Recently, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao announced her “Skills to Build America’s Future” initiative. This is a “nationwide outreach and education effort designed to attract young people and transitioning workers to the key occupations of the (near) future: skilled trades.” This initiative, understandably, was proclaimed with little fanfare.

While President George W. Bush looks toward Mars, Chao hardly can be proud of her decidedly pedestrian prophecy that “construction laborers, operating engineers, carpenters, ironworkers, cement masons, bricklayers, truck drivers and many other construction-related crafts are among the trades expected to see the greatest demand in workers over the next six years.” (This demand will be filled, I predict, by “guest workers” i.e., illegal aliens awarded shiny new government permits.)

Telling America’s young people that the best they can hope for is a career as a tradesman certainly casts a pall over an administration given to grandiose planning and posturing. Essentially, the mathematically precocious youngsters with aptitudes for science, engineering or accounting must be yanked down to earth. Reaching for the stars in the America of the future will be the exclusive province of American Idol participants. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Employment Situation Summary, Chao’s future is now.

For all the din sounded over the addition of 308,000 jobs to the economy in March, the government-fed news filters failed to mention which job sectors were surging. Sure enough, it transpires that employment opportunities are optimal in construction, retail trade, food services, social assistance and (naturally) government. As economist Paul Craig Roberts ,a rare independent thinker on the issue, observes: “Only labor involved in non-traded goods and services is safe from foreign substitution.” In other words, young Americans had better learn to live by their hands lest their livelihoods be “outsourced.”

If President Bush intends to revive the U.S. space program, engineers will be at a premium. Yet the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers USA (IEEE-USA) the world’s largest technical professional society representing more than 225,000 electrical, electronics, computer and software engineers reports that “American high-tech firms shredded 560,000 jobs between 2001 and 2003, and expect to lose another 234,000 in 2004.” This contraction cannot be dismissed as the nadir of the dot-com correction. The jobless rate for electrical and electronics engineers was, in fact, lower in 2002 (4.2 percent) than in 2003 (6.2 percent).

Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association’s Taulbee’s Survey found that total enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in computer science and computer engineering fell 19 percent in 2003, a factor it attributes to “the decline in the technology industry and the moving of jobs offshore.” (Curiously omitted are the impacts of the H-1B and L-1 work visas.) College administrators are already hip to Chao’s future. For example, San Francisco State University is considering the closure of its engineering school. Indeed, today’s college graduates cannot even expect to find entry-level jobs in the high-tech industry, warns entrepreneur Rosen Sharma. Sharma heads a Silicon Valley start-up that “could not survive without outsourcing.” Nevertheless, he fears for America’s future. “As a father, my reaction is different than my reaction as a CEO,” he admitted to Time.

Pay no attention to such Chicken Littles, the high-tech-industry lobbyists counter. Outsourcing is good for America, they claim. Their studies employ the “impregnable” science of econometrics to prove that outsourcing high-tech jobs creates more jobs than it kills. One such study, commissioned by the Information Technology Association of America, predicts 317,387 such jobs will materialize by 2008. The study’s premise, however, begs the question, as it assumes the new jobs are and will be as good as the old (vanished) ones.

Why, they’ll be even better, brags economist and outsourcing enthusiast Catherine Mann. She also labors under the illusion that only bottom-rung jobs are vanishing, playing Pollyanna to a doubting Thomas, Ron Hira of IEEE-USA. Hira confessed to Washington Post readers that he, an industry insider, has no idea what shape the “new” putative high-value jobs will take. “Is it nanotech, biotech, bioinformatics?” Of one thing he is certain, however: “Other developing and developed countries are targeting those very same industries and jobs.”

Thankfully, author Virginia Postrel has located America’s burgeoning (and indubitably “dynamist”) occupations. She faults the Bureau of Labor Statistics for not recognizing the rise of spa-related personal services e.g., manicure and massage therapy for the powerhouse growth industries they are. Of course, if Postrel is to remain faithful to the central thesis of her first book that all change is always good she is obligated to remain, like Mann, a Pollyanna, despite the new employment reality.

