There are a few issues here. 1. Many of these jobs are having a hard time finding Americans to do these jobs. The fruit and vegetable industry is very dependent on seasonal labor which many Americans aren't interested in doing. The construction industry also has been having trouble attracting enough American labor to meet burgeoning demand. 2. Illegal immigration does suppress wages to some extent and certainly in agriculture and back of house service industry jobs wages are very low but at the same time margins are very tight. Relying upon Americans to do those jobs would most likely lead to much greater inflation in providing those that could harm the economy. In the construction industry even illegals are frequently paid well above the minimum wage and in many cases are considered skilled labor. 3. Industries don't exist in vacuum and the affects of a tight and/or expensive labor market in one has implications on the others. In architecture my work is directly affected by the construction industry and if contractors can't find labor or labor prices are high that means my clients are unlikely to take on new projects.
Well said. There seems to be an uninformed liberal base who does not understand the issue at hand. Americans generally do not reject immigrants who go through the proper process. Many of them agree it is actually more difficult than it needs to be. What most American oppose is granting illegal immigrants full citizenship when they have done very little to try to become citizens. We all know politicians do not care about the plight of illegals, only the voter base it sways. Its disgusting to suggest an amnesty.
Seriously without these immigrants doing the work no one wants to do, and doing it with blood and sweat - they are keeping so many businesses alive and surviving. They make it possible for people to afford home improvements, they keep insurance premiums down for homes, they make it possible for women to go to work because they can now afford a nanny, they make our expensive fruit affordable. People act they they exploit the U.S. - if anything, the U.S. uses the fact they are illegal to exploit them. That's the really irony.
I agree with some of this, not the racist labeling of white people but the rest has some merit. Legal immigrants do not view illegal immigrants well. That said, they do understand why there are so many and this is where they agree with each other. Our immigration system does not work for the majority of immigrants. People who have actually succeeded at it know this VERY well, it is near impossible and costs way too much. People need a path that makes sense for both a legal working status without the threat of deportation and a path to citizenship. Both would lead to paying income taxes which is the bogey man that anti-immigration folks throw out there. I think most would take an option that makes sense and the ones who wouldn't are going to be the ones we don't want.
Some ironies and doubts: 1. The irony is that people who say "illegal immigrants are doing jobs Americans won't do", refuse to say "illegal immigrants are also doing jobs legal immigrants won't do". Furthermore, the bigger irony is that perhaps neither are true, and in fact illegal immigrants are driving down wages to the point that no one else but they are willing to work these jobs. 2. I doubt illegal immigrants are creating new job types, and if anything, the dispersal of workers and suppression of wages that they are causing is preventing technological innovation from replacing certain jobs types. So another irony is that some people argue that increasing the minimum wage will just lead to job loss through technological innovation and yet in the same breath say that the same cannot be true of jobs that illegal immigrants are working. 3. I question how illegal immigrants are “keeping inflation down”. Take the case of the housing market where there are essentially three costs: land, labor, and material. a. An increase in labor supply can drive down the costs of constructing an actual housing unit. This is where supply can create its own demand (Says law), which could both increase the demand for land and increase the demand for materials (lumber, paint, etc). b. Says law most positively affects regions where the increase in labor is the greatest, and most negatively effects regions where the increase in labor is not noticeable or non-existent. Essentially, some regions will see a rise in costs (material costs) without seeing the same increase in labor supply (decrease in wages) that other markets are experiencing.
There is not one piece of evidence to back your intellectual musing here. Not even a shred. Do you ever question your own mental masturbation?
1) Are illegal immigrants the reason why corporations refuse to spend their glut of savings? Are illegal immigrants why medical specialists are seeing their wages smashed? Your argument of causality for wage reductions, if it can be made, needs to take into account that illegal immigration is one factor of many--and it would seem to be a rather sector-specific argument. It may also be untrue or heard to measure. I have seen American labour markets adjust well to large-scale immigration waves in the past--you might look at the Mariel boatlift study as an example. 2) The jobs most likely to be automated are white-collar ones because software is much easier to ship than hardware, and that's where most wages go to. Why hire an associate to classify documents when you can parse documents into machine-readable formats and use ElasticSearch? Why have 50 spreadsheet maesters on Excel when you can run an automated data pipeline with a few lines of code in Pandas? I think the former is going to happen regardless of any change in the minimum wage (and is in fact happening right now), but the latter part of automating blue-collar jobs with sophisticated hardware isn't going to happen any time soon: lower savings, much higher costs. As for illegal immigrants creating jobs--their consumption habits and marginal propensity to spend are quite high. In analyses of fiscal multipliers, policies that aim for those who are spending cash right now for needed consumption often does quite well. I wouldn't be surprised if illegal immigrants had some of the highest marginal propensities to spend of all. And immigrants are often entrepreneurial as a whole--something like 40% of the Fortune 500 were founded by first or second generation immigrants. http://www.renewoureconomy.org/research/new-american-fortune-500/ I have kept arguments restricted to consumption, but immigrants can produce as well. 3) Labor as a % of cost of housing is equal or even greater than material as a % cost from what I've seen. And the effect of having more people to build houses (a local market) would be vastly different than the rise in commodities (a global market)---labour supply would have a much larger effect on the former than the latter.
I did, but I think most people would be surprised at the number of people that are "illegal" that I've encountered. The kind of people who overstay visas/are here on a non-work permit but are working can be pretty staggering in tech. It makes me think that it's a more nuanced discussion, and that the notion of illegal immigration may be politically biased to denigrating a certain type of illegal immigrant. One big problem: the H1B and TN visa classes are based on proving merit through degrees. There are a lot of people who have very good programming skills who are high school dropouts. A lot of them are lurking around on tourist visas, I'd imagine, or building cool things in their homelands.
that's the biggest misconception. You sound like this country can't survive without illegal aliens. How did we last 200+ years without them?
wow that's some BS you came up with right there.. You should go visit some border towns' hospitals. Those illegal alien women are pumping out anchor babies by the minute.
1. We've always had illegal immigrants. 2. For a long time (until the early 1900s), the US pretty much let anyone into the country (as long as they were healthy). The US passed a series of racist immigration laws over time (starting with laws that targeted Asians) that weren't fully replaced until the 1960s. But during this time, the US had plenty of illegal immigrants as well.
You may want to look at those studies a little more closely or if you would post a link, we can examine them together. Some of the studies I read (may or may not be the same you quoted) , mixed different sources of Immigrants. The highly educated ones from Asia, Europe vs the ones from South of the border. They have different effects.
Increasing family size isn't just about waving a wand, there have to be well, births. And the birth rate has been trending ever-downwards in developed nations.
your first point is true Your second point is debatable, and depends on what you mean by productivity. ex: Machine learning is creating such accurate predictive models that it's actually unnerving practitioners. The gains are spectacular from an impact perspective and in terms of productivity, they elevate human capability to a level they have never been before. A punchy, non-technical and well-written take on this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151203-big-datas-mathematical-mysteries/.
I like your take on this issue. Curious about what you think about the TN visa class. Technically, unlimited work visas applied to high-skilled workers from either Mexico or Canada (thanks to NAFTA). Do you think H1B should be uncapped like the TN (granted there are some differences, especially with regards to the eventuality of residency, but one often leads to the other)?
