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Some software projects go less smoothly than others, and for the last three weeks I’ve been totally preoccupied with a frustrating major overhaul of the website code at The Review, by far the biggest since I originally launched the webzine in late 2013. My intent was to modify the design to accommodate a substantial expansion of our publication, while also building a much better smartphone edition to replace the totally mediocre version that I’d quickly thrown together in just a couple of days last year. This Mobile effort has absorbed the bulk of my time, including over a week of wasted going down blind alleys, though I think I’ve finally solved the key problems.
Fortunately, while I’ve been struggling with frequently fruitless programming, others in America have enjoyed far greater public success. A week ago I opened my morning New York Times to discover that the national lead story was the 14-to-1 vote in the Los Angeles City Council to enact an astonishing $15 per hour citywide minimum wage, phased in over the next few years. With LA Mayor Eric Garcetti fully endorsing the measure, a stunning 70% rise in the minimum wage for four million Angelenos appears a virtual certainly, and the NYT was totally justified in giving their accompanying lead editorial the title “A $15 Wage Bombshell in Los Angeles.” Moreover, this move will surely put enormous pressure on the rest of Southern California and other large urban centers such as New York City to similarly adopt large wage hikes, while giving the national push for much higher wages a huge shot of momentum. Even before this development, the NYT had reported a few weeks ago that support for an hourly minimum wage of $12 at the federal level now marked the lower end of the spectrum among national Democrats. These developments might have seemed almost unimaginable even just a year or two ago, demonstrating the rate at which the issue is evolving.
From a broader perspective, achieving a $15 minimum wage for a million or more low-wage workers in Los Angeles would probably rank as the greatest national success for American organized labor in decades, a period in which the political defeats for unions have come much more frequently. As mentioned, my first inkling of the LA breakthrough came with my morning newspapers and coffee, but despite my total lack of involvement, I’d like to think that I played a significant role in laying the groundwork for these important developments.
Back in 2011, I had published a 12,000 word article which proposed a large minimum wage hike as the surprising solution to a whole range of our serious social and economic difficulties. In those days—less than four years ago—minimum wage advocacy had long dropped off the political radar screen, and even many liberal Democrats no longer championed the idea. As an illustration of where Democrats then stood, Ezra Klein, an influential young liberal pundit, publicly ridiculed my proposal on his television show, suggesting that only the ignorant or the economically illiterate supported raising the minimum wage. Fortunately, others reacted much more favorably, with influential liberal economist James Galbraith endorsing and promoting my idea, as did the late radical journalist Alexander Cockburn.
The following year, Michael Lind of the New America Foundation persuaded me to publish another major minimum wage article under their auspices, which once again produced a flurry of secondary media coverage. Soon afterward, Ralph Nader redoubled his efforts on the issue, and after a year of lobbying finally managed to persuade Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz—two of the most prominent liberal economists—to reverse their longstanding opposition, and instead support a minimum wage hike, endorsing President Obama’s call for raising the federal minimum wage to $9.00 in his 2013 State of the Union Address.
During the year that followed momentum shifted back and forth on the issue. I was very pleasantly surprised when writers at both National Review and The New Republic endorsed my minimum wage proposal, but any actual legislation was blocked by the Republicans in Congress and success seemed increasingly unlikely, with the whole issue gradually fading from discussion and being abandoned as politically dead by Fall 2013.
At that point, I suddenly recognized the potential galvanizing impact of a major statewide initiative campaign, and after discussing the idea with James Galbraith and Ralph Nader, launched a last-minute attempt to place a $12 minimum wage measure on the 2014 California ballot, sacrificing all the normal preparatory work for a chance at a sudden end-run of the political process. The initial results were even better than my greatest hopes, with massive coverage of my unexpected, quixotic return to initiative politics after over a dozen years of total absence, with a major article in the NYT opening the floodgates . Soon, I was publishing minimum wage op-eds for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a wide range of other national publications, using the considerable media coverage to restore attention to the great economic benefits and political potency of the issue. Within five weeks Democratic strategists had suddenly decided to make a large minimum wage hike a centerpiece of their national 2014 campaign, and President Obama joined this effort by proposing a federal hike to $10.10 in his State of the Union Address.
Although I ultimately failed to raise the necessary funds to qualify my initiative, the six months of enormous media coverage I received produced exactly what I’d hoped, and the issue itself developed a great deal of permanent national momentum. Towards the end, even prominent national Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Tim Pawlenty joined together to endorse a minimum wage hike. Democratic operatives eventually noted the overwhelming November victories of five minimum wage initiatives placed on the ballot, mostly in small, heavily Republican states, even as Democratic candidates nationwide were suffering a tremendous drubbing at the polls.
Furthermore, during the half year my proposed $12 initiative seemed to have huge momentum, I repeatedly pointed out to union leaders and Democratic strategists the obvious political benefits of aiming at a higher rather than a lower figure, $12 rather than $9.00 or $10.10. After all, while a small wage hike only benefits only a sliver of workers and helps them only slightly, a large raise greatly increases both the number of beneficiaries and their income gains; and I think they took my arguments to heart. During my early 2014 efforts, I discovered that no liberal-leaning thinktank had even bothered exploring the impact of a federal figure above $10.10, while now just a year later $12.00 has become the minimalist position of centrist Democrats.
