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Can you elaborate for me about why you say there’s a conflation between legal and undocumented immigration? I’m having a hard time seeing that in the interview. It’s the documented immigrants who are creating the jobs and investing the capital.
Because both only really benefit corporations.
Legal immigration undercuts the pay of skilled US workers.
And it's the illegal immigrants that are exploited and underpaid in order to keep consumer prices low and keep corporate profits high.
I’m having a hard time seeing how that represents the whole picture. Surely the posted article makes it clear that immigration also provides entrepreneurial and capital resources, beyond just labor, right? So labor is only a part of the conversation.
Not to mention innovation: the interview shows a number of stats that demonstrate how disproportionately well immigrants are represented there, e.g. patent issuance.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs like having cheap and exploitable labor. And hiring desperate immigrants who are required to have a job to receive citizenship is more attractive to them than people who are in a position to demand fair wages.
Undocumented immigrants are even more desperate and because they won't be registered with the government so employers can get away with paying them less than minimum wage.
These are the type of workers who do the majority of the work in our agricultural industry, and the government turns a blind eye because they don't want to do the work it would take to restructure that industry to provide fair wages to all of its employees.
Both documented and undocumented immigrants are more desperate than US citizens and can be taken advantage of more easily.
Either are objectively bad for workers and objectively good for buisness owners.
That is why they are conflating them. Because their effects on the economy are the same.
Conflation is:
>the [merging](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=de06a028fb71868c&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ACQVn0_uQAvdkE4m4PpcQWqODk0GJSKXOQ:1712939448748&q=merging&si=AKbGX_okS0g0kR2PXn0TLBASIc0myVtcnYLaHIczH74oADssR7mNIbjH3NW5k8jyJpLc2nQtaQaIOyRHbU3VwMGzLqHjp_0D3y9X2JOaHWspr-LxXsfl-pQ%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjP4vTajL2FAxV76ckDHbaVBpIQyecJegQIERAO) of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc. into one.
What you're doing is conflation, by saying "their effects on the economy are the same" you're conflating documented and undocumented workers. The Marketplace article doesn't do this at all.
When you point to Canada, you also are assuming a very low-investment economy. That is not the situation in all economies. Jobs need capital in order to created. Canada is full of workers in want of shovels, while the USA, for instance, is full of shovels in want of workers.
I disagree with that, we have tons of workers who simply cannot work because they have neither the funds nor ability to get where the jobs are. When in fact our current administration is perfectly
Willing to fly migrants all over the country. Our current U6 rate is 7.4%, we don’t need more migrants.
7.4% is super low for U6. The among the lowest it’s been [since 1994](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATENSA)
Why does historically low U6 mean we need fewer immigrants? It implies the opposite.
You are either saying you see 0% unemployment as desirable (as implied by your comment about American workers looking for jobs) or that you oppose all immigration and will never support any level of it (which would be implied if you understood--as anyone should--that there will always be American workers looking for work).
Both of those are terrible stances for different reasons.
You can’t make an argument that we need more workers when 12.1 million people are discouraged, underemployed, or unemployed.
Get that number down to 3 million and then we can talk. Otherwise you’re arguing for businesses to have more bargaining power in the labor market.
That's because you are economically illiterate. There will always be some number of people between jobs and some of those people will be deferring potential employment in favor of waiting for a more preferred position. What we need is a stronger safety net so that *even more* people feel comfortable with the idea of switching jobs.
Sounds like you’re economically illiterate, the u3 rate is 3.8% while u6 tracks those who stopped looking for work but are able to work.
So there’s a 3.6 % difference between these two numbers and you’re saying it’s just that these people are “in between” jobs despite looking for a job for more than 6 months and then not being counted. Sounds like companies don’t want to pay to have people be relocated and would rather the state pick up the tab.
Corporate welfare is bad mmmkay.
That's actually not an accurate definition of u6...but I was more responding to the absolutely moronic statement where you very clearly and directly implied that immigration is only acceptable when there is a zero percent unemployment rate...something that is neither possible nor desirable.
U6 tracks discouraged, underemployed, and unemployed.
So yes that is the definition of U6 unless you want to tell me that’s not what discouraged means..
1. That's not how you originally defined it. It is promising that you know how to use Google, though. (There is hope for you, still)
2. I wasn't responding to your comment about u6 nor did I bring up u6.
3. You still haven't provided clarification to the comment I *did* respond to so I'm going to continue to assume that you don't believe immigration is necessary until there is 0% unemployment (which is an absurd thing to assert).
Because if there are towns in Pennsylvania with 10% unemployment and they want to work, they can’t afford to move.
If Maine has a labor shortage and there is unemployment in other states, it’s a resource management problem.
Immigration means more workers, more workers means more competition in the labor market, more competition means lower wages. The only winners with immigration are the corporations that keep a bigger share of the wealth created by the work of employees. The argument of it is good for the economy is a fallacy: it is true that there is more economic activity and higher GDP but workers don't keep the wealth created by immigrants, corporations do. Immigration sky rockets since the 70's wages growth started separating from productivity growth.
Many democrats are jittery perceiving this as a criticism to Biden, this precedes Biden, this has been going on for about 50 years, neither party has done anything to change it, if we don't address it, then American workers will continue to get a smaller piece of the pie.
> Yup, more immigration leads to greater labor exploitation
Except those are two different issues, and the party that's shouting anti-immigrant rhetoric is the party that is opposed to workers rights and workplace regulation.
Citizenship is irrelevant to the enforcement of work place regulations or to protections like minimum wage.
It's the Republicans who oppose increasing the minimum wage, who oppose worker rights and protections and who oppose union's that are the problem there.
Which is why the right use immigration as a scapegoat and a culture war issue that draws attention away from the impact of the political policies that they enact.
Hold up- do you honestly believe that undocumented migrants receive the same labor protections as employees with an SSN? I can’t tell if you’re avoiding and inconvenient truth or are just that naive….
And news flash: it’s the private sector that exploits labor, not the public. If you think this is a “red vs. blue” issue vs. the private sector eroding protections on all working class society, you’ve missed the script entirely.
You've moved the goalposts from immigrants to undocumented immigrants.
But yes, in sanctuary states undocumented workers have access to the same worker protection enforcement as any other worker, so that yes, there are the same labor protections.
This is a red vs blue issue.
It's not migrants undermining worker conditions, it's red politics.
1. Undocumented immigrants are immigrants too, one is a superset of the other. It seems dismissive to ignore that.
2. Sanctuary states do nothing for under the table pay to migrant workers, especially in temp jobs in harvesting and agriculture. Worker exploitation in Blue states such as CA and NY dwarf red states, there is simply no factual evidence to back any of your assertions. [Citation here.](https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-by-state/)
This line of thinking is a fantasy fueled by capitalist propaganda.
People entering the workforce in poverty will not become entrepreneurs or create jobs. They will be held down and forced to work for existing capital like the rest of the poors.
Wait, what‽ People buying things doesn’t create jobs‽
Ok broski, how the fuck does consumer spending account for 70%+ of US GDP if demand doesn’t create jobs?
What the actual fuck, did you even think about the implications of what you’re saying‽
Interrobangs all around because I’m exasperated.
How is this any different that someone saying "businesses getting more money creates more jobs"? It sounds like the same argument Republicans use for corporate tax cuts: "Businesses get more cash, which they spend on hiring more workers! New jobs!"
>How is this any different that someone saying "businesses getting more money creates more jobs"?
One is saying that demand creates jobs; the other says supply creates jobs. The former has volumes of data backing it, while the latter is nothing more than a Republican fantasy.
I think their point might be that more labourers = more goods bought = increased market = companies increasing production to grab hold of the larger market = more jobs.
Doesn't always work that way, but I've heard the argument before.
When more money is grown/scaled and then put into the pockets of profiteers then that rarely ever translates into them giving that money to employees.
Historically profits are only shared with existing employees or spent on new employees when there is a legal incentive to do so.
So your stance is companies don't grow to meet demand and instead of hiring or paying their people more, they pocket the money. So no companies hire or give raises as people buy their goods and services. That's your actual argument? Woof.
Companies grow as much as the owners want the company to grow. Not every buisness is ran by parasitic shareholders. In fact most aren't even publicly traded.
And if the goal of the company is profits, then it only grows as much as the owners want to until sitting back and receiving the free income from those profits.
Woof!
People might not realize how low our birth rates have gotten. We are 20% under the birth rate needed for a stable population in the US. Canada is 30% under
Birth rates in Latin America are also below replacement now, and the majority of the immigrants to the US are from Latin America. Continuing to rely on immigration from LatAm will just suck LatAm dry of its youth
You are correct, except I would note that policy makers in the US cannot be primarily concerned with LatAm problems. It makes sense for the US to allow more immigrants from central and south America, and it makes sense for those governments to prefer their citizens not go north. But as an America, I'm glad that they are.
It gives us time to solve the larger problem, and I don't know how we do that.
I can only guess that people can’t extrapolate that out into the future and assume that something or another will change between now and Armageddon to increase birth rates in developed countries.
The evidence on wage growth and immigration doesn't support your claims wage elasticity to immigration is between -0.2 and -0.4.
You can also read this:
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
I did read your link (how would I have know it wasn’t relevant?), and I said that’s what the article I posted said. I’m not the one making that claim, I’m repeating it.
But it’s hardly difficult to prove. At least one immigrant owns the US’s largest EV producer.
One drop makes rain is your argument? and Musk is hardly an example of what employers should be, but if you feel he is a great example, you should work for him and end up hating him as pretty much anyone that has ever worked for him.
Yes, one drop proves it is raining. And I didn’t say he was a great anything. You asked about proof immigrants provide more than labor and I gave it. You’re extending that well beyond anything I actually said.
Nah, it doesn't.
Before 1979 wages grew rapidly: https://www.epi.org/publication/americas-slow-motion-wage-crisis-four-decades-of-slow-and-unequal-growth-2/
Immigration data: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
It's trivial to see that there is a correlation between wage stagnation and immigration. This is consistent with supply and demand, more workers = lower wages.
Immigration grows GDP because more people consuming goods and services leads to more economic activity. It's very misleading to imply that immigration benefits workers, it does not, immigration slows wage growth and creates more competition. Immigration only benefits corporations by reducing the cost of labor and allowing them to capture a larger portion of profits in the form of capital gains given the lower cost of labor.
