From CNN: “The labor force participation rate for men ages 25 to 54 stood at nearly 97% in 1965, but now hovers near a record low of 88%. That rate includes those who are working or have looked for a job in the past four weeks.”
Ballparking, that’s about 8 million people.
I want to be clear about what you’re saying: you think that illegal immigrants would build million-dollar tunnels to get here?
If so, I say let them come. My city could use a subway system, for example. Let’s put them to work.
I want to be clear about what I’m saying, too. I’m agnostic about illegal immigration. From my limited experience, illegal immigrants are mostly hard-working, productive people who are adding to the wealth of the country. Naturally, some of them are criminals, too. But that’s true of any population. Anyway, some people disagree with me, and I acknowledge I could be wrong.
My point is that we could build a wall, if we wanted to, and that it would stem the flow of illegal immigration.
There are an entire host of reasons why fewer men in their prime are working. For example, two million men aged 25-54 receive Social Security Disability benefits, and hundreds of thousands more receive disability benefits from the military or other sources. Part of this is the decline in the stigma of being disabled; part is due to the fact that medical advances mean more people survive injuries that would have been fatal a few decades ago, but they don’t necessarily recover fully. There’s also the men who are still in school or have returned to school, the ones who have decided to be stay-at-home fathers (which would have been almost unthinkable in the 1960s), and other groups.
To be sure, there is certainly a group of discouraged workers in that number, people who have given up looking for work. In particular, the labor force participation rate of people aged 45-54 (people in their prime earning years) has declined 3.5 percentage points just since 2000. People in this age group are old enough that heavy-labor jobs no longer hold much appeal, and they often have family responsibilities that preclude picking up and moving to the latest boom-town. Unemployed workers in this age group who don’t have a lot of transferable skills or higher education experience great difficulty finding a new job, particularly in towns where the mine or the mill or the factory shut down and there are lots of older men with few skills chasing scarce jobs.
(Also, there are 95 million Americans aged 16 and up not participating in the labor force; discouraged workers are still not the biggest or the fastest-growing part of that group.)
Illegal immigrants typically don’t come on their own; those who cross the border in secret are usually smuggled across by people who make it their business to know when, where, and how to move their charges across the border. These businesses range from mom-and-pop operations to large-scale and very sophisticated organized crime enterprises. A decade ago, the sociologist Douglas Massey estimated that human smugglers along the US/Mexico border grossed five billion dollars a year in fees charged to would-be immigrants and their families. Where there’s that kind of money to be made, expenses such as million-dollar tunnels are just part of the cost of doing business.
To be sure, most of the tunnels to date have been built to smuggle illegal drugs, not illegal immigrants. However, there is increasing overlap between the coyotes and the cartels, and that trend is likely to accelerate as security measures along the border continue to increase. Higher security = more elaborate smuggling measures needed = more capital needed.
Yes, we could build a wall if we wanted to. I disagree that it would stem the flow of illegal immigration, however. A wall built, maintained, and staffed at staggering expense would divert resources from other forms of border security, and it would not do anything at all to stem visa over-stayers, smuggling by air or by sea, or plain old-fashioned bribing the guard at the border checkpoint. Increased security in the San Diego sector, e.g., reduced the flow there by merely diverting it to the lonelier and more rugged Sonoran Desert of Arizona; if we succeed in stemming the flow there, while economic opportunities still exist to attract them, illegal immigrants and their smugglers will just find a new path that is not so well guarded.
I don’t find anything particularly surprising and am unsure what you’re referring to. I don’t know what your point about the number of people born in Mexico etc. is. And the years I was looking at were 2005-2010.
Construction specifically was depressed at that time.
If wages are increasing they’re not increasinig enough, then. All these issues with the trucking jobs were always there.
Of course wages are not the only factor. But they’re a big factor. I’ve said this repeatedly. But to the extent that people don’t want those jobs because of work-life and similar issues, then the salaries would naturally have to rise even further yet. (I’ve suggested earlier that they may be depressed by competition from other forms of transport.)
If the combination of other factors - hours, physical demands, sense of satisfaction etc. etc. - is such that the supply-demand curve would set wages at Point X, and union negotiations have succeeded at keeping wages at some point above Point X, then there will be an oversupply of teachers.
There are always temporary discombobulations. Over the long term, one would assume that the supply and wages of lawyers will reach some sort of equalibrium.