And in particular, I may have played a small role in the genesis of Los Angeles’s victorious $15.00 effort. During March 2014 I was twice invited to participate in a discussion of minimum wage issues on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA? radio program, one of the leading public affairs shows in Southern California. In one program, the topic was the fierce lobbying campaign by LA labor unions, which had spent years working to persuade the City Council raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour for workers at large, non-unionized hotels. Perhaps unexpectedly, I was harshly critical of the idea, arguing that it was ridiculous to focus efforts to raise the wages of just 1% of LA’s workers while ignoring the other 99%, who would therefore have no personal stake in the battle; this was exactly the sort of narrowly targeted special-interest effort that tended to give labor unions a bad name. Since a $12 level seemed reasonable for the entire state of California and LA’s cost of living was so far above average, I argued it might be reasonable to set the entire city figure at $15, thereby benefiting all local workers rather than just those at a few large hotels. This suggestion seemed to surprise and shock all the other participants on the discussion.
Which Way LA? regularly attracts a large and elite audience, and nine days after my appearance, two of LA’s most politically influential billionaires, Democrat Eli Broad and Republican Rick Caruso, told the Los Angeles Times that they both supported the establishment of a citywide Los Angeles minimum wage, possibly as high as $15 per hour. When powerful Republican and Democratic billionaires, with a history of anti-union sentiments, suddenly join forces with the Labor Movement, important things may happen, and in little more than a year, that proposal is now on the verge of becoming law.
During the months that I was promoting my minimum wage initiative, I had regularly emphasized to union leaders the obvious benefits of such a broad-front popular strategy rather than the narrowly-targeted emphasis on gaining even higher wages and richer pensions for the small and rapidly shrinking slice of already-unionized American workers. Not only does the latter approach often rightly seem to be special interest lobbying for workers who need it the least, but it establishes those very well paid recipients as an unpopular and seemingly greedy minority, easily vulnerable to the broad-based attacks of conservative anti-union groups. I think this misguided strategy helps to Labor’s plight over the last generation or two, during which the rate of private-sector union membership has collapsed by well over 70%. By contrast, a focus on raising the wages of all low paid workers not only benefits significant numbers of union members but also generates the popularity and broader credibility which the union movement must attract if it is to survive.
Even while the minimum wage crusade was achieving such an important breakthrough, another issue was returning to the national stage, though with no signs of any great progress to date. In late 2012, I had published a 30,000 word article “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” with one of my main points being the strong statistical evidence for the existence of Asian Quotas in college admissions at Harvard and the other Ivy League colleges, a suggestion that quickly sparked a New York Times symposium and numerous other discussions in the media. One of my obvious arguments was noting that although the national percentage of college-age Asian Americans had roughly doubled over the last generation, there had been no corresponding change in their Ivy League enrollments, and at Harvard, even a slight decline. A very simple graph illustrating this point was widely discussed and republished.
Almost three years have now passed and almost nothing seems to have happened, with the top administrators of our elite universities being just as shameless in their stonewalling on the issue as they have been in the past. Speaking at an annual conference of education journalists last year, I pointed out that nearly all of the established Asian-American organizations had been deafening with their silence on this issue, but at long last that may be starting to change, with 64 different Asian-American groups recently joining together in public criticism of Harvard’s unfair admission policies.
This development provided a natural media hook for long-time opponents of Asian Quotas to revive their critiques, led by a major Wall Street Journal Op-Ed column carrying the evocative title “The New Jews of Harvard Admissions.” Numerous other pieces in the conservative or libertarian media soon followed, including Steve Chapman’s syndicated Chicago Tribune column that explicitly cited my analysis. Although public declarations by activist groups and periodic media attacks are unlikely to bring down the heavily fortified Ivy-covered walls that surround our elite universities, they do lay the basis for future efforts, and I’m reasonably confident these will ultimately prove successful.
Last year, during the height of my minimum wage campaign, a prominent Asian-American activist expressed his frustration that my writings on that subject seemed to be making so much real world progress in contrast to my work on Asian Quota issues. I pointed out that it had taken three years and a great deal of effort before my original 2011 article in the former topic had begun to bear any fruit, and so it was hardly surprising that the latter would take some time as well. I also noted that upon publication my Meritocracy article had attracted perhaps ten times the national attention as my original minimum wage article, so he should take comfort in the evidence of a huge potential for that topic.
Transforming policy proposals from the printed page to political reality is always a difficult task in our complex and coagulated political system, and the best chance of achieving success is to somehow find the right point of political/media leverage, at which a reasonable amount of applied effort might be able to produce results. Over the last few years, such an approach seems to have worked out in the case of promoting a large minimum wage hike, but a similar path to success on the Asian Quotas has yet to appear. So I suppose on my personal checklist it’s one down and one to go.
Unfortunately, I must now return to the programming keyboard, doing my best to get the new presentation layer of my website ready for testing. As a bit of interesting news, a couple of days ago the business section of the NYT carried a front-page story about the travails of Fusion, the news/entertainment media outlet and website jointly launched by ABC and Univision in late 2013, at almost exactly the same time I launched The Review. Obviously, any comparisons are difficult and inexact, but based on the quoted figures regarding budget, staffing levels, and website traffic, our cost-effectiveness seems to be somewhere between 100x and 1000x greater. This is certainly quite encouraging.
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…illegal immigration among them, and I’m surprised you don’t mention that anywhere in this piece. FWIW though, you’re wrong about that. Illegals will continue working at whatever they work for; it’s not like their employers, having already been in violation of one law — that of employing them at all and looking the other way at their stolen Social Security numbers — are suddenly going to care about one more law.
But a $15 minimum wage will be great at driving the last of the American teenagers from the jobmarket.
