforce. But as this large generation headed into retirement, the increase in the potential labor force would slow markedly, and immigrants will play the primary role in the future growth of the working-age population (though they will remain a minority of it).

Republicans know this. Then why have Republicans and the Trump administration opposed immigration reform when there has never been enough American-born citizens to fill the labor rolls?  America has always had a labor shortage, which is why we have always been a land of immigrants.

A hint to the answer may be in the Gestapo-like tactics of the ICE raids to deport undocumented immigrants that is supposedly because they are supplanting lower-paid jobs that could be held by American citizens. (But that has never been the case, according to various studies that show American citizens won’t take such lower-paying jobs.)

The Republican Party has come to believe that it can only maintain power by preventing minorities from voting. They have suppressed voters in red states by limiting access to polls in minority districts and getting the Supreme Court to nullify parts of the Voting Rights Act that allowed federal government oversight of voting districts to ensure they weren’t over-gerrymandered to not accurately represent the population mix.

And now it is taking a darker turn with Trump’s callup of National Guard Troops to occupy Democratic cities, and threats to call any protests signs of an insurrection. Why have Republicans become so desperate that they now want to rule by decree?

One reason is the total growth of adults in the prime working ages of 25 to 64 over the next decade will be lower than the total in any single decade since the Baby Boomers began pouring into the workforce in the 1960s. The growth rate of working-age adults will also be markedly reduced, according to a PEW Research study.

The latest immigration trends studied by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI), a labor think tank, echoes the PEW analysis. Future economic growth will suffer if there aren’t enough new immigrants to supplant retiring workers in our adult labor workforce.

“The fast growth of the labor force between 1948 and 2007 and the slowdown since then can be explained by three big demographic changes: the Baby Boom that saw high fertility rates from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s and then a sharply lower fertility rate since, the steady influx of women into the labor force from 1948 until roughly 2000, and population aging that has seen the share of the over-65 population rise rapidly since 2007,” said Bivens.

We know that President Trump has always been racist; calling any immigrants that aren’t from white, Caucasian countries, such as Norway, criminals and the lowest of the low, hence his appeal to White Christian Nationalists.

Withholding funds from states and institutions in the name of suppressing DEI hiring is the Trump administration’s attempt to impoverish Americans in the blue states, as they have done in the red states. Their answer to the smaller workforce is the hope that AI and robots will fill the labor market void.

It is the reason for the huge rally in AI companies that is driving today’s stock market highs, driven by the hope that AI can replace our declining population.

The EPI’s Bivens says the labor force of the U.S.-born population will likely fall each year for the next decade. So what can we do to alleviate the hardships to come because Republicans have no answer for the half of our working population that will be replaced by AI, and already live month-to-month with no excess savings?

The EPI says it can be done with a social safety net that serves all Americans, not just the wealthy. “In addition to policies that prioritize tight labor markets, policies should target the following for adults:

• reductions in opioid use
• reductions in incarceration rates
• improvements in policies that support parents and caregivers
•  substantial improvements in the pay and working conditions of jobs of the future (like caregiving jobs) to attract and retain workers

“Investments in today’s children are crucial for boosting the labor force participation of future generations, such as safety net policies that promote long-term health and educational investments. 

This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky wish list but what can be done today, as it has been done in the past when such autocracies fail, as they always do.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Professor Stiglitz’s Plea to Save Capitalism

Popular Economics Weekly

MarketWatch

Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has been saying he wants to make capitalism work for everyone again in various writings, just as it did post-WWII, including this CNN commentary on the recent Earth Day. Is there even a viable alternative?

“America's economy has not been working for a large portion of the country. Workers at the bottom of the income scale earn wages, adjusted for inflation, that are not much higher than what they were 60 years ago, while the income of a typical full‐time male worker hasn't budged much from 40 years ago. In addition, life expectancy is in decline. But the economy is not only failing American citizens. It's failing the planet, and that means it's failing future generations.”

So how do we make it work for more Americans in the face of almost united opposition by the Republican Party? Firstly, we have to recognize the actual problem—Republican attempts to disempower large segments of Americans—women and blue-collar workers, for starters that have suffered the most from rollbacks in healthcare and workers’ collective bargaining rights.

We know the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cut bill; more than $1.5 trillion of spending cuts in Medicare and Medicaid coverage over 10 years in an attempt to lessen the projected $1 trillion annual budget deficit it is already costing; not to mention the endless attempts to cripple or outright abolish Obamacare without an alternative, and ban abortions, if not contraception outright.

