All Episodes
Previous Next
April 9, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:21
"Trump Waves in Seasonal Foreign Workers as Pandemic Peaks" Stefan Molyneux and Jessica M. Vaughan
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right. Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
I hope you're doing well. So we're here with Jessica Vaughan.
I'm, I guess, experienced enough to not pronounce it Vaughan.
But yeah, it's like Salisbury or Gloucester.
But anyway, so we're here with Jessica Vaughan.
Now, Jessica Vaughan Works at the Center for Immigration Studies, otherwise known as, do not believe what either Wikipedia has to say about them or myself, because we are reasonable people looking at data to try and make good decisions regarding the futures of our civilization as a whole.
So we're just going to wait for people to pile in, and I really do appreciate...
Jessica, taking the time today, I've actually talked to a number of her colleagues in the past.
I will put a link below to my previous interviews with members of the Center for Immigration Studies.
And yeah, there's a little static coming from Jessica, but that's because her brain is so active.
It interferes with the electronics as a whole.
I'm sure we can take that out in post-production.
All right. So, okay.
So, Jessica, first of all, thanks a lot, of course, for taking the time today.
Secondly, so, you wrote an article which was published a couple days ago.
Trump waves in seasonal foreign workers as pandemic peaks, which, you know, when you see those horror movies where there is some kind of pandemic, what often happens is you get the exposition at the beginning of the movie.
be and this sounds like one of the things like things got really bad in America after Trump waved in seasonal foreign workers as the pandemic peaks.
So can you tell me a little bit about how you got a hold of the information and what had you sit down to write the article?
Well, first of all, I'm glad to be with you and your audience.
This is an important topic.
People are starting to understand really how the enforcement of our immigration laws and borders...
I'm so sorry to interrupt you just after I asked you a question, but we are getting some pretty bad audio coming from you.
Is there a magic button that says better audio or anything that you know of?
I could try.
All right, let's try that.
Okay, let's see.
Unless you're currently housed inside a waterfall on an AM radio.
It may need to be a little sweet.
What should I do a minute ago?
Let's try a different...
Real quick. It's the joys of live broadcasting.
I'm sorry. No problem.
Now we've gotten rid of the static, but I'm pretty sure we also got rid of you as well.
So somewhere in between the two would be excellent.
Shall we read the troll comments?
No, they're not troll comments. Is she on the loudest computer ever?
Are you under a waterfall?
Do you want to call by...
Well, you could call in by phone, I suppose.
Yeah, that might be the way to go.
You've muted yourself at the moment, so for sure you won't be able to get any audio.
Just if you can unmute there. Yeah, that's bringing back the sound.
Oh, now we have static, but not you.
So, if we could just reverse that, that would be excellent.
Yeah, not a thing. Let's see here.
So, in your...
You should have a camera or mic little cog down at the bottom there.
People are asking if there are any lip readers in the house.
That's a very reasonable question. I can understand that.
So under camera and mic you might have the option to switch your camera.
She needs to lower her mic sensitivity.
So under that you should have general camera audio and under audio you should be able to choose your mic and your speaker.
No, sorry, we've just got audio.
Well, a kind of crackle and hum, but no actual audio from you.
So, yes, go get a camera mic and just see if you can choose some mic that has input.
How's that? Yeah, well, see, that's not bad, but I think you might need to raise your mic level a little bit.
Do you need me to turn it up?
Not my volume, but yours.
So again, under camera and mic, under audio.
Is that better? How's that?
Now I have the microphone closer to me.
Could you come in by phone?
Yeah, I have my phone here.
It's muted. Okay, so why don't you jump out of this, and if you could just call in using the link, just come in with your phone.
I'm sure that'll be better.
Okay. All right, thanks.
So listen, while we wait for her to come back in, I'll just mention a little bit about this article, which really, really struck me.
This came out a couple days ago.
And she said, the State Department will not be interviewing most applicants for seasonal guest worker visas under a new policy announced in late March.
Aside from the absurdity Of bringing in any foreign guest workers at all at the height of a global pandemic that just threw millions of Americans out of work, this move has reopened a security and fraud vulnerability in the temporary worker visa program that Korea, Homeland Security officials have fought for years to close.
On March 26th, the State Department announced that the applications of new and returning farm and non-farm seasonal workers would be immediately expedited by waiving requirements for most visa applicants to be interviewed.
So yeah, just come on in.
You don't even need to be interviewed.
The entry of these workers apparently has slowed to a trickle in the wake of travel restrictions imposed wisely on March 20th due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Previously... Only returning workers asking to renew their visas were allowed to bypass the interview.
Under the new policy, even first-time applicants will be able to get a visa without speaking to a consular officer.
Quote, Clearly, the Department of Agriculture is pleased to deliver the cheap labor that U.S. growers have become accustomed to, rather than adopting farm modernization trends used successfully in the rest of the developed world.
The Department even has its own watchdog-slash-lobbyist detail to the White House to look out for the interests of farm employers concerning immigration policy.
The State Department says it considers the seasonal guest worker program to be, quote, mission critical, end quote.
Its announcement stated, quote, the H-2 program is essential to the economy and food security of the United States and is a national security priority.