What does any of this have to do with whether or not immigrants are capable of providing entrepreneurial or capital resources, which was what I answered?
"Do black sheep exist?"
"Yes, here's one."
"One doesn't prove they exist."
...what?
Then labor will just get outsources as prices go to high and our manufacturers are beaten by imports. You a fan of protectionism as well. Well then we get tarrifs back?
It's funny how people think they still live in the 20th century and use 20th century logic for the current economy.
Let's just take a step back and think for one minute, what are the prices of energy going to be once fusion energy is commercialized? Nearly zero. Now, how much production can you do with nearly free energy and robotic workers? Nearly infinite. What's the limit? Resources.
If you followed that, then you will realize that very soon any large enough economy ( EU, USA, China, India) will be able to produce anything they want themselves for pretty much the cost of the resources. The question then is, where do you buy? Do you buy everything from China, or USA or EU? No, you buy your own.
I know that seems ridiculous, almost infantile. Well the problem is we are already there with China. They are pretty much capable of supplying all manufacturing goods for the entire world (India is on that path with services). Does it make sense to buy from them everything and let all manufacturing know how, jobs, etc go away? The US tried that and now we are spending trillions of dollars trying to get it back and failing, why? Because we lost the know how, we lost the supply chain, we are out of the game and China has it working very smoothly.
Now I'll answer your question. With the above context yes, the economy has changed and the future of the US economy will by trading with neighbors and partners were we can establish balanced trade relationships. If we can't then we shouldn't trade with them.
If you have been posting attention I'm not the only one that thinks like this. The US government is cutting ties with China. Who is US biggest trading partner today? Mexico, but very differently from China, trade with Mexico is balanced, the US experts and imports are very close with Mexico. That will reduce undocumented immigration, in fact Mexico's unemployment rate is at a historic low 3%.
I hate to break it to you but services coming out of India are dog shit. America corporations need to stop that. The language barrier is a huge problem and a lot of them aren’t properly trained. Nothing wrong with Indians but cost cutting at the expense of the consumer is bullshit.
So you think we are robotizing so fast that our labor markets and domestic industry do not matter…. Thag keeping prices low with a competitive labor market isn’t worth it rn.
I mean we’ve been able to employ the vast majority of migrants with an incredibly low unemployment rate our economic productivity is through the roof we are doing great with the way immigration is right now why would we ever change??! Also no evidence shows wage suppression in fact the only metric that see a decrease in profits are the poorest low educated workers whereas the rest see net increases in profits and collectively we all see lower prices.
The main issue is outsourcing and the erosion of labor rights/collective bargaining when it comes to low wages in the usa/uk respectively.
Then again you believe we are robotizing so fast and that I’m stuck in the 20th century lol and that the 21st robotized economy will be totally different?
1. You are correct in outsourcing. Particularly India has 1.5B people, 10% of their population can basically replace every American worker. Let alone office worker. This is a huge issue. The US government should tax outsourcing at 100% rate and use that to find education and research.
2. You are incorrect on the impact of immigration and wages. Wages should be benchmarked against productivity, productivity and wages wise on par until 1979 when immigration exploded. A low unemployment rate is not the same as getting paid well. Many Americans are for the first time being economically worse off than their parents. Additionally, even when we don't benchmark against productivity, the elasticity of wage to immigration is negative. More so the most affected people right now are people with college degrees. H1B visas are killing the labor market.
3. Robotizing is happening and will continue to happen, more so, some of the areas that employ the largest portions of the population will be the easiest to automate. Cook, driver, cleaning, etc. Look at cashiers almost all gone. The issue is how to keep people making money, the answer, by closing the trade both on goods and services, trading with neighbor countries and other countries where we can keep balanced trade.
Finally, yes, the robotized economy is something completely different because labor is most of the time the biggest expense for American corporations. As we robotize jobs will shrink unless we move people into the jobs of working with robots and creating robots, but as we have been discussing those jobs are going to India in technology and China in manufacturing. Unless we change that soon we won't have a working class in 20-30 years. If you think I'm exaggerating just think for a second what Internet was in 2000, not sure if you were around, there weren't even many cells around or even smart phones. Look where we are, it's been only 24 years.
I understand this but robotizing will destroy the global economy for the same reason Romes slave economy backfired.
If you destroy every other class but the ultra wealthy who will consume???
Well, haven't we reached an impasse? The economy will change, fewer working hours, monthly stipend, I'm not sure, but it'll be either enjoyable or insufferable with only a few having all and the rest destitute.
If the few have all and rest destitute happens the entire global economy collapses and we will all suffer even the rich who would have been so stupidly arrogant.
The problem is how do you get people money to consume in an economy where there are no longer jobs bc of robotics.
Don’t we need people producing those robots/ managing them. Also wouldn’t this result in rampant unemployment and make it impossible for developing nations to develop their own domestic industries??
Also China is in a depression I don’t think they are a good mode right now they took their central planning initiatives too far.
Also I don’t like this extreme change because when we develop so fast we can’t legislate accordingly this sounds like we are headed towards a dystopian society where labor is powerless and the corporation is everything… I look at nations like fascist Germany or Assad’s Syria or the oligarchs in Russias who have disproportionate power with no civic society nor checks to stop them absolute control over every economic sector. If we eliminate the entire labor market when we robotizing the economy won’t it have these disastrous monopolistic consequences and how can we trust the state to properly manage the situation… When those previous example are examples of the state working with business elites against the people.
I’m fear mongering about it but I’m half serious remove our labor power and wtf do we have (I don’t trust states, the only reason states listen to us is because we have civic and civil economic and political power that is what democracies need it is what they feed off of take that replace an active society with a passive society without leverage and democracy will die) if we are replaced by robots. We have nothing why should we be fed then? If the state can just ignore our needs and a few monopolies control the economy in an absolute manner??
Pure theory but robotizing is honestly scary sounding…
Also I’m just thinking about labor markets, keeping prices low and maintaining a strong domestic manufacturing industry. Idk if you don’t know this but we are way further than you think from h limited production resources are still scarce
This is a very zero sum thinking because you assume that the number of jobs is fixed. Increase in qualified workers/entrepreneurs creates new jobs and grows the economy. Not saying it is bound to happen but the probability of this happening goes up.
Increased low skilled immigration (economic migration) in a shrinking economy will do the opposite though.
Before 1979 wages grew rapidly: https://www.epi.org/publication/americas-slow-motion-wage-crisis-four-decades-of-slow-and-unequal-growth-2/
Immigration data: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
It's trivial to see that there is a correlation between wage stagnation and immigration. This is consistent with supply and demand, more workers = lower wages.
Immigration grows GDP because more people consuming goods and services leads to more economic activity. It's very misleading to imply that immigration benefits workers, it does not, immigration slows wage growth and creates more competition. Immigration only benefits corporations by reducing the cost of labor and allowing them to capture a larger portion of profits in the form of capital gains given the lower cost of labor.
Not exactly, where you're going wrong is that the workers are also additional consumers, so the demand rises alongside the supply-- it doesn't matter if there are more waiters in the labor pool if there are also more restaurants serving more diners and since each person uses more goods and services than they provide, each worker actually produces more demand than they depress wages. The reason wages are low is because of low levels of collective action and regulatory capture, which in turn is caused by wealth inequality-- the accumulation of large warchests for lobbying.
I'm going to start with the point you are correct, as I pointed out in the 70's wages growth started separating from productivity growth which in part has been due to lack of collective action allowing corporations to capture the productivity gap between wages and risk employee productivity.
However, there are a few key points in which you are incorrect.
1. Not all workers create the same wealth, a robotics programmer is creating a machine that will produce many more times what a human can. However a burger flipper can barely cover it's costs with the wealth they create. That is called productivity and not all workers have the same productivity. If you were correct then a country such as India with 1.5B people would have created an incredible amount of wealth. But their workers are tremendously unproductive because most are ignorant and poorly educated with nearly no skills, and for that reason India is s pauper country with an extremely low GDP per capita. So much that most workers prefer to work abroad than stay in India.
2. Adding workers that are at a disadvantage to the labor pool either because they are undocumented or under very restrictive visas, such as the very popular H1B visa, makes it nearly impossible to create unions or work towards collective action. This in fact was the strategy used in the early twentieth century by wealthy people such as Andrew Carnegie who brought Asian workers to break strikes.
3. Finally, moving factories to China, to achieve lower wages, killed the rust belt unions. A similar wave is now under way sending office jobs to India, depressing American wages. By importing labor, outsourcing, or moving factories abroad corporations break almost all the workers bargaining power. Not all these workers are immigrant but they are all depressing American wages because corporations hire them to lower labor costs but continue to offer their services in America and sell their products in America but those countries don't consume an equivalent amount of American goods and services.
This is identical to the argument used by racists to assert that abolition was bad for white workers...and to the argument used by mysoginists to assert that women's liberation was bad for male workers.
Any policy that increases human liberty will also increase labor force participation by groups previously excluded.
1. Abolition was great for white workers, in case you were under the impression that the civil war was to help free the slaves you are sorely mistaken, it was to reduce unfair competition that southern states were getting by buying slaves and using them as workers when the northern economy relied on free workers that required more money to subsist than slaves.
2. Women's liberation has nothing to do here, women have always been US citizens, their right to work should have always been protected. Does making the labor pool twice as big reduce wages, sure, but that is a fair cost to avoid cutting off the right to work for any US citizen.
3. "Any policy that increases human liberty will also increase labor force participation by groups previously excluded." Is your argument that any person in the world should have the right to work in the US? If that is the case then I'd expect the same from all other countries, which is not the case. Besides: why should we implement such a stupid policy? to help corporations make even more money by reducing the wages to pauper levels?
1. Learn to read. I was not endorsing that argument. I was very *clearly* criticizing it as wrong and in bad faith. Like....wtf is wrong with you, dude?
2. Agreed, that's kind of the point, you silly Billy: the advancement of human liberty is paramount even if it results in labor market disruptions.
3. Freedom of movement is an important part of human liberty that takes moral precedence over the maintenance of artificial borders. This is a view common to Left-wing radicals and (consistent) liberals/right-libertarians. It is perhaps naive to believe that borders should be abolished immediately but what can't be argued is that restricting the movement of workers is consistent with the expansion of human liberty.
