Tucker Carlson presented some remarks on Thursday about the insanity of the left’s anti-borders movement and the anarchy it would create.
What’s frightening is that the Abolish ICE rhetoric is becoming more mainstream among Democrats. Anything to attack President Trump.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: There was an ideological revolution on the left this week, and hardly anybody noticed it. For months, you may have noticed, members of the progressive fringe had been calling for abolishing ICE — that’s the agency responsible for enforcing our immigration laws. That’s not a mainstream position obviously, and Democratic leaders seemed embarrassed by it. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer opposed the idea; so did many others. And then everything changed.
Two days ago, a self-described socialist called Alexandria Acacio-Cortez unexpectedly won a Democratic primary in New York. Acacio-Cortez ran on abolishing ICE. Suddenly, in days, getting rid of ICE is something many Democrats say they are for. Now midterm elections are approaching, so it’s time for the rest of us to take this idea seriously.
What exactly would happen if the left killed ICE? Well here’s some of the facts about ICE. ICE is responsible for all immigration enforcement within the United States. Last year, ICE arrested 32,958 illegal immigrants with criminal records; almost 5,000 of those were members of violent gangs. Without ICE, all of those criminals would still be at large within our borders. Last year ICE also seized 2,370 pounds of fentanyl: that’s the narcotic that is driving the single deadliest drug crisis in the history of this country. That’s enough fentanyl to kill every single American citizen by overdose. Without ICE that fentanyl would still be in circulation.
And of course ICE is also the body responsible for deporting anybody illegally inside the United States. Last year ICE removed more than 226,000 people who broke American law. ICE did that because ICE is the only agency we have to do it. Without ICE, criminal aliens could stay in this country with impunity; that would include gang members, drug smugglers, child molesters, convicted murderers — they could not be deported. Companies, meanwhile, could bring in an unlimited number of illegal workers that would crash wages for American citizens, even more than it already has. It would be a disaster, but it’s the point.
The campaign against ICE is a campaign for open borders, and some are honest enough to admit that. During protests against the administration, activists have chanted this: “No borders, no nations, stop the deportations.” No borders, no nations — one leads to the other, always. Without borders, nations are impossible.
If we passed a law tomorrow allowing strangers to live in your house would it still be your house? No it would not be; it would be everybody’s house. Soon it would be nobody’s house.
That’s the left’s plan for America. Finally they are saying it out loud.
Home-building skills are needed for reconstruction in Texas and Florida.
Now, it would be unwise to steer young folks into skills like masonry, which looks likely to be largely automated by robot bricklayers in the near future. Carpentry and plumbing skills will probably survive longer in construction, and remodeling will also supply a lot of jobs even in the automated future.
We certainly want Americans to do the rebuilding, not have thousands of immigrants move in, often illegally, as they did in New Orleans after Katrina to do the work and never leave.
Perhaps someone could organize some on-the-job apprenticeships in the rebuilding, if such a thing is possible.
Here’s the report from CBS Sunday Morning:
]]>A new blueprint for America’s construction trades, CBS News, October 1, 2017
The HELP WANTED signs are up, both figuratively and literally, in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. There’s a lot of reconstruction to be done — and not enough trained workers to do it. Our Cover Story is reported by Mark Strassmann:
It’s been a month since Hurricane Harvey devastated the city of Houston and Southeast Texas. Damage estimates go up to $190 billion. The cleanup has begun, but a major shortage is looming for the rebuilding effort. It’s not a lack of will, or money; it’s a lack of skilled labor … a national shortage that’s reaching a crisis stage.
[. . .]
America’s economy has a growing labor crisis — a shortage of skilled construction workers. These men and women — carpenters, plumbers, electricians and masons — put a roof over your head. They’re getting harder and harder to find, at a time when — with two devastating mainland storms in the past month — they’ve never been more needed.
“Over the last four years, we’ve seen rising rates of open jobs,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist for the National Association of Homebuilders. “In other words, there’s a help wanted sign put out by the builder or the remodeler, and they simply can’t fill it.”
We talked to Dietz about these “Made in America” jobs, a traditional front door to the American dream.
“Over the decades as we’ve gone through different rounds of infrastructure development, building the nation’s suburbs, the highways and the rest, those construction jobs have been a critical part of building a middle class,” he said. “The challenge right now is that we simply do not have enough people who are ready and willing and able to join the construction industry.”
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Abundant Robotics has developed a vacuum-based system that doesn’t bruise [...]]]>
Abundant Robotics has developed a vacuum-based system that doesn’t bruise the apples. It doesn’t pick particularly quickly, but on balance, the machines can literally work 24 hours a day and don’t require lunch. In the video below, the developers describe how they moved from experimental versions to building a commercial machine.
Apples are easily bruised so hand picking has been the norm. Robot developers think they have that problem solved.
The world of work is being fundamentally altered because of automation. What worries me is how the government is oblivious to smart machines coming on strong and acting as if nothing has changed.
]]>A robot that picks apples? Replacing humans worries some, Associated Press, April 28, 2017
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Harvesting Washington state’s vast fruit orchards each year requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States.
That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market.
The robotic pickers don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day.
“Human pickers are getting scarce,” said Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics. “Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly retiring.”
FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, California, are racing to get their mechanical pickers to market within the next couple of years.
Harvest has long been mechanized for large portions of the agriculture industry, such as wheat, corn, green beans, tomatoes and many other crops. But for more fragile commodities like apples, berries, table grapes and lettuce — where the crop’s appearance is especially important — harvest is still done by hand.
Members of the $7.5 billion annual Washington agriculture industry have long grappled with labor shortages, and depend on workers coming up from Mexico each year to harvest many crops.
President Donald Trump’s hard line against immigrants in the U.S. illegally has many farmers in the country looking for alternative harvest methods. Some have purchased new equipment to try to reduce the number of workers they’ll need, while others have lobbied politicians to get them to deal with immigration in a way that minimizes harm to their livelihoods.
“Who knows what this administration will do or not do?” said Jim McFerson, head of the Washington State Tree Fruit Research Center in Wenatchee. For farmers, “it’s a question of survival.”
Washington leads the nation in production of apples and several other crops. Harvest starts in the spring with asparagus and runs until all the apples are off the trees in late fall.
The work is hard and dangerous, and has long drawn Mexican workers to central Washington, where several counties near the Canadian border are now majority-Hispanic. Experienced pickers, who are paid by the bin, can make more than $200 a day.
Advocates for farmworkers say robot pickers will have a negative effect.
The eventual loss of jobs for humans will be huge, said Erik Nicholson of Seattle, an official with the United Farm Workers union. He estimated half of the state’s farmworkers are immigrants who are in the country illegally.
But many of them have settled in Washington and are productive members of the community, he said.
“They are scared of losing their jobs to mechanization,” Nicholson said. “A robot is not going to rent a house, buy clothing for their kids, buy food in a grocery and reinvest that money in the local economy.”
While financial details are not available, the builders say the robotic pickers should pay for themselves in two years. That puts the likely cost of the machines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
FFRobotics is developing a machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch. The machine would have between four and 12 robotic arms, and can pick up to 10,000 apples an hour, Kober said.
One machine would be able to harvest a variety of crops, taking 85 to 90 percent of the crop off the trees, Kober said. Humans could pick the rest.
Abundant Robotics is working on a picker that uses suction to vacuum apples off trees.
Plans for the robotic harvesters — including a goal of getting them to market before 2019 — were discussed in February at an international convention of fruit growers in Wenatchee.
The two robot makers are likely to hit their production goals, said Karen Lewis, a Washington State University cooperative extension agent who has studied the issue.
“Both of them will be in the field with prototypes this fall,” Lewis said, calling the robotic harvesters a “game changer.”
But for the machines to work, apples and other crops must be grown in new trellis systems that allow robots to see and harvest the fruit, she said.
“We are evolving the tree architecture and apple placement to be compatible with robotics,” Lewis said, a process called “robot-ready.”
Large farming operations likely will be first to adopt the machines, but it might be decades before their use is widespread.