I don’t see this as a problem at all. If anything it show how immigration is exploited to keep salaries artificially low and hurt the worker and lower middle class.
Inflation can’t outpace income forever, or who will buy the goods?
Both sides of the supply/demand curve are affected.
Too much inflation? People buy less. Too little inflation? People buy more. Labor too expensive? Less labor is used (perhaps via automation). Labor too cheap? More labor is soaked up on projects that would have been marginal or automated otherwise.
Latest median earnings are negative for the last month as well as year over year:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
Real average hourly earnings decreased 1.2 percent, seasonally adjusted, from October 2020 to October 2021. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.3 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 1.6-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.
Look at this graph:
Also inflation is driven by labor squeezes outside of the United States. (Freer immigration into the US would actually worsen that problem, but negligibly, since US immigration is on the order of 100K people annually out of a world total around 8B.)
Honestly, I don't understand why we are debating another few trillion of stimulus right now. My preference would be to pay for new projects with matching taxes until inflation subsides. We don't need any more "job creating" projects at the moment.
Good lord your comment history is enthralling.
Aren't illegal immigrants doing jobs that natural born citizens don't want to do? Farming, low pay contract work, etc.?
Businesses can't hire illegal immigrants on the books. They can't be waiters, retail workers, or other types of labor that the lower class depends on. So how does this impact America's poor and middle class? Absence of these workers should push prices higher.
H1B immigration is capped, and it has never led to a decrease in the salaries of skilled workers. Software engineers have never made so much.
More people working and living in the US will create more productivity and consumer demand, increasing the strength of our economy.
Why all of the vilification?
No, illegal immigrants are doing jobs that residents don't want to do (or can't do) at that price. They can afford to work for less because they're often working in order to send remittances, not to live a fulfilling, sustainable life, which is what they're hoping to do after they get back home.
> Businesses can't hire illegal immigrants on the books. They can't be waiters, retail workers, or other types of labor that the lower class depends on. So how does this impact America's poor and middle class? Absence of these workers should push prices higher.
Absence of those workers should push prices higher because it pushes labor costs higher - meaning that the effect you're noting here is evidence of the opposite of the claim you made immediately before. Absence of those workers should raise costs (which may or may not be reflected in prices), and also raise the salaries of people who work. Inflation is rising prices, rising wages, and falling debts.
Legalizing those workers and encouraging them to migrate their families here too would have the same effect, giving them the means to negotiate.
> H1B immigration [...] has never led to a decrease in the salaries of skilled workers. Software engineers have never made so much.
You're just making up the first part, and the second part is irrelevant to whether H1Bs lower salaries.
> More people working and living in the US will create more productivity and consumer demand, increasing the strength of our economy.
Lower wages = higher productivity. Lower wages != an increase in demand.
> Why all of the vilification?
Immigrants aren't the villains, the villains are these rationalizations for exploiting the precarious and brown for the sake of stockholders and owners. A quick an easy path to citizenship is just as objectionable to these people, because citizens have rights and can organize.
I believe they key point of disagreement is if immigrants earning less are competing for the same jobs. I personally think not.
>This group is now starting to wake up to its plight and voting anti immigrant and against traditional labour parties which have been co opted by the progressive university elite.
That's a bit of a stretch to think universities are progressive or that they're the ones calling the shots politically. The multi millionaire oligarchs pushing this and funding anti immigrant AstroTurf groups and running the usual PR firehose of BS are of course somehow "not elite" as ever.
This isn't a requirement, this is a bad choice that one can make. There's no benefit in favoring highly-skilled workers other than that these are the workers that middle-class professionals associate with. The only reason IMO to favor highly-skilled workers in specific fields is to break professional cartels; you don't even have to favor them, just remove the artificial barriers to their employment that have been institutionalized.
> That's a bit of a stretch to think universities are progressive or that they're the ones calling the shots politically.
It's just sucker right-wing pseudo-populism financed by the same people who employ 99.9% of illegal immigrants.
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edit: those people would love to make the process of legal immigration so onerous that only they themselves could navigate it easily, to make laws against illegal immigration so draconian that every undocumented worker was living in constant fear, and to route all enforcement of those laws through an regulatory agency that they have completely captured.
There, I fixed it for you. In a purely globally democratized and free market, wages would be perfectly aligned to market rates, but this isn't reality. In other words, your labor supply is artificially fixed to birth rates in that sovereignty.
The overall point is anyway moot because you could also make an argument that says "because we're not having enough babies and therefore labor is relatively short from previous decades, wages are artificially high...maybe we should create policies to increase birth rates?".
Point is - trying to correlate wages and immigration dynamics is a fool's errand. IMHO, immigration policies need to be considered from an overall market perspective and not an individual wage one. i.e. does immigration provide a net benefit to the economy and that sovereign society? Given how much illegal immigration is used in our food system in the US to keep consumer prices low, I think Americans equivocally believe some level of immigration is necessary to generate wealth for the middle class.
But, yes, pricing is a useful discovery and market making mechanism. If I want a personal chef but I'm only willing to pay $2/hour in the US for such a service, I should and will have to deal with cooking my own meals or otherwise find some way to obtain food that doesn't have as large a labor component as personal service does.