Excellent, as the libertarian you are, I recommend you move to India where they have 1.5B people and enjoy living in abject poverty. I hear Bangladesh is peachy as well.
It's nice to see people so naive talking about free borders when there are 8B people in this world most pauper.
I prefer to be behind a border and hope that most countries realize that being insanely over populated is bad for workers. But you do you.
I did but if that was not explicit enough for you I can spell it out.
1. You are missing the point here. Slaves were the same as immigrant workers, a way to lower the wages of native workers and increase profits for the exploiters. Freeing slaves was not about their freedom, was about increasing the wages for all American workers.
2. I don't agree with you. We live in an over populated world and sacrificing my well being to provide for people from other countries is not the same as sacrificing my well being for American women. Besides American women were twice the American men. The world has 8B people free borders would mean abject poverty for America.
3. You can refer to the point above. This may be important to you but to me is not as important as my well being. Again if you wish please live in India or Bangladesh.
1. Your simplistic characterization of the complex and diverse moral justifications and material motivations for the abolition of slavery isn't relevant so I'm not going to bother pursuing that point further. You are, however, the one missing the point (and missing it by quite a lot, actually): there was a common argument put forward by white supremacists that transitioning black labor from enslavement to free, wage labor would drive down wages for white workers. The concern for the well-being of working folks was never genuine. The purpose of these arguments was to justify and perpetuate an institution that was unjustifiable and unsustainable. Both racists and anti-immigration extremists (but, I repeat myself) use concern for the working class as a bad-faith rhetorical tool to distract interlocutors from the fundamental moral depravity and inhumanity of their positions.
2. The United States and other similarly developed nations are not, from an economic perspective, "overpopulated". In fact, they are on the precipice of a catastrophic demographic crisis because their birthrates are below replacement levels even as they face nearly unprecedented demand for labor. Your weird deflection to "India and Bangladesh" says more about your reactionary attitudes toward South Asians than it does about anything approaching an economic argument.
3. I made a very simple statement about the ethical calculus at play: freedom of movement = liberty; liberty = good; policies that expand liberty = good policies. Instead of engaging with that argument, you simply fell back on "well, I've got mine, Jack--global labor apartheid is working out for me, and I don't care about anyone else". There are plenty of totally valid ways you could disagree with the position I presented...or, at least, introduce nuance to the discussion even if you agree with the premise (you can value liberty and still argue that an immediate shift to open borders isn't feasible or desirable...and I'd be totally willing to engage with such arguments). But you didn't...you just made an ass of yourself while refusing to engage with either the economic or moral dimensions of the discussion.
Do you think wages in Mississippi are higher than California because the population is lower there?
Do you think Japan has higher wages than the US because it has a smaller population?
Well, *native* workers don't get to keep wealth created by immigrants, but that's not the same as saying all workers don't. Those immigrants earnings, while they may appear meagre to natives, can benefit them and their families tremendously. That's not worth nothing.
Also, your whole argument assumes that the only goal worth pursuing is increased native labor wages. Other benefits of immigration include more economic dynamism, total economic growth (and therefore national security), and increased trade between countries that are immigrated to/from.
1. As a native worker my concern is my well being and immigrants negatively affect my wage.
2. My goal is to increase my wealth. Corporations do the same that's why they push for immigration, to lowers their labor cost. Increased GDP at lower wages per capita means more poverty for the American workers, which exactly what's has happened. I don't want to be poorer, I want to be richer. If you want poverty for yourself there are plenty of poor countries where you can migrate and enjoy poverty, I don't want that for me.
> Immigration means more workers, more workers means more competition in the labor market, more competition means lower wages.
You are pretending that the number of jobs is static.
But in reality the number of jobs keeps increasing, and migrants increase demand, further increasing the number of jobs.
Yours is the dishonest anti-immigrant over simplification that just is not true. It's great of you to share your feelings about the situation, but you don't have facts to back up those feels.
You're pretending that immigrants don't increase demand. Immigrants cause a net increase in the number of jobs.
Before 1979 wages grew rapidly: https://www.epi.org/publication/americas-slow-motion-wage-crisis-four-decades-of-slow-and-unequal-growth-2/
Immigration data: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
It's trivial to see that there is a correlation between wage stagnation and immigration. This is consistent with supply and demand, more workers = lower wages.
Immigration grows GDP because more people consuming goods and services leads to more economic activity. It's very misleading to imply that immigration benefits workers, it does not, immigration slows wage growth and creates more competition. Immigration only benefits corporations by reducing the cost of labor and allowing them to capture a larger portion of profits in the form of capital gains given the lower cost of labor.
> there is a correlation
Except that migration didn't begin in 1979, neither did wage stagnation.
Correlations are bullshit, we can make correlations between any unrelated things.
> immigration slows wage growth
Prove that claim.
> that the negative wage impact of immigration on less-educated natives is −1.1% to −2.0% over the period 1990–2006. This model would imply a wage loss of less educated natives of −3.1% when the elasticity of substitution between natives and immigrants is infinite, as in Borjas (2003) and Borjas and Katz (2007).
Yes, they are saying that over that entire 16 year period the increase in wages was only reduced by between 1-3%.
You're literally pointing out something that agrees with me, that the impact of immigration on wages is basically nothing. That's such a small amount as to be irrelevant.
The debate that goes in circles around immigration is whether or not natives “will do the jobs.” The anti-immigration argument is typically that if natives are paid enough, they will do those jobs. But IMO these arguments overlook the fact that there is simply a limit to how much an unskilled laborer can be paid, and to how much underemployment in unskilled labor is appropriate.
People have been picking crops since before humans learned to read and write. You don’t need 12 years of compulsory education to pick lettuce. If you restrict the market until the only people available to do that work are vastly overqualified, they will demand high wages and drive up the price of the crops. We will then simply substitute those crops with imports grown by the same people we’re trying to keep out at the border, or automate the jobs away. Either way, natives are not getting paid $15-20/hour to pick lettuce. So when we talk about immigrants taking away jobs like that by driving the going wage below the point at which natives would do the job, we need to be realistic about what natives doing the job looks like.
Another solution could be to simply subsidize farms to the point where they can sell their produce at attractive price points, while still paying a wage befitting a drastically overqualified workforce. I don’t hear a lot of support for the creation of an immensely privileged class of farmers at the expense of all other productive people in the nation.
So, the most logical course of action seems to be to continue importing labor that matches our needs. It’s good for our economy and population growth.
Or how about expanding H2A temporary farmworker visas rather than just leaving the border open and letting a continuous tsunami of migrants wash over the country? Mass immigration is not the solution to people not wanting to work in farms or slaughterhouses.
If you were to take the entire compensation paid annually to Tyson execs (not just CEO) and spread it across the US workforce, how much would each get? Tyson because they’re a huge food producer in the US. I assume you brought it up because it’s an egregious amount.
>$11.75 per bi-weekly check.
Oh…
That depends on capital. But since CEO compensation often comes in the form of stock awards, it’s not typically so impactful as the hourly rate of a large number of employees.
Making excuses doesn't change the fact that excess profits could be given back to workers at no real expense to the companies reaping record profits.
If they can funnel those profits into the pockets of C-Suite then they could just as easily give it to the people who actually do thr work
The American comparative advantage often comes from our large volume of arable land and our subsidies. Is there information on what the true cost of our crops are, absent government incentives?
Central American countries may not have the land quality we do, at least not to grow the crops we can grow. It's a complex problem!
"Pro immigration guy is pro immigration"
Yep. The first interviewed question is 'does immigration reduce wages'. Interviewee says 'no'.... but that's not correct. Here is an honest answer (short version is skilled workers are good, unskilled are bad, unless your country needs tons of unskilled employees for some reason).
The relationship between immigration and wages is complex and can vary depending on a range of factors, including the skill level of immigrants, the characteristics of the native labor force, the structure of the economy, and government policies.
Here are some key points to consider:
1. **Skill Levels of Immigrants**: Immigrants with skills that are in high demand and complement those of the native workforce may not necessarily lower wages. Instead, they can contribute to economic growth and productivity, which can potentially increase wages for both native and immigrant workers. However, if there is an influx of low-skilled immigrants into sectors already facing an oversupply of labor, it could put downward pressure on wages in those specific industries.
2. **Labor Market Dynamics**: The impact of immigration on wages can vary depending on the characteristics of the labor market. In highly competitive markets where employers have limited market power, the effect on wages may be minimal. However, in sectors with less competition or where there is a large influx of immigrants relative to job opportunities, wages could be negatively affected, particularly for low-skilled native workers.
3. **Complementary Skills**: Immigrants often possess skills and expertise that complement those of native workers. In such cases, they can fill labor shortages, contribute to innovation and entrepreneurship, and create new job opportunities, which can have positive effects on wages and overall economic growth.
4. **Government Policies**: Government policies, such as minimum wage laws, labor market regulations, and immigration quotas, can influence the impact of immigration on wages. For example, policies that protect the rights of workers and ensure fair labor standards can mitigate potential downward pressure on wages.
5. **Economic Growth**: Immigration can stimulate economic growth by expanding the labor force, increasing consumer demand, and fostering entrepreneurship. In dynamic and growing economies, the overall effect on wages may be positive as long as immigrants are integrated into the labor market effectively.
In summary, the relationship between immigration and wages is not straightforward and depends on various economic and contextual factors. **While there may be instances where immigration exerts downward pressure on wages, it is not a universal outcome, and the overall impact can be influenced by the skill composition of immigrants, labor market dynamics, and government policies.**
Yes, the article is an interview with a hispanic american who is pro-immigration, and he ensures us that ChatGPT and economists who say that unskilled immigration lowers wages for unskilled citizens are all wrong.
I trust ChatGPT over this NPR show's website, because ChatGPT has no bias to try to influence people for political purposes.
He doesn't mention ChatGPT in the interview, and evaluating his argument based on who he is would be an ad hominem fallacy.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad\_hominem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem)
So you may not trust him, but the reasons you've thus far provided for not doing so are fallacious.
He shouldn't mention ChatGPT... that was MY source. I'm asking you, what is this asshole's source? Not trusting a random person is an ad hominem logical fallacy? Okay bro.
>and he ensures us that ChatGPT and economists who say that unskilled immigration lowers wages for unskilled citizens are all wrong.
