And I definitely agree about doctors. The AMA is a price-fixing cartel whose time has come and gone.

the American working class gets paid third world wages and pays first world prices (plus some) for health and professional services. And the doctors and lawyers get to pat themselves on the back for being enlightened and liberal enough to hire an undocumented nanny or pool cleaner for $2 an hour.

A substantial influx of Indian and Chinese doctors would do America a world of good.

I intellectually knew that before; moving to India has driven that home.

If so, have you done a thread about it? I would love to ask you questions but not in this thread.

You think that we should import more professional types to drive down wages as a "lesson" to professional when people who did not speak up enough when you feel immigrants took positions from blue collar americans?

This is seriously what you advocate?

at the very least it would lead to a more honest debate on migration, rather than a bunch of sanctimonious middle class pricks holding themselves out as being more civilised than everyone else.

The doctors especially. Probably the quickest way to single payer would be to import a large number of expatriate doctors.

They churn out doctors at a brisk pace--they'll probably need a bit more training when they get here to qualify, but it'll be a relatively short road I should imagine.

Fine with me, I can get by in Spanish with no trouble~!

should be pleased that Cuban doctors might bring down the price of an appendectomy.

Maybe the upper tiers of workers should see that labor immigration is a bad thing.

that is just ludicrous. How about supporting unions. Look on DU on a daily basis and you will see anti union rhetoric

worker family members) lived through immigrants (legal/documented and illegal/undocumented) flooding the worksites and driving down wages. Even the companies that wanted to keep on well paid, legal labor were forced to bend or fold when they could no longer compete with the new immigrant labor.

When discussing this here on DU all I ever got was grief. 'Jobs American's will not do' is what I mostly hear. Who, pray tell, did those jobs before the immigrants? Well I know the answer as my father, uncles, and several of my cousins were in construction 20 years ago. None are now. And not by choice.

So, when those same people that said that my father and uncles, who had been working over 15 years in construction, were 'non-people' because 'americans will no longer do that work', now find it is their cushy middle class wages/jobs that are now being undercut by immigrants, I do not weep for them.

Maybe you should have listened to what those 'uneducated rednecks' were trying to tell you 20 years ago.

That's stupid

when I hear that unchecked immigration and the effect it had on working class American workers starts being addressed and not dismissed.

Until then, not so much caring going on here about the plight of my so called 'progressive' allies when their cushy jobs go the way of my 'redneck' families jobs ......

anything else constructive. Let's just sit around and hope it happens to everyone else and blame it on being a redneck.


I grew up in a coal mining town. I grew up with my dad striking at the coal mines. I know what a labor movement looks like. I know what it is like to eat deer meat because your dad is not being paid because he is on strike. Your attitude kind of appalls me as a democrat and as a person. The old timers, they get off their asses and did something about it. They did not sit around and just hope it happened to everyone else.

I hope you do something positive with your emotions instead of wishing ill on everyone else. Someone has to make a difference. It could be you.

At the moment, the working class have third-world wages and pay twice as much for healthcare as everyone else. At least importing doctors will solve the second part of the equation.

Too bad you did not know my father or grandfather, both miners. You roll over like a beaten dog and snarl at your plight. You die on your knees. Not my style. Not my history.

Don't worry about it so much. He'll learn to drive a Camry just fine.

Do you belong to a union? Do you shop at union grocery stores? Do you support your teacher union? Your plumber union? What do you do to help yourself or are you waiting for someone to do it for you?

economy more 'global?'

This might be an interesting thread....

The entire middle class? All American doctors?
Hmmmm.....I consider myself middle class, had great jobs in IT, and when I said anything about all of our jobs going to India and Indians, I was told I was racist.

How odd to see someone actively hope for Americans losing jobs. Axe to grind there?

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I hope this doesn't become a working class vs middle class thing. Because I'm also middle class & care about all classes but the 1%.

And besides, we already have plenty of Indian MDs in America.

I don't get this OP.

I cannot believe this person is posting this on DU. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

And, yeah, I was a racist because I resented all the IT jobs lost. I trained and worked with visa holders who honestly should never have been in IT. Worked with "counterparts" overseas who literally took my test scripts and turned them in as their own. My manager (Indian, actually, great manager) trained us on understanding DSL, what it was, how to test the programs that managed the switches. Two of the H-1Bs never did understand, after three attempts to teach them, and it really really is not rocket science. I could explain it to my grandson. Of course, that doesn't mean everyone is like that, but the foul meme that the H-1Bs are smarter really reeks. The people I worked with did not help the economy much, either. Lived 3 or 4 or 5 to an apartment kept by the staffing firm, drove one car, brought their lunches, sent most money home. Nothing wrong with being thrifty, of course, but there is that other meme that H-1Bs put the money earned back into our economy. Not if they could help it.

