I expect more profiles like this to spring up in the next few years, as America continues to grow with a low "native" birth rate, immigration will fill the void.
I expect more profiles like this to spring up in the next few years, as America continues to grow with a low "native" birth rate, immigration will fill the void.
The 'pay is too low' bit always bothers me. It implies that we should want to bring in a serf class to do work Americans won't. It's usually in conjunction with some non-white immigrant group, usually Hispanics, which makes it racist to boot. We must not accept arguments about not being able to find workers because the pay is too low. Raise the pay. The wealth and income gaps are bad enough, don't keep pushing down the median wages by bringing in more serf class workers who are willing to accept these wages.
Working in slaughterhouses, working in fields picking produce, working in construction, working the back of house for restaurants, working as housekeepers, working as landscapers or day laborers, working at the car wash. These are all jobs with lots of immigrants. Are you surprised to learn this?
I am having a hard time believing that you did not know this fact before our exchange.
The reality is that by letting people in, you are vastly improving their lot in life, and all the economic research show it doesn't really hurt anyone here:
https://www.cato.org/blog/14-most-common-arguments-against-i...
If immigration were blocked, just raising agricultural workers’ pay wouldn’t be enough to fill all of those jobs. But raising those jobs’ pay (e.g. by raising the federal minimum wage and enforcing it) would be a good idea anyway. Immigrant farm workers should still be paid fair wages.
Fun that your edit added "willing" while I was writing this.
My godfather (indigenous peasant in rural Mexico) spent some time in his youth carrying two 50-pound bottles of liquor on his back all day long up and down mountains over a rough trail. I get winded if I try to carry one of those bottles for a block of flat sidewalk. If someone asked me to strap two to a tumpline and hike up a mountain I would call them crazy.
He spent other years working on coffee plantations under thieving brutal racist owners. And continued working on his own small plots of land every day up to maybe age 70, even as his body was thoroughly worn out.
Now his grandchildren are white-collar professionals.
This kind of hard manual labor is as demanding as any high-level sport. It takes years of (mental and physical) training to be able to handle it without falling apart.
I'm 39 and for the last 6 months I've been doing a job that involves lots of manual labor, it's gotten easier, not harder. I guess I was in relatively decent condition at the start though, if you consider the US average.
I'm 54. My ex husband is the same age and was career military.
At some point in his career, they changed the PT test standards for younger military members because young people growing up in front of TVs and computers didn't have the stamina his generation had at the same age. Meanwhile, they did not lower the test standards for him/his age group. He quite resented it.
In other words, this is Federal policy acknowledging this change.
Last I heard, the military is having increasing difficulty getting qualified applicants because young people today are simply out of shape compared to previous generations. I've also seen articles that say we increasingly import construction workers because middle and upper class young white males no longer take construction jobs during the summer in high school and college like they routinely did when I was that age.
Here's a meta analysis saying that at best the economic impact is minor, and worse still only the mega-rich benefit, while poor people actually suffer from it:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w16736
If the birth rate is too 'low' then why not pay more benefits for having kids? Or raise the retirement age, as we obviously need to before our pensions all go bankrupt?
Worse still, mass-migration is just shunting the problem down the line a generation or two, while most countries using it aren't investing enough in houses, hospitals, infrastructure, etc. to cater for the mass migration.
Funny thing to say about a country made up of immigrants...
Let me guess, you’re not from nyc. You should visit Ellis island sometime.
It IS the US immigration that has made it what it is now. I always love this part of a speech by Lincoln.
“But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.“
> The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies find only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows. On the other hand, some more recent studies have found larger effects, and many studies note that the negative effects are concentrated on certain parts of the native population. The parts of the population most typically affected are the less-educated natives or the earlier immigrant cohorts -- that is, those who are the closest substitutes to the new immigrant flow currently experienced by Europe.
> Immigration is often viewed as a large fiscal burden for European public finances or as a possible saviour if correctly harnessed. This has been palpable in the recent political atmospheres of France, Italy, and Germany, for instance. Most empirical studies, however, estimate the fiscal impacts of immigration to be very small. There certainly exist large differences across migrant groups in the costs and benefits they cause for a host country; the net impact depends heavily on the migrants age, education, and duration of stay. On average, immigrants appear to have a minor positive net fiscal effect for host countries. Of course, these benefits are not uniformly distributed across the native population and sectors of the economy.
The gist being that overall the adverse effects immigration has on the market is much smaller than people perceive, that those most affected are either the prior generation of immigrants or those with less education and that the negative fiscal impacts are negligible at best, with immigrants generally contributing in a positive way.
What you quoted supports what I said.
Economic benefits negligible.
Poor people suffer.
Where does this excess economic value go? It lowers the cost, for one. This is common sense.
Given the amount of illegal immigration and the support structure that exists among employers, you will have a hard time convincing me their effect on the economy is minor. Why would anyone bother with all the trouble if what you say is accurate?
Before you come tell me that immigration is a net drain on the American economy, you should understand the dominant view in the field is that this is false. You will need to provide some evidence that what you are saying is true, not just a made up rationale.
Does your analysis show illegal immigration is a net gain?