In other words, to quote the disgraced State Department supervisor of the pre-9-11 consulate in Saudi Arabia, people got to have their visas.
This position is in direct conflict.
I like how that's an indirect conflict with the war rather than illegal.
And Trump's own policy moves.
8 U.S.C. 1202H provides that with just a few exceptions.
Every temporary visa applicant aged 14 to 79 must be interviewed.
One of the first visa policy changes made by Trump was to reverse an Obama policy that had called for many more interview waivers, which helped bring about a significant increase in the number of temporary visa issuances, right?
So this is what always happens.
right?
All right. All right. Now you have to stop me playing.
Because I would get a bit of an echo.
Just, yeah, you have to stop me playing.
I think you've got the...
I can harmonize with myself.
Oh, I can hear you.
Yes, but the problem is it's coming back to me.
So that means if you can plug a headset into your phone, even better.
I can. There you go.
There you go. The one I just had a minute ago.
No sweat. No, I can't continue with the audio.
Oh, I can mute her. Wait, she'll just get that plugged in.
And we'll be all set. All right.
At least the sound is better. And that's good.
Now you're sideways. I'll show you.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, just make it vertical, but should be all set.
Oh, I'm guessing that the plug goes into the bottom where your phone was standing, right?
I'm hanging from the ceiling now.
Yeah, so I think you'll just have to hold your phone up.
Sorry about that. Because it's not adjusting to turn around.
I'll just hold it.
Yeah, afraid so. So, yeah, I was just reading the article, and this is kind of what they do, is they say, well, you know, there's going to be a bunch of guest workers coming in, but don't worry, they're all going to be interviewed, and we will know what's going on.
Yeah, I can hear you. And then, of course, what happens is...
They end up not interviewing people.
So help me understand the relationship with food security and how this even comes to be in...
Oh, I think you just switched.
which there we go, how it comes to be in the Trump administration, which was to a large degree an America first situation, and now it doesn't seem exactly like America is first in this environment.
Oh, can you hear me, Jessica?
I think you, hello?
Can you hear me? Yeah, can you hear me?
Can you hear me? I can't.
I can't hear it. Oh!
Oh, God! We'll make it.
We will make it. We will solve tech, and then we will solve immigration.
Now you can hear me?
I can hear you, yes.
Excellent. All right.
So I was just saying that, help me understand how Trump's America First agenda and control over immigration and creating jobs for American workers, how does this play out?
In this completely insane thing that in the middle of a pandemic, anyone and their dog can come in.
It seems almost completely unvetted.
Well, that is the problem.
It seems absurd to actually try to expedite the entry of guest workers at a time when, first of all, there is no way to screen them to be sure that they are virus-free and aren't going to represent a public health threat.
But on top of it, the response to the pandemic has thrown literally millions and millions of Americans out of work So there is absolutely no case, no way to claim that these employers actually need the guest workers from abroad.
You know, it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
People here are out of work, maybe temporarily, but these are supposedly temporary jobs.
And what it really illustrates is, first of all, there's a tension within the White House about how to approach the immigration issue with some influential folks believe that we need more workers, that Americans and legal immigrants just aren't going to do these jobs, or at least not at that Americans and legal immigrants just aren't going to do these jobs, or at least not at a low
But the reality is, is that most of these temporary visa jobs were never available to Americans and legal immigrants to begin with, because the way these programs are set up, they are run primarily by labor brokers who go to they are run primarily by labor brokers who go to employers and say, look, I'm going to take care of all your hiring needs.
You never have to worry about recruiting people.
I'm going to find all your workers.
And then they turn around and recruit overseas And are able to collect fees from both the workers, which is actually illegal, but also from the employers.
And so for them, it's kind of, you know, that's their business model that has been created and actually subsidized by the availability of these visas.
So the employers have come to feel that they need these workers because the brokers are providing them with them.
And they don't want to adjust to having to beat the bushes around the United States to find workers.
I mean, think of the absurdity of this.
You've got these seasonal employers who are willing to bring people in from overseas, but not now try to hire somebody who's unemployed in Chicago or New York or New Orleans or Las Vegas or any of the places where tens of thousands of people have been thrown out of work.
And it's because the system is set up to facilitate the importation of guest workers.
And as I said, these jobs aren't actually even available to legal American workers.
The brokers have led members of Congress and people influential in the administration to believe that there's an actual free market of labor at work here and the growers can't find workers.
When it's not a free market at all, this is almost like a gray market in workers.
And the problem is that there's a lot of fraud in these programs.
The workers are often exploited, forced to pay fees that they shouldn't have to pay, abused in terms of the working conditions and the amount of time that they have to work every day.
So, you know, it almost is like an indentured labor situation that is facilitated by these visa programs.
And now is precisely the right time to do away with them and open up these jobs either for American workers or encourage these farmers, for example, to join the 21st century and actually mechanize their operations much more and to use technology, as to join the 21st century and actually mechanize their operations much more and to use technology, as has been the case in Europe and a lot of other places where, you know, they don't have the
They have machine work, and they actually turn out to be more productive.
And the jobs that still do exist are jobs requiring a little more skill and are going to earn the worker more money.
Well, that's only because you obviously haven't listened to Michael Bloomberg tell you just how simple and easy farming is.