Deliberately putting Americans out of work is stupid. Bad enough the TPP will do that. And who will buy the cheaper goods?
The TPP has pretty much nothing to do with workers and everything to do with the Investor State profits.

Poor farmers who left Italy to work in the mines because Rockerfeller told them "the streets were paved with gold".

This country has made a decision long ago. We only value investment, not labor. There was a time when the unions organized and that attitude changed, but Reagan killed the movement and the corporate owned media spread the lies. Labor has no value in American society. Only investment, only venture, only dividends...these things are the held up as the ideal goal of the ruling oligarchs.

It is NOT immigration that kills wages, it has become public policy to lower wages for every job to the bare minimum. Trickle down economics and the race to the bottom is the new American Creed. Workers, all workers, are losing and losing badly. We are becoming Mexico. We have our own Hacienda owners now but no Pancho Villa to fight against them. We have our own oligarchy. Democrats and Republicans are corporatists.

I am a scientist for the feds. We were told everyone had to "sacrifice" during the economic slowdown. It makes no difference that I am paid 30% less than my private counterparts Obama used the crisis to lower my wages. Republicans will do it even more.

What a coincidence.

being told that we Americans were just not as good was galling. And, again, I would have felt the same way if all the H-1Bs had come from England or Germany or whatever.
I had already worked here and in Japan with Japanese IT people - same thing, some were great, some were not. Just like Americans.
Same with Dutch and English folks I worked with.

As for the minimum wage workers. I remember working in a factory where 13 people had the same social security number and no way did the company not know,they did not get raided until they forgot to pay someone off. NO one really cared much then because unemployment was plenty. Truth is it was detail work for minimum wage, most people did not want to work so hard for that little money, it was hard for them to find people. it was not like now when people would fight to get it.

But the IT jobs, I watched it happen from the 80's where they brought them in from England and Ireland, through to the latest Indian workers, who work for far less than any other country did before. England was like 3/4 US pay, but Indians are closer to 1/6 of the pay. and the best thing yet, our government gives tax deductions to some companies when they bring them over. it is a widely known that this is being done by advertising for ridiculous requirements that the H1B visas can't meet either but they can claim then can't get anyone from the US to do. I remember seeing one job where hte requirements were to know several data bases including one old obscure one - so I applied for the job, they tried all kinds of way to trip me up, but I knew this crap just by pure luck and they had to hire me. Then watched me closely to see if they could fire me, ha ha. But instead they had to let the1r H1Bs go because not only did they not know it,. but they could not even pretend o know it and screwed up their system badly, took me a long time to bring it back. But that was the exception not the rule, as long as the government pays them , they will keep doing it.

And NO, it is not bigotry. I do not hate people for coming to this country, but I do condemn people who bring others to lower the pay grades! and you don't?

Or, perhaps they think absolutely everyone should make the same wage, regardless of their investment in education, or the responsibility of their job.

I think the o.p. must have no personal experience of the situation, and is making a naive prescription.

As for IT jobs going to people from India instead of American workers, there's a host of reasons that's problematic, but among others it definitely drives wages down. If someone believes compensation should be flat across the board, globally, then that's not a problem for them.

and see wages fall if they had gone to England or Germany or France. That's a ridiculous stance.

(Not in Chemistry.) I had two serious plagiarism cases last fall -- one from an Asian student, who just didn't belong in a writing-intensive course in English, and one from a guy from the suburbs. It is the student from the suburbs who is taking me to my boss on it.

From experience, Asian students are pretty much like other students, except they don't have access to the files of back exams that the nice suburban kids have in the frat houses.

Language competence can be a problem -- and the test scores for English as a second language are untrustworthy, for whatever reason -- but even at that I get some of my worst writing from students who speak no other language than English. And some of the best -- from both groups.

One of the things I loved about teaching math was how (past a certain level) the equations were a universal language that we could both talk in. Obviously language teachers don't get that bonus.

I have to instruct my non-English-speaking students to write words as well as numbers and equations! (For my field, math is a tool, and sometimes a controversial one.) This does seem to come more from some cultures than others, I must admit.

I was mostly just musing on your point about how the quality of writing depended little on the mastery of the language. The other half of my thought was that some of the kids who were best at the equations never really grasped what they meant. That's one thing I like about the concept of a "number sentence". You are in fact predicating. And you should think of that.

I'm in the B-school, actually. One of my fond memories of honors calc, freshman year -- 55 years ago! -- is the prof pointing out that "an equation is a sentence."

