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Comment by moe98ntuin34 | Hacker News Reader

To me, the real takeaway is this:

> unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law.

For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigrants. Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are gone and they still can't make a living.

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This breaks the HN guidelines by taking the thread on a generic flamebait tangent (anti-immigration politics in the US). Such paths lead reliably to generic flamewars, the thing we need most to avoid on this site, so please don't take them.

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Turning poor people against immigrants is a time-tested strategy to keep the heat off of employers. The old, "I think he's going to steal your cookie," joke.[1]

1. https://metro.co.uk/2016/08/21/a-banker-a-worker-and-an-immi...

Two things can be true at once. It’s unlikely that there is only one cause to a problem in something as complex as the economy of a country.

Both immigration (both legal and illegal) and employment regulation should be considered and evaluated accordingly. Dismissing one or the other won’t give us a good understanding of reality.

> Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are gone and they still can't make a living.

The people in power who use immigrants as a distraction have no intention of actually getting rid of the immigrants. They know they need them around for blaming.

Shouldn’t the decrease in available labor as a result of decreased immigration lead to wage increases? Particularly for jobs that aren’t going to be shipped overseas (construction, manual labor..).

EDIT: I know the topic of immigration can evoke strong emotions. I’m just pointing out that a decrease in labor pool ought to increase wages. Isn’t this just law of supply/demand?

Get ready for $12 lettuce.

That may be a result of decreased immigration. I’m only pointing out that if illegal immigration were wiped out then wages would increase.

>Shouldn’t the decrease in available labor as a result of decreased immigration lead to wage increases?

It works this way if you consider a terrible work environment to be negative wage.

For jobs that hover around minimum wage because of low margins labor shortages mean better working conditions.

For example, if you toss a "must be able to piss clean" requirement on any job that doesn't require the employee to have the sunk cost of years of training and it adds about 50% to the effective hourly wage.

Another example would be university wages. Many departments can only afford work-study student workers. When you need work-study student workers with more than just a pulse you have to treat them better because most students would rather work for dining services and do an equally terrible job with free food.

The problem is that at a state/national level there's so much feedback delay, immigration is not evenly distributed, etc, etc that you can't extrapolate

There are low wage industries that overwhelmingly employ illegal immigrants and legal immigrants. Those industries would need to raise wages and improve working conditions if immigration were curtailed.

I’m not advocating a position on immigration itself. Just stating one possible consequence of curtailing immigration.

I can't believe you're getting so much flak for saying something so obvious. There are plenty of good arguments for immigration but that doesn't mean it doesn't have negative effects as well.

You have repeated this thesis several times without providing any support beyond a child-like belief in the invisible hand. Why not prove your point by showing that at times when illegal immigration dropped the nominal average wage for low-skill workers increased relative to the rest of the workforce, if you can.

I've not indicated a child-like belief in the invisible hand. Labor is a product. If the supply is constricted then the price for it ought to go up. Isn't this generally true? So much so that if it isn't the case in this situation then one ought to provide reasoning for this.

A claim was made that constricting immigration will not lead to increased wages. I think this is contrary to how it normally works and thus the person making that claim ought to show why it's true. Let's turn it around, why don't you show the reverse of what you ask me?

I'm not an economist. I merely asked a question and sought input as to why labor prices wouldn't increase. I think you are reading too much into what I wrote. I'm strongly in favor of immigration. I'm a union member and I think labor laws are far too lax in the U.S. I think immigration would not be an issue if we had strong labor laws that were enforced. But we don't have those laws and thus people blame immigration for their woes.

But whatever one believes with regard to immigration it's extremist to think that there are no negative consequences of immigration and it's extremist to think there are no positive consequences of immigration.

From [1]:

For some subperiods and groups, the effects are positive or zero, but the most common result is that a 1 percentage point increase in the fraction of the population that is foreign-born reduces wages from 1.0–1.6 percent.

It's worth pointing out that the paper mentions that calculating the true impact is hard and controversial so who knows if the above is correct?

[1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257%2Fjep.9.2.23

You would think that. The problem is they still can't find people to fill the jobs. (Or maybe more accurately, people believe they are above doing those types of jobs.) Take for example this Planet Money piece [1]:

>Tom Deardorff has had to compete for workers. He's raised their pay by actually quite a lot. Back in 2006, working the celery field paid about $8.70 an hour. Now it pays more than $21 an hour. [...] Tom says his workers all are documented and that even doubling wages hasn't solved the labor problem.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hur...

If he paid $100 per hour, I think he'd probably find enough people to do the job.

If that causes celery prices to rise so high that no one wants to buy it, then maybe celery just isn't an economically viable crop.

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