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Engineer (ChE,ME,IT,MBA,PMP) CTO, USN-Inventor- Christian, Dad, Husband, Patriot Gen-X *Amazon Associate. I earn from qualifying purchases.
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A 17 year old account rarely used with a single follower.
Then one day a Tech Bro posted something insulting and vile about American Labor I couldn't hold back.
16 months to 30,000 followers from 1.
From Engineering to an account where we discuss, respectfully disagree, educate and learn about labor, policy, history, and the self - interested corruption of our elite.
Thank you for the support and willingness to fearlessly add your viewpoints for everyone to engage.
We will win this fight through incremental, unending, continuous effort and improvement.
We do it for ourselves | We do it for the prosperity of our youth | We do it until we win
GLOBALIST THURSDAY:
WHERE DID THE MONEY GO?
Here's something American engineers and tech workers might find interesting.
For decades, employers sponsoring H-1B workers have paid a federal fee specifically intended to help train American workers.
$750–$1,500 per qualifying petition.
Congress created the program to help develop America's domestic workforce and reduce dependence on imported talent.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
The federal H-1B Skills Training Grants listing shows:
🇺🇸 FY2024: $37.7 million in grant obligations.
🇺🇸 FY2025: $37 million estimated.
🇺🇸 FY2026: $0 estimated obligations, with a funding rescission expected to absorb accrued fees.
Meanwhile, American engineers, IT professionals, and other skilled workers continue reporting layoffs, outsourcing, and difficulty finding work.
So where is the money going?
How much has been collected over the years?
Which organizations received it?
How many Americans completed training?
And most importantly...
HOW MANY AMERICANS ACTUALLY GOT JOBS?
Here's this Thursday's challenge:
Find the grant recipients. Examine the spending. Demand measurable results.
If employers are required to help fund American workforce development, Americans deserve to know whether that investment is working.
We don't need another post about an imaginary talent shortage.
We need the receipts.
They Dont Work For You
Ever wonder how a senator can spend years in Washington, deliver almost none of the spending cuts, immigration limits, or job protections that were promised, and still get reelected?
The term is six years. That is the whole setup.
Year one the promises fade. The election is over. The campaign donors still have the senator’s personal phone number and email. The lobbyists still get the scheduled meetings and the return calls. The ordinary voter who put the person there has almost none of that access for the next five years.
They have a saying in DC- the voters have the memory of a goldfish.
Years two through four the regular business takes over. Party leadership controls committee assignments and decides which bills get a hearing or a floor vote. Donor networks and political action committees keep writing the checks. Local chambers of commerce, employers, and party officials get used to dealing with the current office. When a bill stalls, the senator can point at the House, the other party, the Senate leader, or a colleague who is not up for reelection for three more years.
Everybody has an explanation. The bill does not move. That's by design and you never get an actual name of who is holding you up and if you do they are never up for the next primary.
The staggered terms make it cleaner. The senator facing voters this cycle can stand up and demand the vote. The senators who are safe until the next election do not have to take it. The campaign promise stays on the website. The legislation does not pass.
Year five the seat gets protected. The party committees and outside spending groups already know which donors gave last time. Local endorsements from county parties, business groups, and key employers stay with the person already in the chair. A serious primary challenger starts with almost no money and no name recognition. The incumbent starts with the war chest, the name people already know, and six years of constituent-service mail and casework.
Year six Washington remembers the state. Ribbon cuttings. Town halls. Photographs with veterans. Announcements about federal grants coming home. Bills they propose but will never vote on. Fresh newsletters and another round of promises about what will happen if the voters give them six more years.
What does not get the same attention is the short list. Which of the last campaign promises on spending, immigration, or jobs actually became law. Which votes the senator personally cast. Which bills the senator sponsored that never left committee. Who wrote the campaign checks. What happened to the senator’s personal stock accounts while the person was in office.
