Word: wages
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Prime Minister insisted that drastic reform was necessary "to prevent an actual collapse" of the Israeli economy. After seven months of voluntary wage and price restraints, the country's inflation rate is still soaring at 300% annually. Burdened with enormous military expenditures and extensive social-welfare programs, the government last year ran a $1.8 billion deficit on a $23 billion budget. The foreign debt, the world's highest per capita, has reached $23 billion, and foreign-currency reserves have dropped to $2 billion...
...Miami's shabby, pastel-colored Liberty City, a knot of young blacks laments the Cuban invasion. "They're messing us up," says one. "They're taking bread out of our mouths." Another complains that the Cubans and Haitians are willing, even eager, to work for the legal minimum wage, or less. Many of the young blacks say they would rather not work than hire themselves out for what they consider insultingly low pay. Says Dorothy Fields, founder of Miami's Black Archive, a historical research agency: "It appears that we have a group who feels the world owes them...
...from a village in Michoacan, Mexico, and drifted north to Seattle, hoping to earn enough to start his own business back home ("upholstery or construction, senor, it would not matter"). But by 1979 ! his wife Guadelupe advised him that prospects for founding a business or even earning a living wage in Michoacan were nil, so Guillermo brought Guadelupe and their four children to join him in Seattle. Today he earns $400 a month from a boss who deducts $250 for rent on a ramshackle apartment that the boss owns. Somehow, though, Guillermo is saving money to buy a sewing machine...
...less costly to Third World nations is the steady migration of well- trained professionals in search of a life, any life, in America. The wage differential between the U.S. and Mexico, for example, is 15 to 1. For many others, even poverty in the U.S. is preferable to an uneasy prosperity at home: thus lawyers and doctors from Central America may be found washing cars or working as bellhops in Miami. Other highly skilled people are driven to emigrate not by economic choice but by political circumstance. During their genocidal 45-month reign in Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge killed roughly...
Thomas Muller, an immigration expert at the Urban Institute, a Washington- based think tank, argues that the large numbers of illegal aliens in the U.S. are less a problem than a manifestation of American economic dynamism. "We have always depended on some low-wage labor," he says. "The illegal alien situation today is the continuation of a pattern." Muller's assertion may help explain one of the glaring contradictions of current U.S. immigration policy: the meager funding given to the INS to apply existing laws. The INS enforcement budget for 1985 comes to only $366 million for a staff...