Hopefully more and more teenagers are coming to understand that those dead end jobs aren’t good at any stage of your life. They need more school or more tech chops, none of which will be had by slaving away at a burger joint. Of course money in the pocket to buy things is nice, but even here, entertainment – a huge of part of a teen’s life – has become bargain basement cheap. YouTube and Netflix fill many an hour. And music is stolen or listened to for free.
And driving? Fewer care about that. Riding bikes is in.
So no more crap jobs for teens? Nobody cares except old fashioned conservatives who think it’ll help build them “character.”
It’s too bad that LA’s great experiment will not officially begin for three years. Were it otherwise, the immediate catastrophic results would finally have put to rest the spurious notion that minimum wage laws improve the average quality of working men’s lives.
As it is now the bad effects of the law will start becoming apparent even before implementation as marginal operations begin to close down and leave LA in anticipation of the horrors to come. Then, in three years, when the law is finally implemented, progressives will point to the preceding three-year decline in LA’s economy and suggest that the sudden additional onslaught of closures and layoffs are actually just part of a trend that will have begun three years before but has absolutely nothing to do with their precious minimum wage law.
Except under exceptional circumstances, when prices go up demand goes down. The labor market in LA is not exceptional and as wages go up the demand for labor in the LA region will go down.
Of course, this is the same polity that does not understand the relation between rent control and Santa Monica’s decrepit housing stock. So what the hell. As Mencken said, democracy is that wonderful system of guvmint in which the people get exactly what they ask for; good and hard.
Is that before or after you account for your own time at $15/hr plus taxes?
Will this increase in the minimum wage to a mid-imum wage encourage more illegal immigration into the gay state? Just wondering – I’m not an economist like many others on this site, but it seems like it might be an attraction.
The only potential presidential candidate who approves of $15 per hour nationwide is Bernie Sanders. Is there a Republican hopeful who would agree?
All societies want to ‘get to Denmark’, as Fukuyama puts it (become stable, prosperous, peaceful etc). It’s amazing how this can be achieved when both left and right agree on a goal (often for different ideological reasons). I hope left and right can do more than fling shit at each other for our entertainment, because it’s getting less entertaining.
He mentioned it in a thread on Steve’s blog.
Incidentally, according to Ezra Klein’s Vox colleague Matt Yglesias, Los Angeles labor unions now want an exemption from the $15 minimum wage.
Yglesias spins that as a logical step on the path to broad, Nordic-style collective bargaining (home of $21 per hour McDonald’s workers), but my guess is that the union leaders have belatedly realized the impact a $15 minimum wage would have on their efforts to import more union workers.
It may sound odd that a union would put mass immigration ahead of higher wages for workers, but consider that the SEIU supports Obama’s recent amnesty.
Any company, corporation, or member of the Chamber of Commerce that supports immigration should be required to pay all their employees 90k a year, plus family medical, dental, and private education for all their employee’s children.
Congrats on your success with the $15 Los Angeles minimum wage.
Have you considered hiring software developers experienced with mobile so you can spend more time on political activism?
In this quest for the higher minimum wage I always wonder what happens to those already making $15 and hour who are presumably better skilled or more experienced. Do they get a corresponding bump in pay?
Then there is automation http://momentummachines.com/ I’ll take the traditional business point of view that raising the rate this dramatically will only accelerate automation.
I think there is a far better idea out in regards to this issue of income inequity is the concept of Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI). Everyone in America gets say $16,000 to$18,000 a year Guaranteed. Of course a entire host of radical tax and entitlement reform would have to happen to make this possible such as the elimination of all forms of welfare, and it would eliminate virtually all tax breaks etc., that the middle class and the affluent now receive. But think about this if I’m getting a GMI of $18K, this actually puts the pressure on employer. How much do I have to pay, to get potential employee’s off the sofa and into work. Beautiful really.
“Except under exceptional circumstances, when prices go up demand goes down. The labor market in LA is not exceptional and as wages go up the demand for labor in the LA region will go down.”
The next political media/pressure point is stopping the effects of illegal immigration using the already proven and established federal ss# registry for just this purpose.
Ron Unz?
I do think the western economic depression is a problem of demand – driving down wages is double-edged as although it reduces costs it also reduces demand – so I can see the logic of the minimum wage idea but I have no clear view as to whether the balance of consequences seen and foreseen will be net positive or negative. It’s a worthwhile experiment though.
I could probably take a weekend web course at my local community college and come up with a more viable business than this ‘Fusion’ dreck…
Is there a major union in the US that advocates any limits whatsoever on immigration? If there is, I can’t find it. Goes to prove that unions want what’s best for their leadership (more members) not what’s best for their members (higher wages).
Albert Wenger makes the case for a basic income here: https://youtu.be/t8qo7pzH_NM
Video Link
Ron,
But no White gentile group has organized to pick up on your showing that they also are discriminated against at Harvard. (Can’t expect Jews to organize to protest that they are over-represented.)
Where to respectably start? Episcopalians? DAR? Catholics? PTA in majority white schools, non-religiously affiliated private school associations?
$30 would be better then
All societies want to ‘get to Denmark’,
Do you mean that figuratively or literally?
What about the other interesting point about your meritocracy article, the non-Jewish white quota at Harvard and other elite universities?
Any real world movement on that?
My children are half-Asian and half-Anglo-Germans. I guess they get screwed both ways.