Because, you know, one always goes to a New York financier for how to toil the sod and produce the food that he relies on.
So are you saying to me, Jessica, I just want to get clear on this.
You're saying to me that if I was an American, let's say I had free speech, right?
So I'm an American, I'm out of work, and I'm like, you know what?
I'm tired of this fluorescent...
Office situation where there's circulating coronaviruses, and I can't even open a window.
I can't go and get a job on a farm in this situation.
That market is physically, legally, factually, practically not available to me.
That's right, because the growers hire a labor broker to do their recruiting, and these recruiters, many of whom are themselves immigrants, will go to their networks and often recruit In other countries rather than in the United States, because they can find workers who are willing to do the jobs for less money, and that increases their profit margin and what they're negotiating with their employers.
And they're kind of a...
I hate to say it, but a more docile group of workers that is not aware of their rights in the United States and easier to exploit.
They're not going to demand time off to go to the doctor or demand a face mask to wear to keep them safe.
It's just a whole different type of employer-employee relationship Although, you know, there are Americans who do want to do farm work.
I mean, I live in a somewhat rural area and moved here from a very suburban area.
And there are all kinds of young people who are interested in starting up farms now that are small, where they can raise their family, where they don't use, you know, they do you pick operations or...
You know, they maybe are organic produce that's seasonal.
They do what's called community-supported agriculture.
They sell at farmers markets.
There's a huge market for that, too, now.
And people are craving less industrial food production.
So, you know, I think on the one hand, mechanization is probably the answer for the big operations that are going to sell in supermarkets, which is where most people are going to buy their food.
But there are also a lot of local alternatives that don't depend on cheap indentured labor to be profitable or desirable as a lifestyle for someone.
Well, it's funny because I'm getting a lot of emails in particularly this time of pandemic crisis from people who are like, I moved out of the city years ago and I couldn't be happier.
So I can see how a lot of people, when they start to see how unreliable the supply chain could be with regards to basics like food, would be like, yeah, I could see the pluses of getting out of the city and growing my own food.
So I can certainly see that, but there's barriers to that as well.
And it's like this weird lesson that seems we just can't learn.
The cheaper and more exploitive your capacity to use labor, the less you're going to automate.
And what that means, of course, is that if there was automation, first of all, food would be cheaper, there wouldn't be all of this tension that occurs from these kinds of programs.
And then let's say, I don't know, there's a pandemic.
Then you don't have to worry about your access to cheap and exploited foreign labor 'cause you got robots picking your strawberries.
It's like all we've done is delay what has to happen anyway.
It's like we never learned that the entire Right.
Yeah, it's almost like a modern form of becoming self-sufficient.
I do like the response of the UK, which has been to turn farm work into a patriotic act now.
During this pandemic, they've been encouraging regular...
Brits to go work on the farms because apparently they do have some crops that need to be harvested now.
I guess maybe strawberries, who knows?
But all of these great cold weather crops need to come out of the fields now and they don't have their guest workers from other parts of the world.
And so people are saying, yeah, I'll go pick crops in a rural part of England rather than sit in the big cities and wait for the virus to attack.
So it'll be interesting to see.
But I think it is clear that we should not still be farming like we're in the 1800s here.
We need to use technology.
And different business models.
And that that can be profitable.
And people need to remember also that this doesn't mean that produce has to be expensive.
Only about 25% of the price of a head of lettuce is the labor.
There are a lot of other costs.
The land. The material, getting the produce to market that we're paying for as well.
So giving farm workers a big raise would not dramatically raise the cost of what we're eating.
Well, it's a short-term situation.
Let's say it did.
It's still cheaper than coronavirus hitting an entire community or an entire state or an entire series of states because people are coming in from Mexico.
Say, well, they're not really testing anyone.
I mean, Mexico, yeah, the numbers are low because they're not really...
Sorry, my battery is about to run out on my phone, so I didn't want to lose you altogether.
Oh, so did you plug it in?
I did, yes. Well, but then the problem is I get an echo on myself when it comes out of your speakers and into your microphone.
Okay, well, we can see how long will last.
All right, so put the headset back in and we'll go until it doesn't.
Okay, fair enough.
All right.
No problem.
No problem.
No.
Okay.
I'll just wait till that.
I'll just mute it.
So that's the issue, right?
I mean, there would be a spike, say, but it would be less of a spike than the problems of coronavirus.
And also then, of course, when the cost of labor goes up, what do people do?
Well, they respond to it by automating as much as possible.
I don't think people know this.
Maybe you've sort of followed this point.
I think it's been made by Ann Coulter and others.
There are robots so delicate now, they can pick strawberries, they can pick raspberries, they can pick grapes.
I mean, the amount of automation that is right around.
Do you think automating trucks is one thing?
That's nothing compared to the incredible kind of delicate labor that can occur.
Like, I'm waiting for robot masseuses, you know, robot haircutters.
I mean, The amount of sophistication and sensitivity and the ocular capacities of these robots in the farming industry, it truly staggers the imagination.
But of course, when you can get cheap labor, why would you invest in all of that?
That's right. Necessity is the mother of invention and the growers do not have the necessity as long as these visas are available and as long as the labor brokers are willing to step in and for a cost make these workers available.
