One other thing along these lines: when I was on jury duty, two people were let off the jury because they didn’t have an adequate grasp of English (one Spanish-speaking woman was here 11 years, and a Chinese man for 17). This makes it impossible to have the fulfill one of their duties as a citizen.
It necessitates no such thing. We’d all have to pay slightly higher prices, but the country would do just fine. better, even, in that wages would raise to a fair level where Americans would be happy to take them.
But isn’t that primarily because we have so many people who are so rich. OUr bottom 10% are living immeasurably better lives than the bottom 10% in Cameroon. There will always be rich and poor. If I’m poor, I’m worried about my day to day life. It makes no difference if the richest 10% have ten times more than me or ten million.
A. The point of open legal immigration is to allow the Mexicans who are coming in anyway to unionize. It’s the illegals who are working below minimum wage. Make then legal & that stops.
B. Any country that doesn’t manufacture enough for its own consumption is in trouble, long term. And we aren’t–not even the whites–really all middle class. Nor can we be.
C. Given that you have these stupid (but distressingly common) assumptions about the US economy, I don’t really have any faith in anything you say about Mexico.
Correct. Australia is similar to the US in many ways, but it does not have a large pool of illegal workers willing to work below minimum wage. Partly this is because it’s quite hard for third-world people to get to Australia illegally. So the people in Australia working at jobs like that are paid the legally mandated wage, and often belong to a trade union that looks after their interests. Prices of goods and services don’t seem to me to be noticably higher because of this.
Odd how if you divide GDP by the population that you get the average wage then…
It might not be how it’s calculated, but it amounts to the same. Wage is based on your value–i.e. how much you produce compared to another worker. If the US can support workers of a higher wage, it’s production goes up, if it can’t it’s production goes down.
Gross Domestic Product is a measure of production by value. The value of produce is the cost of the people it took to fashion it (tracking all the way back to the people who mined the minerals).
GDP does not just consist of wages, since it includes other forms of income such as profits and dividends.
Our economy runs on consumption - Australia’s economy runs on whoring out their natural resources to the world. if prices rise around here because of increased labor costs for basic economic goods that low-cost labor is most appropriate for, affordability would become an issue for a large number of people
The price of gas went up by a buck a gallon in this country a year ago and people were shitting themselves because of an inability to afford life - going into credit card debt just to get around. A buck a gallon, on an average yearly drive of 12k miles and an average fuel efficiency of 20MPG is $600 dollars a year. 600 dollars is the difference between being able to revolve your credit card debt and declaring bankruptcy…
i’m not saying we need to perpetuate illegal immigrant labor to keep the country afloat - i’m saying that there are alot of affordability issues for the lower-middle class that are mitigated by having a black market for low cost labor, so there are entrenched interests to preserving the status quo.
That’s a great point. And good for future reference. I’m not surprised to hear that stuff doesn’t cost much more. I recall seeing where the labor costs in agriculture for things like lettuce are just 10% of the total. So if a head costs $1.00, that’s labor cost of a dime. Double it, and you pay $1.10 for the head of lettuce.
Well, possibly. I’d have to check again, but I’m relatively sure that GDP / Population is fairly consistently at or near the average wage of a nation.
But ultimately that’s getting off the topic.
The US immigration bureaucracy can only support the import of X number of foreign nationals.
- Is the US heading towards or away from being a manufacturing mecca?
- If you were running a university like Yale, for instance, would you take in all the students who were closest to the school with little other criteria, or would you choose the best and brightest from all around the nation/world–optionally preferring those who could use the break more?
Actually we can all be middle class or upper class. It used to be that the lower class worked in jobs that were outdoors, and the middle class worked in jobs that were indoors. These days, lower class works on the bottom floor, middle class works on the second floor.
Pizza Hut, for instance, forms their cheese and sauce and dices their vegetables in a central factory somewhere. These foods are then frozen and sent to individual shops. These shops then assemble and redistribute these products to individual houses. The first step of this process can be and likely has been offshored. There’s no particular reason that most American food needs to be grown or prepped within the US.
Second Life has started to be used as a place to have office fronts for businesses. Extending it into being an office full with conference rooms and so on is in the immediate future. All of the business meetings that take place today with people getting on a plane and flying across the nation, sleeping at Red Roof Inn, they don’t need to do that anymore. This is bad for the hotel industry, reducing their market by 60%, but the overall productivity of the nation increases as operating costs and travel costs are massively reduced.
The lowest, grunt worker jobs of today, for as necessary as you might think, are going to disappear. They’ve always disappeared eventually. That hasn’t ended up in mass unemployment because there’s no longer jobs for the lowest class, rather it’s moved right along with methods being developed for the least capable workers to achieve what the more capable workers used to be needed for.
As I said in my previous post, unless you’re arguing that the US is moving towards and not away from being a manufacturing/low-wage-employee mecca for the world, how exactly are you justifying the worthiness of Mexican workers in relation to what we need and where we are going?
It’s odd in the sense that it’s wrong. US Per capita GDP ($50k, give or take) is about the same as the mean household income, not the mean individual income.
You appear to be correct. It looks like “average income” usually means “average household income” which doesn’t make too much sense to me but does seem to be the standard.
But right so GDP is largely equivalent to average income * population * 2. I’ll need to ponder why this is and if it’s just happenstance in the cases I looked at. Maybe I didn’t do a big enough sample way back when.
Hm, well ignore that particular little bit of easy math on my part. I confused myself at some point and it’s been left sitting till now.
I would still argue, however, that the value of X number of high skill workers is greater than the value of X number of low skill workers. Unless anyone can find fault with that, the GDP issue is moot. If it was X of one and Y of another and X was large enough, then sure, but even then it would be a question of whether we want to go in that direction for our future.
Value, yes, but you’re assuming we can only let X number of people in, and this thread is discussing letting more or less anyone in.
Who manages that?
Well, presumably there are law enforcement type personalities & clerical types that would be glad of the work.
Well, which would you vote for?
- Doubling our school funding.
- Doubling our immigration funding.
Why isn’t ~500,000 immigrants a year sufficient?
Hence my suggestion that we charge a large impact fee, rather than the ~$300 it costs to get a green card or $800 it costs to get citizenship.
Coyotes charge about $1000, iirc. So we should charge them more than the coyotes? This will help how?