That’s absolutely hilarious! Sure enough, I clicked through to the LAT, and it’s absolutely true. Union leaders seem like pretty decent people to me, but they must have the worst political/media instincts in the known universe, which is why they’ve suffered an almost unbroken series of defeats for the last 30-40 years. I passed along the story to a prominent liberal I’m friendly with who was involved in the MW issue to me, and he was utterly stunned.
Meanwhile, the problem with the all the anti-immigration fanatics who hang out on this website is that they seem to believe that everyone in the world is as totally fanatic about immigration—whether pro- or con—as they themselves are, which is simply delusional. The vast majority of people or political activists don’t particularly care about immigration one way or the other, except insofar as it impacts other issues. It’s like all the gun-nuts believing everyone cares only about guns or the abortion nuts about abortion. Maybe all the immigration nuts should ask themselves why the Republicans keep nominating pro-immigration presidential candidates and after mouthing a few platitudes, they easily still get 90% of the Republican/conservative vote.
What’s going on in LA obviously has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. It’s just that the local union leaders suddenly got the “brilliant idea” of luring businesses into unionizing by offering them the chance to pay a sub-minimum wage. At a stroke, those union leaders have totally blown themselves up, and probably managed to destroy all the good will they had built up while pushing for a $15 MW. Basically, if low wage workers, immigrant or not, are offered the choice between union membership and getting paid $15 per hour, roughly 99.9% would choose the latter. Maybe the Koch brothers secretly bribed all the LA union leaders to commit political suicide…
Congrats on spiking the momentum on wages.
That said, now all we need are a whole lot more jobs, period.
Ron says he hasn’t seen much evidence that Democrats are in favor of increased immigration, but some of the unions (particularly the low-end SEIU) are one obvious example.
I had an exchange with a libertarian econ professor on Twitter about this ( https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/603674479672348672 ).
But haven’t their defeats come mostly while pursuing the opposite tack – demanding higher wages and benefits? Not that their defeats were necessarily, solely caused by that. Steve has blogged about Thomas Geoghegan ( http://www.alternet.org/story/147859/were_you_born_on_the_wrong_continent_why_you’d_probably_be_healthier_and_wealthier_in_germany ) in the past, a labor lawyer who sings the praises of Germany’s profitable, high-wage, unionized companies.
I had an exchange with a libertarian economist about this on Twitter earlier ( https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/603674479672348672 ), and he offered some (unconvincing, to me) non-immigration explanations for why unions might want to be able to negotiate sub-minimum wages, but neither of us came up with your explanation above. It sounds too ridiculous to be true.
The immigration explanation made sense to me in the context of the SEIU’s other positions, such as supporting Obama’s amnesty, but there is another potential explanation, consistent with the unions’ desire to increase their numbers: they are worried that the higher minimum wage will lead to more automation, fewer jobs, and, consequently, fewer union members.
Ohbut immigration is central. Unions are basically Latino political machines importing worker voters from Mexico and Central America, where defeated Latino pols get stashed on payrolls until they run again.
Higher min wages discriminates against the illiterate in two languages guy from Michoacan in favor of the native, American who can read English. Given that a higher wage reduces head count and increases capital investment aka automation. The guy who can read English can read the equipment manual. The guy from Michoacan is just a pair of arms.
Bottom line people want to live in America not Greater Northern Baja. Hence the min wage support.
Raise it to $30 an hour. Make it $50 and retroactive for illegals. Punish enemies and reward friends.
LA would be fifty times nicer and cheaper if we could get rid of the illegals and their kids.
Gauranteed min income? Think Korean shopowners will pay for Tookies kids? Jose from Michoacan for some granny from Iowa? The Li family from Shanghai for Jose? That’s a good one!
Dude that is EXCELLENT! Two of the “superior” races. That’s not getting “screwed” that’s just building steel with fire! I think that they should claim “Jewish” as religion, and “conservative” as a political affiliation, and list “make a shitload of money” as their life ambition on their resumes and college aps as well. Why?
Well, when Deion Sanders was in college at Florida state, whenever he caught a punt he would jog in place for a second before he started is return. Often times, he would still take it back 80 yards to the house. A reporter asked him once, “well Deion, why would you jog in place for a few seconds while the defense is bearing down on you?”
He answered:
“Aw man, I just want to give ’em a chance.”
Nothing helps to focus the mind like understanding that those dead end jobs are all you will qualify for unless you get skills to do better. Plus they do help to understand what is required in a job.
Yep, because Millennials and their pretty much skipping the entry level job market has made them such great employees with realistic expectations. They know less about the world than any generation because they have lived in a bubble of school, TV, and organized activities.
Character, we don’t need any of that now do we.
Well, that Nowrasteh fellow tends to illustrate my point. He’s one of those fanatic pro-immigration nuts, of the libertarian variety (or at least he acts that way due to his paycheck). So, yes, based on his ideology he wants unlimited numbers of immigrants. He’s also fanatically anti-Minimum Wage for similar libertarian reasons.
Being fanatically pro-immigration and anti-MW, he naturally launched ferocious attacks against me during my MW initiative campaign, publishing an extremely harsh op-ed in my hometown San Jose Mercury news that denounced me as an anti-immigrant activist and notorious xenophobe.