I was looking at 2005-2014, covering both the highs and lows of the business cycle.
My point about the number of people born in Mexico, etc., is in reference to your point:
Per the 2010 national census of Mexico, less than one percent of the population of Mexico was born abroad; the number born outside North and Central America is minuscule. Meanwhile, about thirteen percent of U.S. residents were foreign-born, with over half originating outside of North and Central America. Therefore, I’m not sure what statistical or other significance you see in the fact that Pew is comparing everyone from the U.S. versus Mexican-born, because “Mexican-born” would encompass 99%+ of “everyone from Mexico” anyway.
While the issues have always been there, they’ve assumed new importance because many younger people are simply unwilling to consider working conditions that their fathers and grandfathers accepted. The very term “work-life balance,” e.g., didn’t even exist until the late 1970s.
When people are unwilling to consider something, that sometimes can be At Any Price. There are many people, and an increasing number of people, who would not be truckers for a million dollars a year (if only because you can’t enjoy a million dollars when you’re stuck behind the wheel of a big rig all day every day with no vacation or family time for weeks on end, and you’re not even going to be able to enjoy it in retirement because driving that truck shortens your life expectancy). Eight to twelve percent a year increases, when wages for the population at large are almost stagnant, is a pretty good clip.
I don’t think you understand how the labor market for teachers (at least, public school teachers) works. Schools are legally mandated to educate all of the students who present themselves for education, and there are legal, political, and practical limits on the number of students who can assigned to any given classroom. For example, if you are a school administrator, have 197 students to educate, and your local rules say you can have a maximum of 25 students per teacher, you have to hire eight teachers. If wages are above Point X such that you have money for only seven, it’s your responsibility to look under the couch cushions for enough money to pay the 8th. Shoving too many students into a classroom is the sort of problem that tends to get parents riled up, and then the job on the line is yours. “Well, we just don’t have the money to hire anybody to teach algebra this year” is not a winning argument, or even an acceptable one. School-teaching is one of the occupations (firefighters and some areas of medicine are others) in which the demand curve doesn’t show a lot of elasticity, or even much curve, so your argument is incorrect.
That specific comment was about the Pew study, which covered 2005-2010.
The percentage of people in Mexico born in other countries is not what counts here, and the comparison of that percentage with the comparable figure for the US is even less relevant. The US is a lot bigger than Mexico and also has a lot more immigration from countries other than Mexico.
The point again, is that the Pew study found net immigration to/from Mexico as flat but did this by scoring immigration from the US into Mexico differently than from Mexico into the US.
It rose extremely slowly during that period. 2010-2013 was pretty close to the bottom in terms of number of construction jobs, regardless of the direction in which it was slowly moving.
There is virtually nothing that people won’t do at any price, as in my example earlier about oil field workers. There may be some people who won’t take those jobs at any price, but there are others who would.
I don’t think you understood the point here, which has nothing to do with the number of teaching jobs available. It’s about the wages offered for teaching jobs.
In theory, if there is a field where there is an oversupply of workers that should push the prevailing wages down (inverse to a field where there is an undersupply, which would push the wages up). To use your example, if you are a school administrator, have 197 students to educate, and your local rules say you can have a maximum of 25 students per teacher, you have to hire eight teachers, and wages are above Point X such that you have money for only seven but you have 47 applicants for those 8 jobs, what you might do is lower the offered salary, to the point where you could hire more teachers for the same total dollars (or at least save money in any event). If you and all your fellow administrators did that, then wages in the teaching field would decrease to the point where fewer people would go into the teaching field, at which point the oversupply would be reduced or eliminated. So the question is why that hasn’t happened. And I speculated that this is because unions keep the salaries higher than would be maintained by a pure supply/demand situation.
They did this by scoring immigration from the US into Mexico in a way that is not meaningfully different from the way they scored from Mexico into the US because “from Mexico” and “born in Mexico” are 99%+ overlapping. I don’t see a a statistically significant difference between the two; do you? Can you explain what you see as meaningful about the difference given the demographics of Mexico?
January 2011 was the bottom; from that point, the industry was gaining jobs (more than a million to date). Are you arguing that illegal immigrants have not taken any of those jobs, or only an inconsequential number?
The fewer the number who will, however, the greater the difficulty in recruiting, even when wages are rising.