And “In a new study for the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, we report survey results in which we find that one in five workers with a high school education or less are subject to a noncompete. A quarter of all workers are covered by a noncompete agreement with their current employer or a past one,” reports the NYTimes.

This means they are banned from working for a competing company in a similar line of work for a certain period, limiting their mobility and hunt for a better job.

This is why Americans’ life expectancy is on the decline, while rising in all other developed countries; which have universal health care, pay for the costs of state-run, higher education institutions, and in general protect their citizens with an extensive social safety net.

Why does America have more than ten times the per capital prison population than other developed countries, and stratospheric gun violence—now 40,000 per year killed with white males the largest segment of gun suicides—whereas other developed countries annual gun deaths number in the 100s?

We don’t need to be diverted by the many “crimes and misdemeanors” of POTUS and the White House. Republicans have been rolling back social benefits and increasing inequality since at least 1980 by commandeering the levers of power—Wall Street with the repeal of Glass Stegall and deregulation of whole industries, corporate America with now unlimited fund-raising due to their Supreme Court win in citizens vs. united, and gutting of the Voters Rights Act that weakened federal enforcement of voter discrimination against minorities in states with a history of discrimination.

The list goes on and on. So what can be done about it? Make government(s) again the solution, rather than the problem that Reagan liked to intone to his supporters, and that ran up the first record public debt. It wasn’t until President Clinton’s successful attempt to actually create a budget surplus in his last four years (1996-2000) that America first began to pay down that debt.

But the Bush/Cheney government frittered it away with multiple budget cuts and foreign wars, increasing it again rather than diverting the savings to domestic programs that would strengthen America, and led to the Great Recession.

The lesson is obvious. Government wasn’t ever the problem, since Republicans have been willing to spend taxpayers’ money to support their own programs and run up record debt without any intention to pay it back to the American taxpayer.

Instead, government has worked very well when it funded their wars, higher corporate profits, or gone into the pockets of their high-net worth supporters. We should never buy Republicans’ attempt to brand-name government as the problem, particularly when it has benefited them far more than the average American.

Will it save capitalism, as we know it?  Only if we don’t buy the Republicans’ mischaracterizations.  Modern capitalism is really the creation of modern liberal democracies, with its ability to nurture growth and innovation that accompany the democratic checks and balances to prevent its excesses.

So  in saving democracy, we can save a modern capitalism that works for the many.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

ANSWERING THE KENNEDYS CALL

We are announcing a new blog series—ANSWERING THE KENNEDYS CALL. It will report on what is being done today to address the problems that deal with record income inequality, immigration and civil rights, environment protection, and the rebuilding of local communities both at home and abroad that we cover in a forthcoming book, ANSWERING the KENNEDYS CALL: Inspiring Lessons in Public Service and Community Building from the Sixties for the Future.

It is a book about the cultural and social revolution of the Sixties carried forward by newer generations that is healing our broken communities and a dysfunctional government.  The Sixties created many of the benefits we enjoy today—environmental protection, civil rights for minorities, scientific research that brought us moon landings, the Internet, modern commerce, and a greater openness to other peoples and countries. 

By portraying the history of community development via the experiences of the Sixties’ generations, and practices of M. Scott Peck, Cesar Chavez and sociologist Robert Putnam in community organizing, we will show we have never really left that hopeful spirit that is creating new forms of a healthy, functioning, participatory democracy.

The efforts of those generations in making the world a better place is finding a response among younger generations today in countering the rampant pessimism and sense of limited possibilities prevalent in much of our society, due in large part to the economic uncertainty and successive recessions that have impoverished a majority of Americans since the 1980s.

President Obama is now mounting a campaign with a similar goal to inspire our youth to a life of service; and the youth he talks about are my target audience:  http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/330269-full-remarks-obama-at-chicago-event-discusses-future.

“The only folks who are going to be able to solve that problem are going to be young people, the next generation,” said President Obama. “And I have been encouraged everywhere I go in the United States, but also everywhere around the world to see how sharp and astute and tolerant and thoughtful and entrepreneurial our young people are. A lot more sophisticated than I was at their age. And so the question then becomes what are the ways in which we can create pathways for them to take leadership, for them to get involved?”

We begin with this recent headline from the United Farmworkers Union: Salinas, Calif.-based D’Arrigo Bros. of California has just signed a new contract with the United Farm Workers union that will cover more than 1,500 farm workers, according to this press release from The Packer, “the fresh fruit and vegetable industry's leading source for news, information and analysis.”