But he’s also a very lazy young idiot, since I immediately pointed out that if he’d ever bothered checking my background, he’d have discovered that I’d for decades always been one of the strongest *pro-immigrant* voices in policy circles, with something like 200,000 published words taking that position. As just one example, during the 1994 Prop. 187 campaign I’d been one of the top featured speakers at the 70,000 strong LA March, the largest pro-immigrant political rally in American history. I presented all these facts in a short published rebuttal to his absurd nonsense:
https://www.unz.com/runz/raising-the-minimum-wage-isnt-an-anti-immigrant-idea/
Just before launching my MW initiative I’d been in a major televised debate on unlimited immigration against another one or two of those same types, and easily crushed them by emphasizing the craziness of their ideas:
https://www.unz.com/runz/open-borders-american-elites-and-the-minimum-wage/
Since so much of the agitated immigration debate occurs between pro-immigration nuts (like those gentlemen) and anti-immigration nuts (like almost all of the commenters on this website), both groups naturally conclude that *everyone* is an immigration nut, either one way or the other. But that’s just not true. For long stretches of time, immigration typically ranks well below the top political issues in polls, though at times it jumps up when the MSM focuses on it. My guess is that 90% of people usually don’t really regard it as a burning issue, but the 10% who do spend all their time arguing with each other, which gives them a distorted impression.
Well, I haven’t followed the doings in LA and my suggested motive was speculative, but it seems totally obvious and plausible. Basically, the union idea would be to use the threat of paying much higher wages to pressure businesses to unionize. In fact, that’s exactly what the unions had been talking about doing a year or two ago with regard to large hotels in LA, and the their opponents were publicly citing that explanation, which seemed plausible to me.
As far as I know, the SEIU and the other unions had never been pro-immigration. During the 1980s and early 1990s, lots of unionized jobs were lost to a flood of poor immigrants, and the unions were unhappy about immigration. But once millions of immigrants had been in America and working for a decade or two, the SEIU decided to start organizing them and bringing them into the union, which makes perfect sense. Since so many of them (or their friends and relatives) were illegal, naturally their union backs them by supporting amnesty. But supporting amnesty for long-time illegal immigrants is quite different from wanting a flood of new immigration, though admittedly one thing may lead to the other.
Just like that silly Nowrasteh fellow assumes that anyone opposed to Open Borders must be a fanatical anti-immigrant activist, the anti-immigration nuts just assume that anyone supporting amnesty must also support unlimited immigration.
That’s totally ridiculous. If so, why would the unions have invested such enormous amounts of time and money over the last year to pass the $15/hour law? They were the main backers, and if they believed it would destroy large numbers of their members’ jobs, they probably wouldn’t have done so.
No, they got exactly what they wanted and they’re not worried about union jobs being lost. But now right at the end, they’ve gotten a little greedy and decided to also try to use the law to squeeze non-unionized businesses into becoming unionized, possibly blowing themselves up politically as a result.
Congratulations to Ron Unz on a job well done leveraging the minimum wage issue toward action. I fully support his efforts.
Henry Ford’s Five Dollar Days increased the quality of his workforce and helped move America toward the middle class living standard we all still take for granted. A decent foundational level for wages in our time might do similar things — and help preserve the society that men like Ford built.
And as always, a big thank you to Mr. Unz for the great service he does by providing the Unz Review.
In the words of John L. Lewis, Unions want MORE. I believe Lewis wrote it in capital letters to emphasize this. Unions acquire members and collect dues in return for MORE. Wages are a mandatory subject of bargaining, and having them pegged at $15 an hour limits the usefulness of organized labor.
I too am worried about low wages, but believe that a minimum wage increase is the wrong way to go about raising income. Workers at all levels have had their earning power eroded by illegal immigration. Surely you understand that increasing the supply of labor lowers the price that workers can command? Offshoring work, loosening trade restrictions and technological change has also reduced demand for labor and further weakened workers market power.
Moreover, the economy suffers from lack of demand. Workers need more money, and they need to spend those dollars. Billions of dollars in wages earned in the US by immigrants are sent as remittances back home, and immigrants are willing to live crowded into substandard housing. This severely limits the impact that economic stimulus such as increased government spending or a minimum wage increase might have to promote domestic growth.
Immigration, trade and technology have taken a terrible toll on the unskilled, less able and less bright amongst us. Technological change will not stop, but immigration and trade are policy decisions that have been made in favor of the wealthy and non-citizens, with immigration enforcement ignored, contrary to the law of the land.
The Review appears to be staffed by a part-time one-man army.
From what I can gather from Paul Collier’s book, immigrant workers are the ones who are most hurt by further immigration. His central point is that the immigrant diaspora communities enable more and poorer people to migrate and immigration will accelerate prodigiously.
Exactly. The software system I’ve built is so highly automated that I’d guess I average only 3-4 hours per week running the webzine and publishing all the articles. I probably spend much more time than that just reading comments on a few threads and occasionally writing some of my own, which I would do even if it were someone else’s webzine. On the other hand, every now and then, I do need to put in stretches of work adding new features to the software itself.
Precisely correct. That’s exactly why all the noisy anti-immigration activists are such a bunch of totally counter-productive dummies. Looking at things from the perspective of self-interest, existing immigrant workers would be the group most strongly opposed to high levels of continued immigration, and this was exactly the situation in the past, when Cesar Chavez spent decades as America’s leading anti-immigration activist.
However, since 90% of all the noisy anti-immigration activists tend to attack and denounce immigrants in a very nasty manner, often with a sharp racialist tinge, they naturally drive away any potential support from existing immigrants for immigration-restriction, making it very easy for the business lobbies to keep immigration levels very high.
Yes, if your roof leaks and you subsequently devote 90% of your energy to cursing the rain, then you reveal yourself as irrational and ineffective.