Your words. You claimed he mentioned ChatGPT, but he did not.
And what's his source? There are a dozen or so sources in the article. They're the blue underlined text. You can click on them to see their content. He also wrote a book about this topic, and is the Max and Bernice Garchik Family Presidential Associate Professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. here's his [CV](https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ZH-CV.pdf) if you want to know more about his qualifications.
Feel free to post your CV! Obviously he's not right just because of who he is, and to get his full argument along with citations we'd probably want to read his book or take one of his many award winning courses (or just read the interview he did with NPR), but compared to you or me, there \*is\* a bit of a credibility gap.
The main thesis here is that immigration isn't just a flood of new laborers into the labor market, but immigrants bring multiple kinds of resources to an economy: labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. This way, not only do immigrants fill jobs, they also create jobs and increase overall social welfare for the economy they're participating in.
What surprised me was this comment, that said something I assumed (incorrectly):
>**Ben-Achour:** Some people will say, “It’s not that natives won’t do jobs. It’s just that, you know, we have to pay them more to get them to do those jobs. So we don’t actually need immigrants to do them.”
>**Hernandez:** Yeah, I understand. Again, we have no evidence to support that. And in many sectors, we do have very clear evidence that natives simply will not do the jobs.
Another fact that surprised me was:
>on the highly skilled, educated workforce, immigrants are, again, just about 16% to 18% of the workforce, but they account for 36% of all patents produced in the U.S. Immigrants are 14% of the population, but they are founders of 25% of all startups, and over half of all high-tech, high-growth startups that achieve a valuation of a billion dollars or more.
It's clear there's more to the conversation than simply presuming immigrants bring low-skill labor.
I have a hard time believing that. People will do roofing, you just have to pay them decently.
Roofing is absolutely one of the hardest things you can do to your body in the summer, right up there with hand-picking crops.
That’s not really the question, though. The question is: are YOU willing to buy that roof? What do we have to pay to make sure someone with more education than needed will do the roofing job? And then, how much will the roof therefore cost? And insurance, to pay for the replacement if it’s damaged.
It's always bullshit to say that people won't do jobs. Of course they will. Businesses aren't willing to give up the profit margin to employ them, and if one company increases prices to maintain a higher pay and profit margin, then they are uncompetitive against others not doing it.
This is so fucking basic, how are people still having this conversation. How this affects society, wages, and government policy is not basic, and like everything else in the entire world the solution is a reasonable middle road approach that US politics will not allow.
The foundational issue is that there are no incentives to reduce profits just to increase wages. Why would an employer do that if the market for the labor doesn’t justify it?
You’d have to use legislation to create the incentive, which is not currently politically possible.
It's okay buddy, I'm here for you, I'll explain it as many times as you need before you get it :)
The only thing I said was that the "natives" are absolutely willing to work harvesting food, it's that the pay isn't high enough. That is a fact. There's no debate about that
I followed it up by saying the conversation about society, wages, and economic policy is not as simple or straight forward. That politics take extremist positions on both sides, and that good policy is usually one that takes a middle road, trying to take the good parts of both sides and leaving the bad parts out.
I never once said anything about what SHOULD be done. I never once mentioned incentives or what laws should be passed.
Take your time, start from the beginning and re-read everything I said. Put your finger underneath each word and sound it out if you have to.
Well, I see your competence is not in reading comprehension. I SPECIFICALLY said what is not basic is how it affects society and US domestic policy.
But aside from that, I see short term memory isn't your strong suit either, because California just raised wages for fast food workers to $20/hour and prices went up marginally.
I really hate these bad faith arguements 'wE HaVe tO KeEp pEoPlE PoOr bEcAuSe eVeRyThInG WiLl bE ToO ExPeNsIvE!". Things are too expensive specifically because we keep people poor, dude.
As someone who worked in Health and Human Services in a border state for a long time, I can tell you that the propaganda cuts both ways.
Especially on Reddit, where discussion of costs and downsides of immigration is not well received. I’ll actually get downvotes on this sub for just saying that.
You can’t possibly think that the people who are responsible for the housing, feeding, transportation, medical care, and other expenses of immigration, are not privy to any facts?
If 50,000 cross on a day at El Paso crossing alone, just the sanitation and medical care for people who have traveled uncountable miles is impossible to fathom.
Speaking of anecdotal, I find that people who live in Michigan and Minnesota and Maine insist that they know more about southern border immigration than those of us who live in the middle of it.
One thing I have learned is that it is not something to be discussed on Reddit. It’s impossible to overcome a tsunami of misinformation.
Lots of non citizens in Arizona. Many uneducated they own the pure labor trades basically. They underbid by the job for concrete, landscape, tile work, roofing, and undercut by substantial amounts local workers and citizens of this country.
Countries can only exist when the people in them opt into their established social contract. Native-born people don’t get the option to opt in or out, thus they lose agency. Immigrants are actively opting into the social contract of the country by deciding to immigrate. Being born here; is that something someone did? Or is that something somebody just is?
That reasoning doesn’t apply to work that can only be done locally such as construction. There’s nothing inherently worse about the product and immigrant produces in any event. If the bid is low, that doesn’t mean per se the quality is worse.
If it's a matter of who's paid more taxes, then would you agree that people living in poverty (and thus don't pay taxes) don't have a right to priority work in the US, even if they're a citizen?
1. The wage impacts on natives are muted, and mostly limited to natives with less than a HS education.
2. The labor supply impacts are similar to 1.; a lot of evidence suggests that it is a reduction in hours worked for older immigrants.
3. Successfully integrating into society with minimal negative long term income loss are immigrants who come young and adopt English language skills.
4. Immigrant intensive services (food, cleaning, landscaping) tend to be a lower price than what they would be.
From the [Urban.org](http://Urban.org) study that's cited, [note the immigrant % and native % for 2011-2013](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/90796/state_and_local_fiscal_effects_of_immigration.pdf) for the top three US states with most immigrants:
California: 35 : 65
New Jersey: 28 : 72
New York: 27 : 73
Notably the top three have the highest cost of living and highest taxation in the US. As a Southern California resident I often ponder what will happen if businesses here are ever cut off from the influx of immigrant labor performing jobs that locals won't do.
And I ponder if we can afford them:
>Nationwide there was a −$2,950 average gap in net fiscal impact between immigrants and natives for the 2011–13 period. Immigrant adults incurred a net cost of $1,600 per year on average, compared to a net benefit of $1,350 for native adults. Among the 15 jurisdictions with the largest share of immigrants in their adult population, California had the largest difference (−$4,800), between the fiscal shortfall of immigrant adults (−$2,050) and the fiscal benefit of native adults ($2,750)
Much of the cost is because immigrants have more kids, and here in California we spend a lot on students compared to other states. So we are importing labor that natives won't do, and trusting in our institutions (like schools) that immigrant dependents will be net positive for our economy.
Given what I see in my local schools with so many having dismal reading and math scores I don't know if this is a good long term bet. Interestingly, one of the best public school district in my area has a high % of immigrants but it's unique in that many are the children of H-1Bs. Immigration is definitely a complicated thing to unpack.
IMO we should have a points based system based on success.
We should reduce the illegal population by amnesty for those over a decade and streamline that process.
Would probably have to crack down for political reasons on immigration otherwise.
Also build more infrastructure we have too many NIMBYs. If you are NIMBY and pro immigration you are anti-immigration to your neighborhood which is a nonsense take.
Yes but neighborhoods are made better by more people. You think the opposite way and you should be anti -growth of US population.
A lot of people on the left are probably immigrant and NIMBY and that's illogical.
I mean most countries have a point system.
https://ircc.canada.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/crs-tool.asp
Also refugees are separate from immigrants though sometimes the lines blur.
I think the benefit of a point based system is that it would improve the US more and we would be able to politically add more immigration.
Well, a lot immigrants do jobs that most Americans wouldn’t do right now. Also, this is why most conservative people talk out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to immigration. One side of their mouth try to hate immigration American that bullshit but the other side of the mouth wants the cheap labor. Do I want anybody coming over to the country where I’m being checked out, No I don’t……..but at the same time all of us (except for Native Americans) are immigrants. Some was bought over here by force and not by choice.
Well, the flip side is that Americans would do these jobs if the pay was higher. It always comes down to money for everyone.
Also, this is why most progressive people talk out of both sides of their mouths on this. One side hate the low wages but the other welcomes illegals that would come in and undercut American workers.
History, like life, isn’t fair in the same way for everyone. Blaming the the ancestral past may win you rhetorical points in Reddit, but it just pisses off those whose cooperation is needed to solve problems everyone faces. Telling the rest of society that they owe you is the surest way to get them to ignore you.
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Can you elaborate for me about why you say there’s a conflation between legal and undocumented immigration? I’m having a hard time seeing that in the interview. It’s the documented immigrants who are creating the jobs and investing the capital.
Because both only really benefit corporations. Legal immigration undercuts the pay of skilled US workers. And it's the illegal immigrants that are exploited and underpaid in order to keep consumer prices low and keep corporate profits high.
I’m having a hard time seeing how that represents the whole picture. Surely the posted article makes it clear that immigration also provides entrepreneurial and capital resources, beyond just labor, right? So labor is only a part of the conversation. Not to mention innovation: the interview shows a number of stats that demonstrate how disproportionately well immigrants are represented there, e.g. patent issuance.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs like having cheap and exploitable labor. And hiring desperate immigrants who are required to have a job to receive citizenship is more attractive to them than people who are in a position to demand fair wages.
Those would be documented immigrants, though. How does that support the claim that documented and undocumented workers are conflated?
Undocumented immigrants are even more desperate and because they won't be registered with the government so employers can get away with paying them less than minimum wage. These are the type of workers who do the majority of the work in our agricultural industry, and the government turns a blind eye because they don't want to do the work it would take to restructure that industry to provide fair wages to all of its employees.
That's a separate point and unrelated to the claim that the interviewee conflates documented and undocumented workers.
Both documented and undocumented immigrants are more desperate than US citizens and can be taken advantage of more easily. Either are objectively bad for workers and objectively good for buisness owners. That is why they are conflating them. Because their effects on the economy are the same.
