Well, they DID elect George Wallace…
I’m not in agreement with Bricker’s stance here or on illegal aliens in general, but it just seems kind of strange to be throwing the usual responses that imply that a stance to the right on immigration is racism against Hispanics at someone who’s Hispanic himself.
Actually, in the context of the source of that quote (or at least the source I was thinking of), there wasn’t really anything specific about racism against Hispanics. The “they” in that case represented immigrants generally, so go jerk your knee somewhere else.
And, actually, other episodes of that series are quite positive in their portrayals of Hispanic immigrants.
Wait, are you implying racism is logical?
No, he’s implying that racism usually is not against one’s own race.
Not usually is not the same as not ever.
And, look, I’m not saying Bricker hates hispanics. It’s complicated.
Yeah, same thing.
People who need buildings will continue to build them. There might be a dip during transition, then we’ll be back to normal. In the end, buildings will cost a little more. In the grand scheme of things, no big deal.
Actually, given the housing glut in the U.S., now probably would be as good a time as any to totally assfuck the construction industry.
Not the same thing at all. You are saying that the jobs will stay because the costs will be borne upstream by the buyers instead of by the employers. This may or not be the case in any given industry.
Example - where I live is a well known agricultural area where there are lots of “field workers” at the center of a, shall we say, political maelstrom right now.
They work for very low wages, and in fact the measured unemployment here is > 20%.
What is stopping the farmers from hiring the unemployed citizens at a rate that would cause them to do the backbreaking work rather than stay at home?
I suggest that the market will not bear the increase in price of the crops that this would entail, we are simply not going to pay double or triple for oranges and grapes. Instead we will eat something else, and then the farmer has no business left at all.
They don’t hire the citizens because they won’t work for the same low wages. But if you removed the illegals from the equation, then the farmers would be forced to pay a fair wage for the work they have. A wage that would be set by the market.
And the change you point to won’t be nearly as dramatic as you envision. In agriculture, labor accounts for only 10% of the cost of goods. So, if a head of lettuce costs $1.00, just ten cents of that is labor. So you could double the cost of labor and and we’d just be paying $1.10, or triple it and we’d pay $1.20. I don’t know the percentages in the construction industry, but one should keep in mind that there are already many jobs that are unionized, so I don’t know the percent of a particular job that goes to employees that may be illegal. Whatever it is, building s will be built. Like I said, there’d probably be a slight dip, but in a few years it would be gone, and buildings would cost a little more, people working on them will be making a better wage and paying more taxes on the money paid out in payroll.
Considering I not only am one, but I married one, I’d like to hear a bit more of your fascinating analysis, complicated though it undoubtedly is.
I don’t think anyone was saying you were. Dost thou protest too much?
“The wicked flee where no man pursueth.”
And, look, I’m not saying Cisco is wicked.
I think, despite our differences on other issues regarding immigration, Magellan is pretty close to on target here. I’d add a few caveats to his post:
[ul][li]Commercial truck farming is rather more labor intensive than the average industry. Paying fair market wage to field hands would probably increment cost-to-consumer more than he estimates. (I wonder if anyone has access to actual contemporary figures on this – commercial California agribusinesses who intentionally hire only U.S. nationals and pay them a good wage, and their cost of production vs. the ones who “don’t hire illegals, oh, no, but my goodness, how they scam us with fake IDs to get those jobs!” that pay way below market-level wages. [/li][li]Businesses customarily charge “what the market will bear” for their product. A law with teeth requiring fair market wages in industries that are known or rumored to be heavily using illegals would result in price rises claimed to be justified by but in actuality bearing little or no relation to increased labor costs. But the eventual results would be a discounting price war as producers carve out market niches of more value for yur dollar, etc. [/li][*]The effect of an intelligently-run legal “guest laborer” program that doesn’t pander to anyone’s paranoia probably would have a significant impact. But exactly what, I’m not enough of an economist to try to figure.[/ul]
Internalized hispanophobia? 
Citation needed.
There is nothing notable about English per se. There is something notable about the all the signs and traffic communications being in English. The infrastructure and installed user base, as it were. Yes, you can get by without it. Heck, I’m driving in France next month and I only know about 100 words. But you can certainly see that not knowing English would be a disadvantage. If you can drive well without knowing English, a well designed test in English ought to be able to capture that.