I’m still not sure if Dain was speaking tongue-in-cheek there.
One valuable thing you learn at work is to keep your mouth shut. In school it’s the opposite; talking is rewarded.
Ron Unz wrote:
“That’s exactly why all the noisy anti-immigration activists are such a bunch of totally counter-productive dummies. Looking at things from the perspective of self-interest, existing immigrant workers would be the group most strongly opposed to high levels of continued immigration, and this was exactly the situation in the past, when Cesar Chavez spent decades as America’s leading anti-immigration activist.
However, since 90% of all the noisy anti-immigration activists tend to attack and denounce immigrants in a very nasty manner, often with a sharp racialist tinge, they naturally drive away any potential support from existing immigrants for immigration-restriction, making it very easy for the business lobbies to keep immigration levels very high.”
Chavez was consistent and understood the relationship between wages and immigration WRT the low-skilled in the USA. He later changed his mind due to racial solidarity. To quote Lee Kuan Yew, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
And that is pretty much where we have landed. Race-based calls for solidarity began with the minorities. NW European efforts to duplicate this have been suppressed by the ruling class. I do not think that they will be successful for much longer and white/European consciousness & solidarity will grow.
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On a tangent, I suggested to a local alternative news website that they ought to consult you on a comment system. They recently dumped Livefyre and are temporarily using Facebook commenting tools. Their comment quantity and website page views have tanked as a result. I suspect their ad revenues are taking it in the jimmy.
To clarify, the libertarian econ professor I was alluding to in that exchange was William J. Luther. He seems to be a bit more reasonable and less hostile than Nowrasteh.
Even most proponents of restricting immigration, such as Mickey Kaus, would be willing to consider some form of amnesty for long-time illegals after illegal immigration has been demonstrably curtailed. But, in practice, most advocates of amnesty don’t limit their advocacy to “long-time” illegals. They pretty much all agree that recent, unaccompanied minor illegals should be allowed to stay too.
And, in practice, advocating amnesty first (before credible enforcement measures have been enacted) is the same as wanting a flood of new immigration.
Anyone advocating amnesty first, or amnesty after a fig leaf does support mass immigration. And they’re not shy about it. Do you think Jeb Bush or Mario Diaz-Balart or David Brooks isn’t in favor of continued, mass immigration? What gives you that impression?
As for the focus on immigration by many readers on this site, there’s a logical reason for that. Every political issue is impacted by immigration, because immigrants alter the electorate when they become citizens.
Well, it would have looked ridiculous if unions weren’t supporting the increased minimum wage. And maybe they figured/were hoping business interests would quash it?
Anything’s possible, but I find it hard to believe for a few reasons:
1) It’s quite irregular for a union to negotiate sub-minimum wages. The only example I can think of is show business unions that do it on occasion to support small theater productions (I’m not even sure it’s necessary for them to do so on movies, because the gap between union scale and market rates for stars is so high). But that’s an example where the union minimum wage is far above the legal minimum wage to begin with, and it’s done to support their industry’s ecosystem. Neither applies in the LA unions’ case.
2) To unionize, you need the workers to vote for it, and, as you noted above, why would any workers vote for the right to get paid less?
3) Offering business a choice between unionization and a higher minimum wage is like offering them death or oogabooga. They’ve got to realize that if they get the union, they’ll get the higher minimum wage as soon as the union contract expires.
Well even though I don’t closely follow LA politics, it’s been totally obvious from the media that the local unions were the massive, overwhelming driving force behind the push to raise the minimum wage. I’d guess they contributed something like 90% of the activism and money.
This is exactly the same pattern in all the other cities that have raised the MW, in a few cases even as high as $15. It’s always been a totally union-driven effort.
The unions have also contributed the entire funding—millions or tens of millions of dollars—to the national high-profile protest drive to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $15, the so-called “Fight for 15.” They also provide all the funding for the thinktanks like Berkeley’s Labor Center, that provide studies supporting a higher minimum wage, again amounting to millions of dollars.
It’s utterly, *utterly* delusional for anti-immigration nuts or anyone else to claim that the unions “don’t really support” a much higher minimum wage.
Maybe the Cato Institute and George Soros and the Open Borders people don’t really support heavy immigration—they’re just pretending to do so, while secretly cheering on VDare.com…
That’s a great analogy because it’s pretty much as simple as just up and deciding to fix our leaky border..
…
eye roll
Maybe all the immigration nuts should ask themselves why the Republicans keep nominating pro-immigration presidential candidates and after mouthing a few platitudes, they easily still get 90% of the Republican/conservative vote.
This is a ridiculous thing to say in our phony two party system. Romney lied to get the nomination and as soon as he got it he stopped talking about self-deportation. After he lost started talking about amnesty which told every conservative who didn’t vote for him that they were right.
If you say so.
There are no “superior races.” Just ones well-adapted or maladapted to a given environment. Eurasians, for example (not “Hapas,” I mean the native inhabitants of the Eurasian continent), are generally well-adapted to complex, technologically advanced, internally peaceful civilizations, but are maladapted to malarial environments.
My children have no desire to claim religion of others falsely as they are happy with their Catholicism, and the “life ambition” of my eldest child is currently to serve honorably as an officer of the United States Armed Forces. Horatius at the bridge and all that.
I agree that sealing the border is not practical (and not humane), but there are many ways illegal immigration can be deterred. Citizens are asked for their SSNs for every kind of important transaction. Why are there exceptions for immigrants? Hiring an illegal is tax fraud. Why are there so few prosecutions?
