Does anyone think that illegal immigration is the cause of the shrinking middle class?

Question

If not, what is? If so what can be done about it?

Answer 1

It certainly hasn't helped. Given the fact that so many services are used but not paid for by illegals, the burden is then put on the taxpayer who is already burdened with the cost of a wartime economy.

The solution is to make these people cough up their fair share of the cost of these services. Put a brick on their pay checks the way we do with deadbeat parents who don't support their children. If they are paid in cash then they are cheating the taxing body that is not being paid. Both they and their employer are breaking the law and should be properly fined and jailed accordingly.

C'mon, it's time we stopped talking about this bullsh it and did something about it. It's time these goddamn politicians got off their dead @sses and did their job. This is a good place to start.

Answer 2

NO. Try a congress who has not raised the minimum wage in almost 10 years (while raising their own pay 8 times), tax breaks to the richest 1% of all Americans (and nothing for the rest of us), rich corporations outsourcing jobs to third world countries, a president who turned a surplus into a deficit that exceeds the sum of EVERY president preceding him, more government agencies created to handle national security (instead of fixing the ones we had, sounds like a democrat!), a trillion dollar price tag for a war that doesn't serve our interests and destruction of one of our most important symbols of capitalism on 9-11-01 by a man that our wonderful president does not care to find.

Illegal immigrants are being made a SCAPEGOAT.

Answer 3

Not all by itself. It is part of the picture. Take a living wage based on unions and American negotiated labor standards, and then look at the rest of the world. There are countries that will take a fraction of that, given their low standard of living and poverty, to do the same job, and consider it a step up.

Business passes one way trade agreements that give access to the buying power of the nation as customers without demanding any balance to protect the way of life here. Call centers telecommute doing jobs educated people did, accounting ditto. Goods are no longer manufactured at home giving Americans their standard of living but are manufactured even for our own consumption, abroad in places that have a standard of living that is nowhere acceptable by American standards.

Ports here that give job to truckers and people here will be circumvented for shipping these goods because a country where workers will take lower pay is willing to truck the goods in from its ports, with its trucks for less than Americans expecting anything like an American standard of living will take. (Put aside the security concerns due to other things that come across the border in the process for a moment.)

Then, there are still some jobs that have to be done here.

We don't want to be dependant on foreign food as we are on foreign oil, so we subsidize farmers to stay here, but they don't want to pay American worker wages, even in real dollars what they used to pay in the 80s. Construction is cheaper without American labor.

Immigration is the issue, it is regulated so our domestic job market won't be swamped, along with our schools and services. But those making money on cheap labor don't use those schools and services, really, so they don't care about that and stop enforcing immigration laws, winking at violations.

Illegal immigration is above our limits and kills the American Dream by ruining schools and services here, while at the same time lack of jobs paying a living wage drives more American workers towards needing those services themselves.

It is part of what is killing the middle class, but only part.

Right now profits are booming and have been for years. Yet according to the Fed, wages are the smallest percentage of gross domestic product that they have been since the Great Depression.

These tactics are at our expense.

Meanwhile side agreements in trade agreements and just whole cloth creation 'agreements between leaders' erode our constitutional process and seek to give us as voters less say in these issues as the problems with them unfold.

I think the President's 'fast track' free trade authority is unconstitutional because it removes any realistic ability for Congress to govern trade with other nations. The President fully negotiates the deals, and Congress can only say yes or no.

That authority runs out in July and should never be extended.

Answer 4

No immigration is not the cause of the shrinking middle class. The federal gov. is. The gap between the rich and the poor grows with every republican administration we have. The rich get richer, and the poor are all but forgotten. Case in point? New Orleans post Katrina. Enough said....

Answer 5

i have said this before---you are either rich or poor.

middle class? that's the glamorous equivalent of the WORKING poor. if you are obligated to wake up every morning to go to work so that you can pay for your house with a yard, 2 cars in your garage, to send your kids to college, you are one of the WORKING poor. if you wake up with a smile on your face and you CHOOSE to go to work for the challenge, and not because you need to get paid, you are one of the rich. it's always been this way and the poor will burden all the taxes to be paid in any society. hehehe...

Answer 6

yes. The middle class used to have good paying jobs with benefits, etc and now the illegals have come in and taken all the good HIGH PAYING jobs ..therefore Americans are having to work low paying no benefit jobs..the only ones getting richer are the employers who hire the illegals under the table.

Answer 7

Partly, for driving down the wages in areas that people used to get by on.

Answer 8

The main cause is the corrupt govewrnment and their rich cronies. Eventually the middle-class as we know it will be joining the poor,sad but true.

Answer 9

Yes, but not the main cause.

Answer 10

They have brought down wages as well as benfits and a future with any company