Who’s lying?
Congress may on the verge of passing of an immigration bill that would add hundreds of thousands of unskilled foreign workers to the U.S. labor market every year. The reason is that America supposedly doesn’t have enough workers to fill certain kinds of low-end jobs. Econ 101 tells you that such reasoning most charitably can be called a government intervention in the labor market (a less charitable description would be to say that it amounts to stealing from workers).
But as I have pointed out a few times over the past couple of years, Econ 101 aside, there just doesn’t seem to be much truth to the idea that there’s a lack of bodies in America. What we have is a) a lack of jobs or b) a bunch of people who don’t want to work or c) employers who don’t want to hire certain kinds of Americans.
As we’re getting close to summer and crime continues to rack up victims in Boston we’ve reached the time of the year where young urban men and their advocates complain that there aren’t many jobs around. The Boston Herald reports:
Community advocates call it a recipe for tragedy: Hub shootings are soaring as money for summer jobs to put at-risk youths to work is sorely lacking.
“The funds are just not there,” said John Drew, executive vice president of Action for Boston Community Development. “At this point, as best I can tell from where we are, we have the possibility of putting half the kids to work we had last year.”
ABCD scraped together roughly $1 million for summer jobs last year from government grants and private fund-raising. That was enough to employ 1,100 young men and women from low-income families. Three times that many had to be turned away.
“If you are concerned about shootings, what are you going to do when your kids are out of school all day? We have a place for them to go. We just need some help,” Drew said.
The number of people hit by gunfire on city streets skyrocketed through the first four months of the year, jumping to 110 from 65 at this time last year, according to Boston police figures.
“There aren’t that many opportunities out there right now,” said Miguel De Los Santos, 19, of Roxbury, who got his first job in a church child-care center through the ABCD program at 16. “If I didn’t have a job I would just be hanging out with my friends.”
ABCD last year was awarded roughly $600,000 of the state summer jobs money allotted to Boston and hopes to again get a cut this summer of the $4.2 million currently set aside in the proposed state budget, Drew said.
Boston runs its own summer jobs program that last year hired 3,300 teens, while a third program administered by the Boston Private Industry Council put 800 youths to work in local companies last summer.
(Emphasis mine).
There will be tens of thousands of jobs available on Cape Cod this summer, as every summer, but they will be filled mainly by foreign workers with seasonal work visas. The excuse there is that the season starts just a little bit before school’s out and ends after school’s started in the fall. Hell’s bells, what an unfortunate thing for the Cape Cod business community.
And don’t give me the “access to jobs” BS spiel. The Cape Cod workers are flown in from all around the world, for crying out loud.
(There’s of course a compelling reason to shaft Americans in favor of foreigners: Cathy Young’s from the Soviet Union!)