However, looking at things from the perspective of group ethnic interest…
So what your saying is that Hispanics are “natural Republicans”?
This is a common meme/fallacy amongst conservatives. “Leftists would become conservative if only we weren’t so mean, so we only need to be more nice”.
This same meme applies to blacks. The idea is: Blacks see the damage democrats and the welfare state and the breakup of the family are doing to their community and would naturally want to vote for small government conservative republicans. However, because conservatives are racist and anti-black, they vote democrat and big government out of spite. If only republicans would try to show that they are not racist and like blacks, they would all start voting republican. If only Ron Paul would stop saying “colored” and stop complaining about welfare queens with eight kids kids, many blacks would be voting libertarian.
So immigrants are voting against their own economic interests out of spite because were racist?
The very fact you tell us that we need to pander to Hispanics and not offend them to get their votes is the number 1 reason to be against immigration and to not want there to be so many here.
Indeed, and as roo_ster pointed out above, racial and ethnic solidarity ultimately trump economic interest. Ron’s example of Cesar Chavez ends up proving the opposite of what he intended. Latino voters are going to insist on amnesty and more immigration simply because the immigrants are from the same ethnic group as they are. It’s not even about whether more immigration will hurt them economically.
However, I do agree with Ron to the extent that, at this point, the most promising broad political front against immigration still needs to be based on citizenism, which can potentially win the support of liberal whites, blacks and possibly some economically aware Latinos, rather than white nationalism, which alienates all those groups and only appeals to conservative whites. While I’m a “race realist”, I think e.g. VDare’s inclusion of commentary on racial strife between blacks and whites utterly distracts from their core message of immigration control, and gives opponents plenty of opportunity to tar all immigration opposition as racist.
Having said that, it doesn’t look like an immigration policy that actually works for the economic interests of citizens will be enacted, such as abolition of birthright citizenship and imposition of mandatory E-Verify for employers. So what I foresee is that ethnic bloc voting will eventually come to the white community despite themselves, and pro-immigrant white liberals and libertarians will gradually be marginalized.
Why can’t the border be sealed? Israel managed it. Though I agree in principle I’d rather not the seal the border and just make immigration an unattractive economic prospect through the kinds of regulations you suggest, I also think that, in the kind of free society I’d prefer the US to remain, leaky borders will encourage illegal immigration and a black market economy based on illegal labor regardless of whatever regulations we try to put in place.
Getting liberals against immigration would be quite an accomplishment, second only to getting them against abortion.
Anti-immigration iself is by definition racist.
SPLC
(Sweden)
New Law: Easier to prosecute those who insult immigrants or those in power
I don’t want to dissuade your son from his goal, but the military life is very tough and involves lots of hardship – time away from home, low pay, harsh discipline.
Fire fighting is a good alternative. It provides a way to serve the community and a very high-adrenaline field, but with a much better lifestyle. Lots of military vets go into FF after completing their service. FF offers good pay, prestige, fun, and action.
Of course he should make his own decision and do what makes him happy, but you might want to mention FF to him. It could be for him. Another alternative you could mention is policing, which offers good pay and a chance to serve (though without the public favorability of FF).
It’s good though that your son has these goals at his age.
Slightly off topic, but unions were also historically strong supporters of worker regulations and giving work to union over non-union workers. That acted as a huge barrier to entry for immigrant workers.
It’s no coincidence that immigration really began to surge when unions declined in the late 1970s. If there were powerful unions around, it’d be much harder to import foreign workers . Trucking and agriculture are two industries that had relatively few immigrant workers (in comparison to today) until the post-1970s union decline.
One of the most powerful anti-immigration labor leaders was Cesar Chavez, who patrolled the US-Mexico border. Decades before Chavez, it was union leaders (and socialists) who led the 1920s immigration cut off.
I think that unions, immigration restrictionists, and legal citizen Hispanic workers might be able to find some common ground. The $15 minimum wage seems like it’d boost unions, increase wages, and lower immigration.
In the long-term, immigration restrictionism will require strong organizing from unions and the American working class, many of whom are Hispanic or multi-racial. So it makes sense to tone down the racial stuff and aim our fire at oligarchs and kleptocrats, who drive down wages with cheap labor and outsourcing.
As for the Republican party, it’s strongly anti-union, anti-MW. It’s also very libertarian/laissez faire in its outlook and dominated by business interests. So it’s tough to see Republican leaders supporting any policies that cut down on immigration.
In these newest programming efforts, did you add some stuff from Google, Facebook or Twitter, or anything else the Chinese censors don’t like?
The last days the page loads worse than anything else except for the pages like Youtube which are blocked completely. Websites which use Google-APIs have often very long loading times, but sooner or later, they actually load (maybe only after some reload, though). The only thing I get from unz.com is “server not found”. When I use a VPN, it loads OK, so it most probably is not actually a server problem.
Just asking, since I understand that you won’t change much, just because of a few readers in China. But, anyway, how about adding encryption to the site? That would make it a little bit harder for the censors.
I’m surprised that the software changes would have had this effect, but I’ll do some testing and investigation in a day or two, once I’ve finished this round of development.
Yes to some of that, but 1) he’s eager to be away from home (for a while, anyway), 2) pay for officers is actually pretty good, and 3) he does well in high-discipline environments.
I don’t think firefighting or policing appeals to him because he wouldn’t get to put a hurt on bad guys.
I’ve given him a classical education and inculcated a strong sense of virtue and service to his country.
