It turns out that not only are humans being replaced by smart machines, but workers are also getting reduced paychecks even in the booming jobs economy because of automation in the workplace.

The Fed report starts out:

It’s a popular proposal, according to a Rasmussen poll published May 20, titled, Voters Still See Skills-Based Legal Entry As Immigration Fix:

Voters [...]]]> President Trump has called for a fundament change in the government’s immigration system to require skills of entrants, rather than continue the current family-based system concocted by Sen Ted Kennedy in 1965.

It’s a popular proposal, according to a Rasmussen poll published May 20, titled, Voters Still See Skills-Based Legal Entry As Immigration Fix:

Voters continue to believe the U.S. immigration system is broken and still tend to favor shifting to the skills-based system that President Trump is proposing.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 55% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with Senator Lindsey Graham’s assessment last week that “we have a perfect storm brewing at the border because of a series of broken and outdated laws related to asylum and children.”

Tucker Carlson recently presented some observations about “merit” as a value in immigration after the Democrats had the predictable reaction of squawking “Racist!” at the president for common sense. Rep. Maxine Waters reflexively described the Trump immigration policy as “very racist” last week for requiring knowledge of English among newbies.

Some noticed that the Trump plan contained no overall reduction of immigrant numbers — something strongly indicated by the anemic wage growth among US workers. NumbersUSA released a video on May 6 expressing the worker viewpoint:

Another reason to decrease immigration is the increased use of worker-replacing robots. For example, Walmart (America’s largest company by revenue) is turning to automation to save money and increase efficiency:

Plus there is no discussion anywhere of the enormous factor of world population growth — now over 7.7 billion persons, more than double the 3.7 billion residents of the planet on the first Earth Day in 1970. Nearly all of that growth has occurred in the Third World which is now happy to send its excess people to America’s open border — remittances to follow, bringing billions of dollars to alien-sending countries south of the border and beyond.

Heres’s Tucker on the argument for merit-based immigration:

TUCKER CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” This week, the Trump administration revealed its proposal to overhaul America’s immigration system. The proposal would not by itself build the often promised wall on our southern border, nor would it cut current levels of immigration despite the fact that most Americans would like to see that happen.

The one big thing the administration’s proposal would do is give priority to immigrants who might actually help America — skilled workers with English proficiency. It’s hard to see an argument against a system like that — there isn’t really an argument against that system.

For years, Democrats have argued that immigrants make vital additions to our economy. They’re smarter than we are, they’re harder working, they do better in school. They found more companies.

Well, the President has decided to take Democrats at their word; he says he wants all of those good things that immigrants bring. Watch:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We want immigrants coming in, we cherish the open door that we want to create for our country. But a big proportion of those immigrants must come in through merit and skill.

CARLSON: Well, much of the world would move here if they could — hundreds and hundreds of millions of people. So why wouldn’t we pick the absolute best immigrants with skills in English who would fit in better here, their kids would do better in school, they’d be more likely to contribute to social programs instead of draining them.

So are Democrats rejoicing in this change? Of course not. They’re outraged. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke for the party when she declared that really merit is a bad word because everybody has merit:

REP. NANCY PELOSI: I want to just say something about the word that they use, “merit.” It is really a condescending word. Are they saying family is without merit? Are they saying most of the people who have ever come to the United States in the history of our country are without merit, because they don’t have an engineering degree?

Certainly, we want to attract the best to our country and that includes many people from many parts of society.

CARLSON: What a shame we can’t staff the Democratic Caucus in the Congress using the same criteria the Speaker would like to fill our country. “We want to attract the best for many parts of the world,” she says. But of course by that, Pelosi doesn’t mean what she says. She means just the opposite because what exactly is best about immigrants who have criminal records or middle school education, or no ability to hold a job?

The answer is, there’s nothing “best” about that. Immigrants like that might be nice people, but they’re much more likely to burden the United States than to benefit, at least economically. Harvard doesn’t admit students who can’t speak English. It says so right on their website, so why should our country?