So that's what it boils down to.
I mean, we were in France this time last year and marveling at how the grapes for wine are all harvested by machines.
And it made me think, you know, what's wrong with California?
If these tiny growers could make use of these harvesters, you know, clearly the cost is not prohibitive.
We've got huge wineries in California that still rely on people to do stoop labor, essentially, and it's astonishing.
There was a story I read recently about a middle school student in Nebraska who invented a machine to harvest microgreens.
Clearly, we have the ingenuity and the wherewithal and ability to come up with solutions that do not require cheap labor, and that's where we should be moving.
It's happening in Europe.
It's happening in Asia.
We need to get with that program.
Oh, it's so strange. Looking at modern farming in America, it's like opening up the Star Trek's USS Enterprise and finding a bunch of Roman rowers or people with bicycles down there powering the whole thing, you know?
So let's zoom out a little bit because this article of yours, which I'll link to, it's already in the show notes.
People should really have a look at it. Please share it.
And the work that the Center for Immigration Studies do is fantastic.
Please check out their website.
But there's a bigger picture to me around, you know, let's be frank, people voted in Trump because they're sick of mass immigration.
They're sick and tired and terrified and exhausted and overtaxed and over multicultural, so to speak.
So people wanted Trump in to gain control over the borders.
And it turns out, actually, it was China who gave the West the magical power to control their borders with this virus.
Excuse my French, but what the hell is going on with Trump and immigration?
Do you guys have any insights as to why?
Because I know, I know before he ran, he had someone listen to conservative radio, to talk radio for like a year, paid some guy just, okay, what do people care about?
What are they interested in? Ah, they really, really want an end to this crazy modern experiment of mass migration.
So he knows that that was the number one issue.
It was very clear. He read Ann Coulter's book, Adios America.
He was very clear on that.
He hammered that point repeatedly.
And then... Nothing in particular, a little bit of enforcement of Obama's no-fly stuff from various countries that couldn't vet their people.
What happened? Help me understand.
Well, as I mentioned before, there is this tension within the group of people in the White House who are advising the president on the immigration issue.
But also, I think there's some tension in the president's own thoughts about immigration, because on the one hand, clearly he understands that illegal immigration is a huge problem, both for national security And for public safety, but also for the taxpayer to be encouraging this.
And he seems to understand that this is a threat to the livelihoods of the Americans who voted for him, who are in direct competition and paying the taxes that are needed for illegal immigrants to be supported here.
But he also is aware that the economy was booming under his administration, and he bought into this idea that we were going to need more workers, and that we would actually be able to devise a policy That could bring in lots of workers who would be safe for our country.
And that, you know, they would go home once we allowed them to be here and that they wouldn't bring their families, that they wouldn't commit crimes, that they wouldn't bring a deadly virus with them.
And you just, you can't have both.
And in fact, these workers aren't really needed.
There's still lots of Americans who We're out of the labor market and that those were the Americans that his immigration policies were eventually going to bring back to the labor market.
Like, for example, people with disabilities, people being rehabilitated after being incarcerated.
People who just dropped out of the labor force altogether for whatever reason, who haven't had the chance of a higher education.
Those were all the people who were starting to come back and wages were just starting to go up for lower earning people.
But unfortunately, you know, if you reverse course on immigration, it's going to make it harder for all of those groups of people to get back into the labor force.
And I just I think he was listening too much to people who said, oh, no, no, no, we can't have too many workers enter.
It'll all be fine. They will be on public assistance and so on.
But this crisis came at a time when you really have to think much more basically about our borders just keeping people safe on a very basic level.
And fortunately, he has gone with his instincts on that and done the right thing in terms of our borders.
Well, this is what's so frustrating, is that more and more workers piling into America, along with all of the cultural issues and the language issues and all of that, it's just driving down the wages of your average lower middle class, middle class Americans, who frankly haven't had a raise since Carter was in power.
So this idea of, well, we always need more workers, it's like, well, you have as many workers as you want.
You bid up the wages of their workers, which draws marginal workers, as you said, back into the workforce.
I mean, Trump was voted in by the Rust Belt states to a large degree, who said, we'd love to get back to work, but there are no jobs available for us.
So what it does is it draws the marginal people, as you said, back into the workplace.
And then what it does is it raises the wages so that people make more money.
And where you can automate, it automates, which frees up more money to invest and create new jobs and so on.
So it's kind of weird to me.
He's like, well, only one person can be president.
So I really wanted to make sure it was me, not Hillary Clinton.
I'm irreplaceable. But yeah, let's just bring in a bunch of other workers to replace American workers.
And it's not a skilled situation because there's so many, so many.
STEM graduates. Oh, I think we just lost her.
I'll just point this out. There's so many STEM graduates who aren't getting work at all.
And that's really tragic.
So the numbers of people out there, they listened, of course, to everyone.
Who said, oh, you know, you've got to go into STEM, man, because we're not, you know, there's one thing we won't bring in as a really high-skilled worker, so you've got to go into STEM. And then what happens?
Well, they go into STEM, they graduate, and the number of STEM graduates who are unable to find work in America, largely because, of course, there is all of this stuff piling in from overseas.
