Stick to your guns, man! Those close to Jeb Bush

“would like to see him win at least one state in the opening primaries.” (WaPo 6/9/15)

So he is already waffling on his innovative “lose the primary” strategy….

New Republic‘s Brian Beutler praises Hillary Clinton for taking clear, aggressive, “progressive issue positions” that make voters wonder why Republicans take only  halfway positions. On immigration — one of his two examples — Hillary has embraced both forms of amnesty, legislative and executive. Republicans, meanwhile, muddle it up.  Beutler’s description:

Generally speaking, it’s not the liberalization of immigration law they oppose, but the unilateral nature of Obama’s actions. They oppose amnesty, but keep the door to a nebulous “legal status” ajar.

Aha! And why do they stop at nebulous “legal status”?

“When [Republicans] talk about legal status,” [Hillary] said, ‘that is code for second-class status.”

A forceful shot. But note that it only works against Republicans who take mealy-mouthed halfway positions (whether in an attempt to please donors or voters). It doesn’t really work against Republicans who say that in order to protect American workers they don’t want any legal status at all right now.

P.S.: I’m not sure it even works against Jeb Bush, Bush has comically prevaricated on the citizenship/”legal status” issue. But the semi-erotic fever of his passion for amnesty makes it obvious he’ll go for full citizenship as soon as he has the chance.

P.P.S.: Beutler contrasts Hillary’s new approach with traditional Clintonian triangulation, which in its classic form meant taking a middle stance and pushing off against both extremes. Hillary’s anti-triangulation is, instead, a way for the extremes to mow down whoever has wandered into the middle. But surely it also matters, once the No Man’s Land is denuded of life, whether Hillary’s polar position is more popular than the opposite polar position. On immigration, I doubt it  …

P.P.P.S: And how will Hillary extend her new approach to  “social insurance reforms,” as Beutler hopefully predicts? She will say she wants to make Social Security more generous. Republicans will say they don’t want it to go broke. Is that standoff such an obvious loser for the GOPs? Hillary may well have traction against Ryan-like voucherization plans — but that’s against the polar GOP postion, not the middle position. Good for Beutler that he wrote this piece now. …

Maybe immigration isn’t as big a factor as I’d thought. It’s a bigger factor!  “Tyler Durden” of ZeroHedge thinks he has made a discovery in the official job statistics — a discovery that explains

why America’s seemingly “booming” jobs recovery, which is “firing on all fours” according to the BLS, is not manifesting itself in either inflationary pressures [i.e. due to wage growth], or broad economic productivity.

The discovery is that the vast bulk of recent job growth has gone to immigrants, including illegal immigrants who have little power to ask for raises. Specifically, since the start of the 2007 Great Recession “the US has added 2.3 million “foreign-born” workers”, but only 727,000 “native born.” (This is according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own survey.)

This means that the “recovery” has almost entirely benefited foreign-born workers, to the tune fo 3 to 1 relative to native-born Americans! [Boldface not added!]

It would also explain why the politics of the “jobs recovery” is so problematic for Democrats. Disproportionately, voters ain’t ‘feeling it.’ (Plenty of foreign born workers are also voters, but the percentage who are has to be lower than that for native-born workers.)

Durden says he’s not taking sides in the immigration debate, just trying to “fill a gaping hole in economist models.”  …

P.S.: At first I thought Durden’s theory required there to have been a huge surge of new immigration (which, maybe, there has been). But it merely requires that foreign born workers, who may already have been in the U.S., get the lion’s share of new jobs. … Nor am I completely clear on why foreign-born labor would produce low labor productivity, unless the argument is that with so much cheap labor employers don’t have to make productivity-enhancing improvements. …

P.P.S.: We will now attempt to insert a dramatiic graph from Durden’s post:

At this point several readers made Whole Foods jokes … :The percentage of Americans “struggling to afford food” has hit a 7-year low — 15.8% — according to Gallup. That’s relatively good news. On the other hand, the same survey reports that almost 4% of Americans with incomes over $90,000 “struggled to afford food” in the past year, suggesting … I dunno … that there are things about this survey that aren’t as clear as they seem (and probably that the survey overstates the hunger problem). …

“#BlackLivesMatter”?: Only about 5% of black teen male dropouts from poor families are employed, according to this 2013 interview with economist Andrew Sum. That doesn’t mean a 95% unemployment rate — many aren’t in the labor market all. Still. Sean McElwee of Demos calls it “one of the most viscerally jarring statistics I’ve ever read.”

Teenage employment used to be higher, Sum notes. Why did it collapse?  One reason, he says, is that after the 2001 recession, the jobs that teenagers had once gotten instead went to “older workers & immgrants.” Less skilled, younger, and black workers are typically the people most adversely affected by the arrival of lower-skilled immigrants — this is just a pointed example of that general rule of thumb. It’s simply astounding that a president of Obama’s declared sympathies would, when faced with this situation, want more immigration to fill the jobs that poor black teenagers used to get. What’s he going to tell them? ‘Go back to school’?** School hasn’t helped them, and the payoffs from school are far off in the future. A job would have an immediate payoff. And work itself is socializing. It can succeed where public schools fail. In a tight labor market, employers would have to compete to figure out how to bring marginal workers into the mainstream economy.

I would bet on market ingenuity over public schools. But first, the easy path — importing desperate hard-working Third Worlders to fill employer demand — has to be closed off, at least temporarily. …

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** — That’s basically what he tells workers who lose their jobs due to trade (who also tend to be less skilled).  “[W]e’ve got to provide help to transition, and to re-tool and adapt …” It’s easier to say that to people who’ve been in the work force. It’s less likely to be effective advice for teenage dropouts who’ve never been part of the mainstream economy. How do you “re-tool” when you haven’t tooled in the first place? Wouldn’t it be good to have a decent supply of jobs that don’t require “tooling” at all?