Would raising the minimum wage solve some of our current immigration problems? It seems many jobs now filled by illegal immigrants would suddenly become more attractive to American citizens.
Which “immigration problems” did you have in mind?
As far as illegal immigration goes, it might make things worse. Illegal immigrants have been known to work for sub-MW.
What basis do you have for assuming that the illegal immigration problem is because there are minimum wage jobs that Americans won’t do?
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I never said Americans would not do the jobs. I said they would become more attractive and the level of competition would rise. It could have a negative affect also on traditionally low wage earning Americans.
There are a number of very complicated factors implied in your question. The big problem is that most people, especially politicians, treat them as independent issues rather than the completely intertwined mess that they really are.
We can’t have a fairly high minimum wage and still turn a blind eye to many forms of illegal immigration. That would just attract more illegal immigrants and businesses that don’t want to pay it thereby encouraging even more job destruction for the lowest paid legal residents. There are plenty of Americans that will work in agriculture and other industries that depend on illegal labor for a fair wage and working conditions that at least meet legal minimum levels of safety but few people seem to want that for some reason.
We also can’t have a generous social safety net or a guaranteed basic income without getting illegal immigration under control. Some European countries already found that out the hard way.
Those two issues are intractably coupled. If you can’t control your own borders, you can’t control your labor supply or the conditions that result from a very large gray-market labor force. None of my comments have anything to do with legal immigration. That is a completely separate issue and you can have as much or as little of that as conditions dictate at any given time and place.
These are very large problems but they aren’t conceptually difficult to fix. You just have to start enforcing it much more harshly on the employer side even for jobs like nannies and housekeepers. Once you destroy the demand, much of the illegal immigration problem will solve itself and you can focus on raising wages and working conditions for legal workers.
People don’t want to do that though because the politicians don’t want to lose their cheap nannies and housekeepers and their rich friends really like having a large supply of workers in their fields and factories that can’t complain about anything.
A lot of jobs that illegal immigrants do actually pay them more than minimum wage.
I recall that when Alabama passed an anti-illegal immigrant law in 2011(?), the fallout was hilarious. Yes, undocumented workers left the state. But legal immigrants were spooked, so many of them left too. That left a state-full of farmers without anyone to harvest their crops. Of course they put the call out to natural-born U.S. citizens, mostly White, as I recall. They were much slower than the previous workers, and many or most soon quit because the work was so hard. Some didn’t even last a day before quitting.
They would get used to it over time on both sides. There is nothing unique about the stamina and skills of illegal immigrants. If rednecks can work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico like plenty of them do, they can work in agriculture or any other manual labor job. In fact, many of them grew up on farms or worked on them when they we young. The problem is that the conditions are so bad and the pay so low that no rational person would want to do it unless the conditions change and that is the problem that needs to be solved in the first place.
The big difference is that the agricultural employers can make ridiculous demands of illegal workers for extremely low pay. I have seen it myself and have had friends that employed them in places like egg farms and slaughterhouses. The illegal workers lived on a far corner of the farm in a dilapidated mobile homes with 20 or more people living in each ne. They got to come into town once a week (supervised) to buy supplies. If they got hurt or sick, there was certainly no money and they had to find a way back home or wherever they could.
Of course normal Americans won’t work under those conditions but that is not a reason to support the wink-wink system of human abuse that currently exists. It gives everyone cheaper food but we have to ask ourselves, is it worth it?
It would seem to me though that eliminating the minimum wage would do more to eliminate illegal aliens than raising it would. It would eliminate the black market incentive.
That sounds funny. A law to out-law immigrants who are there unlawfully? 
Well… Alabama, so…
I have generally assumed that the minimum wage is a cause of illegal workers. They are willing to work off-the-books at lower than minimum wage rates.
If one really wanted to get rid of Mexican labor, I suspect that eliminating the minimum wage would actually be the most assured route (though, it would take a decade or two for the average minimum wage to migrate downwards to whatever the market value would be).
Of course, this would probably also increase the income disparity by a large factor (the income disparity probably does not include illegal workers at the moment, so this would effectively cause those jobs to be added in), which could cause some problems unless an alternate mechanism to balance the field was implemented.
It’s strange to call it abuse if it’s not terribly different than living conditions in Mexico.
I think that it’s harmful to Mexico to lose so many honest, hardworking people in the prime of their life to the US, just to get them back when they’re tired and ready to make supporting the family the next generation’s problem. But it would be pretty hard to make the quality of their life much different than it would be in Mexico. Farming is farming, whichever country you’re in. Living in a shack with no electricity or plumbing is the same, whichever country you’re in.
If we’re concerned about the quality of life of Mexicans, it’s more useful to figure out ways to convince Mexico’s citizens to improve their country - which would be helped by having their best people within its boundaries. Like Americans, once they’ve lived a decent life, they wouldn’t be willing to take on crap jobs with crap living conditions.
I don’t see how. The employers are still going to want the cheapest labor, and the legal employees still want a better lifestyle than what can be supported on sub-$7.25/hr. Who’s going to take a $3 or $4/hr job?
and non-0imigrants too. Both because they feared for immigrant members of their families, and because they were tired of the persecution. Such so-called “anti-illegal immigrant” campaigns always contain a strong dose of general racist/ethnic persecution.
Or just go out of business entirely.
Mexico isn’t some dystopian hellhole. They have electricity, running water, and civil rights. Nor do workers in Mexico normally need to worry about their employees refusing to pay them and having the government enforce it. Nor do they need to worry about being persecuted for having a Mexican name or brown skin.
It’s bad enough that thousands risk their lives to come here. And don’t kid yourself. Mexico is a very stratified society, and if you’re “indio” (often called “chino”) or too “mestizo” or “negro”, you’re at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Did you ever notice that the president of Mexico never looks like the Hispanic bus boy at your local restaurant? And don’t make me laugh be saying no one ever gets cheated out of pay in Mexico.
I’m still not sure what the “illegal immigrant problem” even is. We want people to harvest our vegetables. Mexicans want to harvest our vegetables. We let them harvest our vegetables. Where’s the problem in that?
Not in the city-sized shanty town I walked through.
Because it means the government isn’t functioning properly. There is no problem with immigrants in general but there has to a proper procedure for it. The term “illegal immigrant” is not derogatory. It is a simple legal status label that can apply to anyone. Both you and I could become ones ourselves by travelling to France, Sweden, Canada and even Mexico and refusing to leave. Try to do that in Australia or Japan sometime and see what happens. Mexico has a huge illegal immigration problem on their own at their southern border and they deport people daily.
I have no idea why people have a problem understanding the basic idea of a nation-state. It is as old as human civilization itself. The fact that a country needs to turn a blind eye to labor issues to achieve fundamental goals is a problem in its own right. We shouldn’t need Mexicans to risk their lives walking across the desert or hiding in a cargo shipment so that someone in New York City can have avocados with their arugula.
There are people that advocate completely open borders. I am not among them but I can understand the argument. What I do not support is people that pretend that they don’t understand the concept of sovereign nations because it causes some liberal tear-jerking while maybe costing them more at Whole Foods.
This is an odd issue because it causes people to flip sides on their fundamental beliefs.