That is just crazy stuff.
So I... It's not a matter of skilled issues.
So let me just give her a quick ping.
I actually figured out how we can get her to come back.
Let me just get her in here and come back.
And we'll take a couple of questions in the interim.
Plugged in. She'll have to reboot her phone.
I'll just mute her while I'm talking.
I have figured out how to mute you while I talk.
You know, which a lot of people want to do in their marriages these days.
So, somebody says here, I'm a high school dropout.
I have plenty of work. Somebody has said, why was David Icke's video removed after 30 minutes?
There's something not right about all of this.
Well, that has a lot to do with, I think, I'm not sure, but I think he was denying the very existence of COVID. And that is kind of a bridge too far for a lot of people.
Maybe Donald Trump can listen to Charlie Kirk and his daddy some more.
Well, yeah. So, I mean, this staple, a green card to a diploma, a foreign workers diploma, that is a terrible idea.
Now, of course, this is entirely to do with my thoughts, not to do with Center for Immigration Studies.
But, of course, the moment that you say that you want...
Workers to get jobs in America rather than come from overseas, the left will lob the arm bomb at you.
Already we call racist. Even though, even though, of course, not having workers pile in from overseas benefits in particular the black and Hispanic communities in America whose wages have just been crushed under mass immigration.
So it is actually the least racist thing you can do is to keep guest workers or foreign workers out of your economy because it raises the incomes and independence of the local workers.
But a problem, of course, is that people on the left really want the government.
Well, they want people dependent on the government.
They want people dependent on the government.
If you're paying taxes, you're kind of more likely going to drift over to the small government, low taxes side, which is at least the face value of the Republican Party.
And if you're dependent on government, then you're happy to have taxes raised and have government take over more and more because you're on the receiving end of government largesse rather than the delivery end of government largesse.
So that is a big issue, right?
To stop taking drugs.
And the idea that you would bring in workers and that would draw people from welfare or from unemployment or from being outside the workforce to being in the workforce.
Well, I mean, we've all gone through that moment, right?
We all know that moment.
That moment where you're very excited because you're getting your first paycheck.
You know, like maybe it's outside of the student thing where you don't get a lot of deductions, but you get that paycheck, right?
And it's a magical, magical moment.
Oh, look. I'm being paid, you know, $10 an hour, $20 an hour.
When I was a kid, I was making $2.50 an hour working in a hardware store, right?
And I would make, like, it was fantastic, right?
So I'd work from 5.30 to 9.30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, netting me $10 a night.
And then I would work eight hours on a Saturday, and that would net me like $40 a week.
So two nights and an entire Saturday at $40 a week.
And then I would sit there with my little watch calculator and I'd say, hmm, how long till I can afford my Atari 800 or my Atari 400 or whatever?
And so you do the division, of course, and you start spending that money in your head.
And then what happens is you get your paychecks, you see all the deductions, and you're living on table scraps like a corgi at the foot of a queen.
And so that is really, really important.
It's quite appalling.
And it's, of course, much worse when you get out into the real world and you're full-time salaried and the gouge that is taken out of your paycheck for employment insurance, for old age pensions, for various other taxes, and of course the big one being the income tax.
It is harsh and pitiful and painful.
It's a real shame.
And if you just try and get all of these deductions and stuff taken out, it's really terrible.
And you bring in more and more people from overseas, it's just going to drive down people's wages.
It's absolutely horrible.
All right, so I can take a couple of questions from YouTube.
We will see if we can get Jessica back.
If not, we will try and arrange for something for her earlier.
Would you be willing to do an interview or conversation with Michelle Malkin about immigration and H-1B? She's been talking about it a lot recently.
I certainly would be.
I've had her on my show before, and I would be very happy to chat with Michelle, who is ferocious in the America First camp, which is going against the conservative Inc.
camp led by Charlie Kirk.
And I would say that that would be a great thing.
Just, you know, shoot her a line and tell her that would be great.
I have somebody says, I have somebody legally living in my rental unit, and I can't evict them because Governor Newsom from California says no more evictions.
What the hell? Well, this is the problem, right?
So the problem in general in late-stage democracy, where it is now a mob rule, largely unrestrained by property rights, the Bill of Rights, or basic human decency, what happens is, you know, who's more populist?
Are there more renters or are there more landlords?
Well, of course, renters outnumber the landlords, and so the politicians will focus on the renters rather than the landlords.
So you end up in this. There was a great old movie with Michael Keaton called Pacific Heights about how tough it was to evict people.
So that is really tragic.
So let's see here.
Yeah, it is very tough. It's very tough to get people out, and that means that it's like rent control, right?
So rent control is very beneficial to the people already in apartments, but all it means is that new apartments aren't going to get built because people don't want to get involved in investing in stuff where the government controls the price.
So it's really, really terrible.
What was Trump's part to play in all of this?
Has he effectively thrown the people who elected him under the bus?
Well, it's tough, you know.
I can only theorize, of course.
It's not like they're inviting me to these private meetings or conversations, but...
I think that the one thing this pandemic has shown us is just how amazingly rapidly countries can close their borders.
Because, you know, it always seemed impossible, largely because of crazy judges in Hawaii, to do anything about this.