The agreement provides family medical, dental and vision benefits for the farm workers that will be paid for by D’Arrigo. Health insurance will be provided by the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan, a plan established in 1968 specifically for farm workers and their families.

“Both parties have come to a new era of a working relationship and realize the agricultural workers need to be taken care of,” President John D’Arrigo said in the release. “That investment will hopefully translate into people wanting to work here the whole season,”

Employees also receive hourly and productivity pay increases. The incentive and box pay rate will increase by 3 percent in the first year, 3 percent in the second year and 2.5 percent in the third year. Workers will also receive six paid holidays a year, and loaders and machine operators who use their personal vehicles will be paid 50 cents per mile for travel time.

“To be willing to put that much investment in their employees really demonstrates the value that John D’Arrigo is placing on his employees,” UFW president Arturo Rodriguez said in the release.

Why the realization from a major Salinas, California grower that union workers are important to his business? There is a growing scarcity of seasonal farmworkers due to the ICE sweeps and “zero tolerance policy” of the Trump administration that is decimating America’s agricultural industry. Growers are beginning to look to the UFW to supply those seasonal workers that labor contractors formally provided, but were mainly undocumented workers.

It took the first-term election of California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown in 1975 to give farmworkers bargaining rights with his enactment of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act that legalized the union organization of farmworkers.

Today’s suppression of employee bargaining rights is little different, even though there is a National Labor Relations Board to enforce union collective bargaining rights. The problem is 28 so-called right-to-work states under Republican control allow private sector nonunion employees off the dues hook who work in a job that benefits from union bargaining.

And just recently the US Supreme Court overturned a 40-year precedent in Janus v. AFSCME that nonunion government workers cannot be forced to pay fees to public sector unions if they chose not to belong to them. Those fees, approved by the court in the 1977 case Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, cover collective bargaining costs such as contract negotiations, but are meant to exclude political advocacy.

SCOTUS’s Chief Justice Alito stated in his majority opinion that taking the side of governments in such labor disputes saves governments money. Really? Justice Alito is admitting that weakening government unions’ ability to collect dues will also weaken employees’ ability to bargain for their pay and benefits.

We don’t buy his argument that he wants to help governments with their finances. He as a good conservative is only interested in downsizing government in any way he (and probably his 4 fellow SCOTUS conservatives) can, which includes downsizing the standard of living of both union and nonunion government employees.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

A 17-year Low Jobless Rate

Popular Economics Weekly

Graph: Market.com

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 164,000 in April, and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, manufacturing, health care, and mining, with manufacturing contributing an oversize 24,000 to payrolls.

The unemployment rate slipped to 3.9 percent—a 17-year low—after holding at 4.1 percent, for six months in a row, said the BLS. The decline owed to a shrinking labor force and fewer people saying they were unemployed instead of an increase in how many people found work. The labor force actually shrank by 236,000, while the number of unemployed dropped by 236,000 in the Establishment (payrolls) survey.

The tight labor market is especially evident in what’s often called the “real” unemployment rate. The so-called U6 rate includes people who can only find part-time work and those who’ve gotten so discouraged they recently stopped looking. It fell to 7.8. percent in April to drop below 8 percent for the first time since 2006. The labor market is almost back to normal, in other words.

All signs say we are nearing the end of the second-longest growth cycle since the Clinton era’s 10-year 1991-2001 boom years I said yesterday; and once again a huge amount of debt has accumulated that ultimately has to be paid for.

Are we dangerously close to the end of this growth cycle, as the Fed tightens credit after years of easy money and consumers then cut back on their spending that powers some 70 percent of GDP growth?

The Fed passed on raising interest rates in this week’s FOMC meeting, mainly because there were few signs of inflation, which was backed up by today’s unemployment report. Hourly pay rose just 0.1 percent to $26.84. The 12-month increase in pay was flat at 2.6 percent for the third month in a row. But prior months were revised upward, at a net 30,000 gain in March and February. Payroll growth includes a solid and slightly better-than-expected 24,000 gain in manufacturing with construction up 17,000, mining up 8,000, and professional business services up a sizable 54,000.

The good news there are still 5.0 million job seekers working part time that want to work full time, and an additional 1.4 million that have looked for work in the past 12 months, but not in the past 4 weeks. The private service-sector contributed the most jobs as usual—119,000, with professional and business services up 54,000 jobs, and education and healthcare contributing an additional 31,000 to the total.

