AP: Gov’t Should Import Maids, Nannies, Food Workers to Aid College Graduates

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Breitbart

The nation is better off when it has an army of immigrant low-wage service workers to aid upper-income urban professionals, says Associated Press economics writer Paul Wiseman, who lives in the Washington D.C. area.

The imported servant-class can work for high-status Americans as domestic maids, personal care aides, food-service workers, home health aides, and as dry-cleaning workers, said Wiseman, who wrote:

Already, foreign-born workers — about 17 percent of the overall workforce — account for 52 percent of America’s maids, 47 percent of roofers and 40 percent of construction laborers and laundry and dry-cleaning workers.

Low-skilled immigrants harvest sweet potatoes and cucumbers in fields in North Carolina. They serve dementia patients in nursing homes. They vacuum offices. They are waiters, cooks and maids at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

More service-job growth is expected, he says:

…[emerging jobs include] an estimated 778,000 personal-care aides (median pay in 2016: $21,920), 580,000 food-service workers ($19,400), 431,000 home-health aides ($22,600).

The imported service-class can free up college-educated Americans for higher-status work, declares Wiseman, a graduate of Indiana University in  Bloomington Ind. He writes:

Instead of competing with native-born workers, immigrants increasingly appear to complement them — and make them more productive. Patricia Cortes of Boston University and Jose Tessada of Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University have found that an increase in immigrant nannies and housekeepers from 1980 to 2000 drove down the price of household services and allowed American-born women to work longer hours on the job because they had less work to do at home.

Wiseman, however, is just another journalist who takes a one-sided investors’ view of immigration.

His article was slammed by the Federation of American Immigration Reform, which reported:

Immigrants, especially illegal aliens, benefit upper income Americans. They, and the owners of capital, get the benefits and the harms are spread out on the general population, especially concentrated in the low-skill sector … Even if low-skill immigration did make the economy better, on average, the benefits are to the owners of capital, both financial capital and human capital — basically the rich and educated. The costs are to those who own neither, and are without a voice.

Wiseman’s skewed reporting shows “there is too much political pressure to advance the cheap-labor agenda which has corrupted almost all Americans institutions,” said Dan Stein, president of FAIR, who was interviewed for 40 minutes by Wiseman for the article.

“I gave him an eloquent dissertation on why everything he claimed in the article is incorrect … speculative, and offensive,” said Stein, but “ideology and self-interest are powerful elixirs.”

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Do it for the upper class?