Then the exit. Some former senators and senior staff move into lobbying firms, consulting shops, or corporate advocacy jobs where the Washington contacts are worth money. Others stay in the Senate for decades. Stock trading continues on the same access. Senators receive briefings and sit on committees that see information before the public does. Disclosure rules exist. A lot of Americans still do not think those rules are enough.
Six-year terms. Seats that are hard to lose. Donor lists that outlast any one election. Party committees that know where to spend. Delayed votes. Committee access that can move a personal portfolio. A lobbying or consulting job waiting on the other side. Each piece has a polite explanation. Together they make it easier to keep the seat than to pass the spending cuts, the immigration limits, or the job protections that were promised.
A senator can serve the full term without a major bill on those issues. They can campaign on the same problems for twenty years. When the cycle ends they ask for six more years to finish the job.
Stop measuring the speech. Measure which of the promised bills actually passed.
They Dont Work For You.
If your senator is in year six and the big promise is still a promise, say the name. Like share and bookmark.
**Engineering Wednesday**
I am not an attorney. I have worked at a lot of levels inside companies, and I spent a few years in local and federal law enforcement before that. Nights at HP loading semiconductor tools while I finished a chemical engineering degree. Technician, process owner, tool owner, tech transfer, then large industrial equipment. I have watched companies that played it straight stay stable, and I have watched companies that should have been stable get hollowed out because the executives were looking after themselves.
If you see something crooked, here is what usually happens if you walk in unprepared. They send attorneys to interview you. Those attorneys work for the company. They are there to collect your evidence, have you sign an NDA, bury the file, and then fire you. After that you have nothing left that shows the firing was retaliation.
If you are compelled to report, as I am, this is the sequence I have watched work better.
File the claim externally first- and request anonymity you can change this later. Get an attorney immediately. You will have to shop. A lot of them have conflicts and will turn you down. That does not mean you have no case. It means they have an agreement they are not allowed to mention. Give all of your information to that attorney that accepts you. The company wants the file. Once your attorney has it, your employer normally have to pay to get it back. Show that information to nobody else. Even if it is evidence of what happened, it is still the employer’s property until the process says otherwise. After your attorney has looked at the legality of the claim, tell them you are ready to file internally. File internally. Do not attach the proof yet. Be specific about dates, people, and events. Assume that may be the last time you can reach your email. Your attorney should then notify the employer. Some want you let go first so the retaliation claim is cleaner. The timing matters. If you wait too long they will say they had no idea you had reported anything.
Once you come forward you are a liability. They want you gone. Their attorneys’ first job is to keep anyone above a line-level employee who knows nothing from ever sitting in a deposition.
I have been on both sides of these. Sexual harassment and hostile work environment claims. Foreign theft of IP. SEC and false-claim matters. Defense attorneys will tell you that you do not want to be at the mercy of a jury. Employers are equally afraid of that same jury. Taking it to court so the evidence is public is a legitimate choice. If that is the path, the media and the public record are how it stays visible. Very few of these ever reach a trial.
Question:
Have you watched someone walk into the company interview first and come out with an NDA and no case?
**Engineering Wednesday**
Working as Chief Engineer at a non-profit defense contractor that said it wanted to commercialize its intellectual property was a trip.
Tens of thousands of employees. Almost all of them had only ever worked at similar places. Every quarterly meeting stressed charging every hour the government had approved. Coming in under the hours was worse than going over. Those hours were the business model. If you did not charge them, you were taking profit out of the company. The employees? Imagine going from High School, to a college lab degree, to a job that was identical to what you did in college.
Zero understanding of market forces or paying for yourself through your work and customer satisfaction. This is how a large segment of our society works including our media.
The CEO and the upper staff of this 'non-profit' had million-dollar salaries that depended on everyone charging the hours.
Meanwhile, they set aside 10% of their earnings to lobby for more business from the government from both sides of the aisle.