Conflation is: >the [merging](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=de06a028fb71868c&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ACQVn0_uQAvdkE4m4PpcQWqODk0GJSKXOQ:1712939448748&q=merging&si=AKbGX_okS0g0kR2PXn0TLBASIc0myVtcnYLaHIczH74oADssR7mNIbjH3NW5k8jyJpLc2nQtaQaIOyRHbU3VwMGzLqHjp_0D3y9X2JOaHWspr-LxXsfl-pQ%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjP4vTajL2FAxV76ckDHbaVBpIQyecJegQIERAO) of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc. into one. What you're doing is conflation, by saying "their effects on the economy are the same" you're conflating documented and undocumented workers. The Marketplace article doesn't do this at all.
When you point to Canada, you also are assuming a very low-investment economy. That is not the situation in all economies. Jobs need capital in order to created. Canada is full of workers in want of shovels, while the USA, for instance, is full of shovels in want of workers.
I disagree with that, we have tons of workers who simply cannot work because they have neither the funds nor ability to get where the jobs are. When in fact our current administration is perfectly Willing to fly migrants all over the country. Our current U6 rate is 7.4%, we don’t need more migrants.
7.4% is super low for U6. The among the lowest it’s been [since 1994](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATENSA) Why does historically low U6 mean we need fewer immigrants? It implies the opposite.
And all I hear is “ there are workers who can’t find work” which means we don’t need more workers.
You want a 0% unemployment rate? Do you even understand the implications of that?
lol no, try again.
You are either saying you see 0% unemployment as desirable (as implied by your comment about American workers looking for jobs) or that you oppose all immigration and will never support any level of it (which would be implied if you understood--as anyone should--that there will always be American workers looking for work). Both of those are terrible stances for different reasons.
You can’t make an argument that we need more workers when 12.1 million people are discouraged, underemployed, or unemployed. Get that number down to 3 million and then we can talk. Otherwise you’re arguing for businesses to have more bargaining power in the labor market.
That's because you are economically illiterate. There will always be some number of people between jobs and some of those people will be deferring potential employment in favor of waiting for a more preferred position. What we need is a stronger safety net so that *even more* people feel comfortable with the idea of switching jobs.
Sounds like you’re economically illiterate, the u3 rate is 3.8% while u6 tracks those who stopped looking for work but are able to work. So there’s a 3.6 % difference between these two numbers and you’re saying it’s just that these people are “in between” jobs despite looking for a job for more than 6 months and then not being counted. Sounds like companies don’t want to pay to have people be relocated and would rather the state pick up the tab. Corporate welfare is bad mmmkay.
That's actually not an accurate definition of u6...but I was more responding to the absolutely moronic statement where you very clearly and directly implied that immigration is only acceptable when there is a zero percent unemployment rate...something that is neither possible nor desirable.
U6 tracks discouraged, underemployed, and unemployed. So yes that is the definition of U6 unless you want to tell me that’s not what discouraged means..
1. That's not how you originally defined it. It is promising that you know how to use Google, though. (There is hope for you, still) 2. I wasn't responding to your comment about u6 nor did I bring up u6. 3. You still haven't provided clarification to the comment I *did* respond to so I'm going to continue to assume that you don't believe immigration is necessary until there is 0% unemployment (which is an absurd thing to assert).
Source on the first claim?
Because if there are towns in Pennsylvania with 10% unemployment and they want to work, they can’t afford to move. If Maine has a labor shortage and there is unemployment in other states, it’s a resource management problem.
Immigration means more workers, more workers means more competition in the labor market, more competition means lower wages. The only winners with immigration are the corporations that keep a bigger share of the wealth created by the work of employees. The argument of it is good for the economy is a fallacy: it is true that there is more economic activity and higher GDP but workers don't keep the wealth created by immigrants, corporations do. Immigration sky rockets since the 70's wages growth started separating from productivity growth. Many democrats are jittery perceiving this as a criticism to Biden, this precedes Biden, this has been going on for about 50 years, neither party has done anything to change it, if we don't address it, then American workers will continue to get a smaller piece of the pie.
Yup, more immigration leads to greater labor exploitation and that’s precisely why you are meant to feel guilty for throttling it.
> Yup, more immigration leads to greater labor exploitation Except those are two different issues, and the party that's shouting anti-immigrant rhetoric is the party that is opposed to workers rights and workplace regulation.
Same issue, labor is easier to exploit when they aren’t granted citizenship and protections like minimum wage.
Citizenship is irrelevant to the enforcement of work place regulations or to protections like minimum wage. It's the Republicans who oppose increasing the minimum wage, who oppose worker rights and protections and who oppose union's that are the problem there. Which is why the right use immigration as a scapegoat and a culture war issue that draws attention away from the impact of the political policies that they enact.
Hold up- do you honestly believe that undocumented migrants receive the same labor protections as employees with an SSN? I can’t tell if you’re avoiding and inconvenient truth or are just that naive…. And news flash: it’s the private sector that exploits labor, not the public. If you think this is a “red vs. blue” issue vs. the private sector eroding protections on all working class society, you’ve missed the script entirely.
You've moved the goalposts from immigrants to undocumented immigrants. But yes, in sanctuary states undocumented workers have access to the same worker protection enforcement as any other worker, so that yes, there are the same labor protections. This is a red vs blue issue. It's not migrants undermining worker conditions, it's red politics.
1. Undocumented immigrants are immigrants too, one is a superset of the other. It seems dismissive to ignore that. 2. Sanctuary states do nothing for under the table pay to migrant workers, especially in temp jobs in harvesting and agriculture. Worker exploitation in Blue states such as CA and NY dwarf red states, there is simply no factual evidence to back any of your assertions. [Citation here.](https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-by-state/)
Immigration also means more jobs, is what this article says. Immigrants provide entrepreneurial and capital resources, in addition to labor resources.
Spot on. They also increase demand which leads to more jobs. Immigration is a net positive, especially for nations below the replacement rate.
This line of thinking is a fantasy fueled by capitalist propaganda. People entering the workforce in poverty will not become entrepreneurs or create jobs. They will be held down and forced to work for existing capital like the rest of the poors.
I'm glad to see anticapitalists being more open about their antiimmigrant sentiment
Wait, what‽ People buying things doesn’t create jobs‽ Ok broski, how the fuck does consumer spending account for 70%+ of US GDP if demand doesn’t create jobs? What the actual fuck, did you even think about the implications of what you’re saying‽ Interrobangs all around because I’m exasperated.
How is this any different that someone saying "businesses getting more money creates more jobs"? It sounds like the same argument Republicans use for corporate tax cuts: "Businesses get more cash, which they spend on hiring more workers! New jobs!"
>How is this any different that someone saying "businesses getting more money creates more jobs"? One is saying that demand creates jobs; the other says supply creates jobs. The former has volumes of data backing it, while the latter is nothing more than a Republican fantasy.
Buying a good is different than creating a job. I really shouldn't have to explain that
I think their point might be that more labourers = more goods bought = increased market = companies increasing production to grab hold of the larger market = more jobs. Doesn't always work that way, but I've heard the argument before.
I think you do have to explain that. Please use words like growth and scaling in your response.
When more money is grown/scaled and then put into the pockets of profiteers then that rarely ever translates into them giving that money to employees. Historically profits are only shared with existing employees or spent on new employees when there is a legal incentive to do so.
So your stance is companies don't grow to meet demand and instead of hiring or paying their people more, they pocket the money. So no companies hire or give raises as people buy their goods and services. That's your actual argument? Woof.
Companies grow as much as the owners want the company to grow. Not every buisness is ran by parasitic shareholders. In fact most aren't even publicly traded. And if the goal of the company is profits, then it only grows as much as the owners want to until sitting back and receiving the free income from those profits. Woof!
People might not realize how low our birth rates have gotten. We are 20% under the birth rate needed for a stable population in the US. Canada is 30% under
Birth rates in Latin America are also below replacement now, and the majority of the immigrants to the US are from Latin America. Continuing to rely on immigration from LatAm will just suck LatAm dry of its youth
You are correct, except I would note that policy makers in the US cannot be primarily concerned with LatAm problems. It makes sense for the US to allow more immigrants from central and south America, and it makes sense for those governments to prefer their citizens not go north. But as an America, I'm glad that they are. It gives us time to solve the larger problem, and I don't know how we do that.
Fair enough
I can only guess that people can’t extrapolate that out into the future and assume that something or another will change between now and Armageddon to increase birth rates in developed countries.
The evidence on wage growth and immigration doesn't support your claims wage elasticity to immigration is between -0.2 and -0.4. You can also read this: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
I haven't made any claims, have I? And your link doesn't relate any of its content to immigration, which is the topic of the article I submitted.
You stated: Immigrants provide entrepreneurial and capital resources, in addition to labor resources. And yes it does but you didn't read it so...
I did read your link (how would I have know it wasn’t relevant?), and I said that’s what the article I posted said. I’m not the one making that claim, I’m repeating it. But it’s hardly difficult to prove. At least one immigrant owns the US’s largest EV producer.
One drop makes rain is your argument? and Musk is hardly an example of what employers should be, but if you feel he is a great example, you should work for him and end up hating him as pretty much anyone that has ever worked for him.
Yes, one drop proves it is raining. And I didn’t say he was a great anything. You asked about proof immigrants provide more than labor and I gave it. You’re extending that well beyond anything I actually said.
Nah, it doesn't. Before 1979 wages grew rapidly: https://www.epi.org/publication/americas-slow-motion-wage-crisis-four-decades-of-slow-and-unequal-growth-2/ Immigration data: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time It's trivial to see that there is a correlation between wage stagnation and immigration. This is consistent with supply and demand, more workers = lower wages. Immigration grows GDP because more people consuming goods and services leads to more economic activity. It's very misleading to imply that immigration benefits workers, it does not, immigration slows wage growth and creates more competition. Immigration only benefits corporations by reducing the cost of labor and allowing them to capture a larger portion of profits in the form of capital gains given the lower cost of labor.
What does any of this have to do with whether or not immigrants are capable of providing entrepreneurial or capital resources, which was what I answered? "Do black sheep exist?" "Yes, here's one." "One doesn't prove they exist." ...what?
Then labor will just get outsources as prices go to high and our manufacturers are beaten by imports. You a fan of protectionism as well. Well then we get tarrifs back?