It’s also a long family tradition on both sides of his ancestry.
Mr. Unz,
Thank you for the latest developments of the site on mobile platforms. I think it’s much better on the latter now.
Ron
Hope you are enjoying a sunny day at your gated estate in No Cal. Do doubt your $15/hr mow and blow guys are at the dentist getting their gold crowns replaced thanks to your new dental plan.
Meanwhile among the hoi polloi their cousins have already lost their new drivers licences under the 3 DUI’s and your out policy. I still see them on the local roads. But the cops can’t deport them as we need them to blow your lawn.
In other bad news, the Unions are seeking an exemption to the new min. wage.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/05/27/los_angeles_15_minimum_wage_labor_unions_want_to_be_exempt_from_it.html
Seems like a great idea, only no one wants to pay $15 an hour for unskilled labor, particularly when there is a huge over supply.
Don’t worry, the Dow is going up.
FF seems to be popular with lots of young men who want to be an action hero, but want to stay in the US and have a good lifestyle (with good pay/benefits too). Policing is #2.
Of course if he enjoys the high discipline environment and wants to be away from home, military is not a bad choice either. Especially if he can get into West Point or a comparable institution. Vets have an advantage in applying to a FF dept. So when he’s done there, he could always transition to FF later on. I’ve known many who did that.
Enjoying what you do is important. Since very few people will ever be truly wealthy, much of your career “success” will depend on how much you enjoyed what you did and the bonds you created with the people around you. From that perspective, being an officer in the USM can be good way to go if that’s what your heart is set on.
Well, today’s article in the NYT seems to completely confirm all the points I was making:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/us/los-angeles-minimum-wage-increase-backed-by-federation-of-labor-group-that-now-seeks-exemption.html
(1) The LA unions were the overwhelming force behind passage of the $15 minimum wage, just as they have been everywhere else in the country on minimum wage issues.
(2) At the last moment, the unions tried to pull a fast one by seeking a special exemption for unionized business. Everybody seems to agree that the reason was to lure/pressure businesses to unionize.
(3) It was a very, *very* dumb trick to try, and the unions are going to get crushed on the issue. Not only will they suffer a major political defeat, but they’ll have squandered a good chunk of the goodwill they’d built up among local low-wage workers by spending so many months and dollars pushing for $15/hour. They end up looking just as greedy and selfish as the businesses they’re always denouncing.
(4) Angry rightwing activists are always denouncing the political incompetence of political conservatives, which is certainly true. But unions and liberals are often just as totally incompetence in their political strategy.
Well I guess if Minnesota or Vermont declared independence from the rest of the US, they would have an excellent chance of getting to Denmark, and the great American progressive dream would finally be realised (assuming they weren’t ruthlessly crushed by the imperial neo-cons in charge of the military).
However, I don’t think that’s how most American liberals envisage getting to the promised land.
I’m ethnocentric, but I’m quite happy to tone down my ethnocentrism in public to appeal to non-white immigration restrictionists if they are willing to listen. This is one of the reasons why I no longer support the British National Party, as they wasted a large amount of resources trying to stop non-whites from joining the party. The French FN isn’t that stupid, which is why it’s about the only populist/nationalist party that is getting anywhere.
A biggest problem is the non-whites who put their ethnic loyalty ahead of their economic interests. American blacks would be the most obvious example, immigration hurts them a lot, but organised black opposition to immigration is almost non-existent.
Sorry my last comment was supposed to be directed at Mr Unz.
As far as having a minimum wages goes, I’m cautiously in favour, especially in big cities with strong local economies.
In Australia and New Zealand, it generally seems to work quite well, and on balance, probably reduces the demand for low-skilled immigration. It also makes it easier for the government to crack down on employers employing people illegally.
In the agricultural sector though, employers often sneak around it by paying people piece rate and then setting the piece rate so low its very difficult to make minimum wage. In Australia and NZ this is a significant problem in the viticulture industry, which is currently struggling with over-production and low profits.
!(?)
My oldest boy is like I am. He doesn’t want to be “an action hero,” he wants to rain down bullets and bombs on the enemies of America overseas.
He comes from a long line of soldiers on both sides of his ancestry. On his father’s side, the family tradition of military service goes back a millennium in Asia. On his mother’s side, he has ancestors who were a Continental Army officer in the Revolutionary War, men who volunteered for the Civil War, all the way to a great grandfather who fought in Normandy, a grandfather who served in the skies over Vietnam, and uncles who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and a cousin who is currently deployed as an aviator.
It’s in his blood.
Yup. A service academy is definitely on the horizon.
My wife and I have been very blessed to be affluent, so we set up trust funds for our kids, in order that they can do what they really love without having to obsess about finances. But they are not getting all our money (when we are gone), because we follow a great advice we heard once – “give your kids enough money to do something, but not enough to do nothing.”
With Chuck Johnson banned from Twitter, maybe Ron can hire him and start a breaking news division at Unz?
It’d probably end in a giant flame-out, but would be very entertaining in the meantime.
You called it. Nice work.
Thanks for the response.
Since yesterday everything is working fine, actually the pages seem to be loading quicker than before. I didn’t change anything on my side, so I have no idea where the hiccups came from.
NEW FORMAT OF UNZ.COM IS TERRIBLE
PLEASE GO BACK TO THE OLD ONE.
Sir, the new format is really bad.
It just too cluttered and overwhelming.
The previous format was much better.
I am putting this comment here because I am not sure where else to put it.
Thanks.