As a non-profit they could also sit in the middle. Other for-profit companies put workers on the non-profit’s payroll. The pay stub said the non profit name. The person worked somewhere else as a contractor. H-1B and others moved through that door and there was no limit and all sorts of exclusions that extend to non-profits that the for profits pay a simple 10% pass-through for.
I started a daily scrum and asked the normal questions. What did you do yesterday. What are you doing today. What is blocking you.
Similar to Elon's bullet points.
I was told I was not a fit for the culture. The project I was asked to deploy in two years was ready in three months. The two-million-dollar budget came in at sixty-five thousand. Management could not argue with the result. The first deployment was supposed to be a demonstration. I got an actual customer to pay for it. The non-profit had no system to receive the check. They were confused because I had actually delivered on the job they hired me to do.
They promoted me and said there were more projects and products. Then people pulled me aside and explained what you can and cannot do with intellectual property the government funded. That was the limit I had not fully seen. That is another story but you already know, I did the ethical thing.
The pattern is the same one that shows up in other organizations. A product is only valuable if the people running the place get their share. Shareholders and the public are downstream. If something could make the organization a trillion dollars and put nothing extra in the CEO’s or the board’s account, it does not get launched.
Question:
Who else has seen both the commercial and government/non-profit side of the business and did I capture it?
**Engineering Wednesday**
I left a private-equity company to go to a tech company in southwest Florida.
A company where the last product took 7 years to develop and still had issues. I stepped in and started fundamental waterfall and agile training and execution. 17 products in 3 years.
The second it worked in a lab or on a bench it went to the customer to give feedback. TRL 3 to 9 go go... We were having a blast and our customers loved us- I took the semiconductor philosophy to another field.
We were doing product development for international customers including governments, our own, as well. The work required real certifications and intense testing. Revenue moved from about $15 million to $51 million. That meant expanding manufacturing. The CEO came to the site and said he never expected to be there. The division existed to fill a portfolio gap and show vertical integration- it was never supposed to be profitable. This was a multi billion dollar company that we were a small division of.
Then the CEO said we had become a problem. The profits were uncomfortable. He did not want to issue a dividend that the shareholders would start to expect. So the money needed to be spent.
Buy environmental chambers, shaker tables, Keysight Oscilloscopes with all the bells and whistles is what I did. Investing in our ability pretest and move our launches up even quicker but this was not making folks happy because the investment was resulting in even more revenue and margin.
Read that again, because every word of it is true.
After that unexpected boost in revenue the spending arrived. Consultants we did not need, with direct ownership ties to leadership we were told to employ for ridiculous services we did not need. Contracts with no schedule and no deliverable. Product that left as empty boxes and came back as refunds and charges and our quality manager hit the exit door saying the amount of money involved was enough to make her think the mob was involved.
In the quarterly reviews the plant manager explained low or negative cost of goods.
That number is not possible if you are actually building what you ship.
I called the SEC. The response was that they needed at least $20 million in identified theft before they would move. They had limited agents and limited court time. I reported it inside the company as well. The director an attorney, below the person I reported ethical misconduct to called and told me the contracts without schedules or deliverables for massive amounts of money were fine to sign.
I left- I was not going to get caught up in it. They tried one time to cut me in and my questions made them uncomfortable.
I left and soon after half my team left too.
Six months later they removed the VP who I reported to, the general manager, the lawyers, and the others I had named internally.
To be clear if I had known - I would have stayed, I was very happy and couldn't wait to get up in the morning and make stuff.
Corruption is a buzz kill to innovators.
I had already moved into defense contracting trying to commercialize with people who had never sold on the open market. There the priority was charging hours, not hitting a number a customer would pay. It was bizarre.
The sequence is not unusual. Build something that works. Watch the margin appear. Then watch the margin get treated as a balance that has to be moved before anyone outside the deal notices it. The customer and the employee are both downstream of that decision.
Question:
Have you watched a division get punished for overperforming?
When a Private Equity took over my company froze wages and canceled every single employee benefit and were overheard telling the VP's to create an atmosphere for folks to want to leave ->
- I stopped working for my company and started working for my customers. That was my motivation to come to work each day.
