I help write the planks of the local republican committee... I know. It’s is a joke.
I don’t have time to be a Cindy Sheehan activist. I have to scramble to pay the commercial leases I am responsible for and the payroll I have to meet, and the vendors I have to pay. The taxes I have to pay. The taxes I have to collect for the damn village, then report and pay in. I have to evaluate, hire, fire and manage my business or it will bury me.
Because I am productive everybody has their hands in my pocket. Everybody. We have a political system, a constitution to protect me while I feed all these families. But nobody looks out for the small business class. Not even the chamber of commerce. They get caught up in the regulations and licensing. Accepting the status quo, etc.
Yes, the country is done. It may fumble along for another 1000 years like the Byzantine Empire. But the light of Liberty died a long time ago.
We have been working with various state legislators to get E-Verify bills passed. We have had some success--the state government and its contractors must use E-verify--but we want to make it mandatory. I have testified before various committees on legislation. We have had a number of small businesses testifying with us to get mandatory E-verify. The stories of how these people lose their businesses because they cannot compete with illegal labor used by their competitors are heartbreaking. The Chamber of Commerce is helping destroy this country. They support expanded guest worker programs and amnesty.
A few years ago, I had a new roof put on my house. The firm that did it has been in business since 1947. The crew that came out to my house were all from the same village in Mexico. Only one could speak passable English. In talking with them using some rusty Spanish, I learned that most of them had never done any roofing before coming here. When I spoke to the American supervisor about why he was using all Mexican labor, he said that was the only way they could stay in business and compete with other firms doing the same thing. It just cost too much money to hire Americans.
We have over 300,000 illegal aliens here in VA--the tenth largest in the nation. Foreign workers are everywhere--on road crews, construction sites, etc. I had a black, master brick layer and former Army veteran tell me that he was getting the same wages he received in the 1980s because of the competition of illegal aliens. If workers were in such short supplly in such trades, wages would be going up, not down or stagnant
The latest data show 22.1 million immigrants holding jobs in the U.S. with an estimated 8 million being illegal aliens. By increasing the supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4 percent. Among natives without a high school education, who roughly correspond to the poorest tenth of the workforce, the estimated impact was even larger, reducing their wages by 7.4 percent. The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status.
Yes, the country is done. It may fumble along for another 1000 years like the Byzantine Empire. But the light of Liberty died a long time ago.
We are being colonized by the Third World. The U.S. adds one international migrant (net) every 36 seconds. Immigrants account for one in 8 U.S. residents, the highest level in more than 80 years. In 1970 it was one in 21; in 1980 it was one in 16; and in 1990 it was one in 13. In a decade, it will be one in 7, the highest level in our history. And by 2050, one in 5 residents of the U.S. will be foreign-born. Your estimate of 1,000 years is much too generous. We will be gone long before that.