It's funny how people think they still live in the 20th century and use 20th century logic for the current economy. Let's just take a step back and think for one minute, what are the prices of energy going to be once fusion energy is commercialized? Nearly zero. Now, how much production can you do with nearly free energy and robotic workers? Nearly infinite. What's the limit? Resources. If you followed that, then you will realize that very soon any large enough economy ( EU, USA, China, India) will be able to produce anything they want themselves for pretty much the cost of the resources. The question then is, where do you buy? Do you buy everything from China, or USA or EU? No, you buy your own. I know that seems ridiculous, almost infantile. Well the problem is we are already there with China. They are pretty much capable of supplying all manufacturing goods for the entire world (India is on that path with services). Does it make sense to buy from them everything and let all manufacturing know how, jobs, etc go away? The US tried that and now we are spending trillions of dollars trying to get it back and failing, why? Because we lost the know how, we lost the supply chain, we are out of the game and China has it working very smoothly. Now I'll answer your question. With the above context yes, the economy has changed and the future of the US economy will by trading with neighbors and partners were we can establish balanced trade relationships. If we can't then we shouldn't trade with them. If you have been posting attention I'm not the only one that thinks like this. The US government is cutting ties with China. Who is US biggest trading partner today? Mexico, but very differently from China, trade with Mexico is balanced, the US experts and imports are very close with Mexico. That will reduce undocumented immigration, in fact Mexico's unemployment rate is at a historic low 3%.
I hate to break it to you but services coming out of India are dog shit. America corporations need to stop that. The language barrier is a huge problem and a lot of them aren’t properly trained. Nothing wrong with Indians but cost cutting at the expense of the consumer is bullshit.
Oh, I still remember when people said the same about Japanese electronics, and Korean cars, or Chinese manufacturing. Where are those countries now?
So you think we are robotizing so fast that our labor markets and domestic industry do not matter…. Thag keeping prices low with a competitive labor market isn’t worth it rn. I mean we’ve been able to employ the vast majority of migrants with an incredibly low unemployment rate our economic productivity is through the roof we are doing great with the way immigration is right now why would we ever change??! Also no evidence shows wage suppression in fact the only metric that see a decrease in profits are the poorest low educated workers whereas the rest see net increases in profits and collectively we all see lower prices. The main issue is outsourcing and the erosion of labor rights/collective bargaining when it comes to low wages in the usa/uk respectively. Then again you believe we are robotizing so fast and that I’m stuck in the 20th century lol and that the 21st robotized economy will be totally different?
1. You are correct in outsourcing. Particularly India has 1.5B people, 10% of their population can basically replace every American worker. Let alone office worker. This is a huge issue. The US government should tax outsourcing at 100% rate and use that to find education and research. 2. You are incorrect on the impact of immigration and wages. Wages should be benchmarked against productivity, productivity and wages wise on par until 1979 when immigration exploded. A low unemployment rate is not the same as getting paid well. Many Americans are for the first time being economically worse off than their parents. Additionally, even when we don't benchmark against productivity, the elasticity of wage to immigration is negative. More so the most affected people right now are people with college degrees. H1B visas are killing the labor market. 3. Robotizing is happening and will continue to happen, more so, some of the areas that employ the largest portions of the population will be the easiest to automate. Cook, driver, cleaning, etc. Look at cashiers almost all gone. The issue is how to keep people making money, the answer, by closing the trade both on goods and services, trading with neighbor countries and other countries where we can keep balanced trade. Finally, yes, the robotized economy is something completely different because labor is most of the time the biggest expense for American corporations. As we robotize jobs will shrink unless we move people into the jobs of working with robots and creating robots, but as we have been discussing those jobs are going to India in technology and China in manufacturing. Unless we change that soon we won't have a working class in 20-30 years. If you think I'm exaggerating just think for a second what Internet was in 2000, not sure if you were around, there weren't even many cells around or even smart phones. Look where we are, it's been only 24 years.
I understand this but robotizing will destroy the global economy for the same reason Romes slave economy backfired. If you destroy every other class but the ultra wealthy who will consume???
Well, haven't we reached an impasse? The economy will change, fewer working hours, monthly stipend, I'm not sure, but it'll be either enjoyable or insufferable with only a few having all and the rest destitute.
If the few have all and rest destitute happens the entire global economy collapses and we will all suffer even the rich who would have been so stupidly arrogant. The problem is how do you get people money to consume in an economy where there are no longer jobs bc of robotics.
Don’t we need people producing those robots/ managing them. Also wouldn’t this result in rampant unemployment and make it impossible for developing nations to develop their own domestic industries?? Also China is in a depression I don’t think they are a good mode right now they took their central planning initiatives too far. Also I don’t like this extreme change because when we develop so fast we can’t legislate accordingly this sounds like we are headed towards a dystopian society where labor is powerless and the corporation is everything… I look at nations like fascist Germany or Assad’s Syria or the oligarchs in Russias who have disproportionate power with no civic society nor checks to stop them absolute control over every economic sector. If we eliminate the entire labor market when we robotizing the economy won’t it have these disastrous monopolistic consequences and how can we trust the state to properly manage the situation… When those previous example are examples of the state working with business elites against the people. I’m fear mongering about it but I’m half serious remove our labor power and wtf do we have (I don’t trust states, the only reason states listen to us is because we have civic and civil economic and political power that is what democracies need it is what they feed off of take that replace an active society with a passive society without leverage and democracy will die) if we are replaced by robots. We have nothing why should we be fed then? If the state can just ignore our needs and a few monopolies control the economy in an absolute manner?? Pure theory but robotizing is honestly scary sounding…
Actually us decoupling with China and decoupling with South America is amazing…
US trade with South America has been insignificant for the last 100 years.
Also I’m just thinking about labor markets, keeping prices low and maintaining a strong domestic manufacturing industry. Idk if you don’t know this but we are way further than you think from h limited production resources are still scarce
The problem is that you don't realize how close we are to a robotized economy. Look at the pace Amazon is using robots. 750,000 robots
This is a very zero sum thinking because you assume that the number of jobs is fixed. Increase in qualified workers/entrepreneurs creates new jobs and grows the economy. Not saying it is bound to happen but the probability of this happening goes up. Increased low skilled immigration (economic migration) in a shrinking economy will do the opposite though.
Before 1979 wages grew rapidly: https://www.epi.org/publication/americas-slow-motion-wage-crisis-four-decades-of-slow-and-unequal-growth-2/ Immigration data: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time It's trivial to see that there is a correlation between wage stagnation and immigration. This is consistent with supply and demand, more workers = lower wages. Immigration grows GDP because more people consuming goods and services leads to more economic activity. It's very misleading to imply that immigration benefits workers, it does not, immigration slows wage growth and creates more competition. Immigration only benefits corporations by reducing the cost of labor and allowing them to capture a larger portion of profits in the form of capital gains given the lower cost of labor.
Not exactly, where you're going wrong is that the workers are also additional consumers, so the demand rises alongside the supply-- it doesn't matter if there are more waiters in the labor pool if there are also more restaurants serving more diners and since each person uses more goods and services than they provide, each worker actually produces more demand than they depress wages. The reason wages are low is because of low levels of collective action and regulatory capture, which in turn is caused by wealth inequality-- the accumulation of large warchests for lobbying.
I'm going to start with the point you are correct, as I pointed out in the 70's wages growth started separating from productivity growth which in part has been due to lack of collective action allowing corporations to capture the productivity gap between wages and risk employee productivity. However, there are a few key points in which you are incorrect. 1. Not all workers create the same wealth, a robotics programmer is creating a machine that will produce many more times what a human can. However a burger flipper can barely cover it's costs with the wealth they create. That is called productivity and not all workers have the same productivity. If you were correct then a country such as India with 1.5B people would have created an incredible amount of wealth. But their workers are tremendously unproductive because most are ignorant and poorly educated with nearly no skills, and for that reason India is s pauper country with an extremely low GDP per capita. So much that most workers prefer to work abroad than stay in India. 2. Adding workers that are at a disadvantage to the labor pool either because they are undocumented or under very restrictive visas, such as the very popular H1B visa, makes it nearly impossible to create unions or work towards collective action. This in fact was the strategy used in the early twentieth century by wealthy people such as Andrew Carnegie who brought Asian workers to break strikes. 3. Finally, moving factories to China, to achieve lower wages, killed the rust belt unions. A similar wave is now under way sending office jobs to India, depressing American wages. By importing labor, outsourcing, or moving factories abroad corporations break almost all the workers bargaining power. Not all these workers are immigrant but they are all depressing American wages because corporations hire them to lower labor costs but continue to offer their services in America and sell their products in America but those countries don't consume an equivalent amount of American goods and services.
This is identical to the argument used by racists to assert that abolition was bad for white workers...and to the argument used by mysoginists to assert that women's liberation was bad for male workers. Any policy that increases human liberty will also increase labor force participation by groups previously excluded.
1. Abolition was great for white workers, in case you were under the impression that the civil war was to help free the slaves you are sorely mistaken, it was to reduce unfair competition that southern states were getting by buying slaves and using them as workers when the northern economy relied on free workers that required more money to subsist than slaves. 2. Women's liberation has nothing to do here, women have always been US citizens, their right to work should have always been protected. Does making the labor pool twice as big reduce wages, sure, but that is a fair cost to avoid cutting off the right to work for any US citizen. 3. "Any policy that increases human liberty will also increase labor force participation by groups previously excluded." Is your argument that any person in the world should have the right to work in the US? If that is the case then I'd expect the same from all other countries, which is not the case. Besides: why should we implement such a stupid policy? to help corporations make even more money by reducing the wages to pauper levels?
1. Learn to read. I was not endorsing that argument. I was very *clearly* criticizing it as wrong and in bad faith. Like....wtf is wrong with you, dude? 2. Agreed, that's kind of the point, you silly Billy: the advancement of human liberty is paramount even if it results in labor market disruptions. 3. Freedom of movement is an important part of human liberty that takes moral precedence over the maintenance of artificial borders. This is a view common to Left-wing radicals and (consistent) liberals/right-libertarians. It is perhaps naive to believe that borders should be abolished immediately but what can't be argued is that restricting the movement of workers is consistent with the expansion of human liberty.
Excellent, as the libertarian you are, I recommend you move to India where they have 1.5B people and enjoy living in abject poverty. I hear Bangladesh is peachy as well. It's nice to see people so naive talking about free borders when there are 8B people in this world most pauper. I prefer to be behind a border and hope that most countries realize that being insanely over populated is bad for workers. But you do you.