However, the salary of an unemployed teacher is zero. People in teachers’ colleges are not stupid; they know the average salary paid is relevant only if you actually find work, and I’m sure the unemployment rate among teachers in that locality is well-known to those studying for the field. This lends support to the notion that wages alone are not the only sole or necessarily the prime determinant of who enters the teaching field.
Given a choice between entering the teaching field (where wages might be good if you find work, but you might not find work), or entering far more lucrative fields that are experiencing shortages of employees, people are choosing to become teachers. From a solely money-driven perspective, this is irrational; if you are not driven solely by money, though, but are interested in emotionally rewarding jobs or good working conditions or some other factor(s), choosing to forego lucrative but unpleasant work may be a more rational choice. Obviously, it is the choice some number of people are making.
Just because 99% of the population of Mexico is born in Mexico doesn’t mean that 99% of the migrant population was born in Mexico. Expecially since a lot people immigrating to/from Mexico are the same people, going back and forth and bringing their children with them.
There’s a delay between when things take a downturn and when people actually leave. It’s not like people read construction jobs reports and immediately head over to Mexico (or decide not to emmigrate from Mexico). The way these things work in the real world is that people emmigrate and then see how things are going. If things are going well, they stick around, and tell their friends back home that things are going well which encourages more people to show up. When things are going poorly they are more likely to head back and to report negatively to people back home. But it’s not like it happens overnight. Especially since not everyone’s experience is uniform, and there’s a lot else going on at the same time. But as a downturn drags on longer and longer, people get more and more discouraged, and the big picture also gets clearer. So having the contruction downturn drag on for several years had an ongoing effect, even if the actual number of jobs was slightly higher in Year 2 than in Year 1. The bigger deal is that in both years it was a downer for people in that field.
Again, but that should just make the wages rise even more (again, if the economics can support it). I feel like we’re just talking past each other on this, at this point.
Same here. I don’t know why you keep pointing out that money is not the sole determinant of why people work at any given field, when I keep on agreeing with this. But money is one determinant, and at the same time - and you keep ignoring this - the wage level itself is a product of people’s desire to work in a given field.
In your teacher example, the question is whether some of the unemployed teachers who can’t find jobs would be willing to take a job at lower pay if one was available. Assuming the answer is yes, then why haven’t wages in that field declined to meet that point? (I’m suggesting unions.) And if wages would decline, would there be some people who would forgo that as a field as a result, or would the exact same number of people enter the field even if pay was lower? I think the first is obviously correct. If you disagree, then we’re going to have to leave it at that.
Do you have any evidence of what the meaningful differences are?
Okay, but I’m not seeing how this supports the point you are trying to make.
The wage level FOR TEACHERS has a lot more to do with the numbers of kids and the level of state budgets than just “people’s desire to work in a given field.” That’s one reason that teacher pay, relative to the pay of other professions with similar educational requirements, has been declining for sixty years in the United States. cite (Sorry, I’m not familiar with Quebec.)
Probably further wage declines would chase out some more people, but I think at this point most of the people who would be deterred by low wages have already been deterred. The ones who remain know that they are going into a job where funding levels are determined mostly by people who campaigned on a promise to cut taxes. (I think you grossly overestimate the power of unions, especially outside the major urban areas in the north and northeast. Five states, e.g., including Texas, prohibit collective bargaining for teachers entirely, and others have very weak systems.)
It seems fairly obvious that people who were themselves not born in a country are more likely to leave it, simply based on their demonstrated inclinations and their weaker ties to that country. And this will obviously be true of children born of expatriots, who would move back to their parents’ home country with their parents. It’s hard to imagine you’re disputing this, so I don’t know what your point is.
That having construction employment at a depressed level in Year 2 will continue to discourage migration even if that depressed level is slightly less depressed than it was in Year 1.
Again, you keep discussing things as one-factor either-ors. That’s not how things work. Multiple factors influence things. Pay is a big one. It’s not the only one.
And similarly, even if it’s true that “most of the people who would be deterred by low wages have already been deterred”, that’s very different than if all of the people who would be deterred by low wages have already been deterred. Which is besides for the fact that the influence of low wages would have a bigger impact on new people contemplating the field than it would on people who are already in mid-career.
Is there a comparable surplus of teachers in those states? That would be a test of my theory.