Business investment and exports are rising, but should be rising faster with the new tax bill, according to New York Times Paul Krugman:

“Anything that increases the budget deficit should, other things being the same,” says Krugman, “lead to higher overall spending and a short-run bump in the economy (although there’s no indication of such a bump in the first-quarter numbers, which were underwhelming). But if you want to boost overall spending, you don’t have to give huge tax breaks to corporations. You could do lots of other things instead — say, spend money on fixing America’s crumbling infrastructure, an issue on which Trump keeps promising a plan but never delivers.”

So what is normal at this late stage of the business cycle? Wages aren’t yet rising fast enough to warrant a more hawkish inflation watch by the Fed, but they ultimately will as even fewer new workers are available, so that companies have to pay more for skilled workers, as well as invest more in automation to keep growing.

But we still have all that new public debt to worry about, so interest rates will continue to rise to finance the additional debt, until it crimps further business expansion; as always happens at this stage of a business cycle. So stay tuned!

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Tightening Credit = Bad Economic News (Revised)

Popular Economics Weekly

When is the next financial crisis? A Deutsche Bank study predicts it could be sooner than we know, as I said last week. Because the Federal Reserve reiterated its intent to begin to sell off the $4.5 trillion in excess reserves at its latest FOMC meeting at a time of record deficits built up to recover from the Great Recession.

“When looking for the next financial crisis, it’s hard to escape from the fact that we’re seemingly in the early stages of the ‘great unwind’ of global monetary stimulus at the same time as global debt remains at all-time highs following an increase over the past decade—at the government level at least—which has been unparalleled in peacetime history,” wrote Deutsche Bank strategists led by Jim Reid in an 88-page study entitled, “The Next Financial Crisis,” and cited by Marketwatch.

We haven’t fully recovered from the Great Recession, in other words, or the record deficit would have been paid down by now. So, this is the wrong time to be tightening credit. Instead, we should be raising taxes on those that have profited from the recovery—the top 1 percent that have garnered 96 percent of all income generated since the end of the Great Recession—as well as corporations with their record profits.

We really don’t need tax cuts, but pay raises for the majority of our workforce that hasn’t benefited from the recovery, if we want to boost economic growth; which is another way to pay down the deficit. Marketwatch reported on a recent employee survey that tells us exactly why personal incomes haven’t grown along with corporate profits that are the highest in history as a percentage of GDP.

“Pay raises for U.S. employees are not expected to improve next year, according to a survey released Monday by global professional services company Aon, based on a survey of over 1,000 companies. Base pay is expected to rise 3 percent in 2018, up slightly from 2.9 percent in 2017. Spending on variable pay — incentives or bonuses — will be 12.5 percent of payroll, low levels not seen since 2013. This suggests a “pessimistic view of corporate performance in the coming year,” Ken Abosch, a strategy and development analyst at Aon, said in a statement.

So where have all the profits gone that were generated since 2009? Executive Pay Watch, in a report conducted by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), said last year CEOs were paid 335 times the average worker. The average production and non-supervisory worker earned $37,600 annually in 2016. “When adjusted for inflation, the average wage has remained stagnant for 50 years,” the report said.

That’s not a formula that will pay down the $10 trillion accumulated since the end of the Great Recession. The conundrum is why so much debt was issued with so little economic growth, and the US at near full employment?

It’s mainly because corporations have been able to successfully resist their employees’ demands for higher wages due to their monopoly positions in many industries, and massive lobbies. Instead they’ve used most of those profits to buy back their stock, and so enhance their earnings. CEO pay spiked 19.6 percent last year, before inflation.

The median total compensation for CEOs at S&P 500 companies totaled $11.5 million last year, an 8.5percent increase from the previous year and the largest increase since 2013, according to a joint report by the Associated Press and the executive pay data firm Equilar released earlier this year. 

So, we could be seeing a growth slowdown next year, or worse, unless we can reverse the huge redistribution of wealth that has occurred since 2009. But that would mean raising the nationwide minimum wage from its current $7.25/hour, last set in the 1990s, for starters.

And, then stopping the Trump administration and Republican congress from cutting taxes of the already wealthy, and cutting spending that supports the poorest and elderly in the new tax and budget proposals.

Their most blatant attempt to hurt those in most need has been the repeated attempts to repeal Obamacare (another tax cut for them). Otherwise, all that stimulus has gone for naught, and we could see this Great Recession turn into another Great Depression.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen