I read in *The Economist *today that illegal immigration accounts for a 5% decrease in native born Americans wages and only for the lowest paying jobs. A Mexican making an average of $2.25 at home can make $9.75 in the US. It was worked out that you must put 20 times the weight of an American before a Mexican to deny them work in the US. I’m not comfortable granting them amnesty just cause they made it and kept their heads down, I also don’t think stiffer boarders are at all cost effective. In the article I read I liked the idea France has in the works offering ‘green card’ like status but saving a chunk of their paycheck to give them when it expires and they go back home.
I will take a swing at it…
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The border must be secure. If people can easily get in, your controls will not worth as much. However, you do need controls…
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Employers must be able to easily check to see if you are legal to work. Green card holders carry a holographic sealed ID card. These things are easy to make, and there is no reason that we could not have stations at all borders to make these visitor cards for everyone coming. These cards would specifically state if you are here as a tourist, student, or worker. Linked up with digital photo, fingerprint, etc. Not needed for tourists from “approved safe nations” with passports. To go with this, we need the equivalent for US Citizens…
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The US Social Security number becomes the basis of US National ID cards that are the same as the Immigrant cards mentioned above.
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Employers then need an easy way to verify working status and eligibility. Swipe the worker card, input the deductions, confirm residency status, check photo against the person standing there, etc. The same system needs to check to see if that person is also on the payroll at 3 other firms as well, and create an alert.
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With all of these nice cards, we make it easier to come into the US and work. Report to the local border station (yes, I am mainly discussing the Mexican border, but we could put these systems into US Embassies and Consulates as well), get your card, and go on in. Open up the floodgates for workers.
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Current illegals have 6 months to get their cards made. They will all be checked for criminal records. If you are here clean (except for being here), one time amnesty IF you get your card. Yes, this is excusing past behavior. It is amnesty. I don’t see a way to deport 12 million illegals easily, and with many of them having kids who are citizens, it starts getting uglyl
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One year after implementation, any employer who hires someone for cash without checking status is SCREWED. Any worker who does not have their card is SCREWED. I don’t know how you draw the line on short term contract work, or people like housecleaners who come in once a week. The system won’t work if every housewife has to check status of their maid, I admit. Open hole here.
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End the automatic citizenship of those born here. No more anchor babies.
Concerns:
Now, this is just a quck back of the bar napkin thought process.
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To go with this we would need to think about the effect on US workers from having this many immigrants come in to work. H1B visa employees were used to keep US tech wages down, for example.
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We have become addicted to cheap labor. Lower middle class gets to feel like the upper class with their gardener, housekeeper and nanny.
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Companies also have used cheap unskilled immigrant labor. This could make the problem worse, even if they pay minimum wage. This has been the case for many years in the US (Chinese and Irish building the railroad for example). Agriculture is kept cheap thanks to cheap labor, and if we make that labor more expensive then US farms will close and will be replaced by imported food. This could be strategically unsound for the US.
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Too many immigrants can have an effect on US culture.
Now that I have tossed out a bit, I am sure I will get shredded.
Frankly, I don’t want them in. They depress wages. IMHO, employers like them because they’re cheaper then Americans because illegals never file workers comp claims, or bitch about not having health insurance, or bitch when the employers doesn’t pay the employers’ share of social security taxes. I realize that this will result in inflation in the US but I’d live with that.
If it were up to me, I’d say to Mexico that Mexico should take care of its own people instead of foisting them off on the US. I’d pay for kicking illegals out by eliminating foreign aid to Mexico. If you can’t deport 12 million, you can at least deport a lot of them in a very highly publicized manner and get everybody’s attention.
How much are you will to pay? Yes, immigrants depress wages in certain sectors. They also depress PRICES in those same sectors.
If the cost to manufacture in the US gets too high, then MORE manufacturing will go abroad.
As I understand it, illegals work primarily in industries that are not capable of moving abroad, such as farming and construction.
I’d also be in favor of amending the Constitution so that children born of illegals would not get automatic citizenship.