I participate, more or less voluntarily (better me than some of my colleagues!) in a writing-across-the-curriculum program, so two of my courses are "officially" writing-intensive. But there is also important math content, and we do have math and eng students -- of all sorts! -- taking our courses as "guts." They can get good grades in the intro courses without actually learning the basics, and when they turn up in an advanced, writing-intensive course -- well, they don't stay very long. Getting the math right, and showing understanding by explaining it in ordinary language, are the challenges -- and the good students who meet those challenges come from all our student communities.

was in today. His big complaint was the money an F would cost him.

For what that is worth.

My boss backed me up, but I still have to fill out a world of paperwork.

The sense of entitlement that comes with money is probably even more important, in my world.

(and I never actually was initiated, little problem with sabbath keeping and Friday night parties) ...

But I'm not sure that "the nice suburban kids have in the frat houses" is really a good way of looking at it. A lot of the kids in the frats weren't suburban. And a lot of the kids weren't what you'd call wealthy. (My sponsor was the first member of his Polish-American family to go to college, now CEO of a tech consulting firm. The frats didn't select for geography very well. There was a bit of self-selection, so if we want to say "urban = minority" then, well, okay, as long as the non-white frats and the sororities aren't overlooked. They have test banks, too).

The frats also had review sessions in the fall and spring for frosh. Any frosh. Announced publicly before midterms week and finals week. And broken down not by subject but by subject and professor. During this time they went through old midterms and finals given by a given prof in previous years.

" Asian students are pretty much like other students, except they don't have access to the files of back exams that the nice suburban kids have in the frat houses. "

It wasn't a frat thing but when I was working on my doctorate in Political Science a fellow grad student had a copy of a back exam for the finals in a stat course. He did really well and blew up the curve.

The example in the OP made me think. A professor of mine left the room during an exam. Did he think nobody would cheat or was he cynically thinking that allowing people to cheat was the only way they could pass his test?

field where there are a lot of Filipino nurses waiting and waiting for their H1 visas. For years there was such a shortage of nurses in the U.S. that they seldom had to wait very long. I mean at least someone waiting and applying for an H1B visa are going through channels and attempting to do it legally. There are many other reason besides H1B visas why some fields start to get over populated. The proliferation in the 90's of for profit vocational schools is a bigger factor than the visa issue, I am sure. The tendency of even public colleges an universities in the U.S. to turn themselves into vocational schools is another factor.

After all we are an immigrant nation - if some of our more recent immigrants come to the U.S. mainland by swimming across the Rio Grande and others do it by completing an education program and then applying for an H1B visa - I can't say that the latter should be scorned for it. That would not be fair.

As far as the physician shortage is concerned - that is being compensated with P.A. programs opening everywhere. The hospitals and clinics save a lot of money by not having to pay a doctor's salary while still receiving 75% reimbursement. It still leaves American physicians in their positions of power and keeps the doctor shortage well in tact.

He said, we wait for someone to die, then we replace him with someone as closely related to him as possible.

Think of how many neurosurgeons are the sons of neurosurgeons themselves. Its true.

It was created to get better paid workers to stop identifying with low paid workers and identify with the wealthy instead. Middle class is working class. Hoping to see other workers wages driven down is stupid.

It's sickening that I witness this behavior among some of my peers at work. It's OK for them to make as much $ as possible, but everyone else is overpaid to them. They really like to kick down anyone making lass than themselves.

Stupid semantical bullshit.

Actually it still means what it used to mean sometimes but has been so overused that it often means nothing (except the person calling 'racism' is done with the discussion).

Everybody cheered the President's immigration reform then, a couple of week's later, THAT thread happened. I f you replaced "IT workers" with "field hands" and "healthcare" with "day labor" practically every post in that thread would have been hidden.

Isn't most of the anti-immigrant animus directed at "illegal immigrants" middle class? I thought most of the "solidarity" was with working-class unions and like?

Suddenly it's the working class that's providing the motivation for the (R) to be so anti-immigrant?

(We'll leave out the petty revenge and bitterness of "I hope they ramp the hell out of the H1B visa program". There's already a huge phalanx of judges on DU, sitting in judgment of other DUers and even with their axes at hand or their hands on the guillotine cord.)

Last edited Sun Jan 4, 2015, 04:54 PM - Edit history (1)

society's tiers. Remember it was white people who coined the term white trash to define the poorer and less educated among them. So I'm not surprised this phenomena has seeped into academia. In my day it was directed to female students who weren't thought to be as bright and capable as the males. I was the only girl in my advanced algebra class back in 1958 and the professor always made references to how he didn't understand why I would want to be there unless it was to find a future husband.

called the white servants that. I suppose the black slaves also coined the term "trailer trash" too.

