The real cost of Trump’s anti-migrant America

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It takes only two things to keep people in chains:

The ignorance of the oppressed
and the treachery of their leaders.

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Donald Trump wants you to fear all but white, Christian, straight men, who were born in the U.S.

He himself fears women who object to his groping. He fears Muslim men, women, and children. He fears blacks, browns, and yellows. He fears people who were born overseas. He wants you to fear and hate immigrants.

In his fears, Trump follows the classic dictator’s path by creating a “we-vs.-them” scenario in which the only people who can be trusted are “people-like-us.”

For example:

Official: NYC suspect says he heeded ISIS call
After bomb attack, president calls for immigration reforms
By Nina Agrawal, Brian Bennett and Noah Bierman Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — The suspect in a bomb attack in New York City’s transit system Monday told investigators he had been inspired by Islamic State’s recent call for attacks in Western cities around the Christmas holidays, a federal law enforcement official said.

The suspect, identified as 27-year-old Bangladesh native Akayed Ullah, was injured by the explosion and in custody.

President Donald Trump cited the suspect as an argument for his crackdown on legal as well as illegal immigration.

“Today’s attempted mass murder attack in New York City — the second terror attack in New York in the last two months — once again highlights the urgent need for Congress to enact legislative reforms to protect the American people,” Trump said.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted that the attack could have been prevented if the U.S. had canceled the ability of American citizens to sponsor relatives for visas, which the president calls “chain migration.”

Ullah, a lawful permanent resident, was admitted to the U.S. in 2011 on a family immigrant visa.

The specific class of visa he had, an F43, is for nieces and nephews of U.S. citizens 21 and older. Trump called that policy “incompatible with national security.”

If an American citizen will not be allowed to sponsor an adult niece or nephew, we surely will have created “fortress America,” a nation in which we all hide behind a wall of fear, barring anyone from entering.

Is this the America that has made you proud?

Trump also cited the attack in pressing for other policies, including his ban on travel to the United States by people from eight countries. Those nations do not include Bangladesh, according to an administration official.

Ullah appears to have planned the attack on his own, and was “self-radicalized” after being admitted to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 2011, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments.

The bomber was “self-radicalized.” No amount of vetting would have revealed him as a terrorist. Only a complete lockdown of America could have kept him out.

Is this what we Americans want — a walled-in nation no one can enter?

Campaign to Drive Out Migrants Slams Beijing’s Best and Brightest
By Chris Buckley, Sui-Lee Wee and Adam Wu, Dec. 11, 2017,BEIJING — With coding skills, a foreign degree, fluent English and an apartment barely big enough for his espresso maker and two cats, Si Ruomu thought he was the kind of go-getting young tech worker that Beijing needs to thrive in the 21st century.

That was before the police arrived at his apartment building and ordered him and hundreds of others to vacate within 48 hours. Like most of his fellow tenants, Mr. Si had come from elsewhere in China to find work in the capital, which often treats migrants virtually as second-class citizens.

As Beijing has launched its most aggressive drive in decades to rid itself of unwanted migrants, the brunt of the crackdown has fallen on laborers from the countryside. But it has also hurt a different kind of migrant: educated and ambitious white-collar workers drawn to the city’s new economy of tech, finance, and hospitality industries.

China is a nation preventing migration within its own borders, though the result is the same: Lack of cultural mixing.

Beijing is a cultural, technological and commercial capital as well as a political one, and the tenements on its outskirts are home to tens of thousands of hopeful young college graduates who have moved here seeking better jobs and better lives.

These job seekers are treated as migrants in their own capital, because China’s biggest cities are fortresses of official privilege, especially Beijing.

The government gives inhabitants who hold permanent residence papers, called hukou, more generous access to housing, schools, and healthcare. But migrants must pay more for many services, and many live on the edges of Beijing, where rents are lower.

That has ignited debate about how Beijing can function without the blue-collar migrants who serve as its cooks, cleaners, and vendors, but there are also worries the campaign might harm the city’s fast-growing tech sector, which employs armies of migrants who work for relatively low pay.

Migrants help an economy, not only by working in menial tasks, but also by working in high tech. Trump would destroy all that for the U.S.

