For someone who has lived in a tent, I think you are assuming a bit too much that they have landlords, but i could be mistaken. My thoughts again is they are earning most of that money for Mexico, not to spend in the US.
Most migrant farm workers live in dilapidated housing provided by their employer farms. The majority of money earned by migrant workers is sent or taken back to their home countries to support family members there.
What if we let them keep all their pay, but if they overstay their visa, they get raped by demons from hell?
(Or from anywhere, really. The key thing is the demon-rape, not where they’re contracted from.)
That was my initial assumption which has been challenged.
Um, Ok, but yeah, the US has to get paid too.
The politicians will promise that the demon-rapers will foot the bill for the punishment, but you can be sure that it will be the American taxpayers left with the bill for the mystical sexual assaults :mad:
Wouldn’t demon-rapers be those who rape demons?
Fine. I rescind the hyphen.
Actually, many migrant workers send home around half their take home pay.
Having worker with Migrant farm workers in CA, by and large the most live in pay by the month cheap motels, with often four guys sharing the room. It works out to about $2-300 per month. Some live in tents in camps. Some live where they work, in very low cost subsidized housing provided by the employer.
How many is “many”, and what is your source?
By and large, after a IRS program a few decades ago, very few migrant farm workers are paid under the table.
This is due to two factors- the iRS severely enforces payroll tax laws. They will padlock your business, seize bank accounts,and even your farm.
and two, when ICE come calling, if you have farm workers and the illegals ar epaid under the table and less- that is solid evidence that you knew they were illegal and you get arrested. It’s better to just accept their bogis Soc Sec cards and pay them the same as the rest of the workers- quite a few of whom are Mexican American citizens. “Plausible deniability”. This is why so few employers are arrested when raids are made.
Quite a few of each, yes. I may demur with your use of “most” and “majority” but it is a very significant % in both cases, and my experience is limited to just California.
It is amazing the depth of ignorance on this subject. No, most Migrant workers are not paid under the table.
Also, a good farm worker, expert in say picking strawberries can earn quite large sums in that short season, more than even a teacher, say. Yearly, otoh, the pay sucks.
I was part of a special project with the US Treasury.
About 40 percent of the money goes to just one country — Mexico — practically all of it sent by migrants in the United States. The recent surge is all the more notable because migration from Mexico has slowed to a crawl — with the number of migrants in the U.S. increasing by just 1 percent between 2010 and 2016 to a total of 11.8 million. Also, says Orozco, the median amount that any given Mexican migrant sends hasn’t changed — about $300 at a go, 14 times a year, most commonly through a money transfer company such as Western Union.
If we assume the $7500 figure is correct, that is like $6500 after taxes. They send home $4200 a year.
Over your plan. The one we’re discussing in this thread.
You’re not going to convince people to cross the border legally if you make it worse than crossing the border illegally.
Thank you-now let us work with these numbers to see what we get: Presuming the 10% tax is on the whole amount and not just the half the worker gets initially, The take home average should be about $2975/year. I can’t imagine living off of that, and that is providing she/he isn’t sending anything to the family back home. How does that work back home, anyway? “We can’t pay for food, clothing, housing or medical now, but if you all wait until the end of the year we promise we will pay you all that we owe you”?
I am not arguing against any of that, which is why I specifically asked the OP to forget the matters of immigration and whatnot. Millions of people work in the informal economy, and I seek the OPs thoughts on why some workers do that.
There’s another idea- the bracero program. Give them a limited visa. They may come here as long as they have a job. The limited visa does not give them possible citizenship rights as a real “green card” does. Aaka the H2A visa:* An H-2A visa allows a foreign national entry into the United States for temporary or seasonal agricultural work. There are several requirements of the employer in regard to this visa. The H-2A temporary agricultural program establishes a means for agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring non-immigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature.[1] In 2015 there were approximately 140,000 total temporary agricultural workers under this visa program. Terms of work can be as short as a month or two or as long as 10 months in most cases, although there are some special procedures that allow workers to stay longer than 10 months. All of these workers are covered by U.S. wage laws, workers’ compensation and other standards; additionally, temporary workers and their employers are subject to the employer and/or individual mandates under the Affordable Care Act. Because of concern that guest workers might be unfairly exploited the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division is especially vigilant in auditing and inspecting H-2A employers. H-2A employers are the only group of employers who are required to pay inbound and outbound transportation, free housing, and provide meals for their workers. H-2A agricultural employers are among the most heavily regulated and monitored employers in the United States. Unlike other guest worker programs, there is no cap on the number of H-2A visas allocated each year.[2]*
It’s [THREAD=586551]hardly his first time[/THREAD].
I don’t feel I can comment on this ‘proposal’ under the limitations of this forum other than to observe that undocumented immigrants are already a net fiscal positive for the United States–to the tune of billions of dollars they pay into Social Security alone which they are not eligible to apply for and notwithstanding the crucial role they fill in the low wage agricultural, meat-packing, and home care industries–and the notion that we should squeeze even more out of them because of some kind of butt-hurt and entitled sense of injustice hedges this ridiculous proposal within spitting range of indentured servitude. How about instead of building a stupid wall or garnishing the wages of workers to correct some counterfactual notion of a fiscal imbalance, we actually put effort into reforming the immigration system to allow foreign workers to come over here and work legitimately with training and protections that we afford to the very least of citizens, and encourage them to gain education for themselves and their families so they can eventually return to the home nations that most of them would like to live in and develop mercantile and agricultural industries so their nations can become vibrant economies that can afford to buy more expensive American goods and services? That is, if you believe that the United States still has the capability and vitality to be competitive in technology and high end industries.
In other words, economics is not some kind of zero sum game where the United States only wins if everybody else loses, which seems to be a basic tenet of macroeconomics which is completely lost on the protectionist tariff and blockade crowd.
I’ll aver from saying more if and until this thread is moved to the BBQ Pit where it belongs.
Stranger