I literally had no boss I was the GM of my high dollar cutting edge product that I created from scratch and commercialized with constant internal resistance. As a result after the first 50 million in orders - Siemens had let me run it bumper to bumper before the spin out.
When PE demanded I betray my semiconductor customers with poor quality, over priced components that their other company made... Which would have me working overtime to support in 7 day a week task force meetings- I left.
Went and developed new products for a company in SW Florida.
The PE went through 3 other employees that came in to take my place in a little over a year before losing a customer that was 40% of their bottom line with 60% margins.
I had two people I didn't know and my old customer calling me at all hours of the day nearly suicidal. I calmly explained what Kobayashi Maru was.
There was simply no solution.
The PE didn't care they spun the company off and got rich for it.
We aren't talking about thousands here we are talking billions.
Meanwhile, I am the one with the bad reputation.
They didn't do a single illegal thing either.
This is Private Equity explained in a single post
Lesson learned:
When a company changes hands, keep your own records. Pay stubs, benefit statements, reviews, every award and letter from a customer.
I keep mine in one fireproof file organizer. This one has 4.6 stars from 1,500+ reviews 👇
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Know your representatives and sign up for their official email lists.
Once you are verified as a constituent, replies from you actually reach staff. It is not a no-reply black hole. Most people never do this. The ones who do get read. Keep it short, specific, and factual.
Volume and persistence matter.
**Engineering Wednesday**
It's actually the same old story... but lets go back to the beginning.
In 1990 a set of tech companies looked at the same spreadsheet. Demand for engineers was rising. The supply of people who could do the work was not rising as fast. The result, left alone, was six-figure salaries. The millionaire tech bros. balked at that thought.
Those salaries would have come out of the margin.
Tech workers, mostly conservative, refused collective bargaining so were of little use to Democrats.
Tech workers, red dots in blue districts that interfered with Chamber of Commerce interests were of little use to Republicans.
So naturally...
The Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B category. The public argument was a shortage of talent during a recession when people were hustling to tech degrees for a lifelong career. The private arithmetic was simpler. A larger pool of workers who needed the sponsor to stay employed kept the wage from clearing where it otherwise would have been with strictly American talent.
The same arithmetic is now running on AI.
The salary that used to leave the company as payroll can stay inside as revenue if the model does the task and the company sells the output.
The worker trains the AI system as it had their replacement H1B- documents the edge cases, and corrects the failures until the failure rate is low enough to ship. Then the spot on the org chart is removed.
The check that used to arrive every two weeks for the STEM employee now arrives as a subscription or a usage fee paid to the AI vendor. The vendor is not doing this as a public service. The price will be set at what the buyer will pay once the alternative has been reduced.
It does not matter whether the replacement is a model in a browser or a robot on a floor. The structure is the same.
The cost that used to be a wage becomes a payment to the owner of the AI system. The people who used to receive the wage are told the efficiency is a general gain. The gain is real. It is also concentrated.
The CEO yacht and the private islands are not metaphors. They are what retained earnings look like when the largest line item on the old P&L has been converted into a product the same firm now sells.
The H-1B version required a statute and a lobby. The AI version requires a training run and a contract. Both treat the engineer’s pay as a residual that can be captured. One imported the labor. The other is trying to delete the need for it.
In every case our wages are seen as additions to their bottom line.
Our prosperity is an afterthought.
Question:
Have you already been asked to document your own work in a form a model can use?
Medical Tuesday-
American path: Bachelor’s degree with solid grades, then medical school, then residency.
Many of the countries supplying physicians: enter a five- or six-year program at eighteen, no separate undergraduate degree, and in some systems a 33 percent mark is a pass.
Congress and the states still filled taxpayer-funded seats and provisional licenses with that credential while American graduates remained unmatched.
Medical Tuesday
The training visa was supposed to end in a return home for foreign trained physicians.