But the left, see, I mean, the left will go completely mental if someone tries to close off immigration.
Because immigration is their step to power.
It's their step to establishing socialism, then communism in the West.
Hell, they'd invite the coronavirus in if it would vote for them.
So the left will go completely mental if immigration is closed down.
And you think they went mental over Trump?
They would go completely mental over that.
And I believe that the left will foment civil unrest and domestic terrorism and all of that kind of stuff.
Because they are drug addicts for power and drug addicts will lie and cheat and steal and use violence to get a hold of the power that they lust for.
And so I think that he's got inside scoops on the level of violence that would be unleashed in society should he try to control immigration.
I guess the best that you can hope for is that in the second term, when he doesn't have to worry about re-election, He's going to go full tilt boogie on that.
But, you know, I got to tell you, I mean, he's a tough guy.
No question he's a tough guy.
But I kind of think it's got to take a toll to be that hammered by the media, to be that, to have that many investigations poured into you, to have that many people that you like and respect who try to work for you and do the right thing, get investigated and bankrupted and thrown in jail, you know, Flynn style and Stone style.
I mean, that's got to wear you down after a while, just realizing just the terrifying bottomless hatred that is out there in the world for you and how it manifests in all of these conspiracy theories, the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, the whole impeachment fantasy.
And now, of course, even when there's a pandemic, more investigations into all of this.
I mean, it's a Chinese Communist Party virus.
It's a CCP virus, for sure.
And yet, of course, the people on the left who are infested by communism, just as the World Health Organization is, just as the UN is, are all trying to shift the blame to America, to Trump, from Premier Xi in China and from China as a whole.
I'm putting a presentation together at the moment.
Which is called The Case Against China, and I'm going to present it.
You know, it's like a murder mystery.
It's basically just a criminal case, and frankly, it's airtight.
It's open and shut, without a doubt.
People are telling me what they're getting from their paychecks, like, just out of curiosity.
I mean, obviously don't...
I don't share anything too personal, but people are putting in what they get out of their paycheck, right?
So people are saying you get maybe a thousand bucks out of 1800 pounds, you get a thousand pounds.
People out of 3500 bucks, you get...
$2,500. And then, of course, you've got to spend your money, depending on where you are, on liquor taxes, on gas taxes, on cigarette taxes if you smoke, and on other kinds of tax, sales taxes in particular.
So, yeah, you're living on a scrap.
You're living on a relatively small percentage of everything that you could be living on.
All right. Jessica has returned to us.
So we will throw her back in.
All right. All right. All right, so let's see.
Yeah, okay, so when I talk, I'll just mute you, then I'll unmute you when you're done, so it shouldn't interfere with anything, and it should go nicely.
Thank you so much for returning. I'm not sure what time zone you're in, but I can still see a little bit of light outside, so you've got to stay at work like a good Protestant.
All right. So, yeah, you were just talking about what is going on with Trump and this whole immigration thing.
The numbers are not that you need more workers.
And of course, if you need more workers, as you point out, there are a lot of marginalized or underutilized workers.
I was talking about how a lot of STEM grads can't find work in their field.
So the idea of just bringing people in overseas because there aren't any American workers, like it just ain't true.
It's not true.
Again, the white-collar contract visa workers system is not much different from the seasonal visa worker system that we were talking about before.
The primary business model is these outsourcing companies who are essentially labor brokers Who convince the big tech companies and a lot of other big American companies that they can provide certain services like back office services,
database management, IT, computer programming, and so on, to be done by workers from abroad that they bring over in another temporary visa program called H-1B. And so employers start choosing the contract visa workers instead of American STEM grads who could do this work.
In some cases, the American employers have actually just gotten rid of, laid off, fired their American staff and just replaced them with these contract workers that are brought in from abroad.
And you'd be shocked where it happened.
Disney, Anthem, big utility companies, even some state governments, University of California, San Francisco replaced all of their IT staff with guest workers from abroad.
And they do it not because that we lack people who can do this work.
They do it because it's cheaper.
But I think that's a very short-sighted way.
Sometimes they find out that these workers actually aren't all that skilled.
The research we've done has found that most of these IT workers, for example, Are really entry-level trainee-type employees.
They're not geniuses or entrepreneurs or people who are doing jobs that Americans can't do.
And it often takes more than one A contract visa worker to do a job that an experienced and decently paid American was doing by themselves.
So, you know, it's a myth that we need all of these workers.
There was a time when we did, and I would say that was in the late 1990s.
When there really was a shortage of technology workers getting ready for Y2K and really the transitioning of our business to having much more of it done electronically, we did have a shortage at that time.
And you know how you can tell when there really is a labor shortage?
The salaries go up.
That's not happening now.
Because we're bringing in so many contract visa workers, we have more than half a million of them in the United States.
The salaries in those fields have been flat and even going down over time.
And that's a sure sign of really what is a cheap labor business model, not a real need for workers.
Too many American employers really don't have to compete We're good to go.
Or waiters and waitresses in a restaurant, or factory workers, or whether they are computer programmers, or accountants, or any other kind of knowledge job.
We need employers, workers, and then everybody is better off.
So I just wanted to be one of these annoying people who brings An annoying level of expertise to this Y2K question because I was actually chief technical officer in a software company I co-founded in the 90s.
