Hacker News Reader

Comment by moorhosj | Hacker News Reader

Immigration is at generationally low levels, I don’t see how you could blame it for lack of wage increases. What about the stagnant minimum wage, record corporate profits or union busting; might they play a role? “American society” and “our values” are by-products of immigration, how would more immigrants ruin that?

View on HN

I'll give you a firm example. I'm close to a town of 20,000 in rural Minnesota, and the biggest employer is a well known turkey company. Their plants used to be staffed with primarily native (and being in Minnesota, white) people. It was menial, hard labor but it paid well because of that. By the 90s the plant was primarily staffed by illegal Mexican immigrants, and now it's almost entirely Somalians.

The jobs are repetitive, mindless, and it's cold, wet, and loud in there. The pay is barely above minimum wage. If the company didn't have access to those immigrants that are happy for any work at all, they would have been forced to raise those wages long ago. If people in the plant were paid, say, $15 an hour, the hourly workers in the office next door sure wouldn't be happy being paid the same amount. Their wages would have to be higher, which would mean the salaried folks would also want to be paid more.

That town is a perfect microcosm of how the massive amount of immigration our country has seen has kept wages stagnant.

Why would the 15 an hour office workers care? And quite frankly if that makes them unhappy, they are free to find employment elsewhere. They were clearly fine with the pay previously, why should it matter what someone else is making. That just reaks of elitism

Except the problem with that story is that immigrantion is apparently lower now than ever, and the biggest problem is that many americans strongly prefer not to do that kind of work.

You still haven't proven that immigration is the cause of this particular wage stagnation. You want to believe it is, but you haven't given evidence.

Is there proof that non-immigrants even want to do this work? The well-known case from Georgia suggests they don't. https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...

At the same time, couldn't the state just raise the minimum wage?

He says they used to, but wages didn't keep up.

Immigration hasn’t kept up either, so how can it be the driver?

Why do you think it hasn’t kept up? Perhaps legal hasn’t. CA is a very different place than the one I grew up in.

It's just as much the result of the lack of a meaningful minimum wage and reasonable labor standards. Another perfectly acceptable way to have fixed this would have been for Republicans to accept living wage and labor standards laws, and not have spent the last 40 some years waging war on unions.

I'll say it again. Study after study shows that immigration -- illegal or otherwise -- has very little effect on wages. Mechanization and "pro-business" policy is basically all of it.

> What about the stagnant minimum wage, record corporate profits or union busting might they play a role?

I don't discount that these are major contributors to the problem. Adding additional labor supply, supply willing to work for almost nothing, does not help the problem.

Growing the pie has always helped everyone in America. Is there something that has fundamentally changed in your view to alter this trend? Are there Americans out there who want to do these types of jobs?

The pie hasn’t grown for four decades [1], and the middle class has been hollowed out [2]. The existing system must be fixed before more burden is placed on it.

A job not being filled in no way validates that someone should fill that job. Some jobs should not exist (anything where life and limb is constantly in significant peril, for example). We don't throw our hands up when we can't find workers to clean up nuclear waste accidents. We build robots for the job.

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/iCTuo.jpg

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...

==The pie hasn’t grown for four decades [1], and the middle class has been hollowed out [2]. The existing system must be fixed before more burden is placed on it.==

Your first chart doesn't show a stagnant pie, looking at GDP numbers disproves that theory. The pie has absolutely grown, corporations have just chosen to keep more of it.

The problem is that you are connecting these things directly to immigration and there isn't much evidence to back that up. You are taking a real problem (stagnating wages and fewer corporate profits going to workers) and shoehorning in an ideological belief to explain it. Your sources provide no evidence that immigration is to blame for either of these phenomena. They simple show that the phenomena exists.

==We don't throw our hands up when we can't find workers to clean up nuclear waste accidents. We build robots for the job.==

Wasn't your entire point that we are just hiring immigrants to do this work instead of building robots (your Wisconsin dairy example)?

> The pie has absolutely grown, corporations have just chosen to keep more of it.

Then the pie has not grown. You're simply advocating throwing more people on an already broken system.

> Wasn't your entire point that we are just hiring immigrants to do this work instead of building robots (your Wisconsin dairy example)?

My argument is that automation should be prioritized over subjugating illegal immigrants who have no recourse. Dairy farmers cannot afford to pay a legal wage, therefore automation is their only option if ICE shows up and prevents them from hiring illegal immigrants (the fact that the dairy industry is hideously broken and needs to shrink dramatically is a topic for another thread). I am pro-immigration when properly implemented, but staunchly anti-abuse of all people.

But we're not talking about illegal immigrants who have no recourse here. We're talking about opening up immigration so that these people, and others, can come in and do these jobs that as of now only go to illegals, while also receiving the benefits and protections that come as a legal immigrant. That seems to be exactly what you want, so why are you against it?

I feel that I have sufficiently explained my thesis through my other comments.

> Then the pie has not grown. You're simply advocating throwing more people on an already broken system.

I'm not sure where you get this idea, but the growth of US GDP is evidence that the pie has grown. The reality is that corporations are keeping a larger percentage of that pie than ever before. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Secondly, I am not advocating for anything, I am just trying to understand your stance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com