Certainly some people won’t want to leave their extended family, but many will seek out better opportunities, if nothing else than to send money back. We can look at the H-1B visa situation to get an idea of what it would be like. The H-1B visas are a reserved class of visas for specialized fields, such as tech workers. They are meant to fill gaps in highly skilled employment areas. There is no shortage of people willing to come and work on H-1B visas. US companies exploit the H-1B visas to get skilled workers cheaply rather than to fill gaps in skilled workers. US companies can get the skilled workers they need, but they often don’t want to pay appropriate rates. So instead they get H-1B visa workers who are skilled, but they may be doing tasks which are not specialized. For example, in a software company they may be doing basic testing or programming that pretty much any college graduate can do. But they don’t want to pay the college graduate the going rate, so they instead get H-1B visa workers who will work for a lower rate. If H-1B visas were expanded or immigration completely opened up, many more of these kinds of workers would come here and lower wages in the tech fields.
FWIW, and apologies for the parochial perspective, but I meant “we” as the U.S.
The people—professionals* and the like—you are concerned about coming if we open up the borders? Our current immigration system is already far more open to those with advanced degrees and special skills. To the point that it has a very real effect on the makeup of our nation and even disparate racial outcomes. In the affirmative action context, for example, it helps to explain how Asian Americans on average appear to fare better than other minorities and whites as well: because up until the mid-20th century, immigration from Asia was prohibited outright. Since then, to the extent people from Asian countries have been permitted to immigrate, it’s under a regime that heavily favors those with marketable skills, and so tends to attenuate generational poverty.
By contrast, white Europeans were, for most of our nations history, allowed to bring their generational poverty with them, while blacks were infamously enslaved and then subjected to second class citizen status, and up until the mid-1960s there were no quotas limiting immigration from the western hemisphere (allowing people to immigrate from elsewhere in the Americas with generational poverty as well).
Yet another example of how the more I have learned about our immigration system, the more I think it needs to be stripped down to allow presumptive admission. If you can get here, then you can enter.
*ETA: Also, isn’t there, like, a shortage of truck drivers, teachers, and medical professionals? I’m really not seeing why we wouldn’t want more people with the desire/aptitude to perform those jobs immigrate.
The shortage of truckers keeps wages higher in trucking. Having immigrants be truckers would help fill the trucking shortage, but it would come at the expense of wages in trucking. Lots of experienced people are leaving trucking and new people aren’t going into it because of the low wages and poor working conditions. Immigrant truckers would likely lower wages and exacerbate that trend. Trucking might become a profession mostly done by immigrants. That might be overall better for society, but the existing people who are truckers likely wouldn’t support that transition. I would imagine the existing truckers want the trucking shortage to be solved by increasing wages and improving working conditions.
For instance, there recently was a deal between UPS and their union to increase the overall benefit package for drivers to $170k/year. If UPS could easily get new drivers, then they likely wouldn’t have agreed to increase the benefit package. It was because they knew it would be hard to replace the drivers that they had to agree to their demands. If there was open immigration, then UPS would know there’s a plentiful supply of new drivers who will accept lower rates.
Are there a fixed number of trucking jobs? If there are more immigrants, don’t they buy more stuff that has to be trucked?
Yes, of course. More immigrants means both more production and more consumption. It’s a win-win.
Even if consumption goes up, that doesn’t mean wages or working conditions necessarily go up. For instance, immigrants eat produce and meat, but their availability in the workforce contributes to wages and working conditions being low in those industries. This benefits consumers overall by keeping food prices low, but it also means that people who want higher wages leave those industries.
If open immigration was allowed your profession, then there’s a good chance that some of the existing people in those professions would lose their jobs to immigrants. The immigrants will generally accept lower wages and worse working conditions. That may benefit the consumer with cheaper goods, but it would come at the expense of current wages. A Netflix programmer making $100k/yr may lose their job to an immigrant who will accept $50k. The benefit to the consumer is that Netflix is able to keep their subscription prices low, but programmer who was previously making $100k will need to find another job.
This doesn’t mean I’m necessarily against immigration, but when thinking about open immigration, it’s important to think of it affecting jobs across the board. It won’t just be the migrant farm workers who take advantage of looser immigration. Every profession from the bottom to the top would get an influx of immigrants and there would be a significant effect to the employment landscape no matter the job.
I get that you may just be using this as an example, and that you might easily substitute in another profession that is more on point, but… Does Netflix not outsource a great many tech jobs already? Even if they don’t, I can’t imagine that immigration policy is stopping the, from moving hose jobs overseas if they want to.
Even in manufacturing, does not a great deal of the labor happen beyond our borders? Possibly because we are, somewhat perversely IMHO, more committed to free trade than the free movement of people?
Tech companies have offshored a lot of their work, but they still have lots of local employees. There are headaches and difficulties with offshoring which is why not everything is offshored. But regardless, if immigration was opened up, lots of those workers in foreign countries doing the offshored work would come to the US and compete directly for the jobs that US workers are doing.
An example more familiar to all of us would be a fast-food worker. We’ve been seeing wages rising since that industry is having trouble getting workers. What used to be a minimum wage job is now in the range of $15-20/hr because they are trying to entice people to take the jobs. But if there were no limits to immigrants working in fast food, then those wages would likely drop down to minimum wage since it would be much easier to find workers who will accept that lower rate. That would likely bring the menu prices down which would benefit consumers, but the workers would be just making minimum wage.
You make a good case for a robust minimum wage and for solid worker protection laws.