And so this idea that you need credentialed people to do this work is not true.
I mean, Bill Gates wasn't credentialed.
Steve Jobs wasn't credentialed.
A lot of these people aren't credentialed.
If the wages had been allowed to rise in the 90s, it would have drawn the hobbyists into the field, right?
The people who are just like, I mean, I learned how to program computers starting about the age of 11.
I never got formal training and I ended up being chief technical officer in a research department writing the core code for highly sophisticated stuff.
There's tons of people out there who can do the work.
You just don't see them until the wages go up, and then they kind of come out of the woodwork.
So I don't know that there was a time where it was absolutely necessary.
But what I will say at this point is that the CEOs are chasing this short-term money.
Like, it's one thing to write computer code, which I did straight for 15 years for Fortune 500 companies.
It's one thing to write computer code and have it kind of get up and running.
It's kind of like building a house.
Yeah, you know, you can get a house up.
The question is, how long does it last?
How much does it meet spec?
Is it going to sustain?
Because to write code and get something up and running is one thing.
Is the code logically laid out?
Is it well documented?
Is it professionally done so that if one part breaks, the whole thing doesn't come down?
So to me, I think...
What happens is you'll get this code up and running, but the overall price of maintaining the code, of upgrading the code and all of that, people cycle in and out of software companies all the time.
You need a huge amount of detailed documentation to gain any kind of utility.
I mean, I remember in COBOL 74 being handed a program code that was half a million lines long and being asked to deal something within it.
It took me a month just to figure out what the heck was going on.
It wasn't that well documented.
So I think a lot of these workers who are coming in, it seems like they're getting the job done in the same way, you know, like everybody was like, wow, you know, China can really build a hospital quickly.
And it's like, but then you look at the actual insides of the hospital and it's leaking and the walls are like Dr.
Seuss walls. And so I think that the price...
We'll be pretty happy down the road.
But of course, the CEOs are just kind of crack at it going after short-term profits these days.
Yeah, that's really insightful.
You do kind of get what you pay for, whether it's, you know, the difference between buying a nicely tailored suit or one that's just been thrown together where the seams are going to come apart at some point and it doesn't have full pockets.
That's true. And it is also true that Young people's choices for what they want to study at the university are often dependent on where they think they can get a job.
And what has happened now is that there has been such a change in demand for Americans doing STEM jobs that many of them are making the choice, before they even go to college, that they just don't want to go into that field.
Because they sense that there are not going to be the job opportunities when they come out on the other end.
When this whole phenomenon of the tech guest workers started, You did see a lot of the American STEM grads, you know, they had other options.
They would go into other forms of business or management or other kinds of jobs that were not really STEM jobs.
But then eventually they just stopped signing up for the STEM programs at the universities, particularly when at some of these universities, The departments themselves became dominated by foreign students and foreign professors,
and it didn't really feel like a welcoming environment, particularly if you were a woman or if you were African American or some of the other groups that are really underrepresented in STEM fields even today in the United States.
And now we're seeing that same kind of colonization of The hiring process by managers who themselves came in as guest workers, stayed on, got a green card, and now they're hiring from their hometown or home city back in India, which is where more than 70% of the workers are coming from.
And so again, it's not a true market.
These jobs aren't really fully available to Americans or even people from other parts of the country because there's this pipeline now that is controlled by the people who took advantage of the visa program.
And that is not healthy for innovation or really a vibrant technology sector to have it be kind of, as I said, colonized in this way.
Well, this is something I've heard anecdotally, and I'm glad you're bringing it up because I think it's underappreciated for those outside the business.
So what I've heard anecdotally, and maybe there's been studies done on this or maybe you've heard more, but the anecdote goes something like this.
Okay, so some Chinese guy comes in or some Indian guy comes in and he ends up being in charge of hiring people.
And he hires a bunch of other Chinese guys or a bunch of other Indian guys, people he knows, whose culture he's familiar with, and they have their own language and so on.
And then the people who work there, whether they're whites or Hispanics or blacks or whatever, they just sort of feel a little less comfortable every day and then they end up being kind of pushed down.
And you do end up with this kind of spread wherein it's not just jobs that are replaced that are existing.
It's new jobs, new hiring patterns and so on that tend to go with ethnic in-group preferences outside of You know, these wanted values of multiculturalism or even basic economic efficiency.
Well, that's right.
I had a friend in New England when I was living there.
She was a mom.
Our kids were friends.
She loved engineering.
She loved math.
She had a job with one of the big technology companies near Boston.
And she said over the years, gradually, all of her colleagues were replaced by people coming in as contract visa workers.
Or just...
And the whole culture of the office changed.
She was, as a mom, expected to be there at all hours, to have conference calls with teams overseas night and day, couldn't necessarily count on being able to leave in time to pick up her kids from school or whatever, to take them to baseball practice.
It just became almost a hostile work environment for her.
And she said, I can't believe I'm talking like this, that I'm going to leave the field that I love And want to work in.
And frankly, there aren't enough women working in STEM jobs to begin with.
But she was considering leaving because it became a hostile work environment.
And, you know, a lot of this is anecdotal.
