printOn August 31st, President Trump signed an “executive order to boost retirement savings.” It’ll allow “small businesses to band together to offer 401(k)s.”
But what do you know? A businessman present lamented “a very tight labor market, which is tight because of the success of [the president’s’] economy. And we’re all grateful for that, but it is causing us a little bit of problems.”
There we go again.
We have so many companies coming back to our country, which nobody thought was going to happen. And they want to be where the action is. And we’re going to — I can tell you, we’re going to start looking at, very seriously, merit-based immigration. We have to do it, because we need people. We need people to run these great companies that are coming in.
Big or small, American business is focused above all on elephantine-like expansion and greed.
It is not enough to do well and train American talent, so that fellow Americans can become part of the success story: this is never an option. If business is able to petition The State to import the world at a price subsidized by the American taxpayer—why not?
Again: It’s not enough to be doing smashingly well with the labor available. Or, with a view to training American talent. Or, with a view to paying more for American labor. Oh no. Greedy American Business is forever poised to pull one over the American worker.
The New York Times has featured the “heartbreaking” story of “Rob Hurst, manager of Edgartown Commons on Martha’s Vineyard, has had to scrub bathrooms this summer because five Jamaican workers who had long worked at the hotel couldn’t get visas.”
It concluded:
In practice, businesses say the increased red tape has made it harder to secure employment-based visas. That has added to the difficulty of finding qualified workers with the unemployment rate falling to 3.9 percent.
A recent analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, found that the denial rate for H-1B visa petitions for skilled foreign workers had increased 41 percent in the last three months of the 2017 fiscal year, compared with the third quarter. Government requests for additional information for applications doubled in the fourth quarter, a few months after Mr. Trump issued his order.
See: “Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration.”
Isn’t this about growth per capita, too—and perhaps community? And not just about GDP growth.