Conrad 30 turned it into a career.
Congress has reauthorized and expanded it for thirty years. Each expansion is sold as a rural fix. None of the bills first funds the American graduate who already paid for the longer route.
Medical Tuesday
States could have used Medicaid and general-fund money to open residency seats for graduates of their own medical colleges.
A number of them instead enacted provisional licenses that reduce or waive the residency American graduates are still required to finish. The shortage was real enough to justify the foreign pathway.
It was not real enough to justify the seats.
The American Medical Association’s International Medical Graduates Section is roughly about 1 in 5 of the membership and has made expansion of Conrad, visa recapture, and faster processing official policy.
Congress receives that letter every year. It does not receive a letter from the unmatched American graduate.
The body that froze the seats in 1997 continues to accept the foreign pipeline as the solution to the scarcity it created.
**Medical Tuesday.**
Why does AI and Google report fewer malpractice claims against foreign doctors? Easy...they settle, they have to or risk exposing the whole scam.
Reports that foreign-trained physicians generate no more malpractice claims than American graduates, and sometimes fewer, require a look at how those claims are resolved before the count can be treated as proof of equal care.
The majority of medical malpractice cases are settled over 90% are.
The cases most likely to be settled are those in which the evidence of injury is strongest and an award is most probable.
A settlement removes the case from the public record of trials. It also removes the risk that a pattern of claims against physicians hired through a particular pathway will become visible.
If there were data to show a deviation in care - it would likely result in fewer trials, not more... and that is exactly what we see.
Hospitals and staffing groups that rely on foreign-trained physicians are protecting a large and continuous source of labor. A single claim can be managed. A series of claims that draws attention to the training pathway itself threatens the model. The institution therefore has a reason to resolve those claims early, before discovery, before a trial, and before the origin of the degree becomes part of the story.
An insurer facing a physician with a complete American record of undergraduate study, medical school, and residency has a credential that can be defended in court.
The same insurer facing a physician whose medical training began at eighteen in another country, under a different standard of passage, has a weaker public narrative. The rational course in the second case is settlement- no institution wants to admit this and open the floodgates to more claims.
The published rate of claims therefore measures the cases that were allowed to proceed far enough to be counted. It does not measure the cases that were closed before they could be counted, nor the institutional interest in keeping the foreign staffing arrangement intact. A number that is equal, or lower, is consistent with equal performance. It is also consistent with faster settlement of the claims that would have been most damaging to the pipeline.
Here is how the insurance side works...
Most hospital-employed physicians do not buy their own malpractice policy. The hospital or health system provides it, and large systems increasingly self-insure through a captive.
**How the coverage is structured**
Independent physicians and small groups still purchase commercial medical professional liability policies. They pay the premium, choose the carrier, and retain more control over settlement. Employed physicians, now the majority, are covered under the employer’s policy. The hospital selects the carrier or the captive, sets the limits, pays the premium, and controls the defense. The physician usually has no consent-to-settle right. The institution can settle without the physician’s agreement.
**Self-insurance and captives**
Large hospital systems rarely rely solely on the commercial market. They form captive insurance companies, licensed insurers they own, domiciled in places such as Vermont, Bermuda, or the Cayman Islands. The system pays premium to its own captive, which holds reserves and pays claims. Excess layers above a retention are often reinsured. The captive keeps underwriting profit and investment income inside the system and prices risk according to its own loss history rather than the open market. Healthcare captives are a substantial and long-standing part of the market.
**Why this matters to the settlement point**
When the hospital owns the captive, or carries a large self-insured retention, the first dollars of any claim come out of the institution’s own reserves. A claim that proceeds to trial risks publicity, discovery into staffing practices, and a public record that the degree was earned abroad under a different curriculum. A quiet settlement keeps the money inside the system’s control and keeps the origin of the training off the record. The commercial insurer defending an independent American graduate has a credential it can take to a jury. The captive defending an employed foreign-trained physician has both a weaker narrative and a direct financial interest in avoiding the trial that would test it.