With NAFTA, we are seeing more farming moving abroad. It is only through government support that US farmers can compete in certain areas.
http://www.american.edu/TED/tomato.htm
If we raise costs for US farmers, more produce will be brought in from Mexico than grown in the US.
We’ve had price supports for US farmers since at least FDR. So what else is new.
Illegals don’t spend their wages here, but instead send a large percentage of it back to the home country to support their families there. That means that our economy is hurt because the money doesn’t circulate here.
And we have had Mexicans (and their equivalents) picking those crops (and doing other nasty jobs).
The remittances do shift cash out of our economy. However, their labor keeps our prices down. Those remittances might be cheaper for the US than the usual foreign aid we spend to keep those nations stable.
If you want economic data, I personally like www.nber.org
Not much though. Labor is a small percentage of agricultural production cost, around 11%. If you double farm wages,it only raises prices 5%.
What is the necessary wage to pay to attract US Citizen workers?
(great cite, btw)
From your cite:
On our One Dollar head of lettuce:
If you double the wage to 22 cents per head, then either the farmer loses HALF of his operating profit, or the price increases by 11 cents.
Now the grocery store must either raise the price to $1.11, or cut THEIR profits (which are known to be quite slim).
I would say that an increase in farm wages could EASILY hit farmers hard, especially if that price differential puts even more Chilean and Mexican produce in our grocery stores.
Of course, back then the equivalents of Mexicans were “Okies”, that is, US citizens who’d moved from the dust bowl of the central U.S.
Except that history has shown that when farm labor becomes more expensive, technological innovation often becomes more economical than manual labor. From my cite:
So it is conceivable that losing cheap Mexican labor will result in lower prices, and nobody has to do backbreaking labor. The only reason we don’t do it now is the artificially low wage pressure from Mexican labor.
And what makes you think the huge cost of doing that won’t hurt us worse than any number of illegal immigrants, assuming that it can be done ?
And what makes you think that these cards won’t be faked, and rapidly ? And you’ve just made life much easier for criminals; now they only need to fake one card to, say, steal your identity and empty your bank account. And you’ll have plenty of screwups, with people falsely being registered as legal or illegal when they are not. And your system would be expensive as hell. And it just screams “abuse me” to our own government; we have too little privacy as it is.
And what ? Do we toss those children into the ocean ? You can’t send them “back home”; home is here. Or do you want a permanent and growing underclass of stateless people who are legally forbidden to work, lacking those uber-cards, and who are literally forced to commit crimes to eat ?
And what possible benefit would be worth all the cost and suffering created by these sorts of laws and fortifications ? The ones we have are bad enough.
If I was an illegal immigrant Tsar?
I imagine they’d send me back to Russia.
Or Italians (Submarines)
Or Irish
Or Chinese Coolies
Those tomatos picked by machines are not very good. They have to be bred with thicker skins, more internal strength, and are picked early.
Hand labor provides the vine ripened tomatos.
We CAN secure our border, or at least reduce the amount of holes IF we want to.
Have you seen the modern H1B cards? It would take professionals to fake those. Add in fingerprint tech, etc. and you can make a pretty good card that is not easily faked. Technology is your friend.
I do agree with your privacy concerns.
If you are born here to parents on temporary visas, you get a temporary visit visa with equal time length to that of your parents. When theirs runs out, yours runs out. Once you hit 18, you have to apply for a visa of your own.
We HAVE an underground slave class that is regularly abused, paid little, etc. I would like to solve that with a workable worker program that protects US citizens AND offers opportunities to immigrant labor.
I am someone in favor of immigration to the US. We need a workable system that keeps these people above ground and on the books.
You don’t like my proposal? Where is yours?
That is a different debate altogether. Vine ripened fresh tomatoes are not the bulk of the tomatoes harvested in this country. Most tomatoes are made into sauce, catsup and other tomato-based products.
Within 5 years after the end of the Bracero program, 100% of the tomatoes grown in California were harvested mechanically. The prices went down as a result of efficiency.
Okay. Then what?
Mosier can answer too.