The left doesn’t want to answer questions like that or even have the conversation. “Shut up racist.” It is said and is declared that the current system is great. No evidence necessary. Watch this former Obama official make her fact-free case on MSNBC yesterday:

RUTGERS ECONOMICS PROFESSOR JENNIFER HUNT: What’s less obvious is that medium and even the least-skilled immigrants also contribute to the U.S. economy. They come in and they do different things for natives and they allow everyone to specialize more in what they’re doing best.

It’s that contribution of the unskilled immigrants that I think people overlook when they really push the so-called merit-based or as it is called in other countries, the point system.

CARLSON: So what Professor Hunt and so many on the left, including the Speaker of the House are arguing for is a feudal system where foreign-born worker bees toil to support a smug and pampered managerial class, of which they of course are part.

There’s no other explanation for our current policies. We don’t need more low-skilled workers in the United States, we have plenty of low skilled workers. Their unemployment rate is higher than the national average. Their wage growth has been abysmal for decades — generations. So how do those workers benefit from having more competition? Of course they don’t.

How does the country benefit by having more low-skilled workers when technological changes may soon render millions of them permanently jobless? The answer, of course is that we won’t benefit.

But for the left, whether the country benefits is not the point. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar herself a symbol of America’s failed immigration system, if there ever was one; someone who hates this country coming here at public expense, spent yesterday demanding the abolition of ICE, the decriminalization of illegal immigration itself and an end to all deportation programs.

She demands open borders, the unlimited arrival of anyone who wants to come to America whether they have anything to contribute or not. And by the way, you get to pay for it. And if you don’t want to, you’re a bigot.

You know what this is really about, of course, it’s not about civil rights. It’s a joke. It’s about money and power — their money, their power.

The left has aligned with business interests that profit from cheap, obedient workers. Low-skilled immigrants have a harder time assimilating into the American mainstream. They stay poor. They learn English more slowly. They’re more likely to remain an ethnic underclass, all of which makes them much more likely to vote Democratic long term. That’s the point, obviously.

Skilled immigrants might assimilate and become less reliable Democratic voters. They might even compete with the children of our ruling class. That’s not allowed. It’s safer to import serfs, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. Don’t let them tell you, it’s about civil rights, it’s not; it’s about their convenience and their power.

Top leaders like President Bill Clinton and California Governor Jerry Brown have shamefully changed their positions entirely, from protecting [...]]]> The Fox News host used the Prager University video format to review the disturbing recent history of the Democrat Party — how the one-time friend of the American worker went to permissive globalist to achieve power.

Top leaders like President Bill Clinton and California Governor Jerry Brown have shamefully changed their positions entirely, from protecting American citizens to recruiting foreigners who prefer the big government freebies that Ds provide. Plus a big amnesty from Democrats will leave many recipients feeling grateful at election time.

For example, Cesar Chavez is remembered by the left as an icon, but he acted to keep illegal aliens out of the United States.

Around 1975, Gov. Jerry Brown objected to a mass influx of refugees because Americans needed help. (Lately not so much.)

Here’s a transcript of the video, with Tucker Carlson narrating:

Illegal Immigration — It’s about Power, Prager University, October 29, 2018

I recently watched a group of protestors, most of them young, denouncing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. They were waving Mexican flags and shouting: “¡Si, se puede!”—”Yes, we can!”

This is now the rallying cry of the open-borders left, but it wasn’t always. In fact, I wondered if a single person at the protest knew where it came from.

The slogan first became famous fifty years ago, thanks to Cesar Chavez. He was the founder of the United Farm Workers union. When Chavez said “Si, se puede,” he meant something very different: “Yes, we can… seal the borders.”

Cesar Chavez hated illegal immigration.

He was Hispanic, obviously, and definitely on the left, but he fought to keep illegal Mexican immigrants out of this country. He understood that peasants from Latin America will always work for less than Americans will. That’s why employers prefer them. Chavez knew that. “As long as we have a poor country bordering California,” he once explained, “it’s going to be very difficult to win strikes.”

In 1969, Chavez led a march down the center of California to protest the hiring of illegal immigrant produce pickers. Marching alongside him was Democratic Senator Walter Mondale, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the longtime aide to Martin Luther King.

Ten years later, Chavez dispatched armed union members into the desert to assault Mexican nationals who were trying to sneak across the border. Chavez’s men beat immigrants with chains and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses fire-bombed and their cars burned.