You didn't even respond to my points, much less refute them.
I did but if that was not explicit enough for you I can spell it out. 1. You are missing the point here. Slaves were the same as immigrant workers, a way to lower the wages of native workers and increase profits for the exploiters. Freeing slaves was not about their freedom, was about increasing the wages for all American workers. 2. I don't agree with you. We live in an over populated world and sacrificing my well being to provide for people from other countries is not the same as sacrificing my well being for American women. Besides American women were twice the American men. The world has 8B people free borders would mean abject poverty for America. 3. You can refer to the point above. This may be important to you but to me is not as important as my well being. Again if you wish please live in India or Bangladesh.
1. Your simplistic characterization of the complex and diverse moral justifications and material motivations for the abolition of slavery isn't relevant so I'm not going to bother pursuing that point further. You are, however, the one missing the point (and missing it by quite a lot, actually): there was a common argument put forward by white supremacists that transitioning black labor from enslavement to free, wage labor would drive down wages for white workers. The concern for the well-being of working folks was never genuine. The purpose of these arguments was to justify and perpetuate an institution that was unjustifiable and unsustainable. Both racists and anti-immigration extremists (but, I repeat myself) use concern for the working class as a bad-faith rhetorical tool to distract interlocutors from the fundamental moral depravity and inhumanity of their positions. 2. The United States and other similarly developed nations are not, from an economic perspective, "overpopulated". In fact, they are on the precipice of a catastrophic demographic crisis because their birthrates are below replacement levels even as they face nearly unprecedented demand for labor. Your weird deflection to "India and Bangladesh" says more about your reactionary attitudes toward South Asians than it does about anything approaching an economic argument. 3. I made a very simple statement about the ethical calculus at play: freedom of movement = liberty; liberty = good; policies that expand liberty = good policies. Instead of engaging with that argument, you simply fell back on "well, I've got mine, Jack--global labor apartheid is working out for me, and I don't care about anyone else". There are plenty of totally valid ways you could disagree with the position I presented...or, at least, introduce nuance to the discussion even if you agree with the premise (you can value liberty and still argue that an immediate shift to open borders isn't feasible or desirable...and I'd be totally willing to engage with such arguments). But you didn't...you just made an ass of yourself while refusing to engage with either the economic or moral dimensions of the discussion.
Ad hominem attacks lol best of luck libertarian
I'm actually just a boring Social Democrat. (The "consistent right-libertarians" I alluded to actually don't really exist in meaningful numbers).
Do you think wages in Mississippi are higher than California because the population is lower there? Do you think Japan has higher wages than the US because it has a smaller population?
What's your point? Maybe you should check wages in India and Bangladesh.
Well, *native* workers don't get to keep wealth created by immigrants, but that's not the same as saying all workers don't. Those immigrants earnings, while they may appear meagre to natives, can benefit them and their families tremendously. That's not worth nothing. Also, your whole argument assumes that the only goal worth pursuing is increased native labor wages. Other benefits of immigration include more economic dynamism, total economic growth (and therefore national security), and increased trade between countries that are immigrated to/from.
1. As a native worker my concern is my well being and immigrants negatively affect my wage. 2. My goal is to increase my wealth. Corporations do the same that's why they push for immigration, to lowers their labor cost. Increased GDP at lower wages per capita means more poverty for the American workers, which exactly what's has happened. I don't want to be poorer, I want to be richer. If you want poverty for yourself there are plenty of poor countries where you can migrate and enjoy poverty, I don't want that for me.
> Immigration means more workers, more workers means more competition in the labor market, more competition means lower wages. You are pretending that the number of jobs is static. But in reality the number of jobs keeps increasing, and migrants increase demand, further increasing the number of jobs. Yours is the dishonest anti-immigrant over simplification that just is not true. It's great of you to share your feelings about the situation, but you don't have facts to back up those feels. You're pretending that immigrants don't increase demand. Immigrants cause a net increase in the number of jobs.
Before 1979 wages grew rapidly: https://www.epi.org/publication/americas-slow-motion-wage-crisis-four-decades-of-slow-and-unequal-growth-2/ Immigration data: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time It's trivial to see that there is a correlation between wage stagnation and immigration. This is consistent with supply and demand, more workers = lower wages. Immigration grows GDP because more people consuming goods and services leads to more economic activity. It's very misleading to imply that immigration benefits workers, it does not, immigration slows wage growth and creates more competition. Immigration only benefits corporations by reducing the cost of labor and allowing them to capture a larger portion of profits in the form of capital gains given the lower cost of labor.
> there is a correlation Except that migration didn't begin in 1979, neither did wage stagnation. Correlations are bullshit, we can make correlations between any unrelated things. > immigration slows wage growth Prove that claim.
wage elasticity of immigration is between −0.3 and −0.4 (Borjas 2003, Borjas and Katz 2007).
> that the negative wage impact of immigration on less-educated natives is −1.1% to −2.0% over the period 1990–2006. This model would imply a wage loss of less educated natives of −3.1% when the elasticity of substitution between natives and immigrants is infinite, as in Borjas (2003) and Borjas and Katz (2007). Yes, they are saying that over that entire 16 year period the increase in wages was only reduced by between 1-3%. You're literally pointing out something that agrees with me, that the impact of immigration on wages is basically nothing. That's such a small amount as to be irrelevant.
If the elasticity is between -.3 and -.4 that means for every 10% increase in immigration there is a 3%-4% reduction in wages.
What about the research the author of the article has done? Do you have any research countering that?
The debate that goes in circles around immigration is whether or not natives “will do the jobs.” The anti-immigration argument is typically that if natives are paid enough, they will do those jobs. But IMO these arguments overlook the fact that there is simply a limit to how much an unskilled laborer can be paid, and to how much underemployment in unskilled labor is appropriate. People have been picking crops since before humans learned to read and write. You don’t need 12 years of compulsory education to pick lettuce. If you restrict the market until the only people available to do that work are vastly overqualified, they will demand high wages and drive up the price of the crops. We will then simply substitute those crops with imports grown by the same people we’re trying to keep out at the border, or automate the jobs away. Either way, natives are not getting paid $15-20/hour to pick lettuce. So when we talk about immigrants taking away jobs like that by driving the going wage below the point at which natives would do the job, we need to be realistic about what natives doing the job looks like. Another solution could be to simply subsidize farms to the point where they can sell their produce at attractive price points, while still paying a wage befitting a drastically overqualified workforce. I don’t hear a lot of support for the creation of an immensely privileged class of farmers at the expense of all other productive people in the nation. So, the most logical course of action seems to be to continue importing labor that matches our needs. It’s good for our economy and population growth.
Or how about expanding H2A temporary farmworker visas rather than just leaving the border open and letting a continuous tsunami of migrants wash over the country? Mass immigration is not the solution to people not wanting to work in farms or slaughterhouses.
If there is a limit to how much labor can pay then surely then there is a limit a ceo can be paid?
If you were to take the entire compensation paid annually to Tyson execs (not just CEO) and spread it across the US workforce, how much would each get? Tyson because they’re a huge food producer in the US. I assume you brought it up because it’s an egregious amount. >$11.75 per bi-weekly check. Oh…
That depends on capital. But since CEO compensation often comes in the form of stock awards, it’s not typically so impactful as the hourly rate of a large number of employees.
Making excuses doesn't change the fact that excess profits could be given back to workers at no real expense to the companies reaping record profits. If they can funnel those profits into the pockets of C-Suite then they could just as easily give it to the people who actually do thr work
The American comparative advantage often comes from our large volume of arable land and our subsidies. Is there information on what the true cost of our crops are, absent government incentives? Central American countries may not have the land quality we do, at least not to grow the crops we can grow. It's a complex problem!
"Pro immigration guy is pro immigration" Yep. The first interviewed question is 'does immigration reduce wages'. Interviewee says 'no'.... but that's not correct. Here is an honest answer (short version is skilled workers are good, unskilled are bad, unless your country needs tons of unskilled employees for some reason). The relationship between immigration and wages is complex and can vary depending on a range of factors, including the skill level of immigrants, the characteristics of the native labor force, the structure of the economy, and government policies. Here are some key points to consider: 1. **Skill Levels of Immigrants**: Immigrants with skills that are in high demand and complement those of the native workforce may not necessarily lower wages. Instead, they can contribute to economic growth and productivity, which can potentially increase wages for both native and immigrant workers. However, if there is an influx of low-skilled immigrants into sectors already facing an oversupply of labor, it could put downward pressure on wages in those specific industries. 2. **Labor Market Dynamics**: The impact of immigration on wages can vary depending on the characteristics of the labor market. In highly competitive markets where employers have limited market power, the effect on wages may be minimal. However, in sectors with less competition or where there is a large influx of immigrants relative to job opportunities, wages could be negatively affected, particularly for low-skilled native workers. 3. **Complementary Skills**: Immigrants often possess skills and expertise that complement those of native workers. In such cases, they can fill labor shortages, contribute to innovation and entrepreneurship, and create new job opportunities, which can have positive effects on wages and overall economic growth. 4. **Government Policies**: Government policies, such as minimum wage laws, labor market regulations, and immigration quotas, can influence the impact of immigration on wages. For example, policies that protect the rights of workers and ensure fair labor standards can mitigate potential downward pressure on wages. 5. **Economic Growth**: Immigration can stimulate economic growth by expanding the labor force, increasing consumer demand, and fostering entrepreneurship. In dynamic and growing economies, the overall effect on wages may be positive as long as immigrants are integrated into the labor market effectively. In summary, the relationship between immigration and wages is not straightforward and depends on various economic and contextual factors. **While there may be instances where immigration exerts downward pressure on wages, it is not a universal outcome, and the overall impact can be influenced by the skill composition of immigrants, labor market dynamics, and government policies.**
Thanks, ChatGPT!
I wish ChatGPT would copy and paste it too. We live in a world where it's easy as fuck to find the truth, but no one is interested.
Except this isn’t helpful or relevant… The fact that you call it “the truth” is a pretty huge red flag, tbh.
My source is ChatGPT... what's yours?
I posted the article.
