I honestly don’t understand why you would want illegals to “do the jobs that Americans won’t.” Illegal immigrants are almost modern day slaves. They don’t really have legal rights or status which allow them to be exploited and abused with little recourse. Either give them legal status or deport them and hold those who exploited them accountable for their actions.
The issue isn’t ultimately about any single simple thing. But overall the economic aspect is typically exaggerated on both sides. Low skilled immigrants have a marginal net impact on the whole economy. The economic issue is how the pluses and minuses fall. Sure some types of employer would be much worse off for a time if the supply of such workers were greatly curtailed, and it’s just as reasonable to estimate that native born workers would not necessarily fill the exact same jobs at the same wages. OTOH local districts which have seen big increases in the burden of mainly locally supported social services (including eg schools not just ‘govt assistance’ in a narrow sense) from low skilled typically poor immigrants would see relief.
A lot of that cancels out in the big picture. In the longer run industries which have come to rely on low skilled migrants would adjust. Agriculture for example is often given as the reason immigration laws must be winked at and ignored, or changed to let in lots more low skilled people, but that’s 6% of the US GDP and only a fairly small segment of that is highly labor intensive. That’s not IMO a rational reason to say that laws on the books should be ignored. It requires a really special emergency to say that about a law.
It’s less unreasonable to say laws should be changed to let in a lot more low skilled people, though not obvious either, from economic POV. And social factors enter in. Anyone who doesn’t want rapid demographic change in their country is not a ‘racist’. It’s reasonable for them to ask what clear benefit is it for them and put the burden on others to convince them. OTOH it’s also reasonable to factor in past laxity in enforcing laws if you’re going to tighten enforcement. People who were given the de facto right to live in the country for decades illegally shouldn’t necessarily be considered equal to people who came literally yesterday.
There’s a brilliant SF story where fruit is picked, not by robots, but by people controlling mechanical pickers which are much like robots. The brilliant part is that the people actually controlling the machines are in sub-minimum-wage zones like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nicaragua, etc.
In theory, you can enjoy the cheap labor without any immigration at all.
(Now, excuse me, I need to get in touch with a call center regarding my computer…)
Is this a whoosh? Where are they to find the money to relocate and feed their families? 30-hour minimum wage jobs barely pay for food and rent, and savings accounts are a pipe dream. Most of them don’t have their own transportation; are they to walk to some unknown future? Around here, folks with that resume are called “homeless people”. In 1930s California they were called “Okies” and lived in squalid camps.
Generally employers get (what the employers know) are fake SSNs from them, and hire them and pay them exactly like legal (often immigrant) farm workers. Thus if they get raided, they can claim plausible deniability. If the records show that paid illegals half that be clear evidence they knew.
And no, they dont pay them cash under the table, not usually, since if the IRS finds out you havent been giving the IRS the Employment taxes the IRS just t*akes all your assets and shuts you down. *The INS is a bit of a paper tiger, but the IRS is a very real threat.
That’s bogus.
Even the middle class gets more net from the government than we pay in, in taxes.
Remember also illegals pay into SocSec and dont get a nickel back.
sigh. I know, when you have no facts on your side, attack their cite.:rolleyes:
*However, at least 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. vegetable acreage and 40 to 45 percent of the U.S. fruit acreage is totally dependent on hand harvesting. The crops represent about 30 percent of the U.S. fruit, nut, and vegetable acreage and have an annual farm-gate value of over $13 billion. *
Yes. Effectively unlimited immigration of low skilled immigrants drives down the wages of the working class/working poor. Upper classes, from both parties, love it because they love cheap, docile labor.
Well, except for the fact that most of the people who employee them usually pay them far below minimum wage, often in dangerous conditions and treat them like shit. But hey, yeah, it’s all great.
That is far too simplistic a model for the real world. Increasing wages is not the only option/outcome. That only works if the consumers are willing to pay the resulting higher prices. Other options for producers dropping out of the market if they can’t make a profit (and possibly switching to a different crop) and pursuing automation options that previously weren’t cost-effective at lower wages but would be now.
There’s a good article in the Economist about the time we tried this back in the 60s, showing how it did not lead to an increase in wages:
True but while the case given in the Economist article isn’t itself oversimplified it’s just a case study of one situation. Agriculture is a major employer of low skilled immigrant labor but most low skilled immigrants in the US don’t work in agriculture.
As you say in effect, you have to superimpose the curve of native labor supply for a given job at at given wage with the curve of consumer demand at a given price. And besides consumers demanding less if the price goes up, with something like farm produce there’s also the possibility to substitute imports, often from countries which are otherwise a source of low skilled immigrants.
OTOH many or most of the jobs low skilled immigrants do in the US can’t easily be replaced by imports (construction, leisure/hospitality, lower tiers of medical industry like home care, etc), some of them can’t easily be by automation either. It’s a lot more plausible in those cases that wages would rise for low skilled Americans if there were fewer low skilled immigrants, though not as a some freebee, no losers, everything is better economically kind of thing. On first principles of economics even low skilled immigrants might be a net benefit economically: via comparative advantage, same as goods from lower wage labor in other countries are a net benefit, though one must also account for the issue of increased social services in case of immigrants but not goods.
But it’s probably a quite marginal net benefit if it is, and the win/loss distribution could be pretty heavily stacked against lower skilled Americans. This IMO is where there can arise an irony where some of the left/Democratic persuasion obsess over income distribution but have a de facto position that only refusal to enforce immigration laws is fair and humane, and/or imply lots more unskilled people should be allowed into the country.
Except they dont.
as i just said *Generally employers get (what the employers know) are fake SSNs from them, and hire them and pay them exactly like legal (often immigrant) farm workers. Thus if they get raided, they can claim plausible deniability. If the records show that paid illegals half that be clear evidence they knew.
And no, they dont pay them cash under the table, not usually, since if the IRS finds out you havent been giving the IRS the Employment taxes the IRS just takes all your assets and shuts you down. The INS is a bit of a paper tiger, but the IRS is a very real threat.
*
Right. I know there are some nasty sweat shops here and there, but the illegals I’ve known or heard of in California never work for pay as low as minimum wage. They’re paid good money to bust ass a few hours before sunup in the fields, because you don’t want to work when the sun is beating down on you, or they work construction or lawncare but again, it’s hard physical work but they get paid pretty well for it.
What I said earlier was “wages will go up and up until they’re high enough to make up for the extra expense of living in that area’.” I will amend it to add that employers will also add compensation for transport if necessary, even if it’s only the cost of a bus ticket. They *must *do this, if the alternative is going out of business for lack of qualified applicants. Either that, or…
Agreed, by enforcing laws against the hiring of illegal immigrants, agricultural employers would then be subjected to the same marketplace pressures as any other industry. Prices would rise, and you’re right - the outcome might be increased hiring of US citizens and legal immigrants, but it might instead be increased automation, or outright offshoring of production, same as any other industry.
It might help if we had a better grasp of how much cost is added to agricultural goods because of manual labor. Take strawberries, which cost ~$4 a pound. How long does it take a field worker to pick a pound of strawberries? A minute? OK, at minimum wage that’s 17 cents. Imagine we had to effectively double that in order to get US citizens to relocate and do the job. Now your strawberries will cost you $4.17 per pound. No doubt the real increase would be more than that, since other minimum-wage labor is involved in sorting/packaging/loading. But my point is that it seems unlikely to be an earth-shattering increase in price.
Can’t afford machinery? What small farmers are you talking about? The Amish?
Do you have any idea what new combines and tractors actually cost?
http://www.tractorhouse.com/listings/farm-equipment/for-sale/17312231/2016-john-deere-s670
It’s even been rumored that small farmers have even been able to obtain small business loans from money lenders in order to buy needed machinery. :rolleyes:
Yes, they work very hard, sometimes in nice, sometimes in nasty weather, with low pay. But when paid by piecework, some of the best pickers earn good money when the crops are there to be picked. We calculated it would be 60-80K a year if the work was year around- *which it isnt. *
I agree, as part of the politicized debate about the ‘economics’ of low skilled (including illegal, low skilled) immigration, where the two sides are not always really really driven by economics, one of the tendencies is to exaggerate how little such immigrants are paid. And OTOH does ‘minimum wage’ mean the national, higher state/local ones in many places or what some people want the min wage to be. The average pay for field work in the US is around $11/hr per the USDA. Anyway the point is not what exactly the number is, but how the labor market would change if you effectively enforced immigration law.
But also assuming you didn’t make legal allowance for industries where immigrant manual labor is a key component and the market might not support the increase it would require to substitute native workers. And why, exactly, would one rule that out as a policy out of hand?
It’s not obvious you could maintain certain agricultural segments with air tight enforcement of existing immigration laws and no concession on additional ‘guest worker’ etc. programs for agriculture. Which as I said doesn’t mean the whole US economy would come crashing down, far from it. But just saying ‘oh well if it’s $11 natives would probably do it for $15 that’s negligible impact at the checkout counter’ is meaningless. In the real world there actually is a such thing as ‘you just can’t get people’. But you can automate in some cases, such farming activity shift to other countries in other cases. Still, not obvious you’d want a policy that was highly disruptive to an industry, or why it would be so wrong to make a (legal) carve out for it.
Whereas again, most jobs filled by illegal immigrants are everyday jobs which in many cases natives would take, and do take, but the low skilled immigrants tend to hold down wages in low skilled jobs. That’s where it seems strange to me when some people are so dead set against immigration enforcement while so concerned about income distribution. Sure, lower low skilled wages mean lower prices which are a benefit to consumers, not just or necessarily to business owners (probably not in businesses where everyone uses illegals). But in terms of wage distribution low skilled immigrants are a factor stratifying it, or it’s difficult to prove they aren’t. And that gets back to working class citizen/voters’ reasonable position IMO to have to be convinced why a lot of low skilled immigration, or illegal immigration tolerated as much as it’s been, in is their interest; rather than them having to prove they aren’t ‘racists’ for having a problem with it.
Agreed. A lot of them do not even live in the right areas to go and pick strawberries.
Cite?
The first claim is obvious I think, that most low skilled immigrants don’t work in agriculture.
As to the effect on low skilled immigrants on low skilled wages, that has a potentially significant political ramification so like most such things there are dueling statistics and a secondary debate about which are ‘un-biased’. On one had I don’t want to answer ‘Google it yourself’ but OTOH I don’t see the point of citing studies which have found a significant negative effect on low skilled native wages from low skilled immigrants when others haven’t. The general consensus of meta-studies is ‘clusters around zero’ but a lot of underlying studies are looking at the general effect, not particularly on low skilled people. And goes back to what I’ve said twice: the overall macroeconomic effect of low skilled immigration on the US economy is marginal.
But back to the end of my post you didn’t quote, IMO a good starting point for immigration debates is deciding where the burden of proof should be. It seems clear to me people who want to ignore existing laws should be the ones proving extraordinary benefit from doing so or extraordinary harm if the law is enforced. The ground is more neutral overall when it comes to proposing changing the law. But if low skilled native worker/voters believe in their own experience low skilled immigrants hurt them economically, do they really have to prove it? It’s probably true for some people even if it’s not in the overall category ‘low skilled’, and again I believe marginal either way at the scope of ‘overall workforce’. Why should people use their vote to let lots more low skilled people into the country if it’s not a clear benefit to them? And you’d have trouble finding a study which claimed that for lower skilled US natives.