©ILANA MERCER
Insight On the News
May 11, 2004

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There has been some fuss about the qualifications of Eduardo Aguirre, President Bush’s newly appointed head of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Much of the fuss, however, misses the mark. Mr. Bush hasn’t appointed an unqualified man as much as he has, characteristically, used this appointment to make political hay.

Other than being part of the administration’s ongoing public relations battle for the Latino vote, Bush’s choice of a Latino immigration success story as his immigration pointman is intended to shamelessly signal that speaking authoritatively about immigration is the prerogative of an immigrant of ethnic descent. To make immigration-related decisions for the nation, you should, at the very least, be a minority.

A minority is certainly what my family was at the American Immigration and Naturalization Service headquarters in Montreal, as we waited to complete the final leg of the immigration odyssey. It was hard not to notice—and the PC Patrol will hit the roof because I did—but we were, as far as I could see, the only family of European descent in that room. We were immigrating to the United States of America, but the room was a linguistic tower of babble minus the English language.

The lopsided ethnic mix at the INS processing point was no coincidence; it is a consequence of American immigration policy starting in 1965. Had we been legal immigrants during the 1950s, we would have formed part of an inflow of new arrivals of which over two-thirds would have hailed from Europe or Canada. Similarly, during the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920, immigration policy guaranteed that newcomers reinforced the ethnic composition of native Americans; they were from the traditional northern and western European sources.

This policy persisted until 1965, when the Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act took effect, repealing the national-origin criterion and replacing it with a worldwide egalitarian quota that invited each country to contribute equally to the influx. The policy triggered an unparalleled, unselective, relentless human tsunami.

It was then that immigration policy also became predicated on family reunification rather than on skills relevant to the American economy. Unless American companies are recruiting wizened elderly people and small children who speak in foreign tongues, most of the immigrants assembled with us were the extended family of citizens. My spouse’s “outstanding researcher” designation was very clearly not the rule in our intake.

Coupled with the allure of a generous welfare system, this change accounts for the generally poor quality of immigrants since 1965, and their unsustainable never-ending numbers—one qualified individual is a ticket for an entire tribe.

The 1965 Act radically transformed the U.S.’s original ethnic mix. Since its implementation, immigration to the U.S. has indeed been predominantly from the Third World. As Patrick J. Buchanan notes in Death of the West, this is the largest population transfer in history, with mass immigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America destined to displace the American historical majority. Bill Clinton’s glee gives an indication of what’s ahead. Thanks to state-orchestrated immigration policy, he told a cheering high-school audience, “In little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States.”

Implied in Clinton’s jubilation, and in that of “the permanent government of bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats, assorted policy wonks and intellectuals,” to use Peter Brimelow’s taxonomy of the toxic classes, is the following: 1) The American European historical majority was a bad thing; it needed to be cut back through state intervention and centralized oversight. 2) Immigration to the U.S is a universal right.

The soon-to-be-dispossessed historical majority never got to debate these empty assumptions.

Shoring up the immigration tyranny is yet another myth crushed with courage and candor by Brimelow in his Alien Nation. As the fable goes, America is a multicultural nation of immigrants, and nobody whose ancestors arrived as immigrants can possibly oppose mass immigration without falling into self-contradiction. Against this, consider the foolishness of supporting for purely nostalgic reasons a policy that was turned toxic.

Furthermore, the nation was never founded as a multicultural nation, at least not in the manner in which the term is enforced nowadays. The U.S. was biracial: Roughly 19.3 percent were black, but the people who established the political order, described by Thomas Jefferson as “a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, …derived from natural right and natural reason,” were white, overwhelmingly British Christians.

While illegal immigration is logistically vexing, it should pose no problem of principle. Every sane individual agrees that the roughly 12 million illegals have no right to be here, and that repelling invaders who may endanger the lives and property of nationals is an uncontested function of government. It’s as obvious as the Pope is Catholic to all except loony liberals, willfully misinformed utilitarians at the Wall Street Journal, and utopian libertarians, who get hopelessly lost somewhere between what is and what ought to be.

By focusing exclusively on the illegal immigration no-brainer, however, most media scribes and immigration watchdogs are providing a useful diversion from the crux of the immigration problem. And playing into the hands of an administration that wants us to forget that legal immigration is the real catastrophe.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com (Was discussed on “AMERICAN BREAKFAST“)
March 5, 2003

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