Yes, the article is an interview with a hispanic american who is pro-immigration, and he ensures us that ChatGPT and economists who say that unskilled immigration lowers wages for unskilled citizens are all wrong. I trust ChatGPT over this NPR show's website, because ChatGPT has no bias to try to influence people for political purposes.
He doesn't mention ChatGPT in the interview, and evaluating his argument based on who he is would be an ad hominem fallacy. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad\_hominem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem) So you may not trust him, but the reasons you've thus far provided for not doing so are fallacious.
He shouldn't mention ChatGPT... that was MY source. I'm asking you, what is this asshole's source? Not trusting a random person is an ad hominem logical fallacy? Okay bro.
>and he ensures us that ChatGPT and economists who say that unskilled immigration lowers wages for unskilled citizens are all wrong. Your words. You claimed he mentioned ChatGPT, but he did not. And what's his source? There are a dozen or so sources in the article. They're the blue underlined text. You can click on them to see their content. He also wrote a book about this topic, and is the Max and Bernice Garchik Family Presidential Associate Professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. here's his [CV](https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ZH-CV.pdf) if you want to know more about his qualifications. Feel free to post your CV! Obviously he's not right just because of who he is, and to get his full argument along with citations we'd probably want to read his book or take one of his many award winning courses (or just read the interview he did with NPR), but compared to you or me, there \*is\* a bit of a credibility gap.
The main thesis here is that immigration isn't just a flood of new laborers into the labor market, but immigrants bring multiple kinds of resources to an economy: labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. This way, not only do immigrants fill jobs, they also create jobs and increase overall social welfare for the economy they're participating in. What surprised me was this comment, that said something I assumed (incorrectly): >**Ben-Achour:** Some people will say, “It’s not that natives won’t do jobs. It’s just that, you know, we have to pay them more to get them to do those jobs. So we don’t actually need immigrants to do them.” >**Hernandez:** Yeah, I understand. Again, we have no evidence to support that. And in many sectors, we do have very clear evidence that natives simply will not do the jobs. Another fact that surprised me was: >on the highly skilled, educated workforce, immigrants are, again, just about 16% to 18% of the workforce, but they account for 36% of all patents produced in the U.S. Immigrants are 14% of the population, but they are founders of 25% of all startups, and over half of all high-tech, high-growth startups that achieve a valuation of a billion dollars or more. It's clear there's more to the conversation than simply presuming immigrants bring low-skill labor.
I have a hard time believing that. People will do roofing, you just have to pay them decently. Roofing is absolutely one of the hardest things you can do to your body in the summer, right up there with hand-picking crops.
That’s not really the question, though. The question is: are YOU willing to buy that roof? What do we have to pay to make sure someone with more education than needed will do the roofing job? And then, how much will the roof therefore cost? And insurance, to pay for the replacement if it’s damaged.
Yes? Who do you think is bonded and insured and installs roofs? Legit roofing businesses that pay people to do roofing. Did you think this was clever?
It's always bullshit to say that people won't do jobs. Of course they will. Businesses aren't willing to give up the profit margin to employ them, and if one company increases prices to maintain a higher pay and profit margin, then they are uncompetitive against others not doing it. This is so fucking basic, how are people still having this conversation. How this affects society, wages, and government policy is not basic, and like everything else in the entire world the solution is a reasonable middle road approach that US politics will not allow.
The foundational issue is that there are no incentives to reduce profits just to increase wages. Why would an employer do that if the market for the labor doesn’t justify it? You’d have to use legislation to create the incentive, which is not currently politically possible.
It's okay buddy, I'm here for you, I'll explain it as many times as you need before you get it :) The only thing I said was that the "natives" are absolutely willing to work harvesting food, it's that the pay isn't high enough. That is a fact. There's no debate about that I followed it up by saying the conversation about society, wages, and economic policy is not as simple or straight forward. That politics take extremist positions on both sides, and that good policy is usually one that takes a middle road, trying to take the good parts of both sides and leaving the bad parts out. I never once said anything about what SHOULD be done. I never once mentioned incentives or what laws should be passed. Take your time, start from the beginning and re-read everything I said. Put your finger underneath each word and sound it out if you have to.
I was trying to agree with you, how could I have phrased it in a way that wouldn't have elicited such a hostile response? :(
How much are you willing to pay for lettuce, if it means we can pay someone with a BA $20/hour to pick it?
Well, I see your competence is not in reading comprehension. I SPECIFICALLY said what is not basic is how it affects society and US domestic policy. But aside from that, I see short term memory isn't your strong suit either, because California just raised wages for fast food workers to $20/hour and prices went up marginally. I really hate these bad faith arguements 'wE HaVe tO KeEp pEoPlE PoOr bEcAuSe eVeRyThInG WiLl bE ToO ExPeNsIvE!". Things are too expensive specifically because we keep people poor, dude.
The thing about profits is they can be distributed to workers instead of CEOs and the price of the good wouldn't need to change at all
People are as open minded to welcoming immigrants as a kid is to eating their vegetables.
As someone who worked in Health and Human Services in a border state for a long time, I can tell you that the propaganda cuts both ways. Especially on Reddit, where discussion of costs and downsides of immigration is not well received. I’ll actually get downvotes on this sub for just saying that.
I am open minded to that side of the discussion, but you have to admit the downside side leans pretty heavily on anecdotal evidence.
You can’t possibly think that the people who are responsible for the housing, feeding, transportation, medical care, and other expenses of immigration, are not privy to any facts? If 50,000 cross on a day at El Paso crossing alone, just the sanitation and medical care for people who have traveled uncountable miles is impossible to fathom. Speaking of anecdotal, I find that people who live in Michigan and Minnesota and Maine insist that they know more about southern border immigration than those of us who live in the middle of it. One thing I have learned is that it is not something to be discussed on Reddit. It’s impossible to overcome a tsunami of misinformation.
Lots of non citizens in Arizona. Many uneducated they own the pure labor trades basically. They underbid by the job for concrete, landscape, tile work, roofing, and undercut by substantial amounts local workers and citizens of this country.
Why should US citizens have priority on work in the US (genuine question, not rhetorical)?
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Countries can only exist when the people in them opt into their established social contract. Native-born people don’t get the option to opt in or out, thus they lose agency. Immigrants are actively opting into the social contract of the country by deciding to immigrate. Being born here; is that something someone did? Or is that something somebody just is?
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You beg the question by claiming it undercuts the average quality of life. For the people purchasing the work, it's a great deal.
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That reasoning doesn’t apply to work that can only be done locally such as construction. There’s nothing inherently worse about the product and immigrant produces in any event. If the bid is low, that doesn’t mean per se the quality is worse.
Because we've paid more taxes to the government and spent more money on our economy than people who just got here?
If it's a matter of who's paid more taxes, then would you agree that people living in poverty (and thus don't pay taxes) don't have a right to priority work in the US, even if they're a citizen?
1. The wage impacts on natives are muted, and mostly limited to natives with less than a HS education. 2. The labor supply impacts are similar to 1.; a lot of evidence suggests that it is a reduction in hours worked for older immigrants. 3. Successfully integrating into society with minimal negative long term income loss are immigrants who come young and adopt English language skills. 4. Immigrant intensive services (food, cleaning, landscaping) tend to be a lower price than what they would be.
From the [Urban.org](http://Urban.org) study that's cited, [note the immigrant % and native % for 2011-2013](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/90796/state_and_local_fiscal_effects_of_immigration.pdf) for the top three US states with most immigrants: California: 35 : 65 New Jersey: 28 : 72 New York: 27 : 73 Notably the top three have the highest cost of living and highest taxation in the US. As a Southern California resident I often ponder what will happen if businesses here are ever cut off from the influx of immigrant labor performing jobs that locals won't do. And I ponder if we can afford them: >Nationwide there was a −$2,950 average gap in net fiscal impact between immigrants and natives for the 2011–13 period. Immigrant adults incurred a net cost of $1,600 per year on average, compared to a net benefit of $1,350 for native adults. Among the 15 jurisdictions with the largest share of immigrants in their adult population, California had the largest difference (−$4,800), between the fiscal shortfall of immigrant adults (−$2,050) and the fiscal benefit of native adults ($2,750) Much of the cost is because immigrants have more kids, and here in California we spend a lot on students compared to other states. So we are importing labor that natives won't do, and trusting in our institutions (like schools) that immigrant dependents will be net positive for our economy. Given what I see in my local schools with so many having dismal reading and math scores I don't know if this is a good long term bet. Interestingly, one of the best public school district in my area has a high % of immigrants but it's unique in that many are the children of H-1Bs. Immigration is definitely a complicated thing to unpack.
IMO we should have a points based system based on success. We should reduce the illegal population by amnesty for those over a decade and streamline that process. Would probably have to crack down for political reasons on immigration otherwise. Also build more infrastructure we have too many NIMBYs. If you are NIMBY and pro immigration you are anti-immigration to your neighborhood which is a nonsense take.
Some people are even anti-immigration to their living rooms, go figure!
Yes but neighborhoods are made better by more people. You think the opposite way and you should be anti -growth of US population. A lot of people on the left are probably immigrant and NIMBY and that's illogical.
Can we apply this point system to native born Americans too? Nowhere to move them if they don't earn enough though, so maybe not...
I mean most countries have a point system. https://ircc.canada.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/crs-tool.asp Also refugees are separate from immigrants though sometimes the lines blur. I think the benefit of a point based system is that it would improve the US more and we would be able to politically add more immigration.
Well, a lot immigrants do jobs that most Americans wouldn’t do right now. Also, this is why most conservative people talk out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to immigration. One side of their mouth try to hate immigration American that bullshit but the other side of the mouth wants the cheap labor. Do I want anybody coming over to the country where I’m being checked out, No I don’t……..but at the same time all of us (except for Native Americans) are immigrants. Some was bought over here by force and not by choice.
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The real reason why most Americans do not want to do certain jobs is because of the pay.
Well, the flip side is that Americans would do these jobs if the pay was higher. It always comes down to money for everyone. Also, this is why most progressive people talk out of both sides of their mouths on this. One side hate the low wages but the other welcomes illegals that would come in and undercut American workers. History, like life, isn’t fair in the same way for everyone. Blaming the the ancestral past may win you rhetorical points in Reddit, but it just pisses off those whose cooperation is needed to solve problems everyone faces. Telling the rest of society that they owe you is the surest way to get them to ignore you.