Last edited Sun Jan 4, 2015, 09:31 PM - Edit history (1)

Or is it being English?

ETA - apparently the earliest reference is from a novel by Margaret Bayard Smith in 1824, although it is fictional. It comes from a white female character who spurns white society and marries a mixed race man.

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=JeASAAAAIAAJ&q=white+trash#v=snippet&q=white%20trash&f=false

in the forties, it was explained to me that it was a derogatory term used by white elitists to compare poor whites to poor blacks. But it didn't originate among the black slaves as far as I know. Maybe some African Americans need to weigh in on this as to what their understanding of the term is.

As to your implied accusation that I might be anti-English or anti-women, I was only remarking that the person quoted was telling an anecdote according to you so I don't put much faith in it.

Working class are the new white trash... until college graduates belatedly realize that they're working class too.

With few exceptions, immigration is bad for workers. It doesn't matter if it's construction workers or programmers, and it doesn't matter what their country of origin is.

seen the IT jobs go en masse to the English, the Germans, the Dutch - but, because the vast majority of visas go to people from India, I must therefore be racist.
I think some people do love using that word, as someone here noted, in order to avoid discussion.

nt

especially when proctured by some incompetent German.

In fact that would probably be portrayed as us deservedly losing for not working hard enough and we'd be challenged to beat the Dutch.

We have many, many foreign born doctors and many foreign born nurses, as well as other medical personnel.

And I think you are wrong about the middle class. Democratic leaders have sought increased immigration for future votes, and Republican leaders have sought cheap labor, but I think most members of the middle class have cared when any jobs were lost or anyone's wages were driven downward. You wouldn't know it listening to the talking heads on tv, though.

Immigrants driving down wages is good for the bosses, bad for the workers. Doesn't matter what color they are. Doesn't matter what color their collar is, either.

Over most of the 20th century and earlier, republicans restricted immigration and Democrats expanded it. There is a reason why "liberal" immigration laws are called that.

Broad brushing Indian and Chinese people as dishonest or incompetent due to their nationality.

I tutor the child of a Chinse immigrant -- a woman who is a practicing engineer and a part time physics professor. Really, really bright, and would be on any continent.

She has literally no idea how to help her son with his homework, especially (and ironically) his science project, because she "only knows the Chinese way" and "doesn't understand how American children think." Even her own children's thought processes seem foreign to her, because they were born and raised here.

I know that it also very true that Asian schools focus more on rote memorization than problem solving. I know this because I was in charge of a delegation of Chinese educators who came to our district for a week to observe American schools and how they differ from their own; they consider our schools, for the most part, to be far superior, because they focus so much more on creative thinking.

Where did you find an American doctor, lol? My GP is Chinese, my GI guy is Kenyan, and my arthritis dude is Romanian. Even my dentist is Vietnamese!

As long as I don't suffer competition from foreign people willing to work for less, I don't care about this race to the bottom, because those jobs are beneath me anyway.

(sarcasm)

but really thought it pointless to address the massive hypocrisy that goes on around here and among the left in general.

The rich have ALWAYS been the ones behind the so called "free movement of labor". Then they brainwash the gullible to carry their water and call people "racist" and "bigots" (quoting Lindsey Graham speaking to La Raza) when they objected to the ECONOMIC ramifications of importing Mexico's poor and uneducated, which works out great for the Mexican oligarchy, btw. Educated liberals with secure jobs were completely on board with the open borders policies of George Bush because they benefited from the cheap labor but in the case of H1B visas, oh no! Not MY job. So, its okay when the cheap labor provides people with nannies, landscapers, construction workers and the like because this allows people to live like they're rich, too, but when it comes to being replaced by white collar Indians, well, that's another matter. Suddenly people see what the race to the bottom is all about. Should we say that the Indian IT workers, engineers and doctors are doing "jobs Americans don't want to do"? That was always the mantra used against anyone opposing mass immigration when it came to semi and unskilled immigrants coming from Mexico. The real truth was that Americans didn't want to do certain jobs for the low wages that illegal immigrants would. It's a sickening tale of self serving exploitation with the race card and divide and conquer tactics used to carry it out.

Anyway, this ship has sailed so progressives who have supported the Chamber of Commerce agenda will be getting what they asked for.

Interesting article on where this is all going (and it's going) in the Economist (an oligarch mouthpiece if there ever was one):



Workers on Tap

You, too, will be able to leave home and scrounge for a living somewhere far away.

"Its proven that migrants don't impact negatively on wages". It is exactly that kind of hand-on-heart sanctimonious bullshit that has driven working class people from the Democratic Party.

and those working class can't exactly turn to the Republican party for relief, either. Some may have gone teabagger for those reasons but I really don't know. I only know that the 1% controls both parties and they are both responsible for off shoring jobs, destroying our manufacturing base, killing jobs and wages (and BENEFITS!) and globalization. I have a long memory and I don't remember any huge outcry over shit like NAFTA (from our side). In fact, I distinctly remember Al Gore shilling for it and Ross Perot talking about the "giant sucking sound". At that time one of the selling tactics of the left globalists was telling us that Americans had it too good, for too long, and it was our responsibility to raise up the third world by, uh, I don't know, destroying ourselves? I can't remember what the answer was, just he guilt trip/sales pitch and a lot of people bought into it. A lot of knew what was coming - that we would be turned into a plantation once wages were driven down and that's exactly what's happening. When we spoke up we were shouted down.

How anyone could not be aware that it's THE most elite, wealthy and powerful who drive this shit is mind boggling to me. Globalization and trade agreements are patterned on the British empire model of running the world - mass colonization and enslaving people through poverty. When that's achieved, the slaves start fighting amongst themselves to hold on to whatever they have left or to get the other slave's crumbs.

That was the only real increase they saw in the past 4 decades, and that was exactly right after we had changed the rules about capital and labor mobility.

The American textile industry and other light manufacturing were absolutely devastated. I'm not even sure if there are any running textile mills left in the US other than some "heirloom"-type handcraft shops. But during the period when the mills disappeared, US unemployment went down, meaning that on the whole, the textile workers (and people who hadn't been working) were finding new jobs. And more importantly, the median wage went up, meaning that again on the whole they were finding better paying jobs. Some of this may have been the increase in heavy manufacturing that we saw (we were making the factories that Mexico used to make the shirts we had previously been making). Some of this was the explosion of the IT industry. Some of it was the fact that the cheaper shirts people could buy meant they could spend more money on other things, which stimulated the economy as a whole. Compare this to the collapse of the steel industry a decade earlier, which was also caused by foreign competition but didn't have associated trade and immigration agreements that gave us anything in return -- those jobs stayed gone.

As you yourself say, there was very little of a textile industry left in the United States (I believe that there are still some operators in specialist workwear, military and law enforcement), so for the most part it simply wasn't relevant to whether employment went up or down, manufacturing had already been pretty much shattered.

The increase in employment and incomes came about because of productivity growth to a limited extent (most businesses acquired their first taste of computers during that time) but predominantly it was credit fueled. People's home values were going up, money was easy to come by, what's not to like?

incomes trend the same way. People treat their houses as ATMs, they spend big, that consumer spending drives employment.

Have a watch of this:-

I mean, you are completely within your rights to say "the late 1990s would have been better without NAFTA", and there's not really much I can say to argue against that, anymore than one can argue against my opposing claim.

so for the most part it simply wasn't relevant to whether employment went up or down, manufacturing had already been pretty much shattered.

Depends on what you mean. US manufacturing output went up (it's higher now per capita and absolutely than at any point in history), but fewer employees were needed to do it. But then again US agricultural employment has been going down, down, down for about a century and a half. Most of us see that last bit as a good thing; we'll probably eventually see the flight from manufacturing in the same way, and the Ross Perots of the 1990s will look like the William Jennings Bryans of the 1890s -- trying to preserve a sector of employment that the technology of the time had made unnecessary. For that matter, fewer people worldwide are working in manufacturing now than 50 years ago. As machines get better, we need fewer people to make stuff. The question is how we handle that transition (we did it badly for agriculture; we need to do it better for manufacturing).

2nd paragraph. It seems as if these hypocritical voices are saying, "We welcome them -- so long as they remember to keep their place.

The reliance upon dismissing their own competition as frauds and cheats was also rather galling.

the immigrants. They recruit immigrants so they can bring down wages and make full time jobs part time or temporary jobs. That is not right. Wages have been going down for over 30 years now and the cost of living just keeps getting more and more expensive. People can't afford to pay rent and eat anymore. We must fight for living wages for all workers, those native to the US and migrant workers.

If there are more engineers than there are jobs for them then wages will go down. It doesn't matter what anyone's motivation is.

then proceeded to wish that they lose their jobs to H1B's.

Welcome to ignore.

It wasn't the middle class that tut-tutted, it was the upper classes and the political class. This thread just reeks of the worst of American liberalism: smug, limousine liberal elitism.

Instead of trying to beggar your neighbors because you don't understand the problem, why don't you do something constructive to help them?

. . . who would protect the wealthy?