Jeff Bezos’ Editorial Board at the Washington Post is complaining that there aren’t enough Americans who want to work low-end jobs, so the government needs to import more foreign replacements.
“Typically the [immigrants] do jobs — tending crops, washing dishes, mowing lawns — that native-born Americans do not want,” the Post claimed.
The Post’s authors are so out of touch they don’t realize that Americans have willingly done those jobs for more than 300 years, and that millions of Americans have gone on a virtual strike because low-end wages are already too low nationwide. That virtual strike is what President Barack Obama’s chief economics advisor describes here.
Instead of allowing Americans’ wages to rise amid a supposed shortage of workers, the editorial board just calls for a new supply of workers. “In basic economic terms, illegal immigrants meet the labor market’s demand for lower-wage employees, for which there is a shortage of available legal workers,” the Post claimed.
The politest term for these imported workers is “replacements.”
It was quite a popular term in newspapers when labor unions would wrestle with company executives on Cannery Row and in Detroit for a greater share of the industrial economy’s profits. Eventually, the workers did get more of those profits — and became much of America’s middle-class.
But that ‘replacements’ term has fallen out of favor among Democrats since the party was captured by post-American progressives in the early 2000s. Yesterday’s muckrakers have become today’s journalists and Editorial Boards who prefer to wring their hands about the human rights of malleable immigrant workers (and eventually, Democratic voters) rather than spread the economic wealth with their fellow Americans.
Today’s cheap immigrants work as the nannies, waiters, cooks, butchers, gardeners, apple pickers, dishwashers, maids and parking attendants who make life bearable for the the post-graduate urban and coastal professional class that dominates the Democratic Party.
Of course, the board’s hand-wringing about domestic help isn’t merely about cutting wages so they can pay the tuition fees at their children’s private schools. The public worrying also provides the Post’s editorial board with the opportunity to display their nobility in taking up the white progressives’ burden of helping the supposedly lesser peoples outside the nation’s borders.
It might be rude to notice that Bezos would personally gain from any infusion of new immigrant workers. He owns Amazon, where he’s already working to cut labor costs by buying robots to help ship packages. But he gains because extra immigrants will gradually increase Amazon’s sales, especially because immigrant households are heavily supported by taxpayer-funded welfare programs.
It is no wonder that the Post and its upper-class journalists have taken such a hard line against Donald Trump’s policies, which — according to one major Wall Street supporter of Hillary Clinton — would reduce unemployment, drive up wages and make housing cheaper for ordinary Americans.
The editorial’s demand for more cheap help follows a prior editorial where the Post’s writer airily claimed — wrongly — that Americans’ wages are rising.
“The rise of populists on the left and right [presumably Trump supporters] stems from wage stagnation and related trends … But what if that gloomy picture is obsolete, to the extent it was ever true?” said the editorial, which was introduced as “The Post’s View: Things are getting better for workers, despite populist candidates’ talk.”
In fact, wages are declining this year, leaving toughly seven million prime-age American men with few reasons to even seek a job. “The amount [of money] that employers would want to hire them for some reason has gone down. … That’s consistent with what we see in the states and in the aggregate,” Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors told a Brookings interviewer this month.
Bezos doesn’t force his editorial board to put their thumbprint on their editorials, so we don’t know which out-of-touch courtier is complaining he or she can’t get good cheap help past the unsympathetic border cops these days.
Here’s the list of soft-fingered delicates who write the editorials:
Editorials represent the views of The Washington Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the editorial board. The board includes: Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt; Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl; Associate Editorial Page Editor Jo-Ann Armao, who specializes in education and District affairs; Jonathan Capehart, who focuses on national politics; Lee Hockstader, who writes about political and other issues affecting Virginia and Maryland; Charles Lane, who concentrates on economic policy, trade and globalization; Stephen Stromberg, who specializes in energy, the environment, public health and other federal policy; and editorial cartoonist Tom Toles. Op-ed editor Michael Larabee also takes part in board discussions.
Here’s Donald Trump’s popular answer to the Washington Post’s plea for more cheap servants;
We are going to protect your jobs because your jobs are not being protected. Hillary Clinton wants to have a totally open border where people can just pour in and take your jobs and lots of other things happen. We are going to enforce our laws. Remove people who overstay their visas, dismantle the gangs and cartels and protect jobs and benefits for hard-working American citizens — and many of them are African-American, by the way, and many of them are Hispanic. We are going to protect your jobs. That includes protecting the jobs and wages of the Hispanic citizen, and living right here in Florida.