This is the basis for the post. The claim counts reflect the cases that were allowed to become claims. They do not reflect the cases the institution’s own insurance vehicle closed early in order to protect the staffing model that generates the revenue.
Bookmark if you see the pattern.
Quote or repost your observation.
Comment below.
**Chief’s pick**
In my mind most everything I buy falls into one of two categories.
Cheap consumable run to fail
Never want to touch it again buy quality.
On that topic
I keep a pile of these on the desk, one in my backpack, and one in my luggage.
Laptop, dock, second screen, SD card, phone. One port is never enough. A 7-in-1 is the cheap fix. HDMI, a couple USB ports, SD, power pass-through.
They also die. Cheap hubs quit after a year. Port gets loose. HDMI flakes. I do not baby them. I buy another.
This one is $13. 4K HDMI, 100W pass-through, USB-C, USB-A, SD. I am not telling you it is Anker.
I am telling you it is the spare I throw in the bag when the good one is already plugged in.
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**Medical Tuesday.**
Don't waste the days before an election... make them sweat.
Whether the subject is the restriction of temporary skilled visas, the requirements of an election integrity bill, or the shortage of physicians, one body wrote the rules that produced each of them.
Again the root of our pain all came from OUR legislative branch.
Congress froze the number of Medicare-funded residency seats in 1997. It left that freeze in place while medical schools expanded and the population aged. It then permitted the expansion of waiver programs and provisional licenses that fill the resulting gap with foreign-trained physicians. At the same time it has declined, year after year, to lift the cap that would have trained more American graduates.
The same chambers have written the statutes that govern temporary skilled visas and the statutes that govern the documentation required to vote. In each case a majority of the House and Senate possessed the authority to enlarge domestic training, to prioritize American graduates, or to adopt the verification rules a majority of the public has repeatedly favored. They chose other measures. The hospitals, the staffing firms, the visa recruiters, and the organizations that lobby for continued foreign inflows received the predictable benefit. The unmatched American graduate and the patient who waits did not.
A crisis that can be ended by a simple majority vote, and that is instead maintained while the interests that profit from its continuation continue to receive the contracts and the letters, is not an accident of nature. It is a choice of the only body that had the power to choose otherwise.
An election year is the interval in which that choice can be answered. Before the election, not after.
Call your representative and both of your senators. Ask them, on the record, whether they will lift the 1997 residency freeze and place American graduates first before they expand another waiver or recapture another green card. Ask them whether they will support the verification rules the public has already favored. Write the answer down. If the answer is silence or a form letter, publish it. A majority of the House and Senate can end the scarcity they wrote. The weeks before an election are the weeks in which they are most likely to hear the question.
Find your member: house.gov/representatives/fi…
Senate: senate.gov/senators/senators…
Bookmark if you see the pattern.
Quote or repost your observation.
Comment below with the office you called.
They Passed Over American Doctors
Every year thousands of U.S.-trained physicians are shut out of medical residencies. In 2024 nearly 20 percent of U.S. medical school applicants, that is 8,869 people, failed to match. These are not dropouts or unqualified students. They are graduates who invested years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt only to be told there is no place for them.
At the same time more than a quarter of residency slots go to International Medical Graduates, many trained overseas. In 2025 alone 9,761 IMGs matched into U.S. residencies. Some programs favor them because they will work longer hours for less pay and have no leverage to push back.
The real choke point is not medical school. It is residency. Congress limits the number of Medicare funded residency slots and that cap has not kept up with the rapid growth in medical school enrollment. Every year this leaves thousands of American doctors unmatched while taxpayer dollars fund the training of foreign physicians who will stay in the U.S. workforce.
The Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2025 would add 14,000 new slots over seven years. Until that happens the U.S. will keep graduating doctors who never get to practice medicine and importing replacements to fill the gaps.
---
Citations:
• Norton Rose Fulbright – Congressional antitrust investigation of medical residency accreditation and matching programs, 2024
• American Medical Association – “Biggest Match Day Ever? Here’s What 2025 Numbers Reveal”
• Association of American Medical Colleges – “Medical School Enrollments Grow, Residency Slots Haven’t Kept Pace”
• People Magazine – “Medical Student Breaks Down After Residency Rejection”
• Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates – “Intealth Applauds IMG Success in the 2025 U.S. Residency Match”
From Citizen to Replaceable: How Unauthorized Labor Undercut American Work
Post #8: The Reporting Gap
Most worksite cases start with a tip. Almost no one files one.
ICE, the Department of Labor, and the IRS do not patrol every job site looking for cash envelopes or stolen Social Security numbers. They act on reports. A fraction of one percent of the people who see unauthorized hiring ever call. The rest assume someone else will, or they calculate the risk of retaliation and stay quiet. The result is that the mechanisms in the earlier posts continue because the agencies never receive the address, the shift time, or the contractor’s name.
The channels that actually move cases are narrow and specific.
ICE tip line: 866-347-2423 (24/7)
Online form: ice.gov/webform/ice-tip-form
You can leave the name field blank and still submit. Give the company name, address, what you saw, and how many.
IRS Form 3949-A for cash payroll, failure to withhold, or false filings:
irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f3949a.p…
Anonymous is allowed. An award requires a separate form and your name, and only if money is collected.
Department of Labor Wage and Hour for wage theft or misclassification: 1-866-487-9243
People who do report describe the same sequence. Internal HR or the owner learns a complaint was made. Attorneys appear. The reporting employee is isolated, transferred, or laid off. Coworkers who saw the same thing stay silent because they watched what happened to the first person. The case still proceeds if the tip reached the agency, but the personal cost is immediate and the agency timeline is long.
That gap is why the cash job, the stolen number, the contractor layer, and the refill after a raid persist. The owner faces a low probability of a tip and a manageable fine if one arrives. Raising the wage
From Citizen to Replaceable: How Unauthorized Labor Undercut American Work
Post #7: The Historical Quiet Period
From 1924 to 1965 the United States ran a low-immigration regime. Real wages for native workers rose.
The 1924 Immigration Act set national-origin quotas that sharply reduced arrivals from outside northern and western Europe. Annual legal immigration fell and stayed low for four decades. During those years the native-born population grew, manufacturing expanded, and real wages in construction, manufacturing, and other manual trades increased. A single industrial wage could support a household. That period is the closest the modern economy has come to a tight labor market for citizens without a large unauthorized substitute.
1965 ended the quota system. The Hart-Celler Act shifted to family reunification and opened larger flows from Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Legal immigration rose. Illegal immigration rose with it. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granted amnesty to roughly three million people and promised employer sanctions that were never seriously enforced. After 1986 the unauthorized population grew again. Employers in agriculture, construction, meatpacking, and services learned they could hire outside the legal wage.
The current volume is different from earlier waves because earlier waves faced tighter interior enforcement and fewer state benefits. From the 1920s through the mid-1960s an illegal stay was more likely to end in removal. After the 1980s and especially after the expansion of sanctuary policies, driver’s licenses, and state medical coverage, an illegal stay became compatible with steady work and public support. The quiet period showed what happens to citizen wages when the unauthorized pool is small. The years since 1965 and 1986 showed what happens when that pool is allowed to grow and then subsidized.
The mechanisms in the earlier posts (cash work, stolen numbers, contractor layers, benefits stacking, and the refill after a raid) are the operating system that replaced the quiet period. They keep the effective labor supply larger than the citizen population alone. Real wages in the trades that once supported a family have not recovered the relative ground they held when immigration was low.
If you have watched wages in construction, packing, or hospitality stay flat while the unauthorized share of the crew rose, that is the long result of leaving the quiet period.
Bookmark this. Share or quote it. Comment if the wage history in your trade matches the break after 1965 or 1986. Follow for Post #8.