There was a window when the USSR started to let people leave, and the US government still automatically granted refugee status to Soviet citizens who got out. Simultaneously, there was a surge of Russian nationalism, accompanied by a healthy dose of antisemitism.
A lot of Russian Jews fled to the US. And my profession (actuary) is pretty friendly to people who show up with good math skills but indecipherable academic credentials.
I worked with a lot of refugees from the Soviet Disunion. A lot of them are still here, including my department head. You know what? They’ve mostly been good for my field. A bunch of smart, adaptable people. And those who were less adaptable (especially those who struggled with English) didn’t do very well, and found other work. But good coworkers make for a good workplace.
You know what’s actually a threat to my employment? Offshoring. A lot of professionals in my department have been replaced by a contractor whose employees are in India. And those Indians don’t have to give up their home and family to do the work.
There are headaches. There are also benefits. You can ask your Indian coworker to look at the thing you just finished, and they may give you a product you can use when you arrive at work in the morning. The biggest headache we’ve had from replacing local accountants with offshore accountants is that we’ve lost a lot of institutional knowledge. It’s hugely disruptive to replace a big swath of your workforce.
But those offshore workers are ALREADY competing directly for jobs with US workers. And they can live in cheap homes and eat cheap food and hire cheap help because they are living in a lower cost-of-living environment. If they came here, they’d be paying American fast food workers and renting from American landlords and hey, probably hiring not-yet-American cleaning help. But they’d be supporting our economy, instead of moving resources to wherever they live now.
Increased immigration won’t protect us from lower costs in other countries. Heck, the tighter controls on the southern border has led to a lot of our produce being grown in Mexico instead of in the US. And cars being made in Mexico. And of course most of our clothing comes from Vietnam and other low-wage places, and our electronics from China. Our immigration controls have done a terrible job of keeping jobs here.
It depends on the size of the increase.
A lot of my clothing comes from Central America. I think some lately also comes from Indonesia and Pakistan. With immigration quotas eliminated, I expect the low paid workforces of those countries to rapidly move to the U.S. It would be part of of one of the great human migration disasters of history. But I guess that if their workers were mostly here, a small plus is that they couldn’t compete with us — as they would be us.
A lot of U.S. clothing also comes from China and Vietnam. I’m guessing that those countries, consistent with their communist heritage, would lock their workforces in if it became too easy to immigrate to the U.S. and/or they might be prosperous enough so their population would hesitate to join the rush. So we might still be competing with their cost structure.
One big thing not yet mentioned is the impact of eliminating U.S. immigration quotas on countries of emigration. The irresponsibility of no-quota proposals is breathtaking to me.
Because we already have a housing shortage in most of the places where the jobs are. Zoning and NIMBYism get in the way of the free market doing its job. Adding more people to the mix isn’t going to reduce that problem; it’s only going to increase it.
Fair enough. Just so long as we can agree that’s not so much a problem with immigration as it is a problem with the housing market and, more fundamentally, our nation’s constitution (lower case c—but who are we kidding? upper case C as well).
Which is to say if you’ve sold me on anything, it’s that we need to rewrite more than just the Immigration and Nationality Act.
But consider that a great many immigrants come to the US already undocumented. I am still not sold on the idea that “opening the floodgates” so to speak would lead to a massive in rush of people so much as lead to greater freedom of movement and, again, allow those who can’t find work to return more easily to their support network.
I don’t, fwiw. People like to stay where their friends and family and roots are. They like to stay where they are part of the majority culture, where they can get the food and clothing they like.
Would there be more immigration with relaxed or removed quotas? Of course there would be. But it wouldn’t be all the low-paid people of the world. Not even close.
We would get a lot more refugees, of course. Those are people who already have a compelling reason to leave their homes, and just need a place to go to.
This is really complicated. Before most of the people in an impoverished African town (or refugee camp) move to a U.S. town, there needs to be a few people from there already here and telling their friends and family that their best chance to get out, and come to their town in America, is right now. That’s what has already come close to happening with some towns in Mexico, despite quotas. And the small initial groups, from many other sources of immigration, are often already here. But I would agree that if there is a remote village in the Amazon where no one knows anyone in the U.S., they won’t rush to come here.
There are three types of big immigration bills I can see as possible.
One is a progressive bill, passed after a Democratic wave election with zero Republican votes. That’s the thread title dream — and similar to this:
Abolish US immigration agency and DHS, demands AOC
The second type goes by the catchphrase bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform, with the Dignity Act being the current proposal. Such proposals trade amnesty (called something else for political reasons), and a relaxed quota system, to gain moderate liberal votes, in return for enhanced enforcement to gain less extreme GOP votes.
Then there is a third type — pure enforcement enhancement — which I hope no one here wants.
Both of the first two types are going to help a certain number of people, and both will cause suffering for a certain number of people. I argue that the ratio of help to suffering is a lot better with comprehensive immigration reform.
As a practical matter, I agree that an actual open immigration policy would spark a swing to the racist right in the US that would probably end up a net loss. And I guess that is one of the “what if we did it” answers. But I am also interested in the hypothetical. What if we had the political will to do it? Then what would happen.
That’s cute. How about the irresponsibility of letting people die outside your house because you’re worried if you let them in they’ll track dirt on the floor? That’s our current immigration policy.
No, let’s let real people die so PhilyGuy doesn’t have to worry about the scenario where the US population rapidly doubles (if you actually think there would be hundreds of millions of migrants, that’s really hilarious. Like, in a “some people literally believe the moon is made of cheese” way.
[Citation needed]