Chavez wasn’t embarrassed about any of this. He bragged about it.

No matter. Chavez remains a progressive hero. President Obama declared his birthday a commemorative federal holiday.  It’s an official day off in half a dozen states.  There’s a college named after him, and dozens of public schools.

Cesar Chavez’s life is a reminder of how much the left has changed—and how quickly.

Until recently, most Democrats agreed with Chavez. They opposed unchecked immigration because they knew it hurt American workers. And they were right.

One study by a Harvard economist examined the effects of the mass migration of Cuban refugees to this country in 1980—the so-called Mariel boatlift. He found that American workers in Miami with a high school education saw their wages fall by more than thirty percent after the refugees arrived. If you believe in supply and demand, this is not surprising.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown opposed letting Vietnamese refugees into California on the grounds that the state already had enough poor people. As he put it at the time, “There is something a little strange about saying, ‘Let’s bring in 500,000 more people’ when we can’t take care of the one million Californians out of work.”

First term Senator Joe Biden of Delaware agreed; he introduced federal legislation to curb the arrival of the Vietnamese.

Two decades later, leading Democrats were still wary of mass immigration, especially illegal immigration. As Bill Clinton put it in the 1995 State of the Union address, “…Americans… are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”

No prominent Democrat would say anything like that today without being denounced as a racist. Clinton got a standing ovation.

As late as 2006, there were still liberals who cared about the economic effects of immigration, legal or illegal. “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” explained economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times. “…We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skilled immigrants. Mainly, that means better controls on illegal immigration.”

That same year, Senator Hillary Clinton voted for a fence on the Mexican border. So did Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and 23 other Senate Democrats.

Not anymore.

Twenty years after Bill Clinton told Americans they had the right to be upset about illegal immigration, his wife scolded the country for enforcing border controls.

So, what changed?

Not the economics of it. The law of supply and demand remained in effect. It’s not a coincidence that as illegal immigration surged, wages for American workers stagnated. What changed is that Democrats stopped caring about those workers. About the middle class, really.

Why?

Here’s the answer, in four simple facts.

One: According to a recent study from Yale, there are at least 22 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.

Two: Democrats plan to give all of them citizenship. Read the Democrats’ 2016 party platform.

Three: Studies show the overwhelming majority of first-time immigrant voters vote Democrat.

Four: The biggest landslide in American presidential history was only 17 million votes.

The payoff for Democrats: permanent electoral majority for the foreseeable future. In a word: power.

That’s the point, no matter what they tell you; American workers be damned.

I’m Tucker Carlson.

In a discussion of Obama’s pitch for government raising the minimum wage, Ann Coulter re-explained the concept [...]]]> With so much gibberish emanating from the White House and its willing stenographers on the topic of jobs and the economy, sometimes the rock-bottom basics need to be explained to those who may never have heard of them.

In a discussion of Obama’s pitch for government raising the minimum wage, Ann Coulter re-explained the concept of supply and demand, and how excessive immigration is mauling American workers. More immigration means additional competitors for every individual job, not very nice of our government at a time when more the 20 million citizens are jobless.

(A spare video link is here.)

ANN COULTER: The reason the natural minimum wage, what people are being paid at the low end of the scale, is so low is because our immigration policies are dumping millions of low-wage workers on America, so I think Republicans should introduce a bill saying no more immigration until the minimum wage that employers need to pay through the laws of supply and demand just rises. A country like Australia, which has very restricted immigration policies, has an extremely low unemployment rate and a minimum wage that is just naturally about twice what ours is.

We Republicans believe in supply and demand, and Democrats believe in everything being a handout from government whether it’s because you lost your job because of the minimum wage, we’ll give you food stamps and unemployment insurance, or we, the beneficent government, will give you this minimum wage. That isn’t the way a natural market works. We need to cut off immigration until the minimum wage naturally rises. [. . .]

[Immigration] is part of what is leading to income inequality, and as a result of income inequality it is the people at the top of the income scale who want lots and lots of low-wage workers. They want enough to start building the pyramids. They want to have gardeners and nannies and maids and pay them less and less and less, so low-wage workers coming in through our immigration policy are fantastic for the ultra-rich; it’s very bad for the people who are competing for those jobs.