But there have been recently a number of lawsuits that are being filed by American workers against some of these big companies where this is going on to start to document, maybe not producing a lot of data,
but quite a track record of incidents of discrimination, We're good to go.
Forget this job if you're an American.
That's not what we're looking for.
And so these lawsuits now are starting to document this record of Kind of under-the-radar discrimination that has started to occur, and that is very unfair to anyone in this field.
And again, this is a field of work that is critical to our national security and to our viability as an economy and as a world leader in innovation.
We can't afford to have it all Taken over, or even in some significant part taken over by companies that are just relying on the least expensive workers available.
It's almost like you're trying to tell me, Jessica, that having the Awan brothers in charge of congressional computers wasn't a very wise move as a whole.
And for those who want more, I've got a whole presentation on the Awan brothers scandal, which played out exactly as you would expect.
Okay, so last point or two.
I really, really appreciate your time today.
Do you think there's anyone in the administration who's currently saying to him...
This is a stop-bat measure.
This is like getting addicted to a drug.
You get addicted to a drug, and you're going to stop looking for happiness in other areas that will be more sustainable.
And as you point out, so if you get a bunch of foreign workers coming in because there aren't, quote, American programmers, which basically means that they want to pay programmers less, then what happens is people say, well, with all of these foreign workers in, I'm not going to bother going into programming, which I've also heard anecdotally, and that would be a very common sense reaction.
People do respond to incentives and, of course, disincentives.
Oh, we don't have enough STEM workers, so we're going to bring all these STEM people in from outside, so people stop using STEM, and you end up at this permanent problem.
It's like we've lost the ability to grit our teeth and rip off the damn Band-Aid We've made some bad decisions which have misallocated resources in a free market situation.
Let's stop the guest worker program.
That will stimulate people to come out of retirement.
It will stimulate hobbyists to get some credentials quickly and get into the field.
It will stimulate entrepreneurs to start the business.
I couldn't have gotten a job at a Stanford computer lab with a history degree, but I could go start a software company.
It would just draw with hobbyists in it.
It would draw other people in.
And yeah, there'll be a little bit of dislocation.
And this ties into the earlier thing with having workers who you come in so you don't have to automate.
So, you know, there'll be a couple of months of discombobulation, and then everything will be infinitely better and infinitely more sustainable.
I mean, I know Trump has the leadership skills to call for this kind of sacrifice, but it just seems like we've become allergic to anything that disturbs the status quo, even if it benefits us in the long run.
Well, that's right.
It seems as if we've become allergic to being able to tolerate a little bit of pain and dislocation to reset to a more sustainable and healthier situation.
No politician seems to want to risk the short-term pain that would be necessary to transition back.
But here we are in a situation with this pandemic where this might be the ideal time to do it.
Because there's so much other pain going on and other changes that are going to happen in our society that may make it more tolerable to do at this point in time.
I mean, this is maybe not a great analogy, but I remember when my mother was going through some pretty serious cancer treatments, she had been a lifelong smoker.
And she finally decided to quit smoking.
And I said, you know, why now?
She said, well, I'm going to be so miserable.
I might as well do it now. So that may be, you know, what ends up happening here.
But it's going to take a few things.
It's going to take leadership.
It's going to take a vision for how we're going to come out on the other end is going to be better for our country and better for Americans.
But it also requires a certain honesty on the part of People involved in this discussion about what is really going on in these visa programs, that the people who are coming in are not the best and the brightest in the world.
Of course, we do want to attract talent from overseas, but that is not what we are getting through these visa programs.
I'm so sorry to interrupt, but do we?
I mean, and I say we, not even being an American.
I mean, there's certainly a strong case to be made that there's, you know, with 300 plus million people, you're going to find talent in your own country.
And of course, the more that America kind of brain drains the third world, the less the third world is able to grow itself economically.
And, you know, like everyone gets mad at colonialists who go and strip mine gold and diamonds from other countries.
But it seems to me strip mining.
Right.
Right. That's right.
It's like a new kind of colonialism or imperialism where we're going to take, you know, your resources from these other countries.
What we really need to have fundamentally is more faith in the markets to help our country right itself.
Like, if we need workers of a certain skill, That we can create that within our own population of 300-some million people, that we're going to develop that, that we are nimble and people will respond.
And that ultimately is what's going to save us, is a faith in our ability to adapt.
Okay, so I really appreciate your time.
If you wanted to, actually I'd really like it if you could, tell people a little bit about the Center for Immigration Studies, its mission, and where to find it on the web.
Would love to. We're the nation's only research institute dedicated to studying immigration's impacts on our society from the standpoint of what is good for the national interest rather than special interests.
And everything we publish is on our website at cis.org.
Well, I really...
So I really do appreciate your time, Jessica.
Thank you so much. And now we've got the setup.
Perfect. We know how to do it.
So next time we talk, it'll be even smoother.
I thank everyone for dropping by.
Like 1,500 people dropped by to watch this, and I'll probably put out an edited version after.
But I really do appreciate your time.
Thank you so much at cis.org to get the work.
It's well worth following on Twitter.
I'll put the Twitter link there as well.
Your work is greatly appreciated, and I hope we can talk again soon.
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.
▲
Export Selection