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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

This is likely true. I just read a report that said that the shortage highly correlates with the reduction of immigrants due to COVID and the tightening of immigration into the US. It may not be the only factor, but it is one that contributes to the shortage of service workers.

Like it or not, new immigrants are more likely to take jobs that pay less as compared to non-immigrants.

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Another thing to toss into the mix... the immigrant housekeeper in the US on a visa would be working on a H-2B visa.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

These are temporary and are at most 3 years. There is similar "if you don't have a job, you leave."

Add in the 2016 through 2020 was less favorable to immigration.

While past years, we haven't hit the visa cap for H-2B (like we do for H-1B), in 2022, applicants hit the cap ( https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/10/12/dhs-supplement-h-2b-cap-... https://www.marketplace.org/2022/12/14/the-u-s-is-nearly-dou... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/04/1134417921/could-foreign-work... )

This means that in the past it was possible to reliably get people to work on the H-2B visa, and now you can't. Additionally, those "out of work" meant that people had to leave and start over reducing the pool of H-2B visa workers.

There has been no tightening of immigration. In particular, illegal immigration is higher than it's ever been [1]. And illegal immigrants are far more likely to work in the hotel industry as cleaners.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/illegal-immigration-arrests-hit...

I can't read the article completely, but it's from the summer. What about 2016-2020 plus the covid lockdowns? All that takes time to recover from.

There was never any slowdown. Briefly during the initial covid scare and briefly after Trump's election, but neither pause lasted more than a few months.

Another way of saying this is that immigration inhibits wage growth.

You can also say that tight immigration leads to automation. Companies will do their best to find ways to reduce costs and increase profits. So limiting immigration will not necessarily lead to wage growth.

Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.

> You can also say that tight immigration leads to automation. Companies will do their best to find ways to reduce costs and increase profits. So limiting immigration will not necessarily lead to wage growth.

That's fair, but technically I didn't say it would lead to wage growth. My point is that loose immigration allows capital to keep wages at their current levels, or lower them, because it's still probably better for those immigrating here than from where (whence?) they emigrated.

> Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.

But is immigration the only solution to this problem? I get that birth rates are low, but it seems like that's due in large part to having kids being really expensive, on top of everything else being really expensive due to inflation. I don't get why we don't incentivize americans to have more kids. I get that orban is a controversial figure, but his plan [0] seems like a good thing for a government to do for its citizens. Why does helping families have to be a right-wing policy?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...

Norway have had monthly payments to all parents until kids turned 18, very high parental leave, low caps on fees for nurseries (around 300 usd/month), and most of these have support across the political spectrum.

All told, the value adds up to tens of thousands in support per child, and yet it's nowhere enough to keep fertility rates at replacement. As such I doubt Orbans policies will as well.

I would suggest a read of The Effect of Low-Skill Immigration Restrictions on US Firms and Workers: Evidence from a Randomized Lottery - https://www.nber.org/papers/w30589 and reconsider that position.

Another way to say that cheap hotels are a thing of the past.

In America. Elsewhere, hotels have been much cheaper for a long time. Even well before the pandemic, it was much cheaper for me to stay in hotels in Japan or western Europe than anyplace in America.

Notice that wages of hotel maids has not increased. Their jobs have just been automated. Immigration slows automation.

Yeah so does a sustainable fertility rate but…

Immigration only inhibits wage growth when unions and workers rights are obliterated to the point that they can't fight back against corporations and make them pay a living wage to everybody. Don't act like immigration = wage growth being inhibited, that is absurdly fatalistic about there being no alternative to the status quo.

Here's a Washington Post article that speaks to the tie between the labor shortage and immigration.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221215195859/https://www.washi...

However you feel about immigration there's no doubt that we need more people to do some jobs. We are not making enough people. If you don't like immigration, get busy and start making some kids.

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