Whether you agree with it or not, this argument is not based on racism or economics. Frankly, I’m sure that James is a loathsome shit, probably a racist shit to boot. But this particular goal isn’t always racist. You’re wrong to imply that only racists agree with it.
Born and bred in the Windy City… i don’t seem to remember anybody bitching about signs and test being offered etc in Polish. Chicago at one time had more Poles than Warsaw… i mean they freakin shut the city down when Lech Walesa came to visit.
Down here)south)… its funny how when the economy went south suddenly their was this anti-immigration zeal. When the housing market was flourishing all you might hear was some old codger at the Jersey Mike’s bitching because a couple of workers were speaking to each other in spanish. Sometimes it made my job more difficult because i had to use the language line with my cell phone to understand what someone called 911 about.
One thing… I’ve worked over a 1000 accidents and lack of English speaking was not the cause of one. If one were to want to increase traffic safety… my simple answer would be to make DUI offense a mandatory five year prison sentence with no negotiations. Literally remove the ability for the county solicitor to lower the charges… IF you did that… you would see a significant reduction in vehicle accidents.
Cj, think you could throw a few blank lines into your posts? That wall of text thing gets tough to read.
Sorry, it doesn’t work that way at all.
I don’t know where you got your 10% number, but let’s not dispute it here because there are so many other things wrong in your logic that it doesn’t matter.
First, for commodity crops such as oranges and grapes, the farmer does not get to set his price on an open market. He essentially sells his crop to packers who tell him the price based on their analysis of what the end-market will bear for the product. For the most part, this is a take-it-or-leave-it deal for the farmer.
This means the farmer is left to take the risk on weather and other issues, having pre-sold his crop that he doesn’t have yet. the only way he can make a profit is to get his costs down - having a bumper crop does not benefit him that much, but coming up short is a disaster financially.
This isolates the cost of labor in the fields from the rest of the complex distribution channel and the end-user price.
now, there may be some slack in what the farmer can afford to pay labor, but not what it would cost to hire new people who don’t want to be there. For one thing, he would be reducing efficiency - hiring people with no experience with the crop or each other as a team, and surprisingly perhaps, such experience natters.
So he pays more, maybe triple, for less efficiency when he is already operating close to the edge by the nature of his distribution channel and the fact that it is a commodity market.
Even if the farmer is able to pick up the wages, a bit or a lot, the channel is not going to eat those costs either - at each step of the channel, the costs are increased for the same product, and the demand curve of the end user will be changed, so the risk is increased just to handle the product.
That means each time the orange or grape changes hands, more costs will be tacked on to account for the increased risks from earlier in the chain, and ultimately this will be reflected in the retail price tag, where the buyer will have the option of paying significantly more for the same product, or choosing an alternate product (including perhaps imported oranges or grapes or whatever).
So there is no way that a tripling of labor costs, with the concomitant risks involved, is going to be eaten by the channel, nor is the resulting price tag going to be palatable in the retail stores.
Why would you assume that the sum of all the payrolls will be higher when there are less buildings being built?
What are thee costs to the overall economy by not having the buildings that would have been built available for use? It is not like buildings are ends in themselves, they are input and drivers to other sectors of the economy. Without those drivers or tools in place, those other sectors don’t exist or are scaled down accordingly too.
Fore example, if we paid autoworkers top wages, you could argue we would make better cars, fewer of them but better ones by the same argument you just made.
But what would be the effect on the larger economy if cars were fewer in number, and affordable to only people of a certain earning power?
Right, not good!
So it is with your argument for paying construction workers more.
I am all for paying people more - if they earn it by showing that the market values their work accordingly.
But for now, in both markets, I think people generally are paid what their value is. That sucks that it isn’t higher, but given the overall industry structure, it is equitable.
Now, if you want to talk about that giant pink elephant caveat in the last sentence, I am all for that, but that requires some very deep analysis that the public doesn’t seem to have a taste for. It is a complex problem, far more complex than is being presented in the media. There are no easy fixes.