I’ve written before how I don’t care for Pat Buchanan. I think he deliberately caters to the worst in his readers, and he often throws bombs just to stir up the whackoes.
That being said, his piece this week where he calls for the impeachment of President Bush hits a LOT of themes I’ve been pushing here for months, and a bill of impeachment just might wake Dubya out of whatever stupor he’s in about illegal aliens and get some real action.
There’s an old saying that “a broken clock is right twice a day.” In these days of digital clocks, I think we might be down to once, and I think Pat Buchanan finally hit midnight.
Hmm, brain not working tonight. Scratch “the big lie” above, I meant “social proof”.
Hmmmm.
As a computer programer with something like 30 years experience, who really cares anyways, I don’t have much to worry about in terms of employment.
BUT.
Anybody who thinks a “guest worker” program is a good idea needs to look at Germany. There are hundreds of thousands of “guest workers” in that country that have lived there their entire lives. They speak German. They went to German schools. They eat German food. They are, in all respects, German except that they are not German citizens.
Considering that we fought a Civil War and a Civil Rights war to end second class status for people, is actually creating a new second class a really good idea? And what about their families? To make the “guest worker” program stick we’d have to change how the Constitution is interpreted with regards to citizenship being apportioned to children being born in this country. We’d have to include some form of a citizenship test in order to make that work. Can you say extraordinary levels of Identity Theft?
And then there’s the negative impact on working Americans. When I was a kid, and even just as short a time as 12 years ago, young kids made money by cutting grass. But now all the landscaping jobs are done by Mexicans who work for the bottom dollar. Right now the landscapers and construction bosses take a chance in employing these illegal aliens.
What happens if it’s legal and anyone can do it?
The basis of a modern payroll is the law of supply and demand. During the Internet Bubble you couldn’t hire anybody except some schmuck who read a “Visual Basic for Dummies” book for anything less than stellar salaries and perks. Now the situation has changed for a lot of people not just because many jobs were lost or offshored but because a larger pool of available labor was made available to employers. But at least with offshoring employers had to deal with many of the negatives of foreign governments, legal systems, languages and cultures.
In short opening up America to a “guest worker” system would immediately drive any and all non-skilled jobs to at MOST, minimum wage. And many semi-skilled or skilled jobs would reach that point quickly depending on how long it took to train up the replacements. Either that or a massive amount of pay cuts would have to be taken in order to compete with a massive incoming labor force that would willingly accept a bare fraction of the current living wage.
Such a system would shatter today’s labor market and make any sort of prediction or planning worthless.
Goodbye capitalism, hello serfdom.
Hmmmm.
Lol. Actually we already do have a “guest worker” program in place and it just about absolutely destroyed the domestic computer professional job market. The H1B work visa.
As salaries were being driven up by demand, and thus inducing more people to take CS degrees in school, big tech firms got Congress to allow a lot more H1B visas than were traditionally given. In fact, since a H1B visa is good for a few years, nobody really knows how many active H1B visa holders there are in America today.
So what happened? The bottom dropped out for a few years prior to the Internet Bubble, rose a lot during the Bubble and then dropped *below* the original numbers prior to the Bubble. Again the law of supply and demand. There was a demand for tech workers and the companies got around the quasi-law to bring in a larger workforce that would work for less in order to dilute the pool of available tech workers.
About 1995 I worked with an Indian guy named Rajiv. He was an Oracle DBA specialists with many good skills. When I asked him how much he was paid I was astonished to learn he got $800 net a month. Particularly since many American Oracle DBAs with similar background, experience and skills were making about $8k-$10k gross per month as independent contractors.
To shorten this story what ended up happening was that these same tech workers then rotated back home to India, while new ones from India took their place. The ones that went back trained up more tech workers and started outsourcing companies. In less than a decade they’ve pretty much demolished the computer industry here in America. Most salaries I see are below numbers from the mid-1990s, which is amazing considering inflation and all. I haven’t seen a entry-level computer programming job offered in a couple years and would frankly be surprised to see one now.
Instead all the veteran computer programmers are getting older and any replacements that might be needed will have to be filled from India since there’s no pool of young programmers out there.
And in an age of the Internet and a global economy, what makes you think it couldn’t happen to your job? And if you’re saying it’s because you have to be on location:
“Guest worker” right?
Those who say impeachment is too harsh just have to look back a few years and see what we impeached Bill Clinton for. He had 8 years of bombs thrown at him with minimal cooperation.
Do you remember what gas cost then?
Did we have a war in Iraq fighting the wrong country?
Remember when the country was prosperous and not going down the tubes. That is when they decided to impeach a president.
This president is so far over the top for impeachment, it might be too late for him. Just elect better Presidents and throw out congressmen who don’t have the courage to do what’s right. Whether you are liberal or conservative we can’t afford the Republican experiment another four years. It doesn’t work.
There are lots of reasons to impeach Bush:
1) downing street memo
2) fixing the florida election
3) New Orleans
4) refusal to do his duty to enforce immigration law.
The thing is: it is sheer hypocrisy to say immigration is an important issue and then forgive a the crimes of a president hell bent on expanding immigration.