The effects of the crackdown are already evident in Beijing’s booming e-commerce sector, which relies on legions of couriers — nearly all of them migrants — to deliver packages and meals on electric bikes.

Last month, five delivery companies warned of delivery delays following the expulsions.

Gan Wei, secretary-general of the China Electronic Commerce Logistics Industry Alliance, said the companies represented by her group would have to raise delivery prices in Beijing by about 20 percent.

“Why is takeout food so cheap in Beijing? Because of all the cheap labor from the countryside,” said Jia Dayong, 43, a stringy courier from the northwestern province of Shaanxi.

“If they keep clearing out like this, Beijing will suffer a drought of employees next year,” said Wang Le, 29, a hotel manager from the eastern province of Jiangsu.

“Even if the industry I’m in is very high-level, as far as the government is concerned, I’m also a peasant worker, a migrant worker,” said Zhang Xingwang, 24, who studied automation in college and came to Beijing from Hebei Province seeking work as a software programmer.

Some experts have warned that by choking off the flow of migrants, Beijing risks losing entrepreneurial energy.

Yin Deting, a demographer who advises the Beijing city government, warned that heavy-handed clearances of migrants would accelerate the aging of the city’s workforce.

“If we place our hopes for reducing the population just in demolishing illegal buildings and low-grade markets, the actual outcomes may well be contrary to what is hoped for,” Mr. Yin wrote earlier this year.

A dictator assumes power first by instilling fear in the populace, then by proclaiming that he alone can save the nation. Every “outsider” is to be considered “a dangerous alien.”

The dictator’s most ardent followers are those who feel xenophobically threatened, and who desperately want a strong leader to protect them from competition and imagined threats by aliens, and from the disgrace of personal failure.

The dictator’s acolytes seldom understand, or even wish to understand, the high cost of this “protection.” Immigrants invariably bring great effort and new ideas to a nation that otherwise would stagnate from lack of change.

History shows that dictatorships initially may arrive on a wave of charisma, but ultimately, dictatorships always ruin the lives of the people who supported them.

World War II Germans, who expelled or murdered some of their best and brightest, suffered from that loss of Jewish labor and brainpower. Beijing already suffers from that kind of loss.

America does too.

Some Americans may believe that Trump will protect them, but he will protect only himself and those closest to him.  Meanwhile, as all dictators always do, he slowly will destroy your America by:

• taking away your legal protections under the guise of “less government,”
• placing his family and friends in high positions,
• creating and then punishing scapegoats,
• attacking the media for revealing the truth
• building a legal and/or physical wall around the country
• enriching himself at the expense of the government
• threatening critics
• placing himself above the law

Immigration is, and always has been, the lifeblood of America, a nation built on energy, creativity, and progress — and these all are words for “change.” Without change, a nation stands still.

America was built on immigration. That is what has made us great.  Without immigrants, we still would be a large nation, but no longer a great, nation.

That is what Donald Trump and today’s GOP would take from us. Our greatness that immigrants have given us.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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The most important problems in economics involve the excessive income/wealth/power Gaps between the have-mores and the have-less.

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.

Implementation of The Ten Steps To Prosperity can narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:
1. ELIMINATE FICA (Ten Reasons to Eliminate FICA )
Although the article lists 10 reasons to eliminate FICA, there are two fundamental reasons:
*FICA is the most regressive tax in American history, widening the Gap by punishing the low and middle-income groups, while leaving the rich untouched, and
*The federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, neither needs nor uses FICA to support Social Security and Medicare.
2. FEDERALLY FUNDED MEDICARE — PARTS A, B & D, PLUS LONG TERM CARE — FOR EVERYONE (H.R. 676, Medicare for All )
This article addresses the questions:
*Does the economy benefit when the rich can afford better health care than can the rest of Americans?
*Aside from improved health care, what are the other economic effects of “Medicare for everyone?”
*How much would it cost taxpayers?
*Who opposes it?”
3. PROVIDE A MONTHLY ECONOMIC BONUS TO EVERY MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD IN AMERICA (similar to Social Security for All) (The JG (Jobs Guarantee) vs the GI (Guaranteed Income) vs the EB (Economic Bonus)) Or institute a reverse income tax.
This article is the fifth in a series about direct financial assistance to Americans:

Why Modern Monetary Theory’s Employer of Last Resort is a bad idea. Sunday, Jan 1 2012
MMT’s Job Guarantee (JG) — “Another crazy, rightwing, Austrian nutjob?” Thursday, Jan 12 2012
Why Modern Monetary Theory’s Jobs Guarantee is like the EU’s euro: A beloved solution to the wrong problem. Tuesday, May 29 2012
“You can’t fire me. I’m on JG” Saturday, Jun 2 2012

Economic growth should include the “bottom” 99.9%, not just the .1%, the only question being, how best to accomplish that. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) favors giving everyone a job. Monetary Sovereignty (MS) favors giving everyone money. The five articles describe the pros and cons of each approach.
4. FREE EDUCATION (INCLUDING POST-GRAD) FOR EVERYONE Five reasons why we should eliminate school loans
Monetarily non-sovereign State and local governments, despite their limited finances, support grades K-12. That level of education may have been sufficient for a largely agrarian economy, but not for our currently more technical economy that demands greater numbers of highly educated workers.
Because state and local funding is so limited, grades K-12 receive short shrift, especially those schools whose populations come from the lowest economic groups. And college is too costly for most families.
An educated populace benefits a nation, and benefitting the nation is the purpose of the federal government, which has the unlimited ability to pay for K-16 and beyond.
5. SALARY FOR ATTENDING SCHOOL
Even were schooling to be completely free, many young people cannot attend, because they and their families cannot afford to support non-workers. In a foundering boat, everyone needs to bail, and no one can take time off for study.
If a young person’s “job” is to learn and be productive, he/she should be paid to do that job, especially since that job is one of America’s most important.
6. ELIMINATE FEDERAL TAXES ON BUSINESS
Businesses are dollar-transferring machines. They transfer dollars from customers to employees, suppliers, shareholders and the federal government (the later having no use for those dollars). Any tax on businesses reduces the amount going to employees, suppliers and shareholders, which diminishes the economy. Ultimately, all business taxes reduce your personal income.
7. INCREASE THE STANDARD INCOME TAX DEDUCTION, ANNUALLY. (Refer to this.) Federal taxes punish taxpayers and harm the economy. The federal government has no need for those punishing and harmful tax dollars. There are several ways to reduce taxes, and we should evaluate and choose the most progressive approaches.
Cutting FICA and business taxes would be a good early step, as both dramatically affect the 99%. Annual increases in the standard income tax deduction, and a reverse income tax also would provide benefits from the bottom up. Both would narrow the Gap.
8. TAX THE VERY RICH (THE “.1%) MORE, WITH HIGHER PROGRESSIVE TAX RATES ON ALL FORMS OF INCOME. (TROPHIC CASCADE)
There was a time when I argued against increasing anyone’s federal taxes. After all, the federal government has no need for tax dollars, and all taxes reduce Gross Domestic Product, thereby negatively affecting the entire economy, including the 99.9%.
But I have come to realize that narrowing the Gap requires trimming the top. It simply would not be possible to provide the 99.9% with enough benefits to narrow the Gap in any meaningful way. Bill Gates reportedly owns $70 billion. To get to that level, he must have been earning $10 billion a year. Pick any acceptable Gap (1000 to 1?), and the lowest paid American would have to receive $10 million a year. Unreasonable.
9. FEDERAL OWNERSHIP OF ALL BANKS (Click The end of private banking and How should America decide “who-gets-money”?)
Banks have created all the dollars that exist. Even dollars created at the direction of the federal government, actually come into being when banks increase the numbers in checking accounts. This gives the banks enormous financial power, and as we all know, power corrupts — especially when multiplied by a profit motive.
Although the federal government also is powerful and corrupted, it does not suffer from a profit motive, the world’s most corrupting influence.
10. INCREASE FEDERAL SPENDING ON THE MYRIAD INITIATIVES THAT BENEFIT AMERICA’S 99.9% (Federal agencies)Browse the agencies. See how many agencies benefit the lower- and middle-income/wealth/ power groups, by adding dollars to the economy and/or by actions more beneficial to the 99.9% than to the .1%.
Save this reference as your primer to current economics. Sadly, much of the material is not being taught in American schools, which is all the more reason for you to use it.

The